Only the Strongest Survive (14 page)

“
Why not,”
Crouse
said. He pushed back his sleeve to
look at his watch. He sighed, resigned to coming home at eight at
the earliest. Good thing he didn’t have a wife or children. His
thoughts strayed for a moment.

Three times
he had nearly got
ten married, but every
time something happened at the last moment. The first fiancée ran
off with someone else. The second one, he realized, was with him
only for his money. And he didn’t love the third one at all,
something he discerned right before the wedding. He had never
fallen in love again and got used to the advantages of a single
life.
Sooner or later,
everyone is alone,
he often told himself
jokingly. But he greatly missed having children. He was sorry he
didn’t have a son or a daughter. Who would he leave all that money
to when he died? Yes, he was thinking about his death already. When
a person reached his age, it became inevitable. He always tried to
chase these thoughts away, but sometimes they persisted and, merged
with depression, they turned into a kind of nightmare.

The
journalist suggested:
“It’s best if we
begin at the very beginning.”

Blake smiled
faintly and said
, “As far as she told me,
she had some money left to her by her deceased mother, but there
was very little. She could have bought a good car, but she chose
not to spend the money. She got her first job in a small
stockbroking company. The work interested her greatly and she spent
long hours in the office. She began by working as a secretary
….”

*

“
Emely,
please draw up a contract with our new partner,
Gold
en Enterprise.” Her boss was rubbing
his hands with satisfaction, looking out of the window. “They’ll
invest over eight hundred thousand dollars.”

Every
time
, Emely was astonished by the huge
sums of money that individual companies were willing to invest into
shares and bonds. She often tried to imagine how it would be to
have that much money. She thought,
At this particular moment, I’d buy Motors shares. The value
is about to stop falling. Afterward they’ll grow for at least
twenty days.

She took a
sip of juice and adjusted a strand of
long hair that was falling across her eyes. She kept
dreaming:
I’d also buy DDS
bonds. They’re ridiculously cheap this week. Oh, if I had all that
money…

“
And call Mr.
Milder to arrange a meeting for tomorrow at ten,” her boss told
her, interrupting her thoughts.

“
OK, but I
want to remind you that you’re meeting the CEO of Walters
& Walters at half past ten.”

“I know, I didn’t forget. I’ll get rid of
Milder in a few minutes.” Putting his hand on the handle of the
leather-padded door, he added. “And please, find me the invoices I
mentioned yesterday.”

“
Right
.”

*

I’d also buy CW-2 bonds, investing at least a
10 percent share in them.
She was familiar with it all. She always knew
which securities were worth the most at any time. She had been a
secretary for four years, but spent every spare minute with the
stockbrokers.
Oh, if only I
could be in their place,
she
wished.

She
look
ed over their shoulder, at the
screen. “What does this window mean?” she’d ask.

“
Those are
average growth
indexes,” one broker told
her.

“And those diagrams?”

“They show the growth in the value of Julery
Adams bonds.”

“How interesting!” She stored everything away
in her head and never needed to ask the same question twice.

“
Emely,
back to your desk,” her
boss told her sharply. “I’ve told you countless times that your
place is next to my office and nowhere else.”

“Yes, I’m coming.”

She knew
that
she would again join the brokers at
the first available opportunity. What she liked most were the days
when her boss was not there. Then she pulled her chair closer to
the nearest broker and spent hours sitting next to him while he
explained to her the purpose of every individual
transaction.

“
See, these
are worth buying today. I think they’ll go up
tomorrow.”

Emely
absorbed it and tried to learn as much as possible. She knew you
could never know ex
actly what is most
worth buying, but that was the main attraction of it
all.

Stephan, next
to whom she liked
most to sit, told her,
“You have to rely on your instinct. You’ve got to have a sixth
sense, like animals do.”

She
hoped she had it.

“
You just
have to learn how to use it.” He winked at her in a friendly way.
“Sometimes I
don’t know what to buy and
what to sell and I often make mistakes. But that doesn’t matter.
What matters is the result at the end of the month and especially
at the end of the year. You must never allow momentary setbacks to
get you down.”

She nodded
like
a schoolgirl. “Why don’t you buy
more Motors Co. shares if you say that their value will grow by at
least 20 percent in the next two months? I’d put more money into
them.”

“
You can
never know for sure what will re
ally
happen, it’s all just conjecture. The best-laid plans may fail
miserably the next day, turning things upside down. There’s a
general rule that you never invest more than 20 percent of all the
available money into one type of security.”

“
Of course, I
forgot that
. But if it’s a solid company
and the prognosis is good …”

“
You learn
with
the years that the foundation of
even the most solid of companies can turn to dust in a single
moment. Remember the Ralington affair? Their shares were considered
a very good investment. After they published their profits and
dividends of around one hundred and fifty dollars per share, all
the stockbroking companies wanted to grab as much stock as
possible.” He looked at the diagrams on his screen for a moment.
Then he closed a few windows and dedicated his attention to Emely
again. “The CEO of that company boasted about his previous
investments. He was even nominated for the Manager of the Month
Award. And then only four weeks later, the supervisory board
announced bankruptcy. Everyone was horrified. They wanted to sell
Ralington shares and bonds, but sale was blocked and they could do
nothing.”

