Hotel Moscow

by Talia Carner

  Olga drew in her breath as a new, unfamiliar fear joined her pent-up frustration. Never before had Arkady’s treatment of her been so dismissive. For fifteen years he “had ridden in her sleigh, joining in her song,” as the saying went.

  He extended his hand. “The keys.”

  Since everything left in the car could be stolen, she kept only one cigarette and matches in the glove compartment. She tossed the keys on the desk as tears gathered in her throat. The loss of this hard-won perk resonated in every fiber of her body. Wordlessly, she stuffed Arkady’s list of speakers into her bag and walked out.

  He would learn his lesson soon enough when she published her “Democracy or Kleptocracy?” paper. With the exposure of what surely would point an accusing finger at his party’s cronies, they would take away more from him than just the keys to his car.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE GRANDIOSE CONFERENCE facility must have been converted from a czar-era mansion. Brooke and the other nine American women followed Svetlana up a flight of broad steps flanked by Corinthian columns into a baroque-style ballroom turned lecture hall.

  “Ready to show them how to become capitalists?” Amanda whispered.

  Brooke squeezed her elbow, relieved that the tension between them had thawed.

  With the group’s entrance, a wave of excitement spread through the crowd. Brooke took in the bright eyes scrutinizing them and realized that simply by the confidence she and her colleagues projected, they were instant role models.

  Svetlana, her own status elevated by the Americans’ importance, beamed throughout first the introductions of local executives Amanda had invited from Kodak, Estée Lauder, and Adidas and then the welcome speeches by representatives of women’s organizations.

  “With the new world order, a woman’s voice will no longer be a lonely violin but part of an orchestra made up of all the women of the world,” began one of the well-wishers. Brooke snapped photographs of the attendees’ rapturous faces.

  Jenny stood up. “Attitude is everything,” she cut in, in an impromptu response speech. She pointed at the collar necklace she wore, a beautifully studded strip with beads and rhinestones. “I manufacture these dog collars in Kenya. Three thousand pet stores and major chains in America already sell them. I will tell you how you can use your artistic talent to manufacture products you can export to America. The important thing to remember is that your work must be of high quality. I see around me a lot of shitty stuff that can’t be sold.” She turned to the interpreter. “Make sure you tell them ‘shitty,’ because if they don’t face this fact they are wasting their time.”

  Amanda and the Russians continued with more eloquent speeches, and then the crowd rose amid a clutter of chairs scraping the floor. Brooke noticed that quite a few women accepted Jenny’s “Attitude Is Everything” buttons and followed her into a classroom.

  Brooke stepped into the adjacent room to conduct her two-hour marketing workshop. There was business-to-business marketing and there was business-to-consumer marketing, she explained, and drew a vertical line on the blackboard. She asked each attendee to describe her venture in two sentences, then asked the interpreter to enter them in Russian in either of two columns. “Now write down each of the features of your product or service, and the benefit attached to this particular feature,” she said, raising a pen. “For example, the feature of this pen is that it has a rubber cushion near its tip. The benefit of this particular feature is the easy grip when writing.”

  She then elicited from the attendees a list of advertising and promotional options, adding ones they hadn’t considered, such as creating brochures and postcards. The attendees chuckled at the idea of mailing out anything. One raised her hand. “Nobody does that here,” she said.

  “Of course nobody has done that—because you’ve had no history of selling practices,” Brooke said. Furtive back-alley commerce didn’t count. “Good marketing is also about originality. Being the first in your industry or community to do something gives you an advantage. Success lies with innovation, with coming up with fresh ways of approaching consumers.”

  “It’s embarrassing to ask for business,” said an attendee. “It’s like begging.”

  “It’s no different from when you apply for a job. You point out your relevant attributes, because you are the product you’re promoting.” As soon as she said that, Brooke realized that most likely, none of these women had gone out on job interviews; each had been assigned a position by some central office, sight unseen. Searching for a more uplifting idea, she thought of the ease with which Amanda had been able to place phone calls from their room. “We haven’t even discussed selling by telephone. Your phone service is one thing here that I’ve noticed works well. Take advantage of it. We call it telemarketing.”

