Free People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry Page B

walk over, and hostessing would commence.
    *   *   *
    What was a hostess exactly? To Western ears the word sounded laughably seedy and euphemistic, scarcely more respectable than “escort”—redolent of cheap perfume and dingy basements in Soho or Times Square. “We just freaked when we heard,” said Sam Burman, who had a phone call from Lucie a few days after her arrival. “What did she mean, ‘hostessing’? She seemed a bit nervous about telling me over the phone. I think she felt embarrassed because she’d told us one thing, and it hadn’t worked out like that, and we were going to worry about her. The last thing she wanted any of us to do was to worry.”
    Sophie had the impression that the work involved “inane and dull conversations that she would have to smile at and laugh at. It wasn’t like people sat there saying, ‘Show us your tits’ and ‘How much d’you charge?’ It’s very different from that.” Afterwards, when the question of what hostesses really did was a subject of discussion in British tabloid newspapers, Sophie came up with a way of explaining it to skeptical journalists. “The only difference between being a British Airways hostess and being at Casablanca,” she said, “was the altitude.”
    Months later, Tim Blackman would receive a long and emotional letter from a kindly old gentleman named Ichiro Watanabe, a loyal customer at Casablanca, expressing his concern over Lucie’s disappearance. “The club is far from the irresponsible reports by mass media aimed at vulgar gossips and based on groundless conjectures,” he wrote in painstaking italic. “The ladie’s [ sic ] job there is just only lighting customer’s cigarette, making whisky and water for him, singing karaoke together and keeping company in talking. That’s all, nothing else, just like she told her mother, ‘a kind of waitressing.’” He added, “I’ve no mind to put in a good word for me. I dare want to say this fact for her honor !”
    All of this, as far as it went, was true.
    The club opened at nine. A little before then, in a narrow dressing room at the back, a dozen, and sometimes as many as fifteen, girls put on makeup and changed from jeans and T-shirts into dresses. They came from all over the world, although in the summer of 2000 there was a proportionately large British contingent. Apart from Lucie and Louise, there was Mandy from Lancashire and Helen from London, as well as Samantha from Australia, Hanna from Sweden, American Shannon, and Romanian Olivia. Three men worked in the club: Tetsuo Nishi, the manager, a pockmarked man in his fifties; Caz, the Japanese barman; and a Filipino singer whose name no one could remember. It was Caz and Nishi who decided which girls would sit with which customers, who rotated them strategically among the tables, and who gave them perfunctory instruction in the duties of a hostess. Much of this consisted of prohibitions: do not allow a customer to refill his own whiskey glass or light his own cigarette. But once seated, the only real task was to talk.
    This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Few of the hostesses could say much more than “yes, thank you” and “excuse me” in Japanese, and although a customer would be unlikely to patronize Casablanca if he spoke no English, fluency and confidence varied widely. For some, a few hours with a foreign hostess was a kind of language lesson in itself. Certain men even took notes, and unselfconscious conversation, of the kind that one would naturally strike up with a stranger, was usually out of the question. And the customer, being a customer, could never be argued with, contradicted, or deserted. The novelist Mo Hayder worked as a hostess and compared it to “having to be nice to a work colleague in whom you’re not too interested.” “I’d ask where they worked, why they were in Tokyo. I’d flatter them and say, ‘I like your tie.’ The number of ties I’ve really loved!”
    “You’d just talk