standards, corporate finance is the same jungle where predatory and greedy males reign.)

The lady from Salomon listened in unkind silence to my outpourings and, with a heavy sigh, said: in corporate finance, carefully slicked, lacking any independence, squishy squishes work for miserable salaries. Are you a man or not? Where is your enthusiasm? Do you really want to wipe your pants all day, in the office? Were you hit with a dusty bag as a child?

She obviously didn't expect an answer from me. She preferred questions. So I also asked if she was authorized to offer me a job. With that, the question of my masculinity was left, and I was assured that when she returned home, she would make sure that her husband took care of it.

At the end of dinner, the 84-year-old Queen Mother hobbled to the door. We—eight hundred insurance agents, the two bosses of Salomon Brothers, their wives, and I—stand in respectful silence, waiting for her to make her way to the office door—that's what I thought at first. Then I already I realized that this was the main entrance to the palace, and we, having generously paid for invitation cards, were let in here like pedlar boys - through the back door. Be that as it may, the queen mother gave everyone a sign. Behind her came Jeeves, standing unnaturally upright as if swallowing a stick, in a white coat and tie, with a silver tray in his hands. Jeeves was followed in a file by a pack of tiny Welsh Corgis, short-legged, long, fox-faced, most like burly rats. The British consider their corgis to be very cute. Then they explained to me that the royal family does not take a step without these little dogs.

The reception hall was completely silent. When the Queen Mother passed by, the insurance agents bowed their heads like in church. Corgis were trained to curtsey every 15 seconds by crossing their hind legs and pressing their rat bellies to the floor. Finally, the procession reached the exit. We stood on the side where the Queen Mother walked. The wife of the director of Salomon Brothers was glowing with delight. I think I was on fire too. But she burned harder. She was bursting with desire to be noticed. There are several ways to attract the attention of a royal person in the presence of eight hundred silent insurance agents, but the most reliable, apparently, is to scream. Which she did. She yelled happily.

— Hey queen, you have adorable dogs!

Several dozen insurance agents turned pale. In fact, they were already quite pale, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. In any case, they somehow suddenly choked, cleared their throats and stared in unison at their own boots. The only one who looked like nothing had happened was the Queen Mother herself. She left the room without a moment's hesitation.

In this bizarre situation at St. James's Palace, the best colors of two proud organizations shone side by side. The imperturbable Queen Mother pulled herself out of her predicament elegantly—she just didn't notice. The wife of the director of Salomon Brothers, having gathered all the reserves of energy and instinctive wisdom, restored the balance of power - she screamed. I have always been partial to the royal family, especially the Queen Mother. But after this incident, the Salomon Brothers, who disturbed the imperturbable calm of the royal palace, became equally irresistibly attractive to me. Exactly. Some consider them noisy, rude and indecent. But that's exactly what happened to me. These people were just for me, however, I suppose, like any other investment banker. And I was immediately convinced that this extraordinarily energetic product of the Salomon Brothers bank culture was able to persuade her husband to take me to work.

Soon her husband invited me to the London office of Salomon and introduced me to everyone working on the Salomon Brothers trading floor. I liked them. I liked the trading atmosphere of this office, but I have not yet received a formal job offer, and I have not even been invited to a regular interview. Since I was not cross-examined, it was clear that the director's wife had kept her promise and that I was going to be hired. But at the same time, I did not receive an invitation to drop in on occasion.

A few days later another call came. Would I mind having breakfast with Leo Corbett, Human Resources Officer for the New York branch of Salomon, at the Berkeley Hotel in London at 6:30 in the morning? Naturally, I didn't mind at all. And I had to go through the painful perverse torture of getting up at 5:30 in the morning and putting on a blue suit to take part in a business breakfast. But Corbett didn't offer me a job either. Only a plate of poorly fried eggs. We had a really nice talk, which was weird because Salomon Brothers HR had a reputation for being rude bastards. It was very clear that Corbett intended to offer me a job, but he never did. I got home, threw off my suit and lay down to sleep.

Completely puzzled, I told this story to a friend with whom I studied at the London School of Economics. Since he himself dreamed of getting a job at Salomon Brothers, he knew exactly what needed to be done. He explained that this office never invites anyone to work. It would be too cruel to give people a chance, only to find out later that they are not suitable and you need to leave. Therefore, Salomon prefers to do with hints. If I get a hint that they are ready to take me, then the best thing is to call Leo Corbett in New York and get the job yourself.

So I did. I called him, introduced myself again and said:

“I want to tell you that I accept the invitation.

“Glad to welcome you aboard,” he replied, and laughed.

So. What's next? Corbett reported me that I will start with the preparatory program sometime at the end of July. He said that at least one hundred and twenty students from various colleges and business schools would participate in this program. Then he hung up. He didn't say how much I was going to be paid, and I didn't ask either, because I already knew—for reasons that will soon become clear—that investment bankers don't like to talk about money.

As time went. I knew nothing about trading, and therefore Salomon Brothers, because there is no other firm on Wall Street that is so completely immersed in trading. I only knew what the journalists wrote: Salomon Brothers is the most profitable investment bank in the world. Maybe it was, but the hiring process turned out to be suspiciously simple and pleasant. When my first enthusiasm for the fact that stable employment was ahead of me passed, a doubt arose - is life on the trading floor really that good? It occurred to me that I should try my luck in corporate finance. Had the circumstances been different, I would have gone so far as to write to Leo (we called each other by our first names) that clubs that are so easy to accept don't suit me. But the circumstances were such that I had no other job.

I decided that I would have to live with the stigma of a person who got his first job through an acquaintance. It was still better than the stigma of being unemployed. All other roads to the trading floor of this company led through an extremely unpleasant procedure of formal interviews. Most of those with whom I subsequently worked went through ferocious interrogations (that year, six thousand people applied for jobs) and told chilling stories about it. I, on the other hand, except for the fantastic memory of how the director's wife attacked the royal family, did not have any battle scars, and I was very ashamed of it.

However, everything was fine. One of the reasons why I clung to this job so much was that I had already encountered the dark side of the job search on Wall Street and had no desire to plunge into it again. In 1981, three years before my lucky night at St. James's Palace, I applied for jobs at several banks in my senior year of college. I've never seen people on Wall Street react to anything with such astonishing the unanimity shown by the personnel officers to my application. Some actually laughed at me from the bottom of their hearts. The others were more serious and said that I had no commercial streak, a roundabout way of letting me know that I was going to spend my life in poverty. It has always been difficult for me to make sudden changes, and the one that was ahead of me was the hardest. First, I had a strong aversion to business suits. Plus, I'm blonde. I have not seen a single fair-haired person who would have succeeded in a business career. All the successful businessmen I have ever met have been either brunettes or bald. In a word, there were enough problems. About a quarter of the people I started working with at Salomon Brothers got straight out of college, which means they passed all the tests that got me cut off. I still don't understand why.

If I then thought about trading, it was only in passing. And in this I was quite typical. At the time, university graduates thought of marketplaces as pens for wild animals, and the biggest change in the 1980s was that graduates from