…she, Eva she, smart Eva, street smart Eva ever
since she had to look out for herself on the streets of Berlin after her German
soldier father died in the war (World War II, if anybody was asking) and her
mother passed on when she was eleven, never figured that she would end up in
some Buenos Aires whorehouse, oh, excuse her, some bordello for high-end call
girls if there was a different. Sure, she had been wised up to sex, and men’s
wants (and needs) or hungers not all of them expressible in polite society
although on the streets, the school day streets not the working streets, the
girls would talk about various propositions that passing men (men being like
over thirty otherwise boys) made to them without the slightest blush, things
like back alley Italian, French, and around the world things, things with sex
toys and stuff, and about how if they had been younger, the men, and if
the boy was cute they might have thought about doing such things just for
kicks.
Yes, she had been wise since early teenage when she
herself needed things, girl pretty things, and one way or another got them from
boys then men in exchange for a little piece of her. No way, no way once
she caught on after Wilhelm, sweet Wilhelm went a little too far with her one
night back when she was about thirteen, and she found out that she liked it,
like sex, was she doing passing stranger quirky things for free, for what was
it her schoolgirl fellow classmates said , oh yah, for “kicks.” They had
parents though, most of them anyway. Included too in her resume, her working streets
resume not her schoolgirl streets resume, were a few wayward tricks luring some
lonesome American and British G.I.s in for some sex, and then a jack- roll by
her walking daddy (hell they got the sex anyway she had her scruples about
that), her pimp daddy, her fine walking daddy who took care of her, who fed her
that fine reefer that she acquired a serious taste for, and her max daddy lover, Karl, until he got
more than he could handle one night, and had been dumped in some lonely ravine
with a couple of slugs in his back. Naturally, they never found out what
happened to him, and didn’t look hard to find out either. Just some pimp or
drug deal gone south and good riddance. But that Karl lost left her high and
dry.
See, after Karl’s death things went kind of sour,
and knowing that she still had decent looks (“fetching” one guy, some American
ex-soldier who was back in Berlin doing some business after the war and who
wanted to marry her except, the big except, a rather persistent wife wouldn’t give him a divorce, so he said, called her
rather than beautiful but with a kind of pixie innocent and energy that
reminded guys, German guys, American guys, British guys, of the girl next door
and so it was like taking candy from a baby when she lured then up for sex, and
then afterward, after they had taken a piece of her they all misty-eyed, maybe
dreaming of some little cottage and kids, she let Karl do his magic), little formal
education that could help her get out from under and a certain larcenous heart,
she decided to try modeling. Modeling, private modeling, where the clients were
all guys, rich guys and they couldn’t tell Dior from Chanel, or from a hole in
ground, or could care less either and she knew as a way to snag some rich guy and be
on easy street if she was lucky. So like some foolish schoolgirl she looked up
modeling agencies in the telephone book and came up with the Top Model agency,
which advertised that they had world-wide connections and plenty of opportunity for
foreign travel. That appealed to her since Germany was too small for her now,
now that Karl was gone, and now that her little tricks only got her into
trouble.
Alberto, the agent for Top Model, was smooth, smooth
enough to win her over, to entice her with some up-front money, some clothes
money, and a promise to take her to Buenos Aires for the big international fashion
shows, coming up a few weeks in the future. Her judgment was slightly impaired
too, when one night Alberto plied her with some reefer, some crazy laced
Mexican stuff that got her high as a kite, got her into his bed, and after that,
and couple more romps in his bed, she kind of thought of herself as his unspoken
mistress as well as her manager, and he didn’t disabuse her of that notion.
Until Buenos Aires.
Once there, once installed in Casa Blanca, the
whorehouse, locally known as Madame Lafarge’s, after the woman who served as madame
of the place, he left her high and dry (for a glamorous real high fashion model,
his wife), and once the facts of life were explained to her, the simple fact
that Alberto was holding all her papers and passport and she was trapped she
finally understood that she was just another drudge in the international white-
slave trade market. And while life wasn’t bad, the clothes and money part were
real, and the high class parties and reefer too, the guys for the most part were
beasts, although not worse than on the barren streets of Berlin. She wanted to
be her own boss, have a say in her own wants, not somebody else. Hell, she even
though she might open up a bordello of her own, nothing but high- class girls
who wanted to be there, who were looking for rich man connections, and she
would take her cut from that rich vein. But that wasn’t going to happen as long
as she was forced to dance nightly with feo viejo local greasy rich guys who
made her flesh crawl with their clammy hands and their sometimes strange wants.
Then Steve, came in, came in big, young, British,
and rich, a hands-on owner of some rich mines a few hundred miles away, looking
for a good time, and who knows what else. At least when he picked her out of
the dance floor, nodded to Madame Lafarge that he wanted her, and they danced
he didn’t have clammy hands. And later that night in bed he was a far better
lover than the run of the mill that she had been used to, although she could have
shown him a couple of things, things that she was holding in reserve for a guy
who could help spring her from the damn house. And as she grew on him, as she
worked to get him to grow on her, she would give him an example of those little
tricks to weld him closer to her. Then when she was sure he was stuck, good and
stuck, she gave him her proposition. Buy her contract, get her papers and
passport, help her build that bordello she wanted, and she would be his,
exclusively his, with all her bag of tricks. To seal that deal she showed him
another little trick, a trick that no question sealed the deal. Although later, after he
had cooled off, he insisted on a fifty-fifty split (although he laughed he
would take his share out in trade, her trade) and, in some fit of hubris or
national feeling, insisted that no British nationals were to be imported. And
so Buenos Aires, after a fashion, would up with two high- end call girl
establishments and plenty of work for Interpol to try to figure out. 
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