5 comments/ 5482 views/ 4 favorites Puttin' on the Ritz By: sr71plt August 27, 1944 Paul jerked and shuddered at the sound of the salvo of gunfire that penetrated through to his cell from across the courtyard. He looked around the small cell. Stone floor, walls, and ceiling. a cot suspended down from chains on the wall at one side. A drain in the corner with a chamber pot next to it. The Ritz it was not. This was anything but putting on the Ritz. He'd come down far and quite suddenly in the world, and he was somewhat bewildered at the judgment of "collaborator." He'd lived in a dream world, floating above Paris in the occupation. The others living in the Paris Ritz had been the same. And most of the others were still doing the same, going on with a carefree life of excess and denial in the lap of luxury that was the Ritz. He really had little idea why he had come to this. He was completely apolitical. But then maybe that was the problem. But he'd had his run at it, hadn't he? He heard the key turn in his cell door and the scrape of the metal as the door opened. "It's time," his jailer, who was standing in the door, said. Just that. That was all that could be said at this end of Paul's life. A Catholic priest stood behind the jailer, pretending to look sad and concerned. Another salvo of gunfire sounded from the courtyard, and Paul winced. * * * * June 14, 1940 The aspect was one of stark contrasts. A trim, young, ethereal, platinum-blond figure floated above the swarthy, dark, heavily hirsute, slightly bloated, older body on the double bed, sheets and coverlet all awry, in the shadow of the large, loft room in Paris. Paul Stainer, nineteen-year-old second son of a Chicago meat-packing empire magnate, had come to Europe to pursue the free Bohemian lifestyle. Specifically, he had come in search of the artistic lifestyle. He himself was a gifted painter, albeit in need of brushing up against art icons. And, more specifically, he had come in search of artists with big cocks and the want of a young man in their bed. He came craving the notoriety of having been the lover of some of the most brilliant mid-twentieth-century artistic minds on the Continent. He came with the need to overcome the shadow of being a second, embarrassment, son. It was exactly because of what Paul openly sought that his parents were content with the young man doing, as they put it, "an extended European tour," even at his young age, and were happy to wire him the money that kept him in Europe. Noell Giroux was a notable French charcoal artist and sculptor of forty-two, with a big cock. Both were naked on the bed, Noell Giroux, like a reclining black bear, on his back, his hands holding the beautifully proportioned figure saddled on his hips at the waist, and the ephemeral white-marbled skin of the "David" undulating above him, slowly rotating his pelvis and rising and falling on the thick, long cock buried up inside him. Only the slight quickening of the young man's pace on working the cock in every direction, the faster stroking of his own cock with his hand, the strain apparent in the intense look on his face, the backward arch of his back, and the white-knuckled grip he had on a knee of Giroux' raised and bent legs betrayed how close he was to spouting his seed. "Are you near to coming?" the pelted bear murmured. "Yes," Paul hissed through set teeth. "Then I will too," Giroux said. And then they did come nearly simultaneously, Giroux, by his ability to control himself, exhibiting his long experience in fucking young men. Despite the age, near obesity, and hairiness of the sculptor, Paul was satisfied by him sexually. Giroux was a recognized artist, he had a very nice cock, and he was an accomplished cocksman. Minutes later Paul was at the oversized glass French doors across the room—the only window in the dimly lit attic loft, back pressed against the left door frame, right leg bent, foot lifted against the frame, smoking a cigarette, and looking out at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris across the Seine on the ȋle de la citè. The view of the cathedral was magnificent, as well it should be, as it was one of three requirements Giroux had had in choosing this garret to live in: He had to have space and ceiling height to be useful as an art studio, he had to have a clear view of Notre-Dame, and he had to be able to afford the rent himself so that he could bring young men home and fuck them in peace. "Hold that pose," Giroux growled from the bed through the lit cigarette between his lips as he reached for his sketchbook and charcoals. Paul bent the arm holding the cigarette and supported it under the elbow with the other arm. "Yes, just like that," Giroux said. "Lovely long, elegant lines. And the right leg hides the genitals. This will be commercial. Has anyone told you that you have a ripe, young, fuckable body?" "Not since Tuesday," Paul answered in a flat, bored voice. "It's quiet down there. Much too quiet." "What do you expect?" Giroux asked as he sketched. "Most of the city is gone. You should be gone as well. You could go. I worry that you will not go." "Go where?" Paul asked. "And why, after all I had to do to be here?" "It's inevitable that the Americans will come into the war against Germany," Giroux said. "The Germans are entering the city today. Can't you hear the rumble of their tanks? You may not be safe here for