CHAPTER TWO
The Madame was feeling her age tonight. She kept finding herself looking out the window over the stretch of city where her office sat when she should have been working. Yet for some reason, she could not help but wonder about all the changes the town was going through. Being old enough to have seen many things change gave her enough perspective to accept that this latest bout of transition seemed no better or worse than any of the others before it. New Boston had ever been a place of transitions, both temporal and physical. Then her eyes wandered out and over the rooftops, and she smiled.
Some things remained immutable constants.
The shining towers of New Boston’s jeweled crown were easy to see from nearly anywhere in the surrounding megalopolis. They raced like illuminated silver daggers up into the misty skyline to puncture the low-hanging clouds. Like the peaks of great metal mountains, the soaring edifices of Belham Tower and the Gateway Spire dominated the night sky and stood as defiant signposts declaring with ear-shattering volume that one now viewed the center of the richest district on Earth. Every facet of the borough designed, crafted, and presented for the express purpose of reminding a traveler that this is where the rich people lived. More specifically, this is where they belonged.
Likewise, the character of the other districts seemed set in stone as well. Her glance wandered over to her east where she could just barely make out the gray uniformity of The Sprawl. There, endless blocks of offices and factories stacked neatly into rows pressed against each other, humming and thrumming with subterranean vibrations as they belched interminable tons of consumer products for export to their attached warehouses. For every warehouse or auto-factory, a tall office building stood in silent watch. Inside these, thousands of business people in smart gray and brown suits would scurry about like bees looking to their various tasks in a steel and concrete hive. Accountants would account; salesmen would sell. Managers would manage and couriers would curry. The Sprawl clunked along like a machine filled with other machines: a matryoshka doll of people and equipment, each one nestled inside the next. It was a greedy thing as well, gobbling up resources and spitting out products like a hungry worm turning soil into compost. Where humanity began and the machine ended remained anyone’s guess, and drawing such distinctions was not conducive to productivity.
Dockside squatted to the west. The Sprawl was to Dockside as Uptown was to the Sprawl. Dockside existed a full step dirtier and darker than its industrial neighbor, but much like Uptown and The Sprawl, a delicate symbiosis existed between the two.
With so many of their interests intertwined, the border between Dockside and the Sprawl stayed a nebulous, poorly defined thing. A person traveling from the Popsi bottling facility to Farragut Shipping’s main dock would be absolutely certain when they stood in the one district and not the other, but that same person might struggle to define exactly where they had crossed over.
This muddy interstitial stretch of no-man's-land was slashed by cargo tram lines and called ‘The Approach’ by locals. The exact dimensions and edges were oft-debated topics among those who lived and worked inside it. The zone languished in obscurity, a land defined by its neighbors and yet excluded from them. A few bustling retail establishments and some decent restaurants wedged themselves between blocks of factories here, yet even such places as these lacked the defining grit of a true Dockside establishment. Confounding the identity crisis, any of these sites remained far too lowbrow to be at home in the Sprawl, either.
Madame Madeleine liked The Approach. It was a place of transitions filled to the brim with transitional people much like her. The zone defied definition as did the aging woman staring at it through a fourth-floor office window. Like her, The Approach lived its days a permanent outsider, forever ignored by its neighbors and underestimated by competitors. This appealed to the old woman’s sense of irony, as her entire career mirrored this perfectly.
The gentle chime of an intercom shocked Madeleine into movement. “Yes?” The reply came serene and patient, betraying none of her surprise. She had grown more prone to bouts of introspection these days. Getting old did not suit her.
The voice of her assistant came through the small speaker at her terminal. “The receipts are in, Madame. I’ve sent them to your DataPad.”
“Thank you, James. I’ll look them over before I leave. Don’t wait around though. Take off early and go have some fun.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” James sounded delighted. “I will!”
“Ah, to be young,” she chuckled. Youth was overrated in her opinion, yet she did not judge anyone for enjoying it. She pulled the charts up on her DataPad and started to thumb through the screens. There were many screens and many receipts, for Madeleine was rich in the kind of way that made the very concept of money fuzzy. The Madame knew money to be fickle, and there existed many things far more powerful than electronic sums saved in banking computers. She bet her life on that knowledge every single day.
Considered by those in the know to be the most powerful woman in New Boston who wielded no actual power, Madeleine delighted in her stabilizing role amongst the quasi-legal factions that crisscrossed the underside of New Boston’s thriving economy. Despite her obvious success and influence, she had been fastidious in avoiding any sort of collusion with either the legitimate governments or organized crime syndicates. She could have if she wanted to, but she did not want to. Madeleine craved dominance in a much subtler fashion. She turned the corners of her mouth in an old woman’s smile as the distant memories came flooding in.
There existed a common saying among the New Boston criminal circles. It went, “Sex sells, and in New Boston, Madame Madeleine sets the price for it.”
