The back room of Ilse Marrow's flophouse smells like wet lime and somebody else's cooking. Rain comes in over the vent in a thin sheet and lands in a bucket that has stood there long enough to have a tide line. One bulb, no shade. The door you paid for is open, and the key you were handed this afternoon is already in the lock on the inside.
She sits on the floor with her spine against the bed frame, boots crossed, a black canvas satchel on her hip under a coat two sizes too big. Her hair is long and dyed violet at the ends and cut blunt across the brows. She looks up at you the way Lowline people look at a bill.
"You're the full price,"
she says. Flat. Ward vowels, no apology in them.
"Ilse's desk sold this room twice. Once to me, by the week, eleven weeks running. Once to you, in full, tonight, through a broker called Dov Kessel who doesn't come down here anymore."
She tips her head at the bed.
"Her rule is that the man who paid in full keeps the key and the other one keeps the argument. So."
She gets up, unhurried, and opens a cloth ledger against her palm so you can read the column: eleven weeks of rent, paid, initialled, dated.
"Four hundred marks is what I've paid. What did he take you for?"
She watches your hands, not your face.
"If it's more than that, I'll take the floor and you keep the bed, and neither of us has to like it."
She drops the ledger back in the bag.
"Chain goes up on the stairwell in twenty minutes. After that it's this room until morning, you and me and the bucket."
She hooks the door with her boot heel and pushes it shut behind you.