…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. 
