Prague by Arthur Phillips Page A

led him to tell the recruiter, "Yes, I speak fluent Hungarian and would welcome the challenge of helping open the firm's Budapest offices." Suddenly Karoly was again a valued and welcome member of Charles's psychic cast and crew. Unfortunately, Karoly was still twelve. As a result, the investment professional who arrived in Budapest in October 1989, after three months of peculiarly infantilizing training in New York, was a cocky, opinionated young venture capitalist of style, intelligence, and intuition who, in Hungarian, unbeknownst to his employers, spoke to the managers of potential investments very much like a twelve-year-old boy in a well-dressed man's body.
     
    One morning, John sat on Charles's office couch and photographed Charles, looking important at his desk, the picture window behind him comprising one-third Danube, one-third Castle Hill, one-third cirrus-smeared heavens. The photo, which Charles sent home to his parents, showed five stacks of files in front of him. Each stack was of a different height, and Charles explained to the semi-interested John what he did all day, most days.
     
    Every morning, Zsuzsa, the firm's Hungarian office manager, nestled new files into leather covers embossed with the firm's logo (a knight holding high a sword, looking forward into the gloom while sheltering behind him a disheveled, nearly nude maiden). This stack of files on the left—Charles tapped the tower of booklets—represented IQs, Incoming Queries: letters and materials that argued hopelessly on behalf of old state-owned Communist enterprises seeking private investors, inventors requesting seed funding, groups of young entrepreneurs wishing to form a casino, et cetera.
     
    Every afternoon, Zsuzsa would remove the stack on the far right, nearly equal in teetering altitude: SRs—Summary Rejections. Here were yesterday's state-owned companies, too inefficient to merit resuscitation and with little
     
    value even as scrap; inventors too implausible to earn even an interview; and young managers whose inexperience made Charles shake his head in wonder. He had quickly concluded that virtually the entire managerial class of the country was either without experience or burdened by years of the wrong experience courtesy of Communism's inefficiencies, irrelevancies, immoralities. Between the pillar of Hungarian hopes and its near twin of despair lay three significantly smaller stacks. The first—Investigation Requests—was composed of those offers interesting enough to warrant further interviews, on-site visits, requests for financial data, and so forth. Charles passed these files with a strictly enforced four-line summary of his findings to the office's managing partner, a forty-four-year-old VP from New York, burdened with not a single word of Hungarian but with nineteen years of Wall Street experience. This leader leaned inordinately on Zsuzsa and the bilingual junior members of the team. Resenting his sudden neediness, however, he would frequently and with strident machismo lecture them about "how it's done Stateside."
     
    With some excitement at first, Charles followed up on those few cases approved by the VP for further investigation—Under Reviews. But this long-awaited action usually disappointed. Charles laughed through interviews with talented young entrepreneurs willing to surrender too little control or hypothetical profit for the American dollars they sought; nerve-racking exhibitions of prototype inventions unable to perform their hypothetical tasks as despairing inventors grew first chatty then weepy; and tours of state-run factories every bit as laughable as their American P.R. agency-penned descriptions had been arousing.
     
    "Usually," said Charles, sighing.
     
    But for every 5 percent of Investigation Requests that the VP approved and elevated to Under Reviews, perhaps 5 percent of those stood up to some scrutiny. These became the tiny little stack of HPs—Hot Prospects. These files then went back to