Capital Treasures

It was an itinerary, but it had been unfolded faster than Toby, in his current state, the man's hand still resting on his thigh, had been able to fully follow. He hadn't missed that Peeters had said he'd be with Toby this evening and a different man the next evening. And then there'd be whoever he went to Bruges with. So, servicing at least three men.

"Yes. I play tennis. I would be doing that when?"

"Tomorrow afternoon at the Friedman's house in Burcht. Ethan Friedman plays very well and he will want to get comfortable with you."

"He's someone I will be servicing? And you named another Friedman."

"Yes. Joseph Friedman is the enterprise chairman. This has been his family's business back into the middle ages. The Friedmans are among the foremost diamond merchants—they always have been. That's what Antwerp is known for. Ethan Friedman is his son. He is the man who you'll be going to Bruges with. As far as anyone watching is interested, you will be a boyfriend he's taking on a weekend visit to Bruges. Bruges is a famous old town, very much a tourist attraction. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site in Flanders that goes back to the ninth century. You'll enjoy visiting it. Oh, I see that we are almost there—at the Radisson Park Inn."

"Good, thanks," Toby said, addressing how happy that he, at last, was within reach of a bed to sleep in—alone until he regained his bearings. How many more than the men mentioned would he have to let fuck him, he wondered.

More than had been mentioned, it turned out.

He was able to sleep for four hours before Nicholas Peeters returned to eat dinner with him in the hotel restaurant. Toby was on a tab at the hotel at the expense of Friedman Enterprises, which he gathered was a well-respected firm in Antwerp, considering the quality of the service the hotel staff accorded him. After the dinner, Nicholas Peeters accompanied Toby to his hotel room, as Toby assumed he would, and, there, he had Toby strip and move his body to music for him as he masturbated himself erect, and then he bent Toby over onto his chest at the foot of the bed, and fucked him. It was no worse than Toby had given to a man paying for sex before. It was not too taxing, the middle-aged man could only manage one fuck, and Toby didn't have to look at him directly.

One down—on top of those Toby had taken en route. Peeters rolled off Toby, flopped over onto one side of the bed, and was snoring almost before his head hit the pillow.

* * * *

Toby was lying on his back, legs spread and bent, held mobile in the embrace of the old man on the bed in his Radisson Park Inn hotel room in Antwerp. The man was maybe in his fifties, but he was hardbodied and strong, much bigger and heavier than Toby—and cruel, surprisingly cruel . . . and brutal. He was, ultimately, the one paying for all of this and he was taking his share of the pleasure. Toby had been told that fisting was specified, and now he knew who was going to be doing it.

Joseph Friedman, the chairman of the diamond merchant company, the fifty-plus-year-old patriarch of an ancient Jewish family had a possessing arm around Toby's waist, holding the young male whore close into his body, one of his legs pinning Toby's right leg, Toby's right arm trapped under the old man's back, and Friedman had Toby's pelvis raised off the surface of the bed, the young man's torso cascading down to the mattress, his weight on his shoulders, and Toby's left arm raised above his head, grasping the headboard to hold himself steady.

Toby was huffing and panting and moaning, Friedman's right hand was gathered into a fist and covered in a black leather glove slathered with gel. The fist was inside Toby's channel, nearly up to the elbow, and the old man was fucking the young man with it. Pulling his left arm down, Toby reached for his cock and stroked himself off while the old man fist fucked him. When he came, Friedman pulled his hand out, rolled over on top of the smaller, younger man, thrust his hard erection up into the well-opened passage and fucked Toby hard to his own release.

Nicholas Peeters, the diamond merchant company deputy chairman, had accompanied Toby down to breakfast in the hotel that morning. He'd remained in Toby's hotel room the previous night, snoring, on the bed, although he didn't try sex again. For much of the night, Toby sat, dozing in a chair with a blanket wrapped around himself. His system thought it was still the previous evening.

After breakfast, the black Mercedes appeared at the hotel's entrance again, and Toby was driven across a river and into an area of mansions and larger land holdings. The Friedman mansion was a gray stucco, solid building, with a third floor under a mansard roof. It looked like it had been built by a stuffy burgher, which it probably had been, and had been perched there in extensive grounds leading down to the riverbank since the early twentieth century, which, again, it most surely had.