long." "How long is long?" Paul asked. "Is it beyond today? If so, it can wait." "You are trying too hard at this Bohemian lifestyle, I believe. I may not be here much longer myself. What will you do alone in the city?" "Are all of the men of Paris going to disappear? Not a single rich and notable queer in need of a bed warmer staying on?" "Most of the men who can will be gone, yes. And certainly the men who sleep with men; the Germans are known to be prudish and brutal toward such men." "I think German men are much like any others—that they say one thing and do another. As long as the money keeps being wired, I'll be fine," Paul answered. "I was with Allard the portraitist before you. No doubt there will be a man for me after you too." "You are a little whore, aren't you?" "I do what I can," Paul said in the same tired, bored voice. Both men were surprised by the sound of a loudspeaker from the streets below announcing a curfew for 8:00 p.m. that night and every night for the foreseeable future at the risk of being shot. "And so the Nazi occupation of Paris begins," Giroux said in a heavy voice. "Life here will never be the same as it was. You really should leave, Paul. Life is not going to be easy in Paris now for a beautiful and promiscuous young gay American. German soldiers can be brutal, and I believe that you are correct—that their supposed hate for homosexuals can only enhance the brutality with which they fuck them." "Are German soldiers known for having big dicks?" Paul asked, and then he laughed. He had come out of his pose when they'd been surprised by the loudspeaker broadcast. "Shall I—?" "No, I'm finished with the portrait now," Giroux said and then, with a sigh, "So much is finished in Paris now. What you can do is come back here and ride my cock again." And so Paul did, riding the cock in reverse, pointed at the foot of the bed, arms hugging Giroux' bent and spread legs, while Giroux, propped up on pillows at the head of the bed, smoked; ran a hand over the young man's well-sculpted back and buttocks, assigning the curves and crevices to his memory for the bronze he would sculpt; and letting his mind work on what was to be done now that the barbarians were, at last, inside the gates of Paris. * * * * August 28, 1940 Like so many rich Americans before him, Paul Stainer's life in Paris revolved around the Paris Ritz hotel, opened by Charles Ritz in 1898, and from its first night the center of the arts and intellectual life in Paris as well as political intrigue. The opening of the Ritz was couched in the blowback to the anti-Jewish movement of the Dreyfus affair by the novelist and political commentator Victor Hugo, who mobilized support from the cream of Paris' world that revolved around the hotel. The hotel was a magnet for expatriate royalty from the capitals of Europe, headed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, formerly England's King Edward VIII and the American socialite Wallace Simpson, as well as stage and movie stars, like Sarah Bernhardt, artists such as Pablo Picasso, and novelists and journalists of the like of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The comment of Hemingway, who returned to the hotel as soon as Paris was liberated from the Germans, was, "When I dream of an afterlife . . . the action always takes place at the Ritz Paris." Winston Churchill was almost perpetually a guest of the hotel in the months preceding the fall of France as he attempted to bolster France's resistance to Germany's invasion. For a decade in the 1920s, the premier social maven, Elsa Maxwell, earned her international reputation by putting the queens and kings of society together in the party room and salons of the Ritz Paris. Future celebrity even held forth at the other end of the social class scale at the Ritz. A busboy in the hotel's dining room in the 1920s eventually became a superpower defeater by the name of Ho Chi Minh. Whereas some evacuated from the hotel during the Second World War, such French luminaries as the fashion designer Coco Channel; the journalist and leading politician, Georges Mandel; and sultry French film star Arletty, stayed on through the war. In the case of Channel and Arletty—and Paul Stainer, as well—this decision would come back to bite them. Unlike most of Paris, the Ritz Paris, fronting on the beautiful Place Vendôme in a former royal palace backed by a more modern addition, didn't miss a "social heights" beat or a champagne and lobster dinner during the 1940--44 German occupation of the city. Several of the permanent hotel residents stayed on, continuing to attract the cream of the artists, literati, movie stars, social leaders, and politicians who remained in the city, but these were moved from the premium rooms in the former palace to the hotel's back section. In their stead, the military leaders and administrators of the German occupation moved into the front of the hotel, ensuring that the Ritz remained at the center of what was important in the life of the city. Even more significant, the hotel became the center of the various competing spy and resistant forces that was so convoluted that even a guide to who was doing what to who couldn't be deciphered. Until late August 1940, following the June occupation of the city by the Nazis, the leading socialite in residence, occupying the Imperial Suite of living room, dining room, kitchen, and three