At this point I took over the conversation, “The first thing I must tell you is that if your spy is going to do this she can’t just pretend to be a Madam, she must actually run the whorehouse and run it intelligently and efficiently. Including beating the girls when necessary. In other words, she must become a Madam for real. In order to do that she must have been a whore herself for at least 2 years and trained as a whore for at least one of them. That designation, a whore, is forever, and will follow her everywhere so you will have to include that fact in any future legend she uses.
“Wherever she goes and whatever she does she will always be a whore and any whore who encounters her will know it. As well as quite a lot of women with sharp intuition, quite a lot of men who frequent whorehouses, and virtually any cop or social worker with any brains.
“And she’ll always be a Madam, though only whores from a house will spot that. We live in an even more closed society than you do. We don’t walk the same way as ordinary women. We call it the “come hither gait” if we’re a Madam or a “high class tart” and the “slut strut” if we’re an ordinary whore.
“That second designation is one that I usually have to beat the behind off of a new girl at least once for using. The Matriarchs, who pay a large part of the bills, would faint dead away if they heard it, and if a submissive man hears it, sooner or later his dominant women will know it, particularly when they come in pairs, so nobody, NOBODY, can use it in the house or out of it. If a John uses it, I throw him out, if he gives me trouble about that he’ll get a Love Pat [Level 3, crisis-cross welts, butt only–Ed.], fifteen minutes for the welts to fully swell, then a Gentle Rebuke [Level 2] on top of it!”
Lady Chief smiled at the Fem/Dom slang, “I’ve never thought of doing that!”
“You get that one, you not only can’t sit or lie down, everywhere you go, you’ll be walking crooked. One of the Fem/Dom lesbian Janes taught it to me, she says that it always gets her top marks for “correcting men” in her squad, and some quite lovely perks from being a visiting instructor in Fem/Auth’s dominant woman seminars.
“I not only teach young women to whore better, I also teach them to be high class tarts because the Matriarchs want, and will pay for, nothing less. You have to learn the gait, learn to do it more subtly than a “public pisspot” strutting her stuff on the street, and practice it until it becomes second nature. For the rest of your life you will walk that way unless you consciously try not to. At my age I get smiles from all sorts of men who clearly are frequent Johns because I still walk that way.
“We’ve our own separate thieves cant and a high class tart needs to know when to use it and to whom. I’ll teach your spy that if I take her on, because I’ll have to, but I won’t ever speak it to you. And if I find out your spy has told it to anyone outside the life, including you, a single Strict Dressing Down [Level 1] is the least of what I’ll do to her the next time I see her. And a pimp would break her knees.”
Lady Chief’s smile at Fem/Dom slang morphed into the frown that her subordinates never want to see.
I continued, “Just because we live a soft life in the Zone, doesn’t mean we’re any less tough. Even there, we have to be. And your spy will have to be, too, particularly if some John spots her gait over here where solicitation is still a crime. Even worse will be when a pimp spots her. We’re criminals, and your spy will always be, too, even if she never acquires a rap sheet. She’ll always have to be as tough as your thugs, even if she has to conceal it at as a bureaucrat at GLCIS headquarters.
“That’s the way it is, and there’s plenty more of it, too. Have you got a spy that can do all that? That you want these restrictions on any future legend you give her?”
“Elizabeth, you seem to have been giving this a lot of thought.” Lady Chief looked curious.
“I don’t know what Peter told you about my last visit here, but I knew perfectly well that he was sounding me out about a deep cover placement in my brothel. I didn’t say no, so I suspected I’d get a stronger approach sooner or later.”
Lady Chief replied, “I’ve been crying my skills away. None of that should have surprised me coming from you. And I owe you a real apology, I underestimated you once again because I started seeing your appearance as whore and Madam, instead of a person. I’m very, very sorry!”
“That is EXACTLY what I’ve been talking about.”
“We did think about another alternative, picking a likely working girl, perhaps from Scarlet Fever Lane training her to spy….” Lady Chief trailed off.
I laid out the many minuses, “They will not have more than the most basic education. And a few not even that. Some of them start on the street at 12. They also are lazy and expect to be beaten to learn. They’ll be completely confused by the commitment and motivation of their peers. Unless you train them with your thugs and I’m sure we can both see why that’s a bad idea.
“I’ve never seen a single Busy Beaver among them in 35 years. After all, they just lounge around all day waiting on call for the Johns to come to them. My old Cicero Madam used to call me Ms. Professor, because I clearly didn’t grow up in the life and was used to doing real and productive work and to learning it all and learning fast. Anyone in the life can still tell that I came to it from dire need, probably in the Shitstorm.
