The Big Easy

A/N: I promise this is the first and last time I will stick an American character into this story. I just couldn't do a whorehouse fic without a touch of New Orleans. I have already been beaten severely about the head and shoulders by my beta for doing this. It's to her credit that she edited this chapter like a trouper anyway, and there's a little hommage to her buried in it.

Amber stuck her head into Vidalia’s dressing room.

“Hoops is here for you.”

She had that look on her face, the one that said better you than me.

If there was one thing that mystified the staff at The Wayward Wand more than Filius Flitwick’s preference for Vidalia, it was that she seemed just fine with it. Quite pleased with it, in fact. Well, that, and her bizarre—some might even say unkind—way of referring to him. It had started out as “my little b-ball player” but soon devolved into the one-syllable nickname, and now everyone used it, although never to his face.

Vidalia slipped her feet into a pair of outsized pink mules and picked up an enormous matching feather boa.

“Isn’t it a bit . . . strange?” Amber couldn’t resist asking her. “I mean, he’s so, he’s just so . . . tiny.”

“Huh. Strange. Ain’t you the one fucks the dog-man? Don’t go talking to me ‘bout no strange.” She rose from her chair and swept the boa regally over one shoulder.

Even without the mules, she would have stood a full head and shoulders over Amber; as it was, if the smaller woman had moved any closer she would have risked suffocation.

“Come on,” said Amber, not in the least intimidated by the pair of satin-upholstered torpedoes staring her in the face. “How do you even know when it’s in?”

Vidalia raised a plucked eyebrow. “Not everything built to scale, baby girl,” she said with a slow grin. “That man like a little tripod. You look at the way his britches fit. What you think, that one a his legs just bigger around than the other?”

“If you say so. I still think you may squash him by accident one of these days.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. This a dangerous ass, girl; crush a man like a maypop, he don’t behave his self.”

Amber laughed. Vidalia liked her: she had a ready sense of humor and a good work ethic. The kind of girl she would have hired in a New York minute back when she was running her own place, back when she had a clientele to serve.

She shook her head. Ten years, even five years ago, half the wizards in America had lived in Louisiana, most of them in New Orleans. It was far and away the most magic-drenched city in the US, with a nightlife unmatched anywhere. And La Bergère Plantureuse was right in the heart of it all, with a staff of forty girls and something for every taste. Money had flowed like liquor, and liquor had flowed like water, and Vidalia’s little black book had held the names of every powerful wizard—and not a few witches—east or west of the Mississippi.

And then, in the early nineties, New Orleans’ magical population began to move away. Some left for England, some for Canada, and a few for Australia. Many of the old Creole wizarding families moved to France.

No one would tell Vidalia why they were going. They gave vague, evasive answers and would not meet her eyes; it was always some nebulous business opportunity or family obligation. Vidalia, who could smell bullshit a mile away, never pressed them for details, but watched with a sense of helpless frustration as her business dwindled away. By early 1994 she had laid off three-quarters of her staff, and couldn’t put off the decision any longer: in August she gave one last all-night party, and then closed her doors for the last time.

Chretien Bajolière was a long-time client and one of the few who still lived in New Orleans. He took Vidalia aside and said, “Honey, you need to leave town. There’s something bad coming for New Orleans, and you don’t want to be here when it does.”

“Something bad like what?”

“I don’t know. But every sign there is has been saying the new millennium’s going to be mighty bad for this town. You need to get gone.”

“What about you then? You still here.”

He smiled sadly. “Sugarfoot, my family’s been here for three hundred years. If New Orleans goes down, I’ll go down with her.”

So she had sold the property to an eager young restaurateur and come to London with half a million in silver in her bank account and no particular plan of action.

At first it had been fine. She loved the city: the high-class accents, the sense of history everywhere, and the fact that for the most part people left you alone and didn’t get all up in your grill. That was real different from Louisiana, where anybody’s business was everybody’s business, and all your neighbors knew your whole family and how long they’d lived there and whether your momma and daddy had been married for nine months by the time you were born.

Within a few months, though, two things happened. The first was that she began to be concerned about her money supply. She could not have run La Bergère Plantureuse without a first-rate head for numbers, and she soon realized that at the present rate she would run out of funds in about ten years—and that only if the exchange rate held.

The second was quite simply that she grew bored and restless. She had been working since the age of fifteen, and wasn’t used to so much leisure time. So when she heard that Zelda had an opening, she had applied; and Zelda, though skeptical, had taken her on and been surprised and pleased at the result. Apparently a big bodacious thunder-thighed witch with an accent like molasses was right up some British wizards’ alley.

“Tripod or no tripod,” said Amber, bringing her sharply back to the present, “I don’t see how he gets any leverage.”

“What you talking about, leverage? He don’t need no leverage—think about it, girl! You lying down, he standing up, and everything right there. Got his hands right where you want, no reaching, no stretching, right there I tell you. That man a little fucking, fingering, woman-pleasing ma-chine, make you want to slap your momma.”

“That good, huh?”

“That good, baby. And sweet? They don’t make ’em any more gentlemanlike.”

They had come to the door of the sitting room, and Amber lowered her voice. “So why do you make fun of him?”

“What make fun of him? I don’t make fun of him. He a nice man, always welcome in my book.”

“Calling him ‘Hoops.’ He can’t help how short he is.”

There was a brief pause, and then Vidalia threw back her head and laughed. “Got nothing to do with how tall he is.”

“What then?”

Vidalia lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I think it’s ’cause he got nowhere to keep it, he so little. But he start leaking come as soon as he get hard.”

“So? What’s that got to do with basketball?”

She grinned. “Dribbles some before he shoots.”