Pursuing Douglas Ames

Chapter One: Rangoon

July, 1941

"You've gotten the undivided attention of that Japanese man over there."

I looked where my attention not too subtly was being directed by my Burmese guide. The wiry man, who didn't look fully Asian to me, was at least in his late forties and clothed in an expensive-looking suit that, though obviously tailored for him, didn't appear too comfortable on him. I think the thought he was military was influenced by the black leather gloves he wore, even though we were all at a meal in the hotel dining room. I mentioned it to the Burmese guide, who muttered something about fingerprints, but a man wearing gloves had another connotation for me, shared by the other man at my table, the French sailor.

The slightly Asian-featured man looked to me like a military guy trying not to look like a military guy. He looked formidable in ways that only men in command of armed forces could manage. He was sitting ramrod straight and alone at a table, although there were two younger, military-type Asian men standing at attention behind him. And it's true that his beady eyes were boring into Claude and me. Claude somewhat maudlinly was pawing me as if this would be our last meeting, which it undoubtedly was. The Frenchmen seemed to want to spend our last few minutes together declaring to everyone nearby that he had humped me and that I'd taken everything he wanted to do to me.

Well, he had humped me a lot and with a great deal of self-confidence and domination. And it hadn't been vanilla by any means. Claude was French after all. That was good for some very inventive positions in very unusual places. If he'd managed to pull me over onto his lap here in the hotel dining room and have me descend on his shaft while we were eating and the tables around us were full, that would have very much been in Claude's French style. He had fucked me in public before. He had gotten off on getting away with that.

"Let's give him a real eyeful then," Claude said, cupping my chin with the hand that wasn't on the back of my chair in Rangoon's The Strand Hotel dining room and stroking the tip of my shoulder. He took my lips with his and gave me a deep kiss. Pulling away from the kiss, he gave me an open-palmed slap across the face and came in for another kiss, which I accepted more hungrily than the first one. He had identified me in Le Havre, when I first took ship for the voyage to Burma, as a submissive who enjoyed a bit of pain and a lot of control. It was true that I was aroused by the exotic and by a confident stud.

The few others in the dining room, including the Asian military man pretending not to be a military man, were watching us out of the corner of their eyes. Claude liked it this way. He liked others knowing that my ass belonged to him and I was under his control. I saw the nostrils of the Asian man twitch. I bet that he got off on controlling others just as Claude did.

But then I got off on being controlled by a strong man--being submissive and used. I fancied that made the Asian man look more closely, more assessingly at me.

I'd been drinking wine and the French first officer of the ship I'd taken around the horn of Africa to the convergence of Burma's Yangon and Bago Rivers was having a farewell dinner with me and the Burmese man who had met me at the ship when it docked here in Rangoon. It had been a long, boring sail and Claude had been very comforting to me in a rough sort of way that kept my engines humming. He had come off the ship to comfort me in my hotel room the previous night, but after dinner he'd have to return to his ship for the continued trip to Bangkok. The ship wasn't going on to Malaya and Singapore this trip, because the Japanese were poised to take those at any moment.

We were all holding our breaths here in Southeast Asia, feeling ourselves to be on the brink of war. We didn't appreciate that we already were well over the brink and the news just hadn't caught up with us. The news traveled slowly in Southeast Asia. Japan liked it that way.

The Japs already were on the move. Everything in the summer of 1941 in Southeast Asia and the Pacific was contingent on where the Imperial Japanese forces were moving next. The region was flooded with Japanese and German agents preparing for that. No country seemed able to prevent their creation of a Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia. The crumbling British control of Burma certainly didn't seem to be an impediment to a Japanese takeover here. I had a mission here and was hoping I could slip in and out before the Japanese forces swarmed in.

My mission included sleeping with men. It's why I had been sent. If sleeping with the enemy was required, then so be it. Letting Claude paw me in the dining room was part of establishing what I would do for a man.

Claude and I were having a farewell dinner in the hotel dining room. I was sure I'd never see him again; it had purposely been a temporary and casual, meeting of unusual sexual interests, arrangement for both of us. Our dinner companion was Soe Pyne, the middle-aged Burmese factotum Douglas Ames had sent to meet me in Rangoon and bring me up the Irrawaddy River to Pagan. It was Soe Pyne who observed that we were being observed.

