Vermilion City, Pt. 3
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2010
- Messages
- 7,280
- Reaction score
- 3,148
- Thread starter
- #21
- Strong Suggestive themes
- Themes of sexual abuse
Butterflies and Roses
I think I liked Anna pretty much immediately, from the moment we met in that crowded Rozhithe coffee shop. She stirred her coffee like it was a ritual, applying all the meditative concentration of a photographer trying to frame the perfect shot. Her lips often curved into a little smile, as if everything I said were faintly amusing. She was a bit of an odd pidgey, I suppose. Or perhaps this was just an odd conversation – because Rozhithe is Vermilion’s historic red-light district, and Anna is, in her own words, a prostitute.
There’s a reason I was meeting with Anna. A few years ago I was collaborating with my friend Adelaide, on an article about Goldenrod’s nightlife. Adelaide had decided the story needed a sharper edge, so we ought to visit the Blue Luxray ‘burlesque’ Club.
“It’s not seedy, not seedy at all!” she insisted. “It’s all a laugh.”
That was nonsense, right there. The ‘burlesque’ consisted almost entirely of men sculpted like Renaissance marbles, with tiny campy costumes and unreasonably large cocks. Even if the women were cackling like a murder of murkrow, it was still seedy. I couldn’t help but wonder, why were male strippers (Supposedly) tongue-in-cheek entertainment, while female strippers were (Supposedly) seedy and exploitative? What’s the difference? Is there a difference? What’s the reality of the sex industry, not the version parcelled out on crime procedurals?
Though Anna cheerfully calls herself a prostitute, ‘escort’ is considered the polite term. Her straightforward disregard for euphemism, her blasé lack of shame, was surprisingly disarming. Anna is an independent escort – she doesn’t work for a pimp or an agency, running her business entirely by herself (It might surprise you to learn she pays income tax), finding her own clients and working from her own premises.
“Some girls rent a place together in Roz, but technically you gotta be licensed for that,” she says. “I work out of my house in Gunnersea [nearby], it’s more girl-next-door.”
Oh, I can see the girl next door in Anna. Twenty five years-old. An endearingly shy smile when she wants to show it. A body full of generous curves. When I first saw Anna, I was expecting someone svelte, albeit possibly with big tits. Anna has the tits alright, and a Reubenesque figure to go with them. She takes bookings at $120 per hour, a typical rate for Vermilion City; I later learned that elite $2,000 a night courtesans are largely a silver screen myth, as is the idea that ‘nice girls’ necessarily cost that much.
“In the beginning I was surprised how much work I got,” Anna admits. “I advertise as a BBW, and I get enough interest to keep me occupied full-time if I want to be.”
“How many clients do you see in a day?” I asked tentatively.
That little smile again. “In practical terms? Four is my limit. Clients don’t realise how much time goes into prepping for a booking. I need at least an hour to shower, change the sheets … more if the client has any special requests.”
Special requests … you can let your imagination go wild on that one. It makes you wonder, what kind of man goes to see an escort? The short answer is: all kinds. Aside from the requisite casual perverts; nervous young men and men from sexless marriages (“Allegedly sexless,” Anna said), venomous would-be alpha males and would-be white knights.
“You gotta be tough in this business. The white knights are as bad as the macho idiots in their own way. Half of them think they can rescue you, the other half expect you to give ‘em special treatment. They’re lookin’ down on you, just the same as the guy who thinks $120 means he can do whatever he wants to you.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” I asked, remembering the venomous alpha male comment.
“You have sex with a guy you met on a night out, how safe is that? Besides, I don’t have to see anyone I don’t want to. Independents get to discriminate,” she added with a smile.
