The Pearl is a house of pleasure and of massage of the better sort, kept by Mistress Manukian in a spirited quarter of the city. It wears the air of a club, with its music and its mingling of open rooms and half-private booths curtained off for quiet talk; it courts a clientele of some means, and offers the services of the flesh and of the masseur alike.
Within its walls Jean-Zera Mongé met an Arab man who spoke for an assassin, to concert a ruse touching a plot against Mustafa Pasha, the vizier — a device meant to draw out responses whilst the true mark was kept dark. Their business done, the party had recourse to a Memory-Wipe Scroll and wiped from the man's mind all recollection of the interview.