“Anyone not from my brothel will be a security risk waiting to happen. To hire a whore to do anything but fuck you silly, means you have no notion of their background, and trying to vet them would be a joke!
“Finally, you won’t get anyone with enough real courage to service as many as 4-5 strange men a day if she ever thinks that one of them might be from Mossad and there to kill her. That’s also a reason that a spy from you should not actively spy from deep cover until she actually is a Madam.”
There was another dead silence. Then Lady Chief slowly, and a little more softly, spoke.
“I have someone in mind who I think can learn to be tough enough. I’ve given her an overview of the assignment and told her a little bit of the history behind Elizabeth’s Secret. The only drawback I see is that she’s had little experience with corporal punishment and she’s going into a culture where it is a way of life. That’s a real shock.”
I snorted, “Yes, particularly when it’s your tush on the receiving end. Well, the only way she’s going to learn to deal with it is to have it applied to her bottom. My girls all average about 1-2 strappings a year and I don’t think she will be much different. I’m the strictest Madam on the Lane and I will treat your spy just as any other of my girls. I have ironclad rules and anyone who breaks them gets their butt strapped off with a Level 2 “Gentle Rebuke”. You could prepare her here….”
Lady Chief was reluctant, “I’ll have to think about it. Beating thugs is one thing, beating a fellow woman agent is another. And I may have to satisfy our lawyers with a written consent, codicil to everything else in her life that she’s signed away.
“I at least, had my bottom walloped enough in the Zone as a teenager, that I understood what I was going back to; though I already knew that Sec/Spy considered all submissive males a security risk and didn’t employ them, I was never going to have a male in my secret household, and I was at no risk of having a teenage daughter, so I could keep all that at arms length.
“Helen Thoroughgood, the Chief of Sec/Spy would sometimes dish out six of the best from a senior cane to the people immediately below her, but she kept that privilege to herself alone and never used the cane on junior staff. At the time of Henry’s death, Misha hadn’t been caned, and was the only one who hadn’t because of her superior tradecraft.
“The fact that Henry had “made” her was probably going to lead her to bending over in a private interview with the Chief. And she knew it. That’s one of the reasons, since she was the head of the manhunt, why she pursued it so vigorously, calling all hands on deck to not only find Henry, but also to find the Matriarchal traitor who owned his safe house.
“She began to have private conferences with the two brightest of the ten Goons, who started following her around like a pair of puppy dogs, even inside the agency Headquarters itself. If Micha went to somebody’s office, the two Goons would linger in the hall at a distance from the office door where they couldn’t hear the conversation, then close up with Micha when she came out, and stand by her own office door like entry pillars. It made everybody very nervous. A couple of people sounded out the Goon supervisor about it, but her mouth was shut up tighter than a clam. For whatever reason, Micha clearly wanted “muscle” available for her instantly at all times.
“I don’t think Micha had ever been caned, for all she knew about it’s medical effects as the Doctor of the Black Widow. I think personally that if she had been bent over for being made by Henry, it was such a large tradecraft error that she would also have been demoted, or had the choice of demotion or twelve strokes. It all depended on what Henry had to say when finally caught.
“But about 3 weeks into the manhunt, the Chief called her in for a private interview. Everybody thought that it would be for a reckoning with the cane, and every ear on the working floor was listening. Since I knew that she was a Mossad contact, I thought she might instead be discussing the effect a caning might have on her status. Mossad played for keeps and if any of their own spies had gone to the Widow, Helen, the Punishment Supervisor, the Executionress, and the Doctor in charge would all have been dead within 3 months.
“The killers would have made every effort to leave Mossad’s fingerprints and handwriting all over those deaths so that GLCIS, Dixieland’s “Poison Julep” agency with no official name or existence, and Sec/Spy themselves would be clear about who was sending the message, as Fem/Dom was picking up the pieces and scratching their heads over it.
“Helen was probably the only one in Sec/Spy who actually understood how much danger she was in if she caned Micha and Micha duly reported it back to Mossad. Micha came out of the interview quietly with her poker face but killer eyes. In hindsight, I think that’s when the plan was made to kill the traitor and make it look like an accident. Had that happened, any of Micha’s past tradecraft errors would have never been mentioned again. It left everybody baffled, but I knew enough to have a very bad feeling about it, which I couldn’t pin down. It would have pushed the Matriarchal Zone across a line it had vowed never to cross.
“I’ve never been caned myself, and the thought of it then scared me as green as my uniform. But I never saw Micha waver about it or about anything else that happened. She had ice water in her veins. Everyone else had snow cone slush. But everybody knew when the Chief gave a caning because the recipient would scream at every stroke and be heard through most of the building. And a lot of Misha’s peers would be counting the screams with pleasure, and just waiting for her to come out the door crying.
“And the loss of face with her peers would be permanent. Almost as bad as a demotion. After that I think she would have gotten in touch with Mossad to rearrange her assignment and maybe even have a face to face with them. My information, already sent to GLCIS, was that such a turn of events would have set Mossad’s timetable haywire. She had the excuse of a few sick days off until she could sit again, taking this after a caning was commonplace, and in that time she could have flown to Israel and back. Even how many sick days she took would be counted by her Sec/Spy enemies.
“But all that disintegrated with Sec/Spy itself and Henry took the secret of how he made her to his grave. Luckily for everybody concerned, Henry had hidden himself by his own tradecraft rather than a citizen’s treason. No one would have won in that event. Not even Mossad.
“Nobody but myself and Henry had any independent information on both Misha and Mossad and even my peers in interviewing never saw what I saw in her eyes. Had Misha been caned and gone to a face to face without killing Henry, there would have been a slow bloodbath. Everybody else, but me and Helen, had no idea how much fire they were playing with.
“Everybody in the Zone still doesn’t. They think to this day that GLCIS killed both Helen and Misha in revenge for how three of it’s top agents suffered and died. They stubbornly insist on running no agents of their own, even just to read and listen to what’s being said over here, let alone spy on what we’re doing or not doing. And our security people over at GLCCA (GLC Counterintelligence Agency, pronounced glee/kah) have never been quite as far up to speed as we are.
“Helen and every one of Micha’s supervisor enemies (she of course knew who they were) would be marked for disposal either by Mossad or Misha herself. And after they were all dead, Mossad would have strongarmed the Matriarchal Cabinet and Chief Matriarch in to making Micha Chief of Sec/Spy, by telling them that Mossad had ordered the killings, which could perfectly well continue up the ladder since the Zone’s only security agency had just been gutted. They had planned for a two to three year transition timed for the first class of Israeli Dominant Women to graduate to give them a new Sec/Spy employee pool. But they would be perfectly willing to take Sec/Spy over by force, if need be, at any time, because they had Micha in place.
“Though our access is limited, we think the current Matriarchal Cabinet has discussed killing every spy they uncover, particularly from GLCIS, after Fem/Dom had wrung the information out of them by carefully orchestrated strapping. We don’t know what they decided. Nor do we know why new blood there may have pushed the Zone right up to that uncrossable line again, but I have my suspicions centering around Angie the Executionress.
“Fem/Dom has picked up several light and medium cover agents of our’s who are told by us to ALWAYS fully cooperate with their interrogator. And none of these has yet been killed. When I left Sec/Spy, I brought out a lot of the video footage of the Judicial Canings and they are shown to every ordinary training class, and to every Deep Cover training class, with the message that their own work will be in a watertight compartment and any capture of them will have little to no effect on any other operation, so talk, talk openly, talk voluably, and talk immediately. We will cut our losses. And we have hit no one in the Zone since Micha Haaretz. But who knows what might happen if the Zone starts killing our agents.
“There is, however, a definite record of strangulation, silenced gunshot, and neck breaking among people we’re sure were spying on the Zone for other agencies. And the handwriting on all of them is very suggestive. So we have put the Zone on Full Red or maximum hazard status. Fem/Dom is scratching it’s head over it as a major crime wave in a country without criminals.
“I’ll discuss with my staff the future legend problem for our agent. She may have to be assigned there far longer than usual, maybe as long as a decade or more. What I have in mind will keep all the spying within your house, rather than exposing you to the risk of snooping outside. We are playing for the long haul and that’s why we so badly want to place a Madam.
Lady Chief continued, “But now I’d like to invite you to join a week long vacation of sightseeing and shopping in the Windy City with myself and my proposed agent. Just us girls. Then after 5, if you don’t mind, we can always dine at the Agent Club and discuss things in comfort and security over our favorite aperitif. GLCIS has secured the entire floor.
“I already know of your taste in cognac, but I’d like to introduce you to Calvados, Normandy Apple Brandy. Please don’t blame your wine dealer, he has no notion that we’ve been broken into his files for quite some time now.”
Of course I took her up on the offer, “Sure, I like both shopping and sightseeing, but I want one thing. You are recording all this, of course. Get her a transcript to read with breakfast. I see no reason to completely repeat what I’ve said to you about being a whore and a Madam, and I don’t want her going in with her eyes wide shut. I’m sure you don’t either. And I’d like a copy, too, so I can keep track of what we’ve done.”
“Oh, Elizabeth! Can’t I surprise you with anything?”
The Matriarchal Zone 