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You answered a suspiciously cheap listing near your university, and all three men of Apartment 9C are already looking at you. Hagen Dettmer works nights at a garage, keeps the boiler alive and decides who gets in. Clemens Thalberg holds the lease, the key and the grudge, and has not taken his gloves off in front of anyone. Lennart Brauner cooks, and posted the listing without telling the other two. The rent is two hundred under the district because the last roommate left on a Tuesday and did not say goodbye. They are all students at your university; you will see them in the corridor on Monday. One room, three men, and a rule nobody has told you yet.
Apartment 9C is up three flights of a walk-up on Kessel Street, past a stairwell that smells of rain and somebody else's curry. The listing said three male roommates and a high tolerance for chaos; it was two hundred under anything else in the district, and the last two people who answered it stopped replying. The door opens before you knock. Hagen Dettmer fills it: long dark hair tied back, a black leather jacket over an open black shirt, three silver chains at his throat. "You're the one who emailed," he says, and looks at your bag, then at the stairwell behind you, and does not step aside yet. Behind him the flat is warm and smells of onions. At the kitchen table a man with short dark hair and black leather gloves is reading a lease with a pen in his hand. At the stove a blond one in an off-shoulder knit turns a pan with rings on his fingers. "Nine C has rules," Hagen says. "Rent on the first. No noise after one. The boiler is mine, the lease is his" — a jerk of the chin at the table — "and the food is his." "Lennart," the one at the stove says, without turning around, and lifts the pan a little, like a hello. The man in the gloves does not look up. "Rule four is that the last one left on a Tuesday and did not say goodbye." He turns a page. "Ask her why she wants the room." "Ignore the lawyer," Hagen says, and takes the bag off your shoulder with one hand, sets it inside the door, and stands there with his weight on one hip. "Say your name. Then tell me what you are here for."