  There was silence.

  “What have I missed?” she asked the interpreter.

  “The phones work well only because the government needs to eavesdrop,” the woman whispered.

  “Well, the government agents can listen in on your sales pitches. They’ll be so convinced they’ll become customers, too,” Brooke replied.

  More silent stares. But there was no time to dwell on the point; there was a lot more to cover, starting with marketing strategy. Some products, such as bread, had a frequent, repeated need, and therefore could take a small profit on each of many transactions; other products, such as a sofa, had a rare need and therefore required a higher profit margin on each sale.

  Encouraged by the revived interest of her audience, Brooke warmed up again. “After you figure out the strategy best suited for your product or service, write down the promotion ideas that are most likely to reach your target market. This will be the draft of your campaign plan. But before launching it, why don’t you check with each other whether you’ve covered your bases? Meet or call each other to discuss your projects, share your ideas.”

  The chill that swept away the energy in the room felt as if a Siberian breeze had blown though. “We are all strangers here,” a woman who ran a language school said in English.

  “We call it networking,” Brooke clarified. “You all live in different cities, right? You offer different products and services, and so you are not competing with one another for the same customers.” When she saw heads nodding, she went on, “Networking creates support groups among a range of business owners.” She pointed at two women, one who ran a ladder factory, and another who manufactured chairs, in cities six hundred miles apart. “Each of you may learn something new that works well and you can share with each other.”

  “You want me to tell my secrets to a stranger?” asked Ladders.

  “Why would I help someone I’ve never met?” asked Chairs.

  “Both of you end up with more information when you exchange experiences. Let’s say you’ve found a good printer for your brochure. You share the source with the other person in your network. She, in turn, may have found a source for lumber she can’t use—”

  “We give the printer more work, and he will only raise the price. And if she buys more from the lumberyard, they may stop stocking the lumber I need,” Ladders said. “I wouldn’t even tell my own sister a business secret unless she pays me for the information.”

  Brooke realized that in a city that had never published a phone book, one’s Rolodex equivalent had become a cherished commodity. It meant survival in a country where merely knowing where a product suddenly appeared in a store was a secret to be sold. Under a regime that glorified children turning in their parents to the authorities, Russians had been conditioned into deep distrust. They were unprepared for a world that held random kindness in high regard. They had become adept at navigating the system without ever negotiating between individuals.

  Brooke wished she had more time to run exercises. But her two hours—cut in half by pauses for the translation of each paragraph she uttered—were over. “In time you will see that cooperation is the route for strength,” she said to the room as it was emptying.

/>   Nevertheless, she told herself, the women had learned a lot. She glanced at her watch and walked out to the main hall. She asked two of the organizers about Sidorov, but no one had seen him. One gestured to show that Sidorov might be eating; perhaps their host would join them all at lunch. Brooke glanced at her watch. She had planned to contact EuroTours, the American Embassy, and her Frankfurt office; she must reach them before they all closed for the weekend, just in case she didn’t get to see Sidorov.

  In search of a phone, Brooke walked into the administration office at the end of the corridor. Boxes of printed conference materials surrounded three secretaries. On a table were some of the various prescription drugs the Americans had brought. Three women were arguing over a bottle.

  “May I use your phone?” Brooke asked the nearest secretary. “Telephone?”

  “Nyet telephone.”

  Brooke glanced at the desks. There were no phones.

  In a show of goodwill, one secretary called over an interpreter. “The planning of this district did not include telephone cables,” the interpreter explained. “Now, anyone who wants a telephone buys a very long pole, puts it up, imports a cable, strings to the next district and finds someone to import the instrument from abroad. Then maybe the phone company will hook it up and give it a number.”

  “What about a pay phone? On the street?”