This was not hyperbole. If a person purchased the time and attentions of a companion anywhere within the New Boston Megalopolis, one could be certain that The Madame was getting a piece of the action. This person could also rest assured that his price, conduct, and overall rating as a customer would be recorded and held either in his favor or against him depending on how things went. Good customers enjoyed better prices and enhanced services; bad customers suffered consequences that ranged from ‘subtle rebuke’ to ‘death of a horrific nature.’ Therein lay the genius of her operation: customers found themselves held to a standard, and in exchange services were also held to a standard. Once her ‘customer profile’ system took off, The Madame found herself spoiled for choice when it came to both clientele and contractors. Soon after that a franchising system grew, and the rest was New Boston history.
She kept her office modest though quite large by necessity. Supervising her empire required a staff of nearly a hundred middle managers and logistics personnel, and keeping them located in one place was essential to maintaining an orderly operation. The Madame courted order the way young women courted emotionally unavailable men. A youth spent surviving the horror of Big Woo slavers had burned into her a deep and fundamental need to exert control over her environment at all costs. She considered her composure the only good thing to come of that nightmare as her dedication to such strictures had made her wealthy and powerful. These were lessons well-learned, and she never deviated from them.
Seated at her desk perusing the week’s receipts, The Madame heaved a heavy sigh. Drooping lids tried to close over eyes heavy with age and a life hard lived. Her hair had turned gray, her body now stooped, and she was oh-so-goddamned tired all the time. Ruling over empires was a game for the young, and her aversion to gene therapy and plastic surgery was starting to feel like a petty affectation as the weight of time grew heavier every day. She refused to keep herself pretty though. Beauty was a thing to be exploited, not pursued. Madeleine had enough of that to last ten lifetimes. It was natural enough to profit from it, of course. Though for her own part, she considered herself done with the attentions of those who thought her beautiful. Her beauty had been a curse her whole life, and now happily rid of such nonsense she could focus on what really mattered. At least when people talked to her no
w she could safely assume they were not trying to get under her skirt.
Her attention, having again drifted away from the task at hand, returned to the reports in front of her. She did not like what she found in them. The marketplace for illicit goods and services wobbled in a precarious state, and this did not suit her need for control at all. The last batch of squabbling over Dockside had spilled into the other districts and destabilized all the markets to an unacceptable degree. The consequences for this were apparent in the volume and margin numbers reported by many of her franchisees.
Some good news accompanied all the bad. Her brothels in Dockside continued to turn a brisk profit. Better than ever before, now that the introduction of organized trade guilds for the various criminal gangs had put a few extra credits in the pockets of all that horny street muscle. Dockside had a lot of street-level hoods, which was typically a good thing for her. These rough men and women liked to have a good time when cash could be spared for it. An extended period of various criminal enterprises fighting over that territory had kept the cash tight. Tight fists did not go to whorehouses.
The Dwarf made things worse by being his usual greedy self and hoarding money under the pretext of financing the resistance. Madeleine would have bet a year’s pay that the disgusting little hairball had made profits coming and going on the whole sordid operation. It was ever his nature to seek personal gain in every situation, and the century-old prostitute knew a thing or two about the intractability of human nature. The man simply could not help himself where money was concerned.
Poor Rodney probably hated the new system of trade guilds. An uppity street-hood-turned-criminal-mastermind named Billy McGinty had managed to unravel the old system of rival gangs that had served The Dwarf so well. He even got The Dwarf to go along with it somehow. How he accomplished this, even the Madame could not say. Either way, the docks sat quiet once again and without the gang leaders hoarding the cash, creds were flowing very nicely among the enforcers, runners, pushers, and thieves of Dockside. Such folk stayed the perennial big customers for Madeleine, and when the money flowed at street level, her franchises in Dockside always did very well.
This was a fortuitous thing because the collapse of The Combine had the rest of her pleasure houses struggling to stay afloat. Not that they lost money; rather, her profit margins in Quinzy and the Sprawl had thinned to unacceptable levels. Southie, The Brook Line, and Woke Fields still broke even, but she considered this indistinguishable from a complete and utter failure. To The Madame, treading water might as well be drowning. She would need to see to the management of those franchises personally. As much as she wanted to expand into new territory, Cambridge, Summertown, and the Old Fen Way simply did not present viable locales for practicing the oldest profession on a franchise model. Certainly not as long as they stayed obsessed with image and fielded a police force with no sense of humor whatsoever.
Malldown made money still, at least. Yet this did not make her as happy as it should have. Malldown’s resilience to the economic downturn stood out as an anomaly, and The Madame did not trust anomalies. She nursed deep suspicions about what might be going on in Malldown, and those suspicions involved a very short and very greedy little dwarf from Dockside. She frowned, trying to decide if it was worth looking into or not. She was not sure she cared what Rodney was up to, as long as business kept booming. A thin finger tapped the desktop in a rapid tattoo while she considered calling in Tankowicz. It might be worthwhile to have him look into it. The Dwarf feared The fixer, and this might kill two birds with a single terrifying stone.
She tabled the matter to think on it some more before deciding. Tankowicz had grown rather expensive these days, and she remained unconvinced that Malldown presented a situation in which she cared to be involved. More to the point, the hour had grown late, and she was tired. Another sigh came unbidden as the old woman leaned back in her chair. A small, thin-lipped frown creased her lined face as she thought of Roland. She was old enough to remember when he was just another high-end hitter trying to hide out in Dockside during the wild days. She employed his services often enough over the last three decades and had observed his career with interest. It became harder and harder each day to see him as that angry and confused young man anymore. He had grown into something far more complex over the years.