bedrooms and three baths, taking up an entire floor of the old hotel wing, was Laura Mae Corrigan, one of the world's richest women, who had come from nowhere to marry an American tycoon who conveniently died early in the marriage. When Laura Mae, until recently a waitress in a diner, wasn't accepted in American society, no less than Elsa Maxwell, having previously termed Laura Mae the woman who had gold dug her way from waitress to queen in six months, joined Laura Mae's corner when she left the United States and made her the leading society hostess in Paris. As more than symbolic of the Ritz' refusal to accept that the occupation of Paris would mean a belt tightening at the Ritz, on August 28, 1940, barely two months following the fall of the city to the Germans, Laura Mae threw one of the most lavish parties of the 1940s in the Imperial Suite, amid a décor of packing boxes. The boxes represented her banishment to the back building pending the arrival on September 1st of who would be the hotel's premier resident for the next three years, Germany's top-echelon military leader, Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Along with many of the other artists still in the city, Noell Giroux was invited to the party, as was Paul Stainer, partially because of his American connections and Laura Mae's interest in having her victory in Paris passed back to the American society that had shunned her but mostly as the ornamentation for the party his youthful beautify and sensuality provided. "Of course we're not going," Paul had said. "Of course we are," Giroux had countered. "But you despise what the Ritz and people like Laura Mae Corrigan represents" Paul said. "I have my reasons. We're going. And you will be nice to people there," "Yes, sir," Paul had said. They didn't go straight to the party; they stopped at the hotel's bar, the rue Cambon bar, famous for all of the celebrities who had once hung out there, still hung out there, and would continue to hang out there in the future. Even more than the Ritz lobby, the rue Cambon bar was the center of activity in not only the hotel but the city at large. And now, as throughout the occupation, it was the center of spy activities, from all sides. It was later to be revealed that the Operation Valkyrie plot to assassinate Germany's führer, Adolph Hitler, in the summer of 1944 that was hatched among German military leaders convinced that the German leader had gone crazy, was birthed and nurtured in the rue Cambon bar. The principle courier of messages between these military leaders and the French Resistance as well was the senior bartender, Frank Meier. It was Meier who Noell Giroux had come to see under the guise of attending Laura Mae Corrigan's glitterati party upstairs to mark her eviction from the Imperial Suite, and when they came into the bar, Giroux established Paul at a table and went off to confer with Meier. Paul wasn't alone very long. He never was alone very long where the hedonist members of society gathered. In short order, he had on the one side of him the novelist Michel Paquet, a permanent resident of the Ritz, whose novels were fed by the gossip in the hotel; on the other side of him sat Paquet's current boyfriend, the expatriate Polish count and dandy, Jan Bukowski; and, across from Paul, the count's "wanted to be and sometimes was" boyfriend, the darkly handsome French stage actor, Bres Moulin. The three, notorious bisexuals all, flirted with and propositioned Paul shamelessly, and it wasn't long until Paquet and the count each had a hand on one of Paul's thighs and Moulin was rubbing a toe on Paul's ankle. Paul was flattered. He knew of all three of them through the network of artists he floated on the edge of, but he had not been with any of them sexually yet. He was packing in as much experience with the leading artists and intellectuals of France as he could. Paul was in France to grasp the Bohemian lifestyle. He knew he was a strikingly handsome and sexy young man, and to him sex had become nothing more than a pleasurable body function and an "in" with the glitterati. Having the cock of a novelist, count, or famous actor inside him was his idea of ecstasy and achievement. Paul had been trembling with the anticipation of being handed to an ejaculation right there, in the bar of the Ritz, below the surface of the table and then carried off and debauched by three men in one of the fabled hotel rooms above. He didn't need to take his men sequentially; he could handle them in consort. Grasping hedonism, he'd previously sheathed two men at once. Paul was long past protecting his virtue, and he was never as much alive as when he had a desirable man's cock—or two—churning inside him, knowing that he had enthralled and reduced to a level of primeval want and need some of the most brilliant and celebrated minds of the age. Here he was, in the Ritz Paris, the seat of the intellectual glitterati of Europe, about to add one or three more notable names to his list of experiences—maybe in tandem; maybe in consort. He would have gone with the dashing and handsome count in a moment, having heard he was a superb cocksman, and he had a hand on the exiled—exiled from Poland because of his sexual excesses with young men there—nobleman's inner thigh, moving it higher toward the royal jewels in assurance the count's intentions were welcome. And he had exchanged kisses with