Soe Pyne had been a complete surprise to me. His early-forties something was an older version of my twenty-four, when there couldn't be many men like us roaming the world--maybe here in Burma, which was administered by England, but certainly not in the England from whence I had just come. We both were half English and half Burmese, although from our heritage and environment we were quite different beyond our exotic looks. I had been born and raised in England. Somewhat ironically this was my first visit to Burma. My father was a Devonshire squire of wealth and lineage if not useful occupation, and my mother a Burmese princess from a dynasty that had been abolished in Burma in 1885, who had lived in London since she was a girl. Soe Pyne, on the other hand, was the son of a Burmese woman--Douglas had hinted she was a woman of the night--and an English governmental clerk who had returned to London without her--or her son.

Claude and I had soon kissed our good-byes and he was gone back to his ship, his crisp-white nautical uniform and hunky build reducing the lantern-lit hotel dining room to a bit on the tawdry side with his departure. He cut quite a figure; he hadn't had a bit of trouble landing me. I marked it up to establishing a character, but the truth was that he was forceful and I was submissive.

Soe Pyne slid over into the chair the Frenchman had vacated and leaned in to me. "It would not be good to attract too much of the Jap's interest," he murmured.

My brief was somewhat different from Soe Pyne's, but I didn't want to reveal that. "Are you sure he's Japanese?" I asked. "He doesn't look completely Asian to me."

"I've heard his father was German," Soe Pyne said. "Mixed breed, like you and me. I suppose he can pass for either German or Japanese if he is determined to, but my sources say he's a Japanese agent. It doesn't really matter, though. Japanese and German together creates a snake."

"Even if so, why should I avoid him?" I asked. The man was attractive in a dangerous-looking way, and I had found that I was attracted to such men. Claude had seen that in me immediately--that I took my pleasure better when it included domination and a bit of pain. I had been initiated into that early in life, at eighteen, the summer before I entered university.

I was here ostensibly as a features magazine writer, looking for side interests to write about in addition to visiting the great English artist, Douglas Ames, who had deserted Europe for life in the Southeast Asian jungles. And my interests on this trip went even deeper than Ames or Soe Pyne knew or, I hoped, imagined. The British Intelligence Corps--the Int Corps--had been formed the previous year to gin up military intelligence in a period that inevitably was leading into another international war, and I was one of its recruits. And Douglas Ames was my focus of interest in coming to Burma, because, in addition to being an acclaimed landscape and portrait artist, he established himself some time ago as a gifted and quick cartologist. His skills were needed by the military and, as I had been a family friend of his since I was eighteen, I was being sent to try my luck at luring him back to England and to service in the Int Corps with an "all will be forgiven" offer.

That Ames hadn't just been a family friend from a neighboring estate when I was eighteen but had also been the man, with a fetish for young men, who had seduced me and taken my anal virginity at eighteen and held me as his sexual slave throughout that year. He had kept me on the edge over the year by progressing from fucking me to binding and fucking me, to binding and spanking me with his hand and flogging me with a riding crop and fucking me, all of which I came to enjoy and that enhanced my arousal. To the greatest extent, he had made me what I was--susceptible to the cruelty of a strong man. But that part of our relationship was neither here nor there as far as the Int Corps was concerned and was, I assumed, not known to the corps. They just knew our families lived on adjoining estates and knew each other.

As Japan had been spreading its control over the region since the summer of 1940, with the takeover of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and the December silent subjugation of Thailand, checking up on any activity they were pursuing in Burma had been voiced in Int Corps headquarters as a side interest for me to look into while I was here, Thus, I was interested in any Japanese man, especially in one with two young military-looking men standing at attention behind him, who I encountered in my Burma travels.

"He claims to be an importer drumming up business throughout Southeast Asia," Soe Pyne murmured, "but we all know he's a Japanese general and that he's scouting the English defenses here in Burma--which are nil, I can tell you. His name is Heido Nakamura, although he goes by the name Gerhardt Holbein and claims to be Swiss. That alone is suspicious. A bit of checking justified putting a 'general' title in front of that. And I understand he's a cruel man with special sexual interests."