Toby wasn't permitted in the house. Peeters guided him around to the back, to a terrace with a swimming pool in it and a pool house at the opposite side of the pool from the back of the house. Here, Toby was handed tennis shorts, a jock strap, tennis shoes, and socks, all of which miraculously—or studiously—fit him, and was conducted to the other side of the pool house, where a high-fenced tennis court was located and an impossibly handsome, fit Adonis was awaiting him—or maybe a David, since the Friedmans were Jewish.

The son of the family, the man who was supposed to be traveling near, if not with, Toby in his treasure courier trip to Bruges and back, Ethan Friedman, was just a few years older than Toby, at nearly thirty. He was dark and sultry, with hints of the family's Spanish heritage, and of having come to Belgium with the Habsburgs as their bankers and jewelers in the fifteenth century. He also was of the same stature as Toby, dark and slightly hirsute to Toby's sunny and smooth, and was lightly muscled and handsomely fit.

Toby hadn't been given a tennis shirt to wear and Ethan wasn't wearing one either. They played tennis across the net from each other like dancers in a well-choreographed set. They were meant to arouse each other sexually, and that worked a charm. Both played with finesse, rather than raw power, and very well. They were evenly matched and wouldn't have remembered ten minutes after the set was completed who had won it. They melded immediately, both as conversationalists and eventual lovers, each both attracted to and aroused by the other.

After tennis they moved to the pool, where they stripped off their shorts and jocks, dove in, cavorted with each other—and fucked. Lunch was brought out to the pool house for them, during which they were in deep conversation. After lunch they fucked again on the lounge bed in the pool house. Ethan was a proficient and attentive top and Toby thoroughly enjoyed being covered by a young man as beautiful and as accomplished as he was.

After they'd showered and dressed, neither being able to take his eyes off the other, Ethan pronounced himself greatly pleased that they would be together on this courier assignment, and Nicholas Peeters appeared again to guide Toby back to the black Mercedes, advising him of the time the father, Joseph, would be picking him up at the hotel and telling him that what he would wear that evening would be laid out on the hotel room bed.

The clothes were expensive and sexy in a subdued way—tight black satiny trousers, with shiny black leather ankle-high boots, and a billowy white muslin shirt that was just gauzy enough to give a hint of Toby's lightly tanned and muscled, almost boyish, smooth torso. Under it all were red, lacy bikini briefs. It was the first indication Toby got that the father was going to fuck him too.

When the man himself arrived, Toby couldn't have been more surprised by the contrast with the son. Ethan must have gotten his form and most of his beauty from his mother's side. Joseph was also dark, like Toby, and the hint of the Mediterranean was there, but he was a big-boned, glowering, Semitic figure, with more of a touch of the Levant than the Iberian. He was commanding to the point of overbearing. He took Toby to an expensive nearby restaurant, La Fontanella, and was terse and detached throughout in conversation, although it was quite evident that the two were of different worlds—that Joseph was an important businessman and Toby was the servile toy the man would devour.

And devour Toby he did in the hotel room afterward, going straight to the sex, with very little preparation. There was no doubt he found Toby alluring, as he was in full erection when, having just entered the room, he forced Toby to his knees, released himself, and held the young man's head between his large, gnarled hands as he forced the rent-boy to give him suck.

Toby was to suffer the man's large hands in short order. Joseph slapped him around a bit, tore the clothes off him that he had bought for the young man at no small expense, pinned him to the bed, fisted him, and fucked him in a vigorous missionary. One of the pleasant surprises clients had with Toby was if they found that his one tattoo, a green gecko inked to his lower belly on one side, marked an erogenous zone for the rent-boy. If a man found that and rubbed it, Toby went into overdrive in riding the cock. Joseph found the gecko and exhausted Toby in making the most of having found it. The fuck at that point was no longer just a brutal taking. The two men were riding each other hard.

After releasing his seed, Joseph became all distant formality again. He took a quick shower and then left the room, having said little to Toby all evening.

Toby lay on the bed, moaning, unsure whether he had displeased the patriarch to the extent that the trip to Bruges with Ethan Friedman was off—and realizing that he regretted the possibility that he wouldn't be seeing or traveling or writhing under the fascinating younger Friedman again.