both the count and Paquet, when Giroux returned and virtually jerked Paul out of the middle of what was becoming a tryst. "If you are going to open your legs for anyone tonight," Giroux said as they mounted the stairs to the Imperial Suite, "it should be for someone of use to us." "Use to us?" Paul said. "I don't understand." "There's no reason for you to understand yet," Giroux answered. "I will introduce you to anyone of interest to us at the party." The room was crowded when they arrived, the noise was raucous, the drinks were free flowing, and the upper level of the room was covered in a fog of smoke. The packing boxes strewn around were a bizarre touch. Paul met many of the celebrity residents of the hotel in passing, most of whom showed an interest in him and became prospects or useful contacts, even though Paul didn't have a notion what they were useful for. The artists, of course, were useful to Paul himself. He wasn't in Paris just to fuck around. He was a serious art student and was quite talented at it. There was much he was learning from Giroux, which, in addition to the size of the man's cock, was why Paul was staying with him. But Paul was open to liaisons with equally talented artists in exchange for help with his art. He would have died to be taken under the wing of Pablo Picasso, who was known to frequent the hotel and Laura Mae's parties, but he wasn't in evidence this evening. The champagne was flowing, a rarity in occupied Paris, and Paul had lost count of how many he had and that the buzzing in his head was really in his head and wasn't being produced solely by the conversation in the crowded room, when Giroux introduced him to Claude. "Just Claude," Giroux said. "No last name needed in Paris. You should get to know him. At some point he probably will be a lifesaver for you." Giroux didn't say what Claude did and why he'd be of use to Paul. Neither did Claude after Giroux had wafted off and left the two to talk with each other. Claude was a handsome, gray-haired man. Tall and elegantly dressed in his evening dress, he could be a movie star, in Paul's view. His hands were expressive, the fingers long and supporting several expensive-looking rings. He had a talent of touching Paul on the back or arm and coming in close to talk with him in a way that made Paul tingle a bit and that, in his near drunken stupor, Paul found arousing. One moment Claude was drawing Paul away from the party and down a corridor of the Imperial Suite, mumbling about something he had to show Paul, which Paul didn't fully grasp because of the buzzing in his head from the champagne and that Paul saw no reason to guard against because of the same buzzing. The next moment they were both naked, on the bed in one of the three bedrooms of the Imperial Suite, Paul on his back, his legs spread and bent, and Claude lying on him, between his legs, Claude's hands caressing Paul's marble-white thighs, causing them to spread wider for him. Paul, in his haziness, struggled a bit in a perfunctory way, but once Claude had his long cock deep inside Paul's ass channel, the young man just lay still, head turned to the side, while Claude began to pump him. The vigorous pumping brought Paul to life after a few minutes, and he raised his hips to Claude, grabbed Claude's waist, and began his own counterthrusting. Laughing, Claude raised more up on his knees, held steady, and let Paul fuck himself on the cock, with upward thrusts of his hips and revolving them on the cock, panting and whispering, "Yes, yes, give it to me. Come inside me," as Claude kissed and chewed on the hollow of his throat. Puttin' on the Ritz Paul arched his back, and came up Claude's belly. Claude came almost simultaneously and rolled over to the side, Paul leaned down and licked his cum off Claude's stomach and then licked lower and cleaned off Claude's cock. Standing over Paul and looking down at him as he dressed, Claude said, "You are a very sexy young man—and a very good lay. If you're ever interested, there is room for you in my stable." After he was gone, Paul lay there, legs bent and open, working on getting rid of the champagne buzz in his head before going back to the party. There was little doubt that the party down the hall was still going on, even though it must be 2:00 in the morning. It wasn't long before the door opened and another man walked in—a man who lit up the room with his imposing body; his handsome, square-jaw, golden blond features; the elegant way he filled out his evening clothes; and the broad smile he gave Paul when he saw him lying naked on the bed. He retained the smile, his gaze not leaving Paul, who, warily remained in the provocative position he'd been in when Claude had left the bedroom, as he untied his tie, removed his cufflinks, unbuttoned his dress shirt, and pulled it open. Paul took in a great gulp of air. The man, who had to be no older than his late twenties, had a magnificent torso, brushed lightly with a pattern of blond hair on the pecs and running down his sternum toward the waistband of his tuxedo trousers. The only thing that marred the perfection of his torso were the evidence of two puckered bullet wounds four inches below his left pectoral as well as the slightly red and raised line of a sword slash from his right shoulder down to between his bulging pecs. Both wounds just made him more mysterious and arousing to Paul. "So, the