I was very, very lucky. The stampede Lady Chief described to Scarlet Fever Lane came just at a time of stocks starting to rise over in GLC at both the Toronto Exchange and the GLC Board of Trade. I did everything I could to get my girls to stop spending foolishly and start buying into Index Funds with a Money Market Fund hedge. I badgered them, I pleaded with them, I even told them that any of them leaving the Zone destitute would get three separate butt strappings over the last six weeks of their time there. They may have even taken the last threat seriously, since that’s when all 16 of them finally got on board.
Through all the five years a Madam, I carried the strap that had been Elizabeth’s, proudly, and now that we’re together again, I’m keeping hold of it. I still get too many threats of having my butt strapped off from that quarter. The two strappings of my apprenticeship were quite enough, thank you. And I cherish more than anything her description, before I became a whore, of the I’m Just A Whore Blues which my second strapping pulled me out of. I knew it when it was happening and gave in to the strap as my only chance of making it through.
I bought blue chip Mutual Funds because I guessed right that the markets were finally coming off the bottom created by the GLC sanctions on the Zone. All of us whores made a lot of money, but I made enough for the rest of my life. I’d like to have bragging rights, but my Deep Cover and Bernadette’s Deep Cover were pieces of cake compared to Lady Chief and Henry Peterson. It’s just a shame that only revenge and death would satisfy her.
My life at 36 is just beginning and, now that I’ve been back, I’m doing some friendly arm twisting of my fellow Three Musketeers to take them to places like I was taken to Chicago, nine years ago, by the two most wonderful women in the world, both realistic and tough as nails. Just between you and me, Lady Chief’s memo here is some of the most self-straight talking and clear eyed analysis I’ve ever seen on paper of someone’s own tragic end to a career which was completely out of her control. Maybe I’ll get her to see that someday. Such a gift is so much more important than any failure or success. To my knowledge, after the Mossad killings I acquired no more bodies, and if I have, I will never know it, because now I’m not cleared to know it, which is just fine with me. More than anything else, I want to help my sister, who went the longest alone with the heaviest burden of all, find the road back to hope. I will do anything, say anything, give anything for that.
Elizabeth will speak for herself (and for Lady Chief when the going gets hardest at the end) but I’ll mention that I’ve seen enough and heard enough to know that Elizabeth has always been a strikingly beautiful woman at all her ages, though she won’t let you know it on her own. And after six years of quiet, freedom from worry, and care under the wing of Lady Chief, at 74 she is unthinkably radiant, as if every one of her ages, hidden as they were by the hardest of lives (Don’t raise your eyebrows! I KNOW how hard it is. You don’t.) suddenly has bloomed forth at once.
My career as a Madam was straightforward and I kept the reputation of Elizabeth’s Secret and it’s girls as the finest house with the Highest Class Tarts anywhere. I make that broad a claim, because it and they were given the best chance possible by the Zone to do it that any house will ever receive, and both it’s two madams did the right strapping, in the right way, to bring out the very best in the girls that they could be. And even more important, which Elizabeth didn’t mention, is that our pinnacle of High Class challenged all the houses to be better. If my girls encountered another madam, or even a forward whore from another house when outside, she would frequently be bought a free coffee or ice cream to be questioned about our bedroom techniques. To my surprise, neither the Madams nor the whores knew nearly as much as we did. I let our girls be pumped freely, because a better Lane meant more customers for all of us.
There is nowhere we go in the life that we won’t be despised by women and leered at by men. But we held our heads high that in our branch of “in service” we could not be surpassed, though somehow, somewhere, someday we might be equaled. Even today I still occasionally hear whispering behind me if I pass two people together while walking on the street. Once a whore, always a whore, just like Elizabeth told me, and like her I’m proud of it. So anyone who doesn’t think I should be, get stuffed.
(Yes, “aunties” I always was tough enough, even when you weren’t sure.)
