Everybody needs to be someone else sometimes, even if it is only for a couple of hours becoming lost in the flesh of another in an anonymous hotel room. Andrea always held that thought at the front of her mind during the first few moments of meeting a client. She didn’t see herself as a prostitute: she would never allow herself to be sold as just so much meat. She was not, after all, what was normally considered feminine. But not everybody had the same ideal of femininity: the work she got through the agency was for a niche market. After all, she was no ordinary woman and the men who paid to be with her were not looking for ordinary sex. Andrea was well aware that the agency she worked for specialised in the more unusual end of the sex industry and she didn’t like to think about what other tastes they probably catered for. She had always suspected that À la Carte was run by gangsters, but her contact with them was confined to the calls they made to her cellphone and the envelopes she mailed them with their percentage of her fees. She knew they had come looking for her, or someone like her.

The first contact had been in the gym where she had been preparing with a few of the other girls for a local competition. It had been a sleazy-looking man called Nielsen who had made the approach. Nielsen had been dressed like a businessman but had had the thick, thuggish build and face of a gangster. He had spoken to Andrea and another three girls. Andrea had noticed that the girls Nielsen spoke to were the only others with the same amount of muscle mass as Andrea had. Nielsen had at first said the work was photographic modelling. He had been quite specific about the type of modelling and it had not bothered Andrea. She was used to parading in a bikini that strained to contain her heavily muscled body: being gawked at without it didn’t unduly bother her. It was after the second photo session that Nielsen had mentioned that À la Carte’s main business was providing escorts. Escorts for an especially discerning clientele.

Cologne had been the first German city to levy a tax on prostitutes’ incomes, but À la Carte was less than assiduous when it came to record-keeping. This had meant that Andrea had successfully managed to avoid being registered as a part-time sex worker and therefore was not taxed on her ‘extra’ earnings. The money from the escort work was more than useful, supplementing the income she made from running her café; but Andrea knew that she didn’t do it just for the money.