ewancummins wrote:FRANZ, LATER THAT MORNING, AT A TENEMENT HOUSE
Franz reaches the tenement house, following the frau’s directions. The big rectangular building of dark, massive support timbers and peeling plaster walls stands three stories high, taller than anything else in a radius of a few blocks. The street angles down to the right, so that the building appears sunken on the left side, but in fact rises straight up. The front gate stands open to the elements, the big door that once stood in the entry corridor rotted off its hinges and laying on the stoop in fragments. Looking up, Franz sees broken tiles littering the sagging, high gabled roof. A tile slides down and smashes into the cobles, shattering. The rain gutters drip steady streams of dirty water onto the streets, feeding flooded drainage ditches cut on the near side of the path that runs downhill in front of the building. A stack of nailed together boards laid over a three foot stretch of the open sewer allow him a safe crossing up to the entryway.
Crossing into the building, Franz finds a long, shadowy hallway that runs into a barren, icy little courtyard about thirty feet from the entrance, dotted with blackened heaps of dead plants. On either side, doors face Franz, sunk into the walls of the long hall. Some hang open; others a closed. Several doorways have no door panels left standing, only rusty hinges—ragged curtains block those.
Peering across the fallow garden square at the far end of the main access hall, Franz sees the bottom of a staircase opening in an archway on the far side, flanked by two smaller doors in the far wall—both closed.
Munchen catches up with Franz and begins sniffing at doors.
A curtain rustles on Franz’s left side. The cloth rustles again. Munchen growls.
The curtain pulls aside and a grossly fat man in long underwear stares out at Franz,. A rusty butcher knife dangles in his right hand, low at his side. The man grunts and scratches his hairy jowls with his left hand. He looks down at Munchen.
“Does your dog bite?”
Franz looks at the man, face friendly.
"Mein dog does not bite unless the person is deserving, sir. I am looking for Mathilde unt her father. I am Franz. She met me yesterday unt told me of her father's back."