When I came back to Chicago, my biggest nuisances were cops and pimps. I actually killed two birds with one stone, and since I never had a rap sheet (thank you Matriarchal Zone) I could and did, legally buy and register a gun. Money talks, and I have plenty of it, so the much harder to obtain Concealed Carry Permit (which the cops can deny you purely on whim) came to me easily when a good sum of money went in the opposite direction. I bought one of those little five shot revolvers, like Elizabeth’s years ago, to purse carry as she did. My stock of perfectly tailored day clothes were made to flatter my curves, not hide a gun and holster, so that again was the best option.
In my purse I had notarized copies of both my registration and CCW permit as well as my gun. When I first moved to Chicago, I was shaken down on the street by uniformed prowlies 3 times. And then it stopped. So I presumed word got around. As to the pimps, all I had to do was put my hand in my purse and step left so the gun was pointed at their abdomen and say, “Don’t try it if you don’t want to die.” After 5 years a Madam I say such things very convincingly. I only had to do this two times before word got around. Thus with a rep on both sides of the law, I had the freedom of the city.
What I did in the Zone as a spy was and must remain more ambiguous. A whorehouse is the inside looking out and waiting for the outside to come in. What I did physically can be described clearly. It was what Lady Chief originally wanted to do in the first place: install cameras and recorders, but I did it myself, secretly, from 32 reconditioned mail order Dictapads and a new DICTAPAGE to link them. One Dictapad was placed under each bed and one high up in a wall sconce with a pinhole lens in the shade.
The information was sent straightforwardly on a dedicated land line to GLCIS, being bounced off a satellite, after being encoded in the oldfashioned unbreakable way from the first days of Pretty Good Privacy of 90 years ago, and then the coded text placed in one of the electronic images made in the house. Very simple, very traditional, and only possible because Commander Cherry Hawkins did such a good job of chasing the Israelis out of the Zone. They were the only ones with sophisticated enough signals equipment to intercept what we sent. And FEM/DOM’s Shirley AI simply could not see what was going on in the house. All sorts of men and some women came in and out for 18 hours a day. Was that suspicious? Of course not! We were a whorehouse, after all.
What did we send? You have no “need to know”. Sorry.
This stampede to get laid as many times as possible while the Zone still retained some of it’s old character came in three phases: a brighter group of males (great fun to talk to actually) who uniformly thought that family submissives would be phased out ASAP and what males were left would predominantly be sperm donors. I took heed of this, since I thought better of male brains than did most Zone women, and I told my girls to act the same and really listen to what they had to say.
I knew about the advent of MAT/SERV and how most of the other agencies had as much as half their budget pulled out from under them to fund the drive for Maternity. We were well known as being able to show the best time to Johns over 60, so we also regularly entertained the old Speaker of the House of Males who was very frank to me that, though nothing had happened yet, the Lane was living on borrowed time, and would be swiftly phased out for ALL the money we were being given rather than cut back.
The next Sunday morning after I first heard this I held a house meeting, told the girls, and stated that I wanted to see each of them for half a day over the next month to make plans with them for leaving on short notice. If they weren’t ready to do that by the time 2 months had passed, they would get strapped, and not only strapped, but strapped in a new way that would keep them from walking straight as well as from sitting down and sleeping on their back. “And it’s VERY unpleasant, girls.”
Next we were deluged by the teen and ‘tweeners much more so than the other houses. I suspected that one or two of the brighter and older ones who favored our house had put the word out into citizenship training classes about us and the coming Zone changes. The two favorite clients of a happy whore (my strap was there to make sure they were happy because they were the best) are a young virgin who can be taught how to control his emission at will, and shown every trick that will keep him aroused; or an old man that you give back some of the vigor of his youth. Both are emotionally more open than the other Johns and their gratitude is real and uplifting to the entire house.
Finally, for the purpose of our story here, I was interviewed by a woman who wore a black wig (a good one, you had to really look to tell) and black glasses with purely plate glass lenses, named Caitlin Jones, who was a “free lance writer working on an article for a GLC magazine about the Lane”. She probably was, I thought, but with another agenda also, and when she finished the interview she said she heard some of our girls went both ways and was that true. I said yes about a third of us did, including myself. Then she asked to buy some room time with a bi girl. I had Brigit, our blond Valkarie, step out. “Brigit is the only one on call at the moment, but if there are times you can reliably come, I can see to it that more choices are available.” Caitlin paid the room fee and followed Brigit, half a head taller than her Jane, up the stairs.
