Clouds over Antibes

"In the lessons? No, I think I have developed my skills as far as they will go. But interested in perhaps playing a friendly match with you and interested in you as a young man? Yes, definitely." Paoli gave Brent a look that would be hard for the young American to misconstrue if there were a possibility he understood the signaling--and he did understand the signaling and he was interested. The man was pushing fifty at least, but he was fit and extremely handsome. And he looked like he had money, which proved to be a correct assumption. Paoli assured him of that by putting his hand in his pocket and pulling his wallet out far enough for Brent to get the message.

"It wouldn't be a lesson, but I would pay you to play a match with me--and for other services, if you are interested."

Brent didn't call the man off on possibilities. They played tennis and Brent found that Paoli was an expert at that. He complemented the Italian afterward as they cooled down in the club bar.

"That isn't the only thing I am an expert at, I believe," Paoli said, touching Brent's knee under the table. "I have other expertise in the ability to give and take pleasure, for which I would pay well, if you are interested."

Brent was interested.

"I am a demanding lover. I have my fetishes. My young men suffer for the pleasures I give and take."

Brent was still interested. Paoli showed his fist and flexed it, leaving little doubt in what way he could be demanding, and still Brend didn't back off from showing interest.

"You say you came here on a boat," Paoli said, "and that it's moored in the Antibes yacht basin marina. I would enjoy seeing it, I think." And, with that, the venue of their first fucking was established.

When they got to Brent's cabin cruiser, the first thing Paoli saw, on a nightstand beside the bunk, was a dildo, so he was confident the young American was a player. Brent was stretched out on the bunk, legs splayed and bent, the soles of his fee flat on the surface of the bunk, a canvas ballast sack under the small of his back, lifting his pelvis for easy access, and his arms over his head and bound to an iron ring at the head of the bed, gagged with the ball gag Paoli had found next to the dildo, and worked over with the rubber phallus. Brent endured that. Brent endured the fist fuck that came after that as well, and, eventually, he endured Paoli mounting and fucking him to a barebacked ejaculation.

It began with Paoli sitting next to Danforth's prone body on the bunk, both of them naked, their tennis clothes mingling on the deck beside the bunk, the boat gentling rocking against the marina pier, giving off a steady, dull thump, thump, thump cadence.

Paoli had placed the wad of money he was paying the young American on the nightstand next to the dildo he used at the beginning. Staring at the wad of money, Brent started panting and moaning as the Italian's fingers forced their way inside the American's ass, up to the knuckles, waiting for the channel to stretch to take him. His left hand glided over Brent's body and he was leaning over the young American, looking intently into his captive's eyes. He'd already explained that half of his pleasure in fisting a young man like Brent was to watch the youth's facial expressions as he possessed him with his hand.

Danforth arched his back and head and gave a little cry as the greased knuckles breached his sphincter muscle. Mateo ran the fingers of his left hand into Danforth's blond curls and held his head to the surface of the bunk, leaning close over the American's prone body, his face near Danforth's, as he possessed the anal channel up to his wrist. Paoli took Danforth's lips with his and the American rocked his pelvis as the fist moved, slowly, in and out.

At length, Paoli pulled the hand out, moved over on top of the American, and turned Danforth's body to where the younger man was faced down on the bunk. He put a hand on Danforth's belly and coaxed him up onto his knees, the American's cheek and chest pressed to the bunk. Danforth didn't fight the Italian who was taxing him to the limit. He was cowed and exhausted from the fisting, even though it hadn't lasted long.

Paoli positioned himself, mounted, on Danforth's raised ass, his thighs on either side of the American's hips. He slid inside the young man's channel easily, having already opened him up with the dildo and his fist, and he fucked the American to his ejaculation, breeding him, filling him deep, with warm cum. Even in his fifties, the Italian was a virile and vigorous man. The fucking motion augmented the natural thumping of the boat's hull against the pier. His thrusts and the young American's rocking against them had matched the rhythm of the thumping of the hull against the pier.

