Red Square Read Online Free PDF

'Everything you see is reserved. We have nothing, nothing!' she announced.
        Arkady opened the chill room door. An elderly man huddled like a mouse in a corner. In one hand, he clutched a certificate naming him a volunteer citizen inspector to combat hoarding and speculation. In his other hand was a bottle of vodka.
        'Staying warm, uncle?' Arkady asked.
        'I'm a veteran.' The old man touched the bottle to the medal on his sweater.
        'I can see that.'
        Arkady walked around the storeroom. Why did a milk shop need bins?
        'Everything here is special order for invalids and children,' the manager said.
        Arkady opened a bin to see sacks of flour stacked like sandbags. When he opened another, pomegranates rolled around his feet and over the storeroom floor. A third bin, and lemons poured over pomegranates.
        'Invalids and children!' the manager shouted.
        The last bin was stacked with cigarettes.
        Arkady stepped carefully around the fruit and exited through the bay. The men loading the milk tucked their faces away.
        From the back of the shop, his cigarette still in his left hand, Arkady walked across a yard seeded with broken glass to the main street. On it, apartment buildings rusted in seams along drainpipes and window casings. Cars had the creased and rusted look of wrecks. Kids hung on to a rust-orange roundabout without seats. The school seemed to be built of bricks of rust. At the end of the street, the local Party headquarters was sheathed like a sepulchre in white marble.
        At Julya's last address for Kim, Arkady dropped the cigarette as he approached a pet shop whose plaster had fallen from its facade in large, geographic sections. He heard Jaak and the car rolling close behind.
        The only animals for sale seemed to be chicks and cats peeping and mewing in wire cages. The shop assistant was a Chinese girl carving what looked like liver for a customer. When the liver stirred Arkady saw that it was actually a spreading mound of bloodworms. He stepped behind the counter and into a back room as the girl followed with her cleaver and warned, 'This is no entry.'
        In the back were sacks of wood shavings and chicken pellets, a refrigerator with a calendar for the Year of the Sheep, shelves with tall glass jars of teas, mushrooms and fungi, man-shaped ginseng and items labelled only in Chinese characters, but which he recognized from the herbal shops he had seen in Siberia. What looked like tar in a jar was black-bear bile; a larger bottle held a lumpish mass of coagulated pig's blood, good for soup. There were dried seahorses and deer penises that resembled peppers. Bear paws, another illegal delicacy, were stacked on a rope. An armadillo stirred, half-alive, on a string.
        'No entry,' the girl insisted. She couldn't have been more than twelve and the cleaver looked as long as her arm.
        Arkady apologized and left. A second door led up stairs littered with birdseed to a metal door. He knocked and pressed himself against the wall. 'Kim, we want to help you. Come out so we can talk. We're friends.'
        Someone was inside. Arkady heard the careful easing of a floorboard and a sound like rustling sheets. When he pounded the door, it popped open. He walked into a storeroom that was dark except for a shoebox that was burning from the top down in the middle of the floor; he smelled the lighter fluid that had been poured on to it. Around the walls were television cartons, on the floor a bare mattress, tool kit, hot plate. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out of the open window at a fire escape leading down to a yard knee-deep in pet-shop junk: birdseed bags, steel netting, dead chicks. Whoever had been here was gone. He tried the switch. The light bulb was gone, too. Well, that showed forethought.
        Arkady made a complete circuit of the room, looking behind the cartons, before he returned to the burning box. The sound of