One thing he had learned that afternoon that had been running through his mind was that Ethan Friedman didn't live in Antwerp. He worked at the company's office in Paris, training up to eventually getting his turn as chairman. Paris was where Toby was contemplating moving. Now he was contemplating it even more seriously than before.

* * * *

It was back to the Friedman mansion in Burcht, across the River Scheldt, the next morning, with two more days on Toby's contract, and this time he was let into the mansion, where, in a second-floor bedroom, Nicholas Peeters showed him the suitcase he was to take to Bruges, with nearly half a million euros in 500-euro notes lodged in the case's false bottom, and the jacket Toby was to wear back, with a hidden compartment to carry the uncut diamonds Toby was to bring back on the evening train the night after the next.

Toby was still thinking of the opportunity he'd have to spend the next evening with Ethan Friedman who he was falling head over heels for when he went to a window that overlooked the pool area. There was a family down there, a woman and three young children, playing in the pool. Seeing that Toby was looking down at the back terrace, Peeters came over to look as well.

"Ah, Ethan's family has arrived from Paris, I see," he said.

"Ethan's family?" Toby asked, his euphoria collapsing, but then he saw it was true, as Ethan came out of the pool house and joined them. Toby hadn't thought of the need to share Ethan with a young family. The previous day Ethan had encouraged Toby to take the job in Paris so that they could easily see each other. Toby would have to think this one over.

He had a bit of time to rethink his future options during the hour-and-a-half, fifty-two mile train journey between Antwerp and Bruges, as he and Ethan were sitting well away from each other. Although, with Toby carrying nearly half a million of the Friedman Company euros in the suitcase in the bin over his head, Ethan made sure to take a seat within sight of the young American. At the train station in the picturesque medieval city of Bruges, the center of which had been suspended in time in the fifteenth century, when it was a key city of the Hanseatic mercantile league of cities, until it was obsoleted by being separated from the sea by silted-over waterways, the two took separate taxis to their separate hotels. Ethan's taxi followed Toby's to the Hotel De Medici on one side of the Langerei Canal before going on to his own Hotel Fevery, just on the other side of the canal.

Toby was to wait in his room, his case containing the money deposited in the hotel's safe until his contact, who Peeters had told him would be a black Sierra Leonean, Fernando Samu, arrived for the exchange of the money for uncut diamonds. Toby was possibly not as innocent to what was going on as the Friedmans thought he was. When he'd heard the diamonds would be handed over by someone from Sierra Leone, it immediately became clear to him what all of this secrecy had been about. These would be what were known as blood diamonds, which were African-mined diamonds, mined under slave conditions, with the proceeds used to finance insurgencies across the African continent. Trade in such diamonds was illegal worldwide. That didn't mean that it didn't go on below the surface. That's what was going on here, Toby realized. And he was being implicated in an illegal trade.

There wasn't much, he didn't think, that he could do about it without breaching his contract. He would just have to look for opportunities to back out before he was involved in handling the diamonds. There was nothing illegal thus far in carrying the money—as far as he knew. What was pulling at this was his developing relationship with Ethan Friedman, which had progressed to serious thoughts of relocating to Paris but now was being hedged by knowing Ethan had a wife and children, and realization that the Friedmans, including Ethan, were involved in illegal blood diamond trafficking.

After he'd eaten a dinner in his room, Toby retrieved the case of money from the hotel safe and took it back to his room, sitting and waiting for the exchange. After over an hour, Ethan arrived and the two of them waited, nervously, together. They both wanted to do much more with each other than sit and wait, but they certainly didn't want the Sierra Leonean to find them in the clutches.

An hour and a half after Samu was scheduled to arrive and hadn't, Ethan made some calls. Samu was grounded in London, his plane arriving there too late for his connecting flight that evening to the Ostend-Bruges Airport.

"Well, it will be another day," Ethan said. He turned and gave a "not-all-that-regretful look" at Toby. "We will have to think of something else to do tonight. Why don't you take the money case back to reception for the safe, and I will be waiting for you here?"