This was so unusual that I did what Lady Chief talks about, tying a knot in my handkerchief. This lady had really good wigs, better than any in the Zone, had a bright red slash of a mouth, green to purple eye shadow, heavy brow penciling, and foundation used to visually lengthen the cheeks. Written out that way, it sounds more exaggerated than it was, it was reasonably restrained, but it went with startlingly bright blue eyes, eyes as blue as Brigit’s. I simply kept Ms. Caitlin in my mental file for future reference. I asked Brigit how she tipped and was told only So/so.
But after a few weeks, I could clearly see Caitlin’s importance. Suddenly the demand for bi girls by Janes, usually about my age, shot through the roof! It was mostly with us, because we had six of them plus myself. We were surprised by the phenomenon, and the other houses were astonished by it. The stream of thirty something Matriarchals to our house was at times almost comic, particularly in the light of how despised we were by all the older Zone women.
All of we six, as well as me, were constantly busy, and I dropped the word at a house meeting that if any who hadn’t tried it were interested, I had no objection to some inter house education of them by Brigit and the others, IF it occurred on their off hours and no crushes were involved. Pretty soon I had a force of nine plus myself. The teen and twenty plus men noted the heavy traffic, too. And it had them scratching their heads, as well as everyone at the other houses.
All of the dissatisfaction with the direction of Zone life Lady Chief reported on we quickly started hearing, too. Particularly myself, who, like Elizabeth, had a bit more sophisticated conversation than most of my girls. I liked the endorphin perks, too, and, unlike Elizabeth, a young man, particularly an inexperienced teen, was far more open to a woman slightly older than they were, so they gave me a lot of traffic, too. It’s your thirty to fifty odd aged men who are the pullet chasers. And, if I may say so, I was a better whore than most of my girls, who were still not quite “women”, as I wasn’t when asked to leave my basic spy training to go gallivanting around Chicago with my “aunts”. I also had Elisabeth to train me, she was superb at it, and I was far more hard working than all the other girls at learning.
I began to connect the woman avalanche to both their general dissatisfaction and their aching neediness, which was almost universal. Without submissives to pleasure them, life as a Zone woman could get very, very lonely. Against the view of the rapidly aging Matriarchs, a non-citizen whore also knows that women need men to socialize with as well as to keep them satisfied, and a witty John was a whore’s sweet treat. I also began to connect them with Caitlin. They would often mention in passing “this writer that they knew”, and so very many of them wore jewellery with a letter B, which I had noticed on Caitlin previously.
Moreover, it was very clear that many of them had been talking to the younger, dissatisfied Johns who were quite open about their opinion that Scarlet Fever Lane was the Zone’s best entertainment buy, and it might not be here forever. All of them, like Caitlin, were rather reserved about tipping the girls, particularly since they were having such a high old time with them. This caused the girls some dissatisfaction.
But I gave the matter some thought and finally figured out that most of our thirty something Janes were barely getting by financially. They were an entire impoverished generation, actually, and made so by that 5 year period of GLC economic sanctions. So I told the girls that, in most cases, they were making far more money than their Janes, which they found very shocking. And I pointed out that the better tippers among them were the ones with the more expensive and newer clothes. Even they noticed that the Elizabeth’s Secret tradition of buying them bespoke business suits and top of the line negligee left them MUCH better dressed than almost all their Janes.
Zoltan, unfortunately, passed on last year, tailoring to the end, though Irma did more and more of the work. I miss him. And half the fun of dressing up the girls were my yearly meetings with Zoltan, who taught me, like Elizabeth, to measure. He pined for Elizabeth too, and I told him she’d retired quietly away from Chicago. And there IS a school of thought that North Chicago is as far away from Chicago as you can get. A base libel on a very fine town.
The Matriarchal Zone 