The Shady Belle is a prostitute who is hired by someone not for sex, but something else.
Well, not just for cuddling and talking, but something else.
The Shady Belle is hired to do criminal, or...shady activites.
Often they are commissionied to kill or steal from somebody: usually someone important, i.e. a politician or a crime leader. The main idea is that when politicians and crime leaders take the services of a prostitute (that is, the sex part) they allow her to get intimate with them (of course) and are unsuspecting her of any ill will. Especially if this girl is a courtesan, and her clients treat her like their girlfriend, then they are all the less suspective of her, when say, she drops of a few spills of something in the food, or brings handcuffs to "have fun" in the bed, or asks a great amount of money for a new bracelet.
In a military setting, this can be possible because of Camp Followers.
Sometimes their target is not at all important: perhaps a woman cheated on by her husband with a prostitute, asks another one to kill her husband, or just do something plainer, like steal his wallet.
Or perhaps, she hires her to spy on him.
A lot of times these prostitutes are asked to be an informant on someone: yes, those politicians and crime leaders, who aren't suspective of her enough, and will talk about their activites with their friends right in front of her.
Many a time she doesn't even need to "spy" on or target anyone: if she is already involved in the criminal world, people (usually an Amateur Sleuth) will just pay her to give out information on those dealings.
This may not be a one-time experience, and she might become a part-time assassin, or informant.
Subtrope to Platonic Prostitution. Compare Predatory Prostitute. Compare the Dirty Harriet, who goes undercover as a prostitute, but isn't actually one, although if she goes undercover to do shady things, then that would still fit here.
Examples:
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Colonel Roy Mustang uses the girls in his aunt's (and adoptive mother's) brothel as an information network.
- One of the Road to Perdition stories has Michael O'Sullivan visiting an underage prostitute named Juana who he wants information from concerning his nemesis Connor Looney. For obvious reasons, he doesn't do anything with her, but instead gets the information that he needs from her and leaves her with enough money to leave if she wants to.
- Played With in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. At the Border Crossroads Inn, George and John need to get some information from a waitress. While she's not willing to go up to their room with them to have sex, she agrees to come when they explain they just want information and will even pay her. However, for a complicated reason, another woman is sent along with her, and the woman is a known tattler who will immediately report any shenanigans to the persons currently running the inn. So George has to have sex with the tattler to distract her, while John, who can't have sex with human women any more, has to fake it while he telepathically interrogates the waitress. Hilarity Ensues.
- The Night Unfurls: Chapter 7 of the original features Kyril visiting the Rosie and its mistress Shani, who is said to have connections with one of Alicia's wayward knights. Rather than for sex, he's here to gather the intelligence needed to strike back at Arc Villain Beasley and his forces.
- In Dirty Work, Mitch gets back at a jerkass owner of a used car lot by hiring a bunch of prostitutes to get in the trunk of his cars and pretend to be dead during the broadcast of a live television commercial. Later in the film Mitch hires the same prostitutes to act as security while getting revenge on the Big Bad.
- Chloe: Initially, Catherine pays Chloe just to meet her husband at a cafe and see if he flirts with her. Later subverted, however it turns out Chloe's lying about having sex with him.
- Rather early in the Anita Blake series, the eponymous character needs some information from someone who happens to be a prostitute — she was previously a suspicious man's mistress. It takes Anita quite a while to convince her that, really, yes, she really, truly, actually wants to talk.
- This happens in Lord John and the Private Matter, a spinoff of the Outlander series. Lord John patronizes a prostitute, but not for her services. He wants information about one of the whorehouse's clients.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: In A Dance with Dragons, the thought-to-be dead Mance Rayder is tasked by Melisandre to save Arya Stark from her marriage with Ramsay Bolton in Winterfell. To do this, he takes six spearwives with him, who go undercover as camp followers (that is, prostitutes serving soldiers). The spearwives kill several men in Winterfell, and later help Theon to save "Arya", who is actually Jeyne Poole.