The sex with Ethan was as good that evening as it had been the previous evening, with Toby holding on all fours on the bed and Ethan mounted on his tail; grasping his waist, with a finger rubbing the erogenous-zone gecko tattoo with beneficial result; while sinking deep into his core; and taking it all.

Afterward, as they lay stretched against each other, cooling down before the inevitable moment that Ethan would have to roll off the bed, shower, and go back to his own hotel, Toby asked the question that had been bugging him for a couple of days.

"I don't understand why you needed a male escort to do this courier job, Ethan. There is more to it than that, isn't there?"

Ethan didn't answer immediately, and Toby pressed the issue. "The man from Sierra Leone, bringing you those diamonds—he gets more out of this than just the money, doesn't he?"

"When this was set up, I hadn't met you, Todd," Ethan said, still believing that Toby's name was Todd.

"Part of the deal was that Samu gets a night with a high-drawer international male escort, doesn't he? I'm here to give this Samu guy a night of his choice of fucking."

"Yes."

* * * *

This was why the willingness to and capability of being fisted had been included in the contract. It wasn't because Joseph Friedman liked doing it; it was because this big, black bull of African bruiser, Fernando Samu, wanted to do it to a smaller, young blond.

He was big and muscular and forceful—broad-chested with tribal piercing all over his massive chest when the business-like suit was off, his Oxford Street demeanor and English accent had been discarded, and he was in his primeval nakedness. He manhandled Toby at will and, like Joseph Friedman the previous night, but so much more primitively and primordially, moved Toby into position at will, lashing the young man to the bed with leather restraints, spread-eagled, open, and vulnerable. Toby panted and groaned and strained at the bonds as Samu flogged him with a belt, fisted him, and then fucked him.

Leaving him with a big grin on his face and the case of money in his hands, Samu saluted Ethan Friedman, who had been sitting in a corner of the Hotel De Medici room, watching it all and stroking his cock, and left Ethan to untie Toby and help him to the shower in the bathroom.

Toby was a professional. He'd been used like this before, even by African and Arab princes of privilege and arrogance.

Ethan had watched Samu overpower, dominate, and ravish Toby. He had watched with openly expressed pleasure, first while counting the uncut blood diamonds the Sierra Leonean had brought, then by concealing them in the jacket that had been provided to Toby for this purpose—the jacket Toby was now, in the morning, supposed to wear back to Antwerp and hand over to Joseph Friedman—and, finally, by unzipping and handling and stroking himself as he watched the big, black, African bull riding Toby hard.

After Samu had left, Ethan was all concern and coddling. He helped Toby shower and dry off, helped him back into the bed, and held him close, eventually working Toby with his hands until the young man was moaning and sighing—and then taking his turn fucking him.

It must have been exhausting for Ethan watching what Samu did to the other young man, because he was fast asleep when Toby extricated himself from Ethan's embrace, quietly moved out of the bed, showered again, dressed in silence, and left the room. The hotel bill was prepaid, so Toby just walked out of the hotel, flagged a taxi in the predawn hours, having seen nothing of the inviting ancient city of Bruges other than the train station and the hotel, and returned to the train station.

Before Ethan woke, Toby was on a train to Amsterdam. He had left the jacket, with the diamonds hidden in it, for Ethan to get back to Antwerp as best he could. At the station, Ethan called his escort service in Washington, D.C. It was a new day. Because of the African's extra day layover in London, Toby's contract had been finished the day before, which made Toby abandoning the plan for him couriering the diamonds back to Antwerp technically beyond the existing contract. Toby hadn't touched the blood diamonds himself.

When he told the scheduler on duty at the escort agency that the Friedmans had tried to involve him in illegal diamond running and noted how he'd fulfilled every sexual demand on him during the duration of his contract, they approved him leaving the job when he did and effected the full-service billing on the Friedmans' account. He—and they—had fulfilled the contract. His contract didn't require him to do anything illegal other than prostitution, and prostitution wasn't illegal in Belgium.

At Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, Toby rearranged his travel. Ethan just sitting there and getting himself off while Samu ravished Toby had been the tipping point of the decision on going to Paris. In New York, Toby got a flight to Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport with little delay. The trip back to Washington took less than half the time the convoluted route from Washington to Antwerp had required.