Larcenists and Lambs

Prague, Czech Republic - February 28-1

Prague, Czech RepublicFebruary 28

Helena Stone had always felt that weekdays were for the birds, but today was in the running for the most idiotic, at least in the past month, at least judging by the way this morning was going. You’d think that if you were 33, had a husband who was crazy about you, but you could still turn (some) guys’ heads the way you did at 20, and you were a wildly successful banker – the head of a whole division, in fact – and making a fair-sized lump of money to boot, there wouldn’t be much more you could ask for. It was just that Helena felt that getting up before nine a.m. was a crime against humanity. And if you had to get up at seven and on top of that you knew you had a meeting with the most prized idiots you ever had the misfortune to encounter to look forward to, you could just tell today was going to be a pain in the neck.

After fourteen years of living together, Martin Stone knew his idiosyncratic wife pretty well. And he knew darned well that the best thing he could do at that very moment was to put a double espresso in her hand and get out of the way. In a flash, her first, morning half-hour-long stupor could change into anger, and this anger would manifest itself in a shower of vitriolic comments directed at whoever happened to cross Helena’s path. The last hapless victim had been the unfortunate postman who rang at too early an hour and subsequently got blindsided by a pair of her very-well-aimed slippers. Yet, after a half hour and a sufficient dose of caffeine, the beast turned into a lamb. That’s how it always went.

Martin thought his wife was hot and never missed a chance to tell her so. What he loved most was her big butt, which, in his opinion, formed a delightful contrast to her tiny waist. He had no clearly defined opinion about her Halle Berry-style crew-cut; nonetheless, he found the decidedly un-bankerly, deep red color of her hair quite entertaining. All in all, it was grand that after 14 years you were still turned on by the same woman, especially if that woman happened to be your wife, mornings notwithstanding, he mused, while deftly dodging out of the way behind the kitchen table, as Helena blew by muttering something about some unspecified “wretched riff-raff.”

When she finally slammed the door behind her, he breathed a sigh of relief, made himself a cup of real coffee and sat down at his computer. He had roughly ten hours of work ahead of him, until the little lady, in lamb’s clothing, came home from the bank and he could occupy himself with something more pleasant. Like making out with his wife.

For a second, Helena toyed with the idea of turning this all-out rotten day into a barely tolerable one by borrowing Martin’s old, banged up, red, now contending for antique-status Mini Cooper for the drive from their Prague apartment to the bank. But her rational self prevailed and she got into her silver company-issued Skoda Superb.

She never could figure out why her colleagues at the bank were insanely jealous of her company car, because she considered her Superb the ugliest and most asexual thing she had ever driven. (That tallied perfectly with the opinion her colleagues’ liked to whisper behind her back that Helena was “pretty weird” in some ways.) Still, when her employer had given her the keys to the Superb some time back, she’d deemed it wiser to keep her preferences concerning company cars to herself.

Actually, she found it useful to keep more than that to herself; for example her views on the bank’s investment policies, which diametrically opposed those of the board. Or her view that the board directors, all foreigners, hadn’t been sent to Prague from the Austrian mother branch due to their outstanding abilities, but as punishment for their inabilities. Or her view that the general director’s new assistant had more in her bra than in her head. Her position as the head of the trading department of their small bank was, she felt, entirely too-well remunerated for her to feel compelled to share her not entirely relevant views with every Tom, d**k and Harry.

It’s just that she didn’t always manage to adhere to this credo. Helena had always been one to act first and think later. Maybe that’s why she and Martin got along so well. He had a tendency to make slower (or better yet no) decisions, preferring thorough analysis. (Or rather, brilliant analysis, as he liked to think.)

The result was that, the few candid remarks that did slip out sufficed to make Helena’s directly superior board member fall secretly and madly in love with her, and to make the bank’s general director fall secretly and madly in hate with her. She didn’t feel the need to concern herself with either one or the other.

This morning was the same as all the others: from the instant she slammed the door behind her in a white-hot fury over the ungodly hour she’d had to get out of bed, until the instant that she unlocked the door of the company car parked in their outdoor parking space, she managed to cuss out their neighbor, the Left, the other neighbor, the Right, the first neighbor’s wife, the entire government coalition, the opposition and her boss. And then her hands touched the steering wheel. She stopped cussing. For her, the steering wheel was like a cigarette to a smoker, a glass of wine to an alcoholic: a cue to relax.

She had to slow down due to the usual traffic-jam on the Prague ring-road, so she started fiddling with the radio. After flipping through a few stations, she decided that AC/DC’s lively tune, Highway to Hell most accurately corresponded to her mood and destination.

Mere minutes later, she hung a sharp right into an underground parking lot in the Karlín quarter and drove by the attendant, scowling. She knew very well that his waving hand had turned into an upturned finger the minute she was out of sight; she’d noticed that he amused himself this way each time any woman drove past him. Helena decided that, at the earliest opportunity, she’d find out whether he directed any, and if so what, type of gesture at passing men. Not that it was any of her business. But Helena was curious by nature.