For the money--and, he said, the pleasure of it--Brent endured it all. Paoli had done all of this for the opportunity somehow to use the cabin cruiser's radio equipment to maintain secret communications with Rome, but he found that the beautiful young American prostitute gave him quite a lot of pleasure, as well.

He found times to come back to the boat alone, either during the day when he knew Brent was giving a tennis lesson or at night when he knew Brent was lying under a man. The first night after he had fucked Brent so roughly and completely in the boat, he had arranged for Brent to join the Oscar's Bar gay men's club overlooking the marina and he had encouraged other men in this group to sign on for services from the young American--and it certainly wasn't hard for him to convince them to have sex with Brent or to convince Brent into going with them. This gave Paoli plenty of opportunity to be on Brent's boat alone to use the radio. And if Brent surprised him by returning to the boat while he was still there, he always managed to just stretch out on the bunk as if awaiting the return of a lover. The American was quite laid back--and easy to lay. He gave Paoli the run of the boat without questions.

It was a "have your cake and eat it too" opportunity for Paoli. As long as he had money--and he had plenty of that--he had both access to communications back to Rome and the use of a young honey's sweet ass.

The ideal situation just didn't last for long. The reality of the political climate on the French Riviera set in, and the French Resistance, in the guise of an unlikely Resistance unit chief, the bar waiter Tristian Alarie, intervened, as they cottoned on to what Paoli was up to on Brent's boat, they bugged the boat's radio equipment, and Tristian monitored Paoli's transmissions from the neighboring boat.

* * * *

During an evening meeting of the men at Oscar's Bar, Mateo Paoli saw that Brent Danforth was being guided up the stairs at Maurice's inn by the German actor, Gunter Achten, with the small transvestite, Louis, in tow. Feeling the American was safely occupied for the next hour or so and with some information in hand about an impending raid on Jewish families in the city who were transferring their wealth and preparing to depart, Paoli decided to make a night venture to Danforth's boat and relay a message to Rome.

He got there and set up communications with just a dim light on from a flashlight he'd brought and laid on the desk top with the lamp masked to give him just enough light to see the keys he needed to work with. As he was signing off, though, his flashlight fell off the desk and rolled under it. When he knelt down to retrieve the light, he was shocked to find that a microphone, with wires leading back into the cabin wall had been planted on the under surface of the desk top.

Someone was bugging the boat's radio equipment. Chances were good someone here was monitoring the American--but they would have picked up Paoli's transmissions as well, and if they'd been able to decrypt them and knew they were going back to Rome, with the Italians now being seen as a military threat from the east, he was in big trouble.

As quickly and stealthily as he could, Paoli climbed out of the boat and onto the pier. He had not gone far, peering around to see if he was being observed, when he saw Tristian emerge from the boat that had been moored next to Danforth's cabin cruiser.

There was no plausible reason the waiter from the Oscar's Bar would be on a boat in the yacht basin unless he was the one who was bugging the communications equipment in Danforth's boat. Paoli had half suspected that Maurice, the innkeeper and employer and lover of Tristian, and maybe the French priest who came to their gay men's group, Père Bernard, were connected with the French Resistance. But the waiter Tristian?

He picked up his pace but was aware that Tristian did so as well, and, from seeing the flash of reflected light on steel, he realized the Tristian had a knife in his hand. If this wasn't meant to be a physical attack, why didn't the waiter just hail Paoli down?

No, it was a physical attack. Paoli and his role had been uncovered by some other intelligence entity. Perhaps Tristian worked for the French Resistance after all. Reaching the street of shops on the yacht basin quay, Paoli slipped into an alleyway, staying there until he'd seen Tristian passing by, tracking a trail that had gone bad. Racing then to his own villa, Paoli wasted no time in taking his car and very little else and racing for the Italian occupied area around Nice and Monaco to save his life.

Chapter Five: Dallying in Tangier: Brent and Mark Standish

We were in luck--or, more likely, Mark Standish was connected enough--in that we were able to fold in with a convoy of British oil tankers having come through the Suez Canal en route to the Atlantic and protected by two British destroyers for the slow run from the eastern Mediterranean to exit the sea at Gibraltar. I drove the cabin cruiser while Mark stayed below and used my radio equipment to make the arrangements that greeted us when we reached Tangier. I'm sure he made transmissions to others as well, but I assured him I wouldn't come into the cabin while he was doing whatever transmitting he wanted to do. Someone had arranged a slip for us at the marina in the port and we were met by two men--apparently Englishmen, although Mark quite pointedly didn't introduce me to them and I never saw them again after they settled us in.

