The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [106]
They turned the ground floor into a tavern, with Dario cooking delicious food with the poorest of ingredients, and pouring wine that was a week from being vinegar and spirits that were years from being smooth. The second story was where Monique and Dario had their private rooms, as well as the common sleeping chamber the whores shared. Monique would have preferred to have her offices at the top with the servicing area on the second story, but the second floor already had separate chambers, whereas the third was a single open room, and so the third story was where the fucking took place. With the thin, colorful linens separating one bed from the next and the near-constant screams and grunts the place reminded Awa of Paracelsus’s clinic. She took to drawing the ladder to the attic up after her, and fitted a lock to the trapdoor when she went out.
Awa went out often, preferring to pull a cloak down over her face and roam the streets rather than stay in the dark attic with the constant riot of Venus taking place just below her. Each expedition revealed a new marvel to her, from the recently completed urban canyon of the Pont Notre-Dame to the flamboyant, castle-like façades of the aristocrats’ hôtels rising up behind their curtain walls; moldering, unique Gothic flourishes and newly built, symmetrical arcades were of equal interest to the curious young woman. Especially alluring to Awa were the gorgeous cathedrals and abbeys, and the small, charming cemeteries that abutted them, but she had not set foot in a churchyard since parting ways with Manuel and took only an aesthetic pleasure from admiring the tombstones and crypts. No matter what hour she left the majesty of the ever-growing city behind her and returned through the tightly constricting avenues that choked out the sky, she would find the brothel lit up like a beacon, and the third story every bit as noisy as she had left it.
Even had she been inclined Awa could not join in the sport on the third floor—the punishment for a woman lying with a Moor was death, in Paris and elsewhere, and the punishment for two women lying together supposedly the same, so Monique insisted Awa and any girls who shared her or her predilections did so far removed from any witnesses, lest the letter of the law by some rare chance find itself enforced. Monique, good as her word, had found whores willing to take a tumble with a blackamoor; in fact, several seemed eager to try her out, but Awa only rarely got so bored and lonely that she took one up to her attic.
Awa had once awoken to find the woman she had brought up rifling through her bags, and she gave the whore a different kind of little death than she had earlier in the evening, only reviving the terrified, confused woman after she had dragged her down and delivered her to Monique. The gunner waited until Awa returned the whore to life before administering a beating that rang in Awa’s ears even after she had run back to her attic. From then on when she did fuck the whores she did not go to sleep until they had gone back downstairs and she had stowed her ladder.
All that changed a year and a half after they had settled in Paris, when Awa met Chloé. Awa had seen the girl before—indeed, she saw her every morning when she woke up. She was the whore Manuel had painted on commission for Bernardo, the girl whose portrait had saved the artist’s life back in that wet cave two years before, the portrait hanging on Awa’s wall. Chloé was curvaceous yet fit, black-haired, green-eyed, and foulmouthed, and Awa fell in love as she had only