recruiting in the Grain Belt, but evidently Alonzo's conscience never bothered him about recruiting his own countrywomen for a life of sin.
The Chinaman's girls thought they were coming to America to be given to husbands; the Mexican women were told that they would find easy jobs in the households of gold-rich families. And as for the girls garnered from the fields of Indiana and the shops of Chicago, Giorgio posed as a businessman setting up a rival to the Fred Harvey chain on the West Coast; the girls expected easy work waiting tables with big tips in gold nuggets from men who hadn't seen a woman in months.
What they got, was a dose of morphia; they woke up to find their virginity had been taken by men who had paid highly to have it, even from a semi-conscious and unresponsive body. What happened then depended on the girl. The Chinaman seldom needed the services of a breaker; most Chinese girls seemed to resign themselves to their concubinage readily enough. Giorgio preferred to break his girls to the trade himself, but often enough he had more than one who was making trouble, and a man could only do so much in a day. The Mexican girls seemed divided into three types; the ones that gave up, the ones that fought, and the ones that prayed.
They would all end up in the same position in the end; Paul never could figure out why they didn't just resign themselves and make the best of the situation. If a girl played her cards right, she could end up a madam with a house of her own, or even married to a client. But she had to be smart and she had to learn how to play the game quickly, before her looks went. And she had to stay away from drugs and drink, or her looks would go even faster.
'So we've got a weeper, hmm? Well, maybe she'll turn out to be a fighter, too.' He preferred it when they fought; they often thought that because he wasn't built like a prizefighter, he couldn't overpower them, and it increased his pleasure to prove them wrong.
It was his job to break them like untamed horses; to prove to them that not only did they have no choice in their new profession, but that he was infinitely worse than any customer they were ever likely to service. The unspoken threat was that unless they proved tractable, he would get them.
He was popular as a breaker because be didn't need to slap the girls around and possibly damage them to break them. He had an infinite number of ways to hurt them that didn't leave any marks. Some of them used nothing more than words; he couldn't use those on the Chinese girls, but his Spanish was as fluent as Alonzo's, and it was words he most often used on the Mexican's girls. By the time he was through flaying them with his tongue, they were convinced that they had brought this life of sin upon themselves, that they were already so black with sin that God had turned His back upon them.
He would pay for this privilege, of course; the exclusive use of a girl wasn't something easy to come by on Pacific Street. But the cost was a fraction of what such a privilege would have demanded in a House. He would be only the second man to touch these girls, which vastly reduced the all-too-real risk of disease.
The girl looked up quickly as he opened the door, which had neither latch nor handle on the other side. She had been kneeling-obviously praying-as far from the bed in the corner as possible. In the light from the single dingy, metal barred window, her face was swollen and tear-stained, and she tried to cover her nakedness with her hands. That was all there was in this tiny closet of a room; the naked girl, the undraped, iron-framed bed bolted to the floor, and four bare walls with bare wooden floor. There was a single gaslight, too high on the wall for her to reach.
He smiled. He would try words, first.
'Hello, little whore,' he said, in clear Spanish, his voice smoother than honed steel and just as cold and sharp. 'I am your master now.'
The first session had gone quite well; Paul was pleased as he gave the special knock that alerted Diego that he wanted out.
'Well?' the little Mexican asked, as he closed the door on the semi-conscious girl.
'Five or six days , Paul said, truthfully. 'Not more than that. Today she cried, tomorrow she might fight or weep more; maybe the day after, too. Then she'll begin wearing down, and she'll have it in her head that she's dirt and there's nowhere else that would have her but a whorehouse. She'll probably start drugging once she gets into a House, though. The religious ones usually do.'
Deigo shrugged. 'Not our problem,' he said, dismissively. 'Whoever paid for her can worry about that. We'll be seeing you for the next week, then?' He held his hand out, palm up.
'Probably.' Paul counted out enough cash to cover the week, then some over. 'I'll need the usual.'
'The usual,' was for Deigo to dig up well-used clothing in Paul's size, send it to the Chinese laundry, and have it waiting here for him. Even if Cameron 'followed' him here, the man's fastidious nature would never allow him to keep a more direct eye on his Apprentice. And the moment Paul left here on errands of his own, clad in shabby clothing that had never come within Cameron's reach, there was no way the Firemaster could trace him further.