That piqued my interest. I didn't suppose Soe Pyne would understand that it did. However, if he was serving Douglas Ames and had been told I was the man's friend, he must have his suspicions. He seemed a man with a lot of suspicions to have. And I couldn't believe that Ames had lost his interest in subjugating young men to his sexual appetites. He certainly could more easily do that here in Burma than in England.

"He sounds intriguing," I whispered back, giving Soe Pyne a saucy smile that made him scowl. And, indeed, what Soe Pyne had to say about the man was intriguing, both on the military side and concerning his sexual interests. I had already discerned from the reaction he'd shown to Claude kissing and fondling me--and particularly to the slap that he gave me and that I willingly endured--that the Japanese general's sexual interests extended to other men, to rough treatment, and to me, in particular. It wasn't Claude's departing hunky figure the man claiming to be the Swiss Gerhardt Holbein had been looking at. He'd continued focusing his attention on me as Claude strutted off the scene.

"My job is to get you to Mr. Ames in Pagan safely," Soe Pyne said. "And I see no reason to respond to that man as anything more than a Japanese agent."

"And my job is to gather interesting articles along the way," I responded, giving Soe Pyne a calm smile. "There could be a good article in this. This is exactly what the allies of Great Britain need to hear is happening in this region." There also could be sterling intelligence to send back to London, I thought, but Soe Pyne wasn't someone to tell that to. I had no idea what Soe Pyne's interests were as yet. He was a good-looking man, almost like myself looking in the mirror in twenty years and seeing how I'd hoped matured. But he still was inscrutable. He was serving Douglas Ames, and I well knew that Douglas, who had a fetish of painting eighteen-year-old boys in the nude and then fucking them as he did with me when I was eighteen, wouldn't be easily cured of his desires. But I don't know whether that still was central to the man's life and, whether or not it was, where this Soe Pyne fit into the mix.

"Nevertheless, it would be prudent for you to stay as far away as--"

Soe Pyne got no further, however, because one of the ramrod-straight young Asian men in attendance to the importer, who also might be a Japanese general, was standing by me at the table.

"Excuse me. You are Neal Trumble, are you not? A journalist?"

"Yes, I am," I said. "I write feature articles for English magazines, yes." So, the interest in me had extended to having, sometime in the past day, checked the hotel roster and even more than that.

"With the compliments of Mr. Gerhardt Holbein. He wishes to talk to you about some writing ideas. Would you join him after dinner in the hotel bar?"

"I'm afraid--" Soe Pyne started to say, but I placed my hand on his forearm to forestall his refusal.

"Yes, I would be delighted to," I answered. I had more than one job to do.

* * * *

"Are you interested in helping with an article on Japanese influence in Asia--something more in terms of international economics than anything political?" I asked as I sat across from Nakamura at the cocktail table in The Strand's Bamboo Bar. I had to agree with Soe Pyne that it would be prudent to think of the man only in his Japanese persona. He appeared more Japanese close up than he did from afar. He didn't seem to want to press a Swiss--or German--connection. Considering what was happening in the world, it wasn't any more a concern that a man would claim to be German than it was to claim to be Japanese. I found the black leather gloves he was wearing quite disconcerting, however.

I purposely sat across from him so that I could observe him. He wasn't a tall or substantial man and, with the slash scar from an earlobe down to the corner of his mouth, I couldn't say that he was a handsome man either, although he must have been when he was younger and more innocent. He clearly was of mixed race, which helped me to take an interest in him, as I was as well. He also clearly, from the looks he gave me, wasn't an innocent. I got the distinct impression he was a man's man. That didn't put me off him in the least.

I could see that he was a man of steel: hard-bodied and sitting ramrod straight. He had a bottle of whiskey and shot glass in front of him, and he took full shots in one chug. I had little doubt that the scar was a badge of honor for him, acquired in a saber duel of some sort. Soe Pyne probably was right about him being a general rather than an importer--and connected with the Japanese. As I was taking out a notepad and pen, I was trying to frame this as an economic-interest feature, but both of us had the regional political imperialism of Japan on the tips of our tongues. He wasn't shy about talking to the subject. We both knew Japan was poised to gobble up the Malay peninsula in the new year and the Philippines as well. He spoke of that with an attitude of pride. It couldn't be long after that that Burma itself would be in Tokyo's sights.

