Prague by Arthur Phillips Page B

the VP with Charles's second report, now allowed to bloat to five lines, as a single line of Analyst Recommendations was permitted. And after nearly seven months on the job, Charles had seen exactly none of his HPs return. Some had been rejected out of hand by the VP, who expertly discovered some minute flaw in the material Gabor had naively collected. Others had received the VP's endorsement only to be vetoed by the New York office for being insufficiently flashy or potentially lucrative to be the firm's first Hungarian venture. "First?" John smirked. "Our first," Charles repeated with disgust, "while they pour money into
     
    Prague." Eight months after Charles's arrival, nine to eleven months after adoring articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the Hungarian press declared a brave new world, eight months after historic meetings with the finance minister and receptions with the prime minister, eight months after the ninety-nine-year lease had been signed, handing over the former headquarters of an obscure and extravagantly nasty division of the secret police, seven months after Charles had read his first nervous and badly phrased request for money, nothing had been accomplished. 'And nobody cares," Charles said as he slumped back into his chair. The cost of running the office was a small expense for the firm; they could afford to take their time and get their P.R. just right.
     
    But Gabor was not going to be a junior member of the team forever, or even for very long. Eventually the Very Pathetic, the Presiding Vice, would tire of being essentially illiterate, his ache for the good old lunches at the Box Tree and the Quilted Giraffe would overwhelm him, and he would relax back to New York with tales of the quaint Hungarians (of whom, Charles said, the man knew perhaps two, including his office manager). By that point, Charles's value to the firm would be so evident that his promotion to head of the office, or at least to a job where decisions were made, would be a given.
     
    Alternately, he told John, Budapest being what it was right now, he would have no problem finding investors of his own even that very day. Raising money in Hungary was beautifully easy, he explained. The hotel lobbies were sloshing with it. You just needed a suit and a bucket. Bored rich men and the hungry, beady-eyed representatives of bored rich men occupied nearly every room of the major hotels, boldly executing "fact-finding missions," proudly reminding one another that "since democracy requires free markets, a high-return investment is nothing less than a blow struck for liberty." "You'd love these guys, John. You can't swing a dead cat in the Forum lobby without knocking them down and watching money fall out of their pockets." Charles had met a few of these capitalist pilgrims in his office, at embassy parties, in the lobbies. His conservative assessment was that in six months or less, he could raise whatever backing he needed to make a fortune on the Hot Prospect of his choice.
     
    WHO WON THE COLD WAR? WE DID. OUR GENERATION. OUR SACRIFICES
     
    broke the Communist behemoth. Yes, granted, okay: Our parents lived through the
     
    F
     
    flickering black-and-white-footage days of the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam. But those of us born under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford—-we are the triumphant generation. We faced Armageddon from birth; we never knew any other way but mutually assured destruction, and we never blinked. We came of age staring down Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Ustinov. We were inured to their stony silences, wrinkly faces, and short reigns. When Gorbachev peered out from his Kremlin bunker, what did he see? He saw us entering college, pretty much willing to make do with slightly smaller student loans in order to fund Star Wars, doing what had to be done, voting for Reagan.
     
    We were the Soviet studies majors; we skimmed all our reading on Communism and we never once doubted that dreary doctrine's