Around the time of day customers started leaving the business district, people began flowing into a business district of another sort. They came to the pleasure quarter, afire with naked lust that couldn’t be satisfied under the light of day.
At night, cloying voices attempted to lure customers into their establishments, and drunken men who’d lost their cool gambling and fighting stumbled about, slurring their words. Passersby jeered, as if none of it was their problem, while shady dealers ignored the ruckus and kept shouting their sales pitches. During the day, it was merely a quiet backstreet, but now it was so lawless that any person with a shred of decency would frown at it.
Amid the chaos, a small child with a voice full of innocence called out from a street corner—despite the late hour.
“Would you like a flower?” she asked.
In these streets, which were nothing but a bad influence on her, a little redheaded girl carried a basket on her elbow. Her pigtails swayed as she desperately hawked flowers that looked like she’d picked them in the park, but no one in this marketplace of vice was interested in flowers.
This was ten years before Rachel would be thrown in prison. At just six years of age, Margaret was out selling flowers in the pleasure quarter to help make ends meet.
Margaret’s mother was a high-class prostitute. She was beautiful even without makeup, and with her calm, ephemeral smile, she could have passed for a well-to-do young lady. Maybe it was because of her looks, but Margaret’s mother dressed more chastely than the other gaudily dressed women around her. Next to all of the flowers with their toxic colors, her appearance might have suggested she attracted fewer clients, yet she still had any number of pollinators who wanted to bed her.
You would think that this would have been enough for her to live in luxury, since she was one of the big earners in this town, but perhaps because she was picky about her clientele, Margaret never got the sense that they were doing well financially. That was why she went out day after day to sell flowers, so that she could help her mother.
Margaret’s mother was beautiful and clever, and she’d told Margaret, “You should start working now, if you’re thinking about your future.”
Margaret had never thought of anything beyond tomorrow’s dinner, but if her mom said it, then she must be right.
“Would you like some flowers?”
The blooms that Margaret had picked by the roadside earlier looked, as you might expect, rather unimpressive in the gloom of night. Obviously, they weren’t selling.
Go figure. No one would pay money for these things, she thought, but every so often, someone would fall for it and give her some spare change out of the goodness of their hearts, so you never knew.
If two or three people give me pity money, then that’s enough to buy milk for tomorrow.
As she was counting her chickens before they hatched, looking around to see if anyone might stop for her, a shadow fell over Margaret.
“Hm?”
Raising her eyes, she saw a middle-aged gentleman looking down at her.
I did it! I’ve got a customer!
“Would you like a flower?”
Margaret extended some wilted blooms toward the man, but he wasn’t interested in flowers. Instead, he wrapped his hands ever so gently around the hand she was holding out.
“Mister?”
She was perplexed by his strange behavior. She didn’t know what he wanted.
The middle-aged man stroked Margaret’s hand and crouched down so he could look directly into her eyes. Seeing her adorable dubious expression up close, he nodded with satisfaction.
“You’re such a cute little girl. How much do you cost?”
A slimy grin on his face, he looked into Margaret’s eyes as she tilted her head in confusion.
“Huh...? Oh! Ohhh!” Finally understanding his pedophilic intentions, Margaret broke into a smile. “You’re that kind of customer, huh? Whew, you had me worried there! I thought I was about to get involved in an ‘incident.’”
“Huh? Uh, no, that’s exactly what this is...”
“There’s been a lot of problems lately with abductions and stuff! That’s no good, not paying a girl after you’ve bought her!”
“That’s the problem?!”
Margaret, now completely relaxed, raised her fingers to indicate the price and held them out toward him.
“Well, if that’s what you’re after, this is what it’s going to cost you.”
Margaret gave him a price that was more than enough to buy every flower in her basket three times over, yet it wasn’t too much to “play” with such a pretty little girl. In fact, the man was so thrilled with the bargain that he gladly paid her fee up front.
Margaret put the payment away, giddily hugged him, and took his hand.
“Over here. Mom’s got a room she uses for ‘business’!”
“Oh, she does? How considerate.”
They both smiled as they walked hand in hand through this hell.
Margaret led him to a building in a cramped alleyway. The door was nearly falling off, and there was so much dust that you’d think it was a storage room or a ruin. The man felt a bit apprehensive about this, but Margaret flashed him an innocent smile.