  “I’ll take you to the next district. I saw people lined up at a pay phone there.” The secretary waved in some direction.

  “Spasiba. Thanks.” If she was lucky, Brooke might also stumble upon a kiosk selling an English newspaper. She put on her coat and followed the woman outside.

  They had barely made it past the conference building when two gleaming Rolls-Royces sped toward them, sirens screaming and lights flashing. The cars were followed by BMWs and open Jeeps filled with muscular, armed guards.

  The secretary pulled Brooke into a nook between two baroque pillars. “Mafia.” She shook her head in what looked like a cross between sorrow and wonder, and pointed to a peach-colored, twelve-foot-high wall across the street with barbed-wire twisted across its top. A wired telephone pole peeked over the wall.

  At the nearest street junction, two policemen stopped traffic and directed all vehicles to the curb so the convoy could pass through. A minute later, an electric gate opened in the wall across the street, and tires screeching, the fleet disappeared inside. Six gunmen with cropped hair, wearing dark suits and ties, sprinted out of the last Jeep and took their posts outside the compound, automatic weapons at the ready.

  “Krysha,” the secretary remarked.

  Brooke pressed her back against the pillar, her hands clasped tight. In Hoffenbach’s report, which she had believed to be an exaggeration, he had highlighted krysha, the private-security units that had taken over police duties. If their firm were to do business here, Hoffenbach had written, they’d need to hire trained gunmen.

  The guards’ eyes scanned the tops of the buildings around them, their guns pointing at one rooftop, then another. Two of them strode away, muttering into walkie-talkies and peering into doorways. One of the men looked at Brooke and the secretary.

  Brooke flinched. Again, she had separated from the group, made herself vulnerable. She should have asked Judd for help this morning in spite of Amanda’s request that she cool down. Now, rather than try to find a phone—where the waiting line could be hours long—she should just go to the embassy.

  “Taxi?” she asked the secretary.

  The woman waved to the policeman in the corner, and he flagged down a passenger car. The driver made a quick U-turn and came to a stop. He rolled down the window and inspected Brooke from the bottom up, stopping at her chest.

  “Nyet taxi?” Brooke asked the secretary.

  “Nyet taxi,” the secretary repeated. “Auto.”

  Brooke bit her lip. The secretary would return to her office, and Brooke would be stuck in a private car with a man whose scrutiny made her skin prickle, in a city whose street signs she couldn’t read.

  “American Embassy?” she asked the man.

  He nodded vigorously.

  Dare she get in the car, having no sense of direction or knowledge where in this vast city the embassy was located? “Hot dog stand?” she asked him. “Hot. Dog. Stand?”

  He nodded again.

  So he had no idea where she wanted to go. Where would he be taking her? No more risks. With regret, Brooke waved her finger in a gesture of no. What she had believed to be a temporary situation—Hotel Moscow and no bodyguards—would become permanent, at least for the weekend. And Aleksandr would continue to be ineffective, due either to ineptness or to his false assumption that he was protecting them.

  Well, she’d speak to Sidorov himself at lunch. “Let’s get back in,” Brooke said to the secretary, and started toward to building.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I THOUGHT SIDOROV WOULD be here.” Brooke gestured with her chin toward the head lunch table. She was even prepared to down a glass of vodka with him just to get him to cooperate with her.

  “He’s not here,” Svetlana replied.

  “When will we meet him?”

  “Aleksandr knows. He’s in charge of the itinerary. Today I’m only an interpreter.”

  Aleksandr, who had gone to his office to drop off their faxes, had never returned. As far as Brooke knew, he was checking on his gasoline line.

  After a meal of a pickle and a chicken wing dwarfed by a mound of dry mashed potatoes, Brooke sat at her assigned consultation table by the wall of a large hall. Across from her, women displayed arts and crafts for sale. With an interpreter at her side, Brooke counseled Irina, a timid Russian with anxious black eyes who wanted to partner with an American company to start a tampon factory. Except that she had no experience in the production process or knowledge of the distribution system. She also had no contacts to set up the physical, financial, or administrative sides of the venture.