She reached her glassed-in office next to the trading room, a big room full of computers, at a brisk trot. She had a lot on her plate today. Prior to the board meeting, she had to look over her subordinate’s presentation. The young trader, Karel Václav, was diligent – too diligent for Helena’s taste. Truth be told, Helena suspected his diligence was actually brownnosing. What’s more, she could never remember if his name was Karel Václav or Václav Karel and that irritated her. At any rate, it pleased her to think that, by giving him a name like that, his parents had taken a thorough revenge-ahead-of-the-fact on their son.

____________

After reading the first three pages of the presentation, which implied that the brilliant successes of the trading department over the past month were due to the brilliant motivational program of Ms. Stone, Helena concluded with disgust that it was definitely not a case of diligence, but of brownnosing, and had to be punished accordingly. Humming Highway to Hell, she scrolled through the rest of the presentation, found a sentence that mentioned the “crown rate correction” and changed it to “crown rate erection.” Briefly, she weighed the likelihood that her subterfuge would be discovered against the likelihood that it would be attributed to the carelessness of Václav or Karel, and then decided it was worth the risk. She hit “send.”

Five minutes later she was sitting in the oval conference room and staring at ten men in badly fitting, nondescript, gray-black suits, and at one almost-woman. Helena had always suspected that the head of Controlling was only a half-woman. Not only did she wear a baggy, gray pant suit as a matter of principle, but the whiskers above her upper lip also attested to her femininity, or lack thereof.

Helena wriggled nervously in her chair. Compared to the attire of the others, her black suit was form-fitting, to say the least. Her skirt, which barely skimmed her knees, was too short. Her hair was too fiery-red. And when she wasn’t busy keeping her mouth shut – and, in the past few years, outside the walls of her own home, she had been doing her best to keep it shut and limit her comments only to the subject of strategic trading with financial derivatives – her words were rather blunt. She always felt that way with this bunch: she’d never been quite sure she belonged here.

On the other hand, no one could say she didn’t belong here. From the moment she’d taken over as head of the trading room, the bank’s results in financial markets trading had improved rapidly despite the economic crisis. (Unfortunately, one couldn’t say the same of the bank’s other results, specifically loans.) And her economic education put her head and shoulders above the other occupants in the room.

After getting her doctorate at the Prague Economic University, she rapidly went through several different jobs in several different banks, all of which involved financial markets trading. With every job change, she moved up in terms of job position and wages until she became the only female head of trading in Prague.

She wasn’t especially proud of her success, maybe because it had been all too easy. She simply found the thoroughly masculine environment of stocks, bonds and forex amusing and she’d never suffered from an extreme case of feminism. What’s more, she could easily envision her career taking a completely different turn.

Actually, Helena had a surprising amount of talent in a surprising number of areas. For example, she could sketch quite well. During boring meetings, in the margins of her paper, she was especially good at creating outstanding portraits of her handful of superiors as caricatures of a certain part of the male anatomy. Also, as had been demonstrated on a few occasions, she was a literal marketing and overall sales guru. For example, she had not found it at all difficult to sell a ton of compost to an office rat in their apartment building. Still, neither of these activities brought her any especial pleasure.

In rare moments of contemplation, she imagined herself as a professional NASCAR driver. Of course, with the exception of enthusiasm, she had no qualifications whatsoever for such a career, because she had never driven anything more interesting than her company Superb. Neither would she mind being an astronaut, in spite of knowing virtually nothing more about space than what one could read in a run-of-the-mill, pop-science-fiction novel. (Actually, she only wouldn’t mind, provided that she could take her husband up into the stratosphere with her.) And she totally wouldn’t mind being a rock star. Granted, the lack of any musical talent whatsoever, of which she was well aware, wasn’t entirely compatible with this career path. But she refused to fret about that. She was convinced one should do what one enjoyed and not what one had, by some freak accident, earned a diploma in. Moreover, she was deeply convinced that if one sincerely enjoyed something and devoted enough effort to it, one would ultimately master it.

As a result, she had never clung to her job at the bank tooth and nail, which was precisely why she’d managed to climb higher and higher on the bank’s career ladder with unforced lightness and charm. This tended to generate envy and spiteful gossip among her male colleagues.

As for her, she harbored a deep disdain for a substantial number of her colleagues. In their small bank, friendship didn’t exist. There was only inclusion in a clan. And the number of board members vying for the job of general director corresponded to the number of clans. Helena had observed with disgust that the higher on the ladder of real or faked loyalty said person in said clan rose, the more he or she copied the head of the clan. This extended right up to such things as the same brand of shirt. The most frequent and most copied brand was Armani. As soon as Helena had realized this, she’d stopped wearing any type of obvious brand-name items, especially those by Armani, against which, for reasons not entirely clear to herself, she’d developed a special aversion.