The men guided us to a top-floor flat in an old rat-warren section of the city overlooking the port, near the Grand Mosque, off the Rue dar Baroud, and left us there. The kitchen had been stocked. Bed linens and towels were set out, and they gave local currency to Mark and exchanged enough for me for us to get settled in. A grinning local woman, Yasmine, who lived lower in the building, was introduced to us as someone who would take care of our laundry needs and our shopping, if we wished. They clearly conveyed that we should wish that.

At that time, in the late summer of 1940, the Vichy puppet government in France still controlled--loosely--Morocco, so I was given to understand that Mark and I still needed to keep our heads down until I could arrange to get back to the States and he could go on to wherever he was going from here. It quickly became clear that he wasn't planning to go anywhere else anytime soon--that his role of reporting on the ground to British intelligence was just to continue in Tangier. The flat was commodious, with stunning views from roof terraces across the city and out over the port to the Mediterranean, but its height proved to be to aid radio reception. There were three bedrooms. The smallest, the door to which had a lock that Mark kept in use, contained radio equipment, and Mark spent time in there every day. There was a guest room too, and we had a series of secretive guests, mostly men, put the room into use. They invariably were not introduced to me and kept to the room.

The main bedroom was where Mark and I slept, in the same bed. We continued to have sex, but not as frequently as we had for the brief time when I was with him at the Antibes beachside villa where we steeped ourselves in writing. We perhaps fucked a couple of times a week, but here, in Tangier, while I supposedly was trying to arrange passage to the States, we fell back into a rhythm of life that was almost like that of a married couple, one that was taken up, when we were together, with both of us writing on our respective novels and me typing the drafts of Mark's novels. To the extent that the two of us were steeped in passion now, it was revealed in our writing and our discussion of each other's work.

Mark did have another job here, which he kept me out of to the extent he could, and we did go out frequently at night to take in the gay cabaret life. Tangier had long been a safe haven for wealthy gay men driven out of their damning European home countries, and we found several groups of likeminded men, mostly middle aged and wealthy, to meld in with. Mark made it quite clear that I should give favors where we needed them.

I, being young, fit, blond, and good-looking was a hit among our new groups of friends. Some of the men we mingled with wanted to bed me and were willing to pay for it. I was still building finances for a run to the States, and I hadn't lost my need and desire to be covered regularly, so I went with the men. Mark obviously didn't care if I did. My circle of acquaintances broadened out to include wealthy and literary Arab men, and I went with them too.

The relationships we formed were quite unusual and interesting. This had become the focus of the novel I was writing, which I had given the working title "Despite Everything" and basically was a combination of the informal gay men's clubs I had been part of in Antibes and was being drawn into in Tangier, all set against the backdrop of world war. The interaction, of course, was sexual in both places. Mark and I were "a couple," but only in a loose sense. We did fuck, but we both fucked others as well and didn't consider ourselves as permanent lovers. Mark, in addition to his writing, had a job to do in the gathering war. And I needed to accumulate money to finance a run for the States when that became possible, although the possibility became ever more remote as the war heated up and my acclimation to a gay life in Tangier deepened.

Men wanted me, and men could afford to have me openly in society here in accommodating Tangier.

Compared to mainland Europe, life in Tangier was almost idyllic for a gay man--especially a young, fit, blond, promiscuous gay man among a large flock of older, well-heeled gay men. And I had to admit that I was promiscuous. The worsening war in Europe encouraged a "party today, for tomorrow we die" permissive and hedonist atmosphere.