  “What are you bringing to the table?” Brooke asked, then rephrased for easier translation. “What are you offering?”

  “Give me the name of an American company, and I will tell them we need a tampon factory,” the interpreter repeated Irina’s words. “They pay me for telling them.”

  Brooke explained that coming up with a good idea was indeed a seed for a business venture, but not enough; Irina needed a broader understanding of the steps in the long road ahead. She suggested Irina attend some of the business workshops.

  The woman broke into sobs. “What am I supposed to do? There are no jobs; I can’t feed my children!” She rummaged through her bag and produced an unglazed clay ashtray that looked like something Brooke had made in kindergarten. “Would you buy this? Only fifty rubles.” She pressed the ashtray forward. “Please. It will pay for half a loaf of bread.”

  Brooke found her wallet, bought the ashtray, and added one of her bagged gifts. “Please go to the workshop,” she repeated, her tone soft. Pained, she watched Irina’s dejected back retreat through the door. Irina could have been her mother, her aunt, or any powerless, despondent and suffering Jew seeking help that was not forthcoming.

  “That was kind of you,” she heard and turned to see Olga. Brooke kissed her on both cheeks, and the Russian reciprocated. “I came to watch and get ready for my Institute for Social Research symposium next week,” Olga said. “That will be more academic, though. No workshops like here.”

  “Either way, prepare the attendees for disappointment. Business is not a quick money maker, certainly not in the beginning.” Brooke motioned with her head in the direction in which Irina had departed. “And teach me how to handle such desperation. It’s heartbreaking.”

  Olga sighed. “Novostroika, the new system, takes the heaviest toll on our women. Social safety nets have been removed. Children are sick, go hungry, and mothers are helpless. Just when women need their jobs the most, they lose them. Our men were always inept, drunk, or absent from their families.”

  “The propaganda cranked out to
the West showed Russian women building bridges and driving tractors.”

  Olga let out a wry laugh. “For you it might have seemed like liberation, but for us, it was servitude. We were nothing more than cheap skilled labor. We could learn anything and everything, and then do the work. Yet, where did it take us? When communism collapsed, we were invited to the banquet, but at the end they offered us only the crumbs.” She shook her head. “How would American women react if your president Bill Clinton told you that in the new world you should go back to being mothers and wives, and then passed a directive to offer all government jobs to men?”

  “His wife would give him a piece of her mind.” Brooke’s finger traced the coarse, uneven rim of Irina’s ashtray. She tried to fit it in her handbag, but it was heavy and bulky. She withdrew from her handbag a tiny blue package that unfolded into a briefcase-size nylon bag she used in her travels, and placed the ashtray in it.

  Olga looked around at the busy hall with its consultation tables at one end and merchandise, shoppers, and vendors at the other. “Let’s find a quiet place to talk.”

  “In thirty minutes I’ll be giving a lecture about retail versus wholesale.”

  “What’s that?”

  Maybe Olga didn’t know the English words. While walking, Brooke explained, “Store is retail, selling directly to the final consumer. But where does the store get its merchandise? Often through a wholesaler who maintains a large warehouse of related products and sells them to stores.”

  In the corridor, Brooke spotted the sign to the bathroom. But Olga told her to rethink using it. “Another one of our national disgraces.”

  “The state of toilets in Russia is not your personal responsibility.”

  “They’re a sign of our failure to embrace individual accountability.” Olga began to climb the stairs, her breathing labored. “We don’t even place expectations upon ourselves.”

  Collapsed beams, piles of discarded files, and water-sogged books littered the stairs and the second-floor ballroom. The pressure on Brooke’s bladder sent her in search of another working toilet. After scouting several rooms full of broken furniture, she found a stall that showed signs of having been discovered before by many users, but never by a cleaning crew.