room comes with a bed warmer," the man said, with a pleasant little laugh, at he opened an armoire door, took out a hangar and neatly hung up the various items of his tuxedo as he took them off. There was nothing of surprise or embarrassment in his demeanor in finding a man in his bed, which he made very clear was his bed as he undressed. "We find ourselves in my bedroom, at least temporarily, in case you wondered," the man said. "I have a busy day ahead, so I've left the party early. It looks like perhaps I haven't left the party early, though, or that I'll be getting all that much sleep tonight. You are a sexy little piece. They could not have chosen better for me." He said all of this with a matter-of-fact cheeriness in his voice. Paul said nothing, he just looked on dumbly, still fighting the champagne buzz in his head, and half wondering if he was in a dream. If it was a dream, it was one of heaven, he thought, though, as he gasped and sucked in air again, as the man stood beside the bed and slipped the last item of clothing he'd been wearing, his underdrawers, off his legs. The man was hung, with a giant, uncut sausage of a half-hard cock and heavy, low-hanging balls. "This is the moment when you could dress and leave if you don't want me to fuck you," the blond Adonis said. In Paul's first response of the encounter, he answered in a low voice, "I believe I'll stay." "You'd best think twice," the man said, "As small and young as you are and with those slim hips, I could split you in two." "I'm looking forward to it," Paul murmured. The man sat down on the side of the bed, beside Paul's prone figure, leaned over and took Paul's mouth in his in a deep, sweet kiss. He reached down, encircled Paul's cock, and began to languidly stroke it. Paul managed to hand the man's cock, listening to him take his breath in as Paul pulled the foreskin down off the bulb and pressed in on the piss slit with his index finger. As he kissed and licked down Paul's body and eventually through Paul's silky and trimmed platinum-colored bush and then to swallowing Paul's cock, the man raised his muscular, hard legs onto the bed and turned his body toward Paul, the man's now huge, erect phallus was pressed into Paul's cheek, and Paul just turned his head, opened his mouth over the angry-red bulb, and started to suck it. The man had magnificent control, making Paul come in his mouth without giving up his own seed. But then it was his turn. Nudging Paul over on his belly, his body stretched out on the bed, the athletic man saddled himself on Paul buttocks, in reverse, worked his cock inside Paul's channel, in reverse, grabbed Paul's ankles and pumped Paul's ass with his cock, Claude's cum from the previous fucking acting as a lubricant for the deep slide of the thick cock until the blond hunk had ejaculated inside Paul. Paul moaned deeply. No man had taken him in a position like this before. No man had filled him like this before—stretching his walls until they shimmered, the muscles of his passage undulating over the throbbing cock, caressing it, waiting for Paul to adjust to it before the man started to pump him. The bulb reached deeper inside Paul's gut than any man had reached before. And then Paul was crying out, "Shit! Oh, shit yes! Fuck me hard; fuck me deep," as the throbbing cock started to pump him. Faster and harder; faster and deeper, with Paul's own hips involuntarily going into motion, the two becoming one, groaning and grunting, synchronized, finely tuned fucking machine. After a brief respite, the man carried Paul over to the bedroom's dresser, where Paul held onto the edge of the dresser with his hands, his arms stiff behind him, while the man folded Paul's legs around his hips, held Paul steady and suspended over the floor with arms linked under the young man's waist, and fucked him to a second release of his load. The small, young, slim-bodied American was putty in the embrace of the big, strong, monster-cocked blond god. Before the two drifted off into an exhausted sleep in each other's embrace, the man fucked Paul for a third time, more languidly this time, with Paul's buttocks pulled into the man's groin in a side split and, Paul's face turned to the man's, the two kissing deeply and whispering endearments to each other. As they were both speaking French, each unaware of how foreign the other's French was, the nuances of the words of the lovemaking and the fuck could be quite poetic and graphic and they both maintained an aroused half hard, the man's lodged in Paul's passageway, after having come for the third time. "You took the positions extremely well, and you have a ripe, young, flexible body with the capability of handling the cock like a champion," the man whispered when they were cooling off from both having come again and were about to drift off into sleep. "You must be at the top of your profession. Who provided you? Hermann?" Who the hell is Hermann, Paul wondered. "No one," he whispered. "I was just in the wrong bedroom." "I can't agree with that," the man said. "For me, you were very much in the right bedroom. I think I'm going to love Paris. Can you stay the night? Has that been paid for?" The man wasn't going to be dissuaded from the belief that Paul was a prostitute provided for him, Paul thought. But in truth what was the difference between him and a prostitute other than the prostitute got paid and didn't