“
Yes, you’re
right, that’s what happened,” Emely
said.

“See, it’s not difficult, but you have to
follow the rules.”

“Aha.”

“
You’ve got
to
spread your money as widely as
possible.”

Emely looked
him in the eye
, trying to remember it
all. The information took root in her mind because it fascinated
her. She would give anything to be given a chance. It was not that
she didn’t like working as a secretary, but her work couldn’t
compare to that of stockbrokers, whom she saw as the driving force
of the company. They made a profit while she spent most of her time
answering the phone and sealing envelopes. Their work was much more
important than hers. That was why she enrolled at college. She
didn’t want to spend her life sitting next to the director’s
office.

Every morning
she
arose two hours before work, had a
shower, and then studied thick books on economics. Although she was
absorbed in the long paragraphs, she sometimes fell asleep. But she
soon woke up again and continued with her studies. She was strict
with herself, propelled forward by the desire to succeed in
life.

“
You do all
your exams
on time,” Sally, her roommate
and best friend, said to her one evening. “How do you manage it
when you spend all day at work?”

“
It’s not
true
. Only last week I failed the
statistics exam.” She was angry with herself for not having studied
more. But at that time it was mayhem at work and she could never
get home before nine.

“Oh come on, you’re a very hard worker. If
you go on like this, you’ll soon be a fully fledged economist.”

Emely hoped
Sally was right. Every time she ran out of energy she imagined
working as a stockbroker and it gave her strength to go
on.

“
And what
will you do once your studies are over?” Sally
asked.

“I told you I’d like to be a
stockbroker.”

“
A
stockbroker? How strange. Isn’t that a man’s
job? What could possibly be interesting in doing that?”

“
It’s
true
brokers don’t buy shoes and handbags
in designer stores, which is something you’d love to do most,
Sally,” Emely teased, “but I find what they do so
interesting.”

“
If that’s
what you want
. I just hope you’ve
mentioned it at work, you know, about your wishing to become a
stockbroker one day.”

Emely
swallowed hard. She had not mentioned it to anyone, afraid that
they
’d laugh at her. All the brokers were
men and experienced traders. And what was she? What did she have to
recommend her? She would never reveal her wish to them.

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“
Whatever,
I’m sure you’ll land on your feet.”

But Emely was
not so sure. Although they valued her work and kept praising her,
she had a feeling they were pleased with her as a secretary and
didn
’t want her to become
more.

When after
the first year she took her grades to her boss, he praised her.
“Wonderful, Emely, you really are a good girl. I knew you’d manage.
When you finish all your exams, you’ll be able to become
my business executive assistant.”

“
Business
executive assistant?” The words
had
echoed around Emely’s head. “How terrible. Why didn’t he say I
could become a stockbroker? Executive assistant!” She kept
repeating these words, horrified.

“
But that’s a
wonderful job,” Sally said
when they were
discussing it at home. “What more do you want? You’ll send the odd
letter and have lots of coffee.”

“But that’s not what I want to do,” Emely
said.

“And why didn’t you say so to your boss?”

“
I
didn’t dare. He’s so nice to me.” Emely hung her
head down.

“
But then
he’ll never find out
what you want,
exactly.”

She knew
Sally was right, but
Emely was still
unable to pluck up the courage to talk about this to her
boss.

Her friend
said,
“If you can’t mention it to your
boss, tell someone else, for heaven’s sake.”

“
I
will
, I will,” Emely said, but did
nothing, afraid that she would be laughed at.

Finally the
day came when she
had to defend her
degree. Three professors sat in front of her, listening with
interest.

“
Long-
term investments are mostly
dependent on a company’s income, which is connected to the
development of the economy as a whole, the political system, tax
policies. Midterm investments are dependent on development within a
specific economic field, exchange rates, and monetary policies ….”
Emely was hoping that she would remember everything. She had spent
the whole night preparing and the pain at the back of her head was
getting unbearable. “There are also movements on the stock market
which are the result of the disproportionately high number of
offers, i.e., demands ….” She had invested more than three months’
time preparing for this.

Since she was
working at a stockbroking company, her mentor advised her to write
something about stockbroking in her final thesis. But he was
surprised at the result. Her thesis included completely new
approaches in the forecasting of the potential growth and falls in
the value of securities. He was enthusiastic about finally having
found a student who didn’t simply quote from various books, but
tried to find new directions. When he started reading her thesis,
he was unable to put it down until he reached the end. “Leave me
alone!” he shouted at a cleaner who came to his office for the
second time. “Can’t you see I’m very busy!”

“
I
f the values …” he read out
loud, forgetting the cleaner who was giving him angry looks. She
figured he could clean his darned office himself if he
wanted,
and left.

*

One professor
suggested to
Emely that she go on to
postgraduate study, certain that a fund could be found which would
give her a scholarship. But Emely was not interested. She wanted to
finally do what she wrote about in her thesis. That was all. She
wanted nothing else.

*

“
Congratulations, honey, I knew you’d do
it one day,” Sally said to her, giving her a big
hug.