The Smart Girl. Aleksandr Kapyar

don’t trust me. The gangs… – I mean, those kind gentlemen have me on the hook, so I’ll be reporting everything to them, may you forgive me for that. Let me ask you – who can be trusted, anyway? I’ve lived sixty years in this world, and I’m telling you – you cannot trust anyone, not even yourself.”

      He was a talkative type, and for any occasion he had a saying, a story, or an anecdote, but whenever Nina’s father asked him about his criminal patrons, the accountant clammed up and shrank. He had clearly been frightened out of his wits, once and for all. Only much later, in a moment of candor, he said to Nina’s father: “You want to know what can make an old Jew slave to bandits? Children, what else? Arkasha, my only boy. The young ones are all impatient – they want everything, and they want it now. Arkadiy got mixed up with the wrong people, ran into debt, and here I am…” He sighed despondently. “We really should leave – we have relations in… no, I’m not telling you in what country. But who’s going to let us out? Here, Simonyan wanted to leave, too.”

      With all that, he was an excellent accountant, and when he was not telling anecdotes or drinking tea with marshmallow sticks which he was very fond of, he would give Nina and her father very useful advice. His mission though was to keep an eye on the company’s affairs and report everything to the chief gangster whose name turned out to be Mikhail Antonovich, or, among his own crowd, Misha Permyak. Apparently, Samuil Yakovlevich had reported the state of things truthfully, since Misha Permyak paid no more visits to the company and visited the bank instead. That became apparent when Nina’s father had a call from the bank and was summoned to a conference, which had never happened before. Yevgeniy Borisovich was received by the head of the industrial credit department. Averting his eyes, the banker said that it had been decided to restructure two of the company’s short-term loans which were nearly due by replacing them with long term debt, and handed Nina’s father papers for signing.

      That was a princely gift. The company received the necessary breathing space, and with it came a hope for survival. However, instead of joy, the company was plunged in depression. Nina’s father had never been able to recover from the fear that he had experienced during Misha Permyak’s visit, and the position he was in would not let him forget anything. After he had been for a short while the boss of his own, although nearly bankrupt, company, he was now a gangsters’ puppet who was allowed to work only for the purpose of bringing money to the thugs.

      Nina’s father was constantly irritable and depressed. Even his universal remedy for all sorrows, work, did not help. He alternated between fits of frantic activity when he would snatch at any job, and depression when he locked himself up in his office for whole days refusing to see anyone. When that happened, Nina used any truth or lie as an excuse to take a day off at her own job to spend it in the company office from morning till night taking on herself more and more management duties. That caused fierce arguments between her and her father. On the day following the gangsters’ visit Yevgeniy Borisovich declared that she must not come anywhere near the company ever again. “You don’t understand what those bastards are capable of,” he told her. “I’ll never forgive myself if you get mixed up in this.” Nina protested that it was all the same now – it was pointless for her to hide as the gangsters had already seen her, knew who she was, and were capable of finding her anywhere if they meant to. Although her father never agreed with her on that, Nina kept coming to the office almost daily to delve into the company’s affairs.

      The worst of it was that Nina’s father seemed to have taken to drink again. Nina had not seen him actually drunk – she had only traced alcohol on his breath a couple of times – but she observed the same vacant, lackluster expression on his face as he had a few years before when, workless, he was sitting in his kitchen getting drunk for whole days. Nina was no longer a young, helpless student girl, and supposedly could be helpful to her father in many ways, but the outcome was the same.

      Half a year passed that way. With all the problems that the company was having, the project works were going on according to plan, but there was still no money in the till.

      One day, the door opened again and Misha Permyak with two bodyguards came in. The bodyguards were not the same but very much like those that had accompanied the chief gangster the first time. In the same disciplined manner, they stayed behind in the reception room while Misha walked into the office of Nina’s father. This time Misha told Yevgeniy Borisovich to call in Samuil Yakovlevich and Nina. Yevgeniy Borisovich opened his mouth to protest that Nina had nothing to do with it, and there was no point in getting her involved, but when he met with Misha’s gaze, he shut up and obeyed.

      Misha took the same chair, lit the same kind of cigarette and glanced around those present. This time though, he did not say “Sing”, but simply nodded at Samuil Yakovlevich. The accountant started speaking hurriedly – pouring out figures, dates and accounting terms – eager to provide the gangster with a full picture of the current situation. Misha listened silently for a few minutes, and then motioned to the old man to stop.

      Suddenly, Misha glanced at Nina – looked her straight in the eye. His own eyes were totally insane; there was nothing human left in them.

      “You,” he said.

      Seized with fear, Nina could not utter a word.