choose his partner? Paul hadn't chosen this partner—nor the one before him. And he'd let both of them fuck him without the merest of objections. So the lines between him and a paid whore were nearly invisible. This hung hunk had no reason to pay anyone for what he gave, though, so Paul decided not to fight the impression. "Yes, the night is covered." "And so are you," the blond giant whispered, as he turned Paul on his belly without dislodging his cock, and covered him close from above, his dick moving languidly in Paul's channel and Paul sighing his total surrender to it. The man woke before dawn on his back to find Paul riding his cock sideways. The man laughed, twisted Paul around and brought the young man's shoulder blades down into his chest. He laced his arms under Paul's armpits and stretched the young man's back along his hard torso. Bending and spreading his legs, while lacing his ankles around Paul's and raising and spreading Paul's legs as well, the man took Paul hard again in deep upward thrusts in a closely controlled, athletic morning fuck. Before rising from the bed, Paul heard the man murmur something he didn't quite understand, because it wasn't in French. But the man added, in French, "And I love your sweet ass," to which Paul responded, "And I love your huge cock." He almost added more in terms of affection than that, but he caught himself just in time. He'd never had a connection with a man before that he had with this mysterious stranger. It was more than the man's beautiful body and oversized cock. There was an attraction in him that went further for Paul. He had to think about that. He didn't want to be hurt. It wasn't just the penetrative sex that was different and engaging with this man. The man held Paul and cuddled him, whispering endearments to him and kissing and fondling him. He took his time with Paul and made him feel special and appreciated. At the same time, he controlled and took Paul totally, athletically. That the man's attentions to him encouraged Paul to open his legs to him and draw him inside him was beyond the point. The attention he gave Paul was beyond what he needed to do to get his cock inside the young man—it was beyond what any other man had done to get his cock inside Paul. Lying on the bed in much the same position he'd been when the man entered the room the night before, Paul watched the man dress. He took a uniform out of the armoire and started putting it on. Paul's heart rate and his fear and consternation increased as the man dressed in the white shirt, black tie, black trousers, black tunic jacket, and black billed hat. When the man had pulled on the black leather harness and belt, with the gun holster at his side, the bolt of lightning on the man's jacket right collar, the four stars in a square on his left collar, and the scarlet red armband with the Nazi swastika on it on his left arm told Paul more than he wanted to know. The man was a captain in the German SS Gestapo, one of the elite occupiers of Paris. It was only after the German had left the room that what he had been speaking in before he rose from the bed. He'd said, in German, "Ich liebe dich"—I love you. The fear gripped at Paul's throat. What he'd almost said earlier was the same. This was dangerous ground they were treading on. Paul couldn't see the man ever again or else he knew he'd be lost to him, war or no war. But already Paul's body ached from the absence of the German SS captain. He lay there, legs spread, ass twitching, aching to have the master cocksman between his legs again, the man's monster cock filling him, possessing him, owning him. The German SS Gestapo conquering, occupying, fucking America. Paul had seen the captain leave something on the dresser before he left. When Paul checked what it was, he found it to be a five-franc note. So, for the first time in his life he had been paid in cash—or tipped, depending on how the German saw it—for sex. If he later came to date when he had become a male prostitute in Paris, it would be today—if he took the money, which he didn't. He left it for the German to know that the sex had meant something else—something more—to Paul than pay for play. * * * * September 1, 1940 "There is no money available in that account. That account has been impounded." "Impounded? What the hell does that mean?" Paul asked. He could feel himself tightening up. He lived from check deposited from home to check deposited from home. He was tapped out. Today was the day of the check deposited from home. "The United States has impounded all money being sent into France because of the . . . because of the occupation," the bank official said, looking oh so sad for Paul's predicament. "I'm sorry. The German presence here has officially been condemned by the United States, and it doesn't want any funds from its country to be made available here." "They can't do that," Paul said. But clearly they could and they had. This was the second blow in a week. When he'd gone back to the loft from the Ritz on the morning of August 29th, he'd found that Noell Giroux had cleared out. He had taken some of his artwork with him, but a group of men—men claiming they didn't know where Giroux had gone—had come to move the rest of his stuff out two days later. Paul had been able to keep his own paintings and supplies, such as they were, back, but everything else was gone. The workmen were only