Veniss Underground Read Online Free PDF Page B

animals of every size and description hide in the shadows, scurrying to deeper safe places, huddling in alcoves and cubbyholes where they are only staring eyes or a swatch of dirty fur. No one knows their species, their intellect, their means of survival, but even the police leave them alone, and sometimes it is only by the feral shrieks, the crescendo of bloodshed late at night, that anyone knows of their existence.
    Laundry lines sail between rooftops, clothes dried and punished by the winter wind. The smells of rot and wastes are sharper, more disturbing, in the winter. Only the ever-present but dust-dulled holosigns break the monotony of dark colors. The few people on the streets walk quickly, with glances neither right nor left, and use the escalator sidewalks, many of which have broken down or make an annoying whining sound. Rising over the “slums”—the old-fashioned word comes to mind—are the glass-and-plastic skyscrapers of the ruling classes, sparkling even against the dull gray horizon.
    Nick loves it. He loves it for its broken-down individuality, its crass, old-fashioned qualities. He loves it because it is cheap.
    And, luckily, he chose an apartment close to the checkpoint station—ten minutes after disembarkation you find his apartment building. It seems to suddenly
rush
at you as you emerge from a long, dim alley, so that the second-floor holosign, faded and crackly, leaps into focus: a half-transparent image of a woman sadly singing the praises of the accommodations while she holds a sign that reads TOLSTOI HOSTEL in frenetic shades of red and pink. Words and motion and song hit you all at once, and, although you have been here before, you stop and stare, annoyed, at the colors and textures, the way, against the gray of the district, the sunlight hits the sides of buildings and illumines them in gold.
    Inside, you find the landlord behind a once-opulent polished oak check-in counter. He hasn't seen Nicholas in over three weeks he says, after you bribe him with the rent money. The fist-faced old codger rewards you with a key, a broken-toothed leer, and desperate conversation: “I was a boxer once. Max Windberg once rode my muscles to victory at eighteen to one!” Has anyone visited him since the robbery, you ask. “No, no one's visited,” he says, and you don't know if he means Nick specifically or the Tolstoi Hostel in general.
    You can feel the landlord's gaze on your back—not lascivious, you feel, merely lonely—as you walk across the lobby, past an old man and woman sitting on a sofa staring toward the open door. Who are they waiting for?
    The pilgrimage to Nick's apartment is a difficult trudge up old-fashioned nonmoving stairs to a second-floor landing right out of one of those ancient revivalist cops-and-robbery movies Nick likes so much: paint peeled, no ventilation, a door scrawled over with so much graffiti that none of it is readable. Nick added the graffiti himself—the accumulation of all the sayings and phrases he created while playing the slang jockey game.
    You put the key in the door, turn it, but do not open it when you hear the resounding click. Suddenly your hands tremble. What lies beyond the door is also beyond your control. You enter into a stark white silence, poorly lit and overlaid with a musky smell. The apartment has three rooms—a living room that merges with the kitchen, and a tiny bathroom toward the back, barely large enough for a shower. The living room and kitchen are empty. Huge blank spots in the living room show where his holoart once stood, while rude scuff marks against the left wall reveal where the ugly, old-fashioned blue couch—metal-springed and without programmable attributes—used to hunker, ready to convert into Nick's bed. Gone too the few scattered chairs that used to litter the floor like lost and confused pets.
    Gone, all gone. How can this be? Has the landlord stolen what the thieves left behind? A