“If the front is like this, they won’t come to crack down on us,” she said. “The back room is nice and clean.”
“Ohh. That makes sense.”
Margaret let go of the man’s hand and pushed on the rusty metal door, letting out a cute little groan. Once she’d gotten the door open, she went inside ahead of him.
“It’s in here. Watch your step. It’s dark.”
“Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa.”
The man entered and followed Margaret’s voice until he saw a light faintly shining under a door at the back. He felt around for the knob, and as he pushed it open, it occurred to him that it was strange the door was closed if the little girl had already gone inside.
A gust of air brushed his cheek. On the other side of the door was...outside.
“Huh?”
It wasn’t a guest room, as he’d expected, or any other kind of structure.
“What?!”
Unable to immediately understand what had happened, the man kept moving and tripped over something big.
“Whoa?!”
He pitched forward and fell through the doorway, plunging straight down into the filthy river far below.
“Aaaah!”
Sploooosh!
There was a terrible scream, followed by the splash of something large hitting the water. Then came the sound of a man thrashing about violently.
The lump the man had tripped over began to move.
“That’s the second guy this week.”
Margaret, who’d been curled into a ball on the floor, closed the door and hurriedly fled the ruin. She hightailed it two or three blocks, found a hole she could safely hide in, and huddled inside it. She opened the wallet she’d filched from the man’s pocket. Even in the darkness, she could see the dull shine of coins.
“Wow! What a haul!”
Margaret had quickly checked the contents of his wallet earlier, when he’d paid her up front, but now that she had it in her little hands, she found far more than what she’d guessed. It contained more silver than she’d already received and even three gold pieces. This was the most she’d made in a long time.
Margaret burst into a big smile. “Whenever I make a sale like that, all the tiredness from working goes right away!” This work was more of an emotional strain on her than a physical one, but the big thing was the stress.
Margaret counted up what was in the wallet, then headed back to the pleasure quarter.
Standing on the busiest street corner, Margaret called out to a man with a nasty-looking face.
“Boss!”
“Oh? Margaret?”
This man, the “boss” of the pickpockets and touts, was also the representative of the entire pleasure quarter. He was the judge who decided what was acceptable in this place that straddled the line between legal and illegal.
Margaret handed over the wallet she’d taken from the man to the boss.
“Just now, I got one of those customers who wanted something other than flowers...”
“Oh... Lot of them lately, huh?”
Anyone doing business in this town, even little girls, had to pay the boss his due, and the boss knew that Margaret sold rubbish flowers and tricked pedophiles out of their wallets.
Margaret dumped the contents of the wallet onto a tray, then returned most of the coins to the wallet once the boss had seen them all. She gave him the ones she hadn’t put back, the three gold ones.
“It’s supposed to be a fifty-fifty split, so your share is too small,” the boss said.
“I can’t use gold coins,” Margaret replied.
“Yeah, I guess not.”
Gold coins were so valuable that the kind of shops where common people bought their daily necessities wouldn’t take them. Later in life, Margaret would have taken half of the gold coins as well, but she was still a little too simple for that right now.
“If you want to make change for me, I’ll take it,” she added.
“You shoulda done that before you came here.”
“I’m giving them to you because I can’t. Well, make sure you work enough to pay me back the difference.”
“You sure don’t talk like a kid...”
Even at this age, Margaret was still Margaret.
Just to be safe, Margaret gave the boss a description of her previous customer. When guys like that finally got out of the river, they either crawled back home in low spirits or came hunting for her in a fit of rage.
“I’ll keep an eye out, but you watch yourself for a while too, you hear?” the boss said.
“Sure!”
Margaret and the other denizens of the pleasure quarter paid the boss a tribute so that customers who fell for their shady dealings couldn’t get back at them. So long as she paid the boss his due, even if that man returned and tried to come after her, no one would hand her over to him. The people of the quarter would all play dumb. Obviously, if she did business without paying him, he’d give her up to the pedophile instead.
For her own safety, Margaret would have to avoid working for a bit, but today’s earnings were really good, so she’d be fine as far as her living expenses went. She decided she would go to the market tomorrow to buy cheese and sausages.