Watching Anna stirring her second coffee, a peaceful little frown on her face, I couldn’t quite decide what to make of her. A girl next door. Silk hiding steel. Never swears but frankly describes fucking a client silly. She’s a girl of apparent contradictions. In a sense Anna is representative of Rozhithe – curiously fascinating, full of character rather than caricature, resistant to stereotype.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Vermilion’s History III: Port of the Roses
Rozhithe started life as a royal wharf, removed from the noise and crowding of nearby Chesilby. In 1625 it was sold to the West Lemuria Company by Henry, duke of Celadon. The WLC used their new acquisition as their principle port, importing vast quantities of sugar and tea from the colonies. All that colonial money flowing into the town turned it into a thriving mercantile centre. Rozhithe became the eleventh city ward in all but name – a henge of Ostaro was built and hallowed in 1632; a Post Office and Messenger Yard was opened in 1649, becoming busy enough to require oversight from a Postmaster Colonel by 1660; in 1675 the city council decided to establish the new Exchange on Rozhithe high street.
Between 1650 and the end of the century the population of Rozhithe more than doubled. Each time one of the great merchant ships returned from a voyage to the colonies, alongside the hundreds of tons of cargo (Sugar loaves, bales of tea, crates of ginger and chocolate, barrels of jam), brought almost two hundred bored seafarers with pockets full of wages. WLC officers bought modern townhouses around Rozhithe’s elegant new piazzas, while the common seafarer spent as only the common seafarer can. It didn’t take long for WLC directors to start buying up gambling dens, brothels, inns – squeezing their employees for the wages they’d just paid them.
Eventually the Crown annulled the company’s charter, and their monopoly with it. Rozhithe went into decline. The town already had a reputation as Vermilion’s premier red-light district, but with dwindling imports, sex work and smuggling was all that remained.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
By day Rozhithe looks a bit like the Old Gunwharf, characterised by independent coffee shops, little bistros and vegetarian restaurants, Sunday markets. And therein lies the contradiction. Well over a century of adversity remorselessly drove rents down, attracting theatres, struggling poets, artists … and in more recent decades, comedy clubs, LGBT bars, and independent film studios. A rich cultural history sits alongside Rozhithe’s historic red-light district status.
By night Rozhithe was bright and buzzing. It seemed that every bar and nightclub along the high street was doing a roaring trade, music spilling out onto the street along with the night's revellers. It looked like a normal Friday night.
“That would be a reasonably accurate assessment,” says Detective Inspector Violet Jenny. DI Jenny knows Rozhithe as well as anyone – she has to, as deputy lead for Operation Mayfair, the taskforce dedicated to policing Rozhithe’s sex industry. Her command invariably overlaps on other policing areas, tonight, neighbourhood policing in the town centre on piss-up night. Jenny stopped to talk with a human billboard (He was advertising something called Club Lush, a strip joint I thought at first). I counted about a dozen officers on duty, dotted around the street in hi-vis jackets. They had the subtly tired expressions of people who knew they still had a long night ahead of them. A girl spotted us and impulsively pulled out her tits, proudly hooting “Whooo!” as she did so.
“Day-to-day policing in Rozhithe isn’t significantly different from any other town centre,” Jenny said, watching her expressionlessly. “Our Friday night arrests are usually Breach of the Peace. Common Assault. Drunk and Disorderly, of course. Most will be what we call ‘de-escalation arrests’.”
There was a ‘but’ hanging in the air, and I said so.
“But Rozhithe is Rozhithe.”
* * *
“It was all much worse in my mother’s day,” Jenny explained. “Organised crime effectively controlled the sex trade in Rozhithe. There wasn’t a brothel in this town that wasn’t backed by one gang or another. And no-one was safe. It became ugly, really ugly.”
Today, contrary to popular belief, across most of the Empire neither buying nor selling sex is inherently illegal. But Jenny is quick to insist that sex with someone coerced or underage is always illegal:
“Being paid doesn’t legally oblige you to have sex,” she emphasised. “Nor does payment legalise sexual assault.”
It was also here in Rozhithe that the great experiment of licensing was begun. Brothels were allowed to operate under a license originally granted by Vermilion City Council, whilst at the same time, massive crackdowns were launched against unlicensed establishments in an attempt to break the mob’s grip on the town.
“Mother broke the mob, in the end. I can’t remember how many times they tried to kill her,” Jenny said casually, raising her voice over a group of lads chanting what they believed to be a song, their t-shirts so tight it was a wonder they could lift their arms above their head. We’d reached the end of the high street where it meets FitzRegis Square. There was a taxi rank of ambulances presciently parked up on the eastern side. About three hundred years ago this was the most elegant, most modern square in Vermilion City, a now-overlooked masterpiece by Zelda FitzRegis.
