There’s all kinds of fancy-pants sidestepping in the business of selling sex, as this bit in the Hartford Courant, where reporters called up an escort service to ask what they could get, reveals quite plainly:

“Service,” she said, would cost $200 an hour.

What do you get for that?

“It’s full service,” she said.

Can you say specifically what that involves?

“I don’t get into specifics,” the unidentified woman said, sounding annoyed. “It’s full service. That should be specific enough.”

One of the ingenious by-products of the criminalization of prostitution is a whole secret sexual vocabulary that make hiring a sex worker, or negotiating with a client, tantamount to a erotic espionage. For some, this is the turn-on of the trade: slipping down (it’s always down) into a shadow society for a time, costumes and fantasy and all.

So does it break some some sacred spy compact, then, to go public with one’s client records? Are sex workers a sexual clergy, oathbound to a client’s secrets, or really, are sex workers more akin to double agents, whose allegiance, at the end of the day, is to their own cause and those who would support them?

In that context, here is the first page of alleged DC Madam Deborah Jean Palfrey’s phone records.