Nakamura had a wad of British ten-pound notes in his hand and was slowly doling them out on the top of the table. There were five of them there when I sat down. I continued to be distracted and slightly tingly by the black leather gloves he was wearing.

It didn't take him long to move the conversation to the personal and then, quickly, to the sexual.

"I am surveying Burma for its potential in the Swiss export trade, Mr. Trumble. It would be advantageous to have a journalist travel with me and record my findings, possibly for publication, and it would be especially advantageous for the journalism to be a Burmese guide."

"Ah, well," I answered. "I can't help you with that second part. I've only now arrived in Burma myself. I'm not fully Burmese. I'm half English."

"Ah, that explains the exotic look of you, then," he said. "And is that your father I saw you--you and the French sailor--with in the dining room?"

"No," I laughed. "He is to be my guide in Burma. It was my mother who was Burmese, although she was raised in England. My father was English."

"Ah, then, the man with you and the Frenchman was your procurer."

"Excuse me?" I said, taken completely off guard.

"The Frenchman is bedding you, isn't he? He is the man topping you, not your procurer, Is that not so? And he covers you with a great degree of confidence and control. I believe he dominates you--cruelly--and you enjoy being submissive to such a man." He was moving his gloved hands before my face. I had to check myself not to follow them with my eyes in fascination.

"And the Burmese gentleman--half Burmese as you are, I would surmise--was with you and appeared to condone your relationship with the Frenchman. So, I take it that he makes these arrangements for you. Don't take umbrage. That is what I'm more interested in than a guide--or even a journalist. I wish to have the comforts of having a young man in my bed while I tour the country--preferably an experienced young man. You and I are similar--one foot in Europe and the other in Asia. We could benefit each other."

He made a grand gesture of adding two more ten-pound notes to the pile on the table, and I now understood why he was doling out the money. It was mine for the taking--with conditions. "I am also a dominant," he added, slitting his eyes and giving me a tight smile. "I could bring the passion out of you." He reached forward and touched the back of my hand with a gloved finger. I couldn't help shuddering, which I'm sure he observed.

"I'm not a prostitute," I said. "I'm a journalist, here to find an old acquaintance who my editors are interested in featuring in an article--an artist. I'm not a prostitute working the guests at The Strand."

"You did not say that you don't have sex with men--let them dominate you--though. You keep looking at my gloves, Mr. Tremble. Do they fascinate you?"

"Not particularly," I lied.

"Do you know what a man can do to another man with gloved hands? I sense that you do know--that you know intimately."

I ignored that question. "No, I didn't say I don't have sex with men," I acknowledged. "But I didn't have to come to Burma, or the Strand Hotel, for that."

"Ah, yes, here as a journalist." Having established what he wanted to establish, he backtracked. "You're here to find and interview Douglas Ames, I understand."

That put me back on my pins. "You are well informed," I said when I had recovered.

"We both know why Douglas Ames is living in Burma, don't we?" Nakamura said, laying another ten-pound note on the pile, which was now up to eighty pounds, a generous price for a prostitute even on the streets of London at that time. I would have imagined it was very good for a higher-class courtesan in Burma--or one who would be willing to serve a man's special, and demanding, needs. Once more I found myself looking at the gloved hands.

"And I'll wager that the reason you believe you can find Ames and convince him to let you write about him is for the same reason I saw you letting the Frenchman take such liberties with you. You have been covered by Ames, haven't you?" Another ten-pound note landed on the pile. "And I understand he inflicts pain as well as passion--and that he has some very special techniques."

"That was a long time ago," I said after a pause while the two of us eyeballed each other. "As I've said, I'm not a prostitute."

"But you make no effort to deny that you take a man's cock. Not even any embarrassment that I am even now trying to buy your ass. You were how old when Ames bedded you?"