The Kremlin Games(127)

“What lesson?” Brandy asked.

“Don’t try to hold up the Russian government. Or, more accurately, don’t fail to cut him in on it.”

“So how bad is it?”

“Bad! For us here it’s the advances.” The ruble, now a paper currency, with the image of Czar Mikhail and the double-headed eagle on the face and the Moscow Kremlin and a Russian bear on the back, was valued at less than half the value of the Dutch guilder in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be equivalent to the silver ruble coin that had twice the silver of the Dutch guilder. Partly that was because the czar and Boyar Duma had issued rather more rubles than they really should have. But mostly it was because the Dutch merchants resented the paper ruble. The new currency had changed the whole trading landscape in Russia. Dutch merchants had gone from absolutely vital to convenient. And the price they paid at Arkhangelsk for grain, cordage, lumber, and other Russian goods had more than doubled.

So, the Dutch wouldn’t deal in Russian paper money or money of account based on Russian money. They would still accept Russian coins, but their refusal to deal in Russian paper had its effect. “If the canny Dutch merchants wouldn’t take paper rubles, there must be something wrong with them. Right?” So rubles traded in Grantville, Venice and Vienna at less than a quarter of face value. And that was if you were basing face value on the amount of silver in a ruble coin. If you figured it in the price of a bushel of grain at Arkhangelsk versus the same bushel at Amsterdam, it traded at less than a tenth of its face value.

It was hard to make a profit when you were losing more than nine-tenths of your money to arbitrage. Vladimir spent his rubles where they would buy something, then shipped the goods to the USE for resale, just as he had been doing from the beginning. And, like any good man of business, he tried to find buyers in advance rather than shipping the goods on spec. What Sheremetev objected to was how much of the money Vladimir was investing in Grantville and the USE. Sheremetev wanted Vladimir to buy silver and gold and send it back to Moscow. Which made no sense at all. If Vladimir was going to do anything along those lines, he would be buying paper rubles in Grantville with silver where he could get a lot of them, then shipping the rubles back to Moscow where they would buy more.

Vladimir had contracts to sell five thousand stacked-plate mica capacitors, plus several tons of other mica products. But what he didn’t have was this quarter’s shipment of mica and mica-based components. Also missing were a couple of hundred miles of cordage, several tons of Russian hardwoods, plus sundry other goods. In other words, several million American dollars worth of goods, which he was morally and legally obligated to provide. And about half of it had been paid for in advance. He was insured against loss at sea. With Swedish control of the Baltic, the insurance hadn’t been all that expensive.

What he wasn’t insured against was Sheremetev and the Boyar Duma preventing him from bringing out the goods. Goods that had never sailed from Nyen—St. Petersburg it would have become in that other history. Goods that had never even reached Swedish Ingria. It wasn’t just that money wasn’t coming in—money that had already come would have to be paid back with penalties for nondelivery.

Vladimir wasn’t broke exactly. He was now deeply in debt. In some ways that was better than being broke, but in others much worse. Partly to gain access to the developing tech and partly just because it was good long-term financial strategy, he had invested in some of the more long-term projects. He was, for instance, fairly heavily invested in three of the companies that were working on down-time manufacture of automobiles. And he was the major investor in a group that was working on the tubes for microwaves. They didn’t expect results for years, but they were working on it and Vladimir was the primary backer of the research. Microwave tech was just too useful to ignore because it was hard to do.

“It’s bad for us here but what I’m really worried about is Natasha. Sheremetev can make me go out and get a real job, but that’s not much of a threat. The real threat is that he can kill my sister. What I would like to do is get Natasha out of Russia. But I don’t see any way to do it.”

“How much time do we have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I can send a fruitcake,” Brandy said, “You know the kind with a saw in it. A metaphoric saw in this case. Instructions about how to arrange an unauthorized immigration.”

“It’s a worthy thought,” Vladimir agreed, “but I don’t think she’d come. Aside from everything else, Sheremetev needs me as much or more than I need him. If he didn’t have Natasha I’d be able to tell him to shove it.”