You’ve got to wonder what she would have thought of the mansion she built for Baron Fauconberg now housing Club Lush. It’s not a strip joint. From the outside it doesn’t really look like much. The dignified palladian-style façade is surprisingly well-restored – with the discreet addition of the club’s orchid logo above the door, and scarlet drapes in every window. Lush is typical of the reformed brothel, though the club is very coy about what they actually do (Referring to itself as an ‘establishment’, insisting it employs ‘courtesans’). But the high street brothel, bordello if you really must, is on the decline. Most large brothels are really hotels, complete with spas and restaurants. Club Lush can tell you a lot about the modern Rozhithe: i.e. it’s not so much gentrified as rebranded. There’s something insincere about its infamy. It’s edgy, seeming to be dangerous whilst in actuality having no real sharpness. Edgy is titillating, not disreputable, a good dinner-party story. It would be easy to be scornful. Certainly the days of Rozhithe’s brothels being the stage for pitched battles between rival gangs are long gone. And while Club Lush is part of a decline, independent escorting is going through something of a renaissance.
“Patrons are more discerning than you might expect,” Jenny said. “The stereotype of the amoral sleaze is by no means universal. Many of them don’t want to support exploitation …”
“But …”
“But I have six detectives on-call tonight. When trouble starts I want an investigation started within the hour. Because Rozhithe is Rozhithe,” Jenny sighed.
Walking and talking with Jenny, I’m reminded again of Anna’s ‘venomous would-be alpha males’. Prostitution has a way of attracting trouble whatever the era. There’s something about paying for sex that encourages otherwise sane men to get unaccountably aggressive. It’s a category of client Jenny recognises as well – men who get violent the moment they’re told ‘no’ (No to what? No to being given a discount, no to an unannounced in-call in the small hours of the morning, no to unprotected sex, etc).
“I tell my detectives, if there’s not at least one sex assault arrest in the cells by the end of a Friday night, obviously they’re not trying hard enough,” Jenny said. I could tell she was only half-joking. Every escort seems to have a story about a client who becomes unexpectedly … rough. Anna insists that most clients are lovely, but what escorts call ‘boundary pushing’ in law is called sexual assault, battery, etc – or sometimes in DI Jenny’s eyes, attempted murder. Her smile thinly veils the bitter determination of a crusader. There’s still a lot to crusade against.
Escorts, including independents, are still a target. CCTV cameras make clients nervous, so it’s not uncommon for independents to keep Poké Balls on display. It doesn’t always work, when the unnegotiated choking appears halfway through sex. A typical trick for petty criminals is to first scout out a workplace by making a booking, then, armed with an exact address, to rob the place at a later date. This kind of violence against escorts, intimidating independents and robbing rival brothels, used to be a staple mob tactic.
When Superintendent Jenny snapped the mob’s stranglehold on Vermilion’s sex industry, she taught the bosses that bloody turf wars are more expensive than they’re worth. The modern mob rarely invests in brothels, except, ironically, as front businesses. The typical illegal brothel is small, unlicensed, selling services for $80 per hour or less. Invariably they’ll be full of foreign girls, usually Magyars or Langobards, with little English and no understanding of their legal rights. It’s easy for abuses to flourish – low wages, skipped health checks, violence.
* * *
On 15th January 2002, two members of Team Rocket stood trial at Vermilion Crown Court accused of committing a crime that had shocked the region. Eighteen months previously, at around 10am, a local postman had discovered four men brutally murdered in a house in Nazeton. They were family men, well-respected, well-liked, all members of an amateur yachting club.
All four had been decapitated. Their severed heads were later found carefully displayed on-stage in a Rozhithe strip club. That was only the beginning. The next five days saw more murders – more beheadings – among them a property developer, a convicted drug dealer, and a wealthy Celadon housewife.