I received several proposals to leave my arrangement and become part of the households of other men, both European and Arab. Some of them lived like princes and promised the same for me. The offers were tempting, but they all seemed to come with a demand for exclusivity, whereas the arrangement with Mark was open for us both and I wasn't ready to settle down with just one man. I hadn't yet met "that man". And I was still of an age and disposition that I needed to be covered frequently--preferably by a variety of men. In some of the wilder parties we attended, I could lie under three men during the party and still not go home completely satisfied. Of course, the men we partied with didn't complain.

The weeks of our temporary resting stop with the intention, along with thousands of other European refugees who had made it this far, to go on to the isolated neutrality of the vast United States, at least for now, stretched into months and it wasn't long until 1940 turned into 1941.

* * * *

It wasn't long before I lost Mark, as well--although when I looked back on it, we had almost two years together in Tangier in what, really, was a very free and open relationship, with a lot of useful and enjoyable literary interaction. Mark wasn't his real name, of course. He was given another name as soon as we reached Tangier and so was I. Neither was used for long. I kept forgetting mine and reverted to Brent. Mark didn't seem to care. Although we shared a passionate interest in writing, my time with Mark continued to have a temporary cast to it, which, at the time, was exactly what I was comfortable with. It was only years later, when it no longer was possible, that I could have thoughts that maybe Mark could have been "the man."

He stayed around long enough for me to be settled, and then he was gone, presumably back into the cauldron of the deepening war. I assumed he went to Gibraltar, just across the strait from Tangier. He'd gone there frequently, for ever-longer visits, while Morocco was under French Vichy control, but when the Allies moved into Morocco in 1942 and began using it for a staging ground to invade Europe, Mark just didn't come back from one of his Gibraltar trips. By then I was living with Ian Parker-Smyth anyway.

I had always intended on going back to the United States, which presumably would have been easier when Morocco came under Allied control in 1942, but for some silly reason I didn't want to abandon my cabin cruiser, and it wasn't safe for me to try to make the ocean crossing myself in view of the increasing hold on the Atlantic of German U-boats. I wasn't able to find anyone wanting to get to the States crazy enough to want to risk trying to get there with me on the cabin cruiser. I had, of course, sailed to Europe in it from the States, but there weren't submarines on the hunt then. At some point, without my having made a conscious decision about it, living in Tangier became my focus.

It helped when I no longer was leading a tenuous financial life--when I exchanged hourly paid trysts, unsure of when the next would come--for becoming the live-in toy boy, in limited form, for Ian Parker-Smyth.

I met Ian at a Christmas party at his seaside villa to the east of Tangier that year, 1940, although it was not the chance meeting it purported to be. I could tell that Mark had had something to tell me--something that would change our lives--for a few weeks, but I was taken unaware by how he handled the issue. Ian was a well-known novelist, certainly better selling at the peak of his fame, better than Mark was or I ever would be. He was English and his novels were best-sellers at least until he got into trouble with "not-quite-old-enough" boys in London and critics began to pull the hint of this interest he had out of the plotlines of his books. He grew out of the fetish, or at least had by the time I met him when he'd reached his mid-sixties and had cooled down a good bit. But it had destroyed his reputation and sent him to Morocco nearly two decades before the clouds of war formed over Europe. He was quite wealthy, though, was continuing to write, with a publisher of his "on-the-edge" novels right here in Tangier--and his younger "companion" had returned to London and joined up in the war effort in the fall.

Mark took me to Ian's Christmas party ostensibly for both of us to network with a successful novelist, but he had ulterior motives as well. If I thought during the party, which was quite intimate, all of the invitees being part of the middle-age gay male crowd in the city and Arab rent-boys having been brought in to flirt--and more--with them, that we'd come to this party on a whim, I was wrong. For a while I thought I was out of place here. I was neither one of the middle-age gay club members or an Arab rent-boy, but when I had gone out to the balcony overlooking the sea, I was brought to think that perhaps the whole party was planned around me.

Ian followed me out onto the balcony. "So, have you found permanent refuge here with us, Brent?" he asked, handing me a glass of smuggled French champagne to go with the one he'd brought out for himself.

"I am working my way back to the States," I said. "I'm missing my sophomore year at Dartmouth." Actually, I'd lost track of time. By this time, I was missing my junior year and I didn't think Dartmouth was expecting me back at all.