The big man had been an important part of her rise, though he never realized it. One of the reasons so many working girls and rent boys flocked to her banner was her reputation for taking care of them. The pleasure business attracted a lot of dangerous customers after all. Tank’s unsubtle ministrations ensured that those who mistreated her workers suffered horrific consequences. This often proved a more complicated task than one might think. Many of her clients came from the rich and powerful segments of the population, and a lofty station made a proper chastisement tricky. A regular leg-breaker might be bought or intimidated if enough money changed hands, and when a rich man felt threatened, it usually did. The solution for how to rebuke a rich and influential person lived in employing someone singularly unimpressed with such things. Enter Tank Tankowicz. If that monster was ever intimidated by wealthy or politically connected people, Madeleine never heard about it. Once paid to make an example of a rough john, the example got made whether it was a lowly drug dealer or a billionaire industrialist.
The reason for this was obvious: money and power meant nothing to Roland. The man dealt exclusively in the currencies of violence and death. Madeleine did not know where Roland had come from, but he was a far wealthier man than most when it came to those. When folks rich with credits had to settle accounts with Roland, they often found their wealth immaterial and their relevant balances deeply in the red. She understood the way of such things, probably better than the giant oaf did. Madeleine dealt in pleasure and fantasy, each vice powerful coin in its own right. Thus, she had always felt a special kinship to New Boston’s most famous fixer. It made no difference to her that he did not reciprocate. Both of them had in their own way discovered things more valuable than money, and the knowledge had made them powerful.
The old madame could not help but think it a shame he was now under better management. What she used to pay him was a pittance against the value of actual services rendered. The Madame loved herself a bargain, but wasted no energy on pining for the old days.
Realizing she had lost track of the accounts yet again, she gave up on finishing the reports. She had never been the type to lose track of time woolgathering though it would be a lie to say that it had not been happening more often lately.
“Doddering old woman,” came a mumbled rebuke to herself. Then she pushed her chair away from her desk and stood. Knees and back immediately competed for the titles of ‘stiffest’ and ‘most painful,’ and she could not easily declare either to be the victor. Calling it a draw, she grabbed her coat and shuffled to the door. When it opened she was startled to see a familiar face standing at the threshold. At first taken aback and then annoyed, she scowled into those dark eyes and barked, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Working,” came his clipped reply, and then Madame Madeleine died of a single gunshot wound to the forehead.
CHAPTER THREE
Kitty liked her job for the most part.
On one hand, her co-workers were universally awful and the customers even worse, but on the other hand, the pay was good and the tips often better. She had to put up with a lot of crap, but it kept her off the docks and out of the warehouses. As with so many other aspects of her life, Kitty had learned to take the bad along with the good. This job had more good than bad, so she tried to appreciate it in a reasonable context.
Tonight presented an example of the ‘bad’ that had to be taken with the ‘good.’ Mondays always drew poor crowds and the barely quarter-full main bar was about as good as she could hope for. Kitty hated the Monday crew. Morose and sneering street hoods sat drinking cheap beer and engaging in what an optimistic person might refer to as ‘conversation.’ If Kitty told
the blunt truth, these interactions amounted mostly to grunting and arguing over the tops of dirty beer glasses. Most of her regulars came here for two things: to curry favor with The Dwarf, and to stare lustily at Kitty. She could do nothing about their ambitions with her boss, but as long as they bought drinks they could look at her chest all they cared to. It was no skin off her nose what went on in a man’s head when he drank. If they got ideas about making fantasies into realities, Barney would set them straight like he always did. The burly doorman had three grown children of his own and he could be downright paternal whenever Kitty’s virtue came into question.
Without exception they constituted a rough group, equal parts dirty and angry. Many chose this spot simply because Hideaway was the type of watering hole that did not care if your profession wandered deeply into the realm of the illegal. More to the point, this dive preferred it that way. More crime was planned and managed from this place than any other in Dockside, and the clientele stood as a cartoonish reflection of this obscure bit of trivia. Kitty did not mind that so much. With the bar packed full of rowdy thugs out to make a name for themselves, booze and money flowed with equal largess. A girl with a tight body and liberal sensibilities about showing it could make a good living working this kind of joint. She actually enjoyed those frenzied nights. She loved the loud, chaotic mess of it all. She liked the industrial-punk bands that came and played, and she liked the swaggering bravos flush with ill-gotten money who tried to impress her with exorbitant tips even more.
Those were not usually Monday nights, however. It was a dull, quiet, tight-fisted crowd in house tonight, and Kitty had already given up on making any real money. Now she just wanted to go home. Even that small mercy seemed distant, since the end of her shift approached with a sort of malicious inverse-quantum plodding. The closer it got to last call, the more slowly time moved. With the sweet relief of closing time a mere hour away, it felt like the universe itself slogged from present to future through a sea of thick molasses.
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