Under an atmosphere of intense public pressure, on 23rd May Celadon City Police arrested Benny Morobito and Anthony ‘Eggsy’ Russola during dawn raids on their apartments. That they were initiated Rockets hit the news within days. The sense of outrage and trepidation was palpable. The region had not seen gangland violence this savage in two decades. If respectable, bourgeois family men could get caught in the bloodshed, who was safe? Was a new mob war imminent? The murders stubbornly remained headline news for weeks, sparking demands for answers from the Home Secretary in Parliament. Amid the tension and fury, the real shock was that the murdered four were not respectable men at all. Their yacht club memberships were cover for a smuggling operation later known to police as the Nazeton Ring. And their contraband: people.
It’s an increasingly lucrative criminal enterprise throughout the Empire. Commonly run by small gangs, smuggled individuals (80% of whom are foreigners in pursuit of what they believe to be a better life) are invariably contracted to serve as bonded labour to pay off the cost of their transportation. The contract lasts for a specified period of time – a year is a typical length of service – so the gang will seek to maximise profit by demanding as much work as possible from the bondsman. The most lucrative type of bonded service, unsurprisingly, is prostitution. It’s a sad fact that for many foreign women (And a few select men), life in the Middle Kingdom means burning out beneath a conveyor belt of clients in an unlicensed brothel. What made the Nazeton murders disquieting was that usually the mob is content to impose a tribute, or ‘street tax’, on smuggling gangs. Why the sudden flare of violence?
On the 8th day of the trial, the region got the answers it demanded, when the defence barrister cross-examined Detective Superintendent John Lloyd. Reluctantly, Lloyd testified that the smugglers had been under investigation by His Majesty’s Special Constabulary. The Nazeton Ring’s greatest source of income, whose contracts were sold to secretive underground brothel owners, were children. Exactly how many children were smuggled into the region and subsequently sold remains a mystery, their identities hidden beneath protective pseudonyms. It’s likely that most of them were Langobards, mostly girls, lured away from dysfunctional state orphanages … though they could just as easily be Saxons, Alto Mareans, or even Kantonians.
At trial the Crown Prosecution alleged that the murders had been committed on the direct orders of a Rocket executive codenamed ‘Archer’. With the evidence against the Rockets rapidly accumulating, Morobito admitted the murders were summary executions (Though the elusive Archer was never arrested nor charged), implicitly a bloody message sent to those the Rockets decided had gone beyond the pale.
Two weeks after the trial began, Morobito and Russola were controversially handed absolute life sentences. There were many who thought Morobito’s confession ought to have earned him leniency; others thought the murders had been nothing less than a public service. But when passing sentence Knight Justice Townsend insisted the Court would never condone cold-blooded murder.
* * *
I’d set out that evening to find the truth behind the sex industry myths. I’m not sure what I found. I found that exploitation, unsurprisingly, is a thing of the present. DI Jenny’s stories of sexual assault, human smuggling and forced prostitution are very much what I assumed I’d find. Modern organised crime has evolved, become more secretive, adapted to hide in plain sight. And yet DI Jenny steadfastly maintains the industry’s dark side used to be that much darker.
I couldn’t help but think that for girls like Anna, escorting is just another job. Thanks to brothel licensing, decriminalised independents – and perhaps, modernised police attitudes – escorts nowadays have much better legal protections. I am sure I found that Middle Kingdom independents, at least, are independent in more ways than one. They want security on their own terms, and resent being treated like little girls. Silk hiding steel indeed. It occurred to me, much later on my way back to the B&B, that Anna was one of the most feminist women I’d met on my journey.
Some things, though, never seem to change. The stigma of prostitution is a persistent one, especially in the minds of people like Mrs Hauteclaire. I suspected something as amiss when I noticed the unaccountably bad bacon and worse coffee she served me for breakfast the following morning. That was confirmed when Hauteclaire frostily demanded that I check out by 10:30. I had actually forgotten about the 10pm curfew, but judging by the look she gave me I’m pretty sure she’d somehow found out I was working in Rozhithe.
I’d had enough. I was a paying customer, for heaven’s sake. It was childish, I know, but I went and bought a copy of Sizzle. And carefully hid it under Classic Boat.
The world’s most beautiful – well, I’ll let you guess.
Last edited:
