Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow Read Free Book Online

what I paid for it?"
    She smiled fondly at him. "No, sweetheart, you're not going to get what you paid for it. All those things they told you when you put two mil into that place, like 'They're not making any more Manhattan' and 'Location location location'? It's lies." Her face got serious, sympathetic. "It's supposed to panic you and make you lose your head and spend more than you think something is worth. That goes on for a while and then everyone ends up with too much mortgage for not enough home, or for too much home for that matter, and then blooie, the bottom blows out of the market and everything falls down like a souffle."
    "You don't sugar-coat it, huh?" He'd come straight to her office from Ate's door, taking the subway rather than cabbing it or even renting a jetpack. He was on austerity measures, effective immediately. His brain seemed to have a pre-made list of cost-savers it had prepared behind his back, as though it knew this day would come.
    She shrugged. "I can, if you want me to. We can hem and haw about the money and so on and I can hold your hand through the seven stages of grieving. I do that a lot when the market goes soft. But you looked like the kind of guy who wants it straight. Should I start over? Or, you know, if you want, we can list you at two mil or even two point two, and I'll use that to prove that some other loft is a steal at 1.9. If you want."
    "No," he said, and he felt some of the angry numbness ebb away. He liked this woman. She had read him perfectly. "So tell me what you think I can get for it?"
    She put her fist under her chin and her eyes went far away. "I sold that apartment, um, eight years ago? Family who had it before you. Had a look when they sold it to you -- they used a different broker, kind of place where they don't mind selling to a corporate placement specialist. I don't do that, which you know. But I saw it when it sold. Have you changed it much since?"
    He squirmed. "I didn't, but I think the broker did. It came furnished, nice stuff."
    She rolled her eyes eloquently. "It's never nice stuff. Even when it comes from the best showroom in town, it's not nice stuff. Nice is antithetical to corporate. Inoffensive is the best you can hope for." She looked up, to the right, back down. "I'm figuring out the discount for how the place will show now that they've taken all the seams and crumbs out. I'm thinking, um, 1.8. That's a number I think I can deliver."
    "But I've only got 200K in the place," he said.
    Her expressive brown eyes flicked at the picture window, the FOR SALE signs. "And? Sounds like you'll break even or maybe lose a little on the deal. Is that right?"
    He nodded. Losing a little wasn't something he'd figured on. But by the time he'd paid all the fees and taxes -- "I'll probably be down a point or two."
    "Have you got it?"
    He hated talking about money. That was one thing about Ria is that she never actually talked about money -- what money did , sure, but never money. "Technically," he said.
    "OK, technical money is as good as any other kind. So look at it this way: you bought a place, a really totally amazing place on the Lower East Side, a place bigger than five average New York apartments. You lived in it for, what?"
    "Eight months."
    "Most of a year. And it cost you one percent of the street price on the place. Rent would have been about eleven times that. You're up --" she calculated in her head -- "it's about 83 percent."
    He couldn't keep the look of misery off his face.
    "What?" she said. "Why are you pulling faces at me? You said you didn't want it sugar-coated, right?"
    "It's just that --" He dropped his voice, striving to keep any kind of whine out of it. "Well, I'd hoped to make something in the bargain."
    "For what?" she said, softly.
    "You know, appreciation. Property goes up."
    "Did you do anything to the place that made it better?"
    He shook his head.
    "So you did no productive labor but you wanted to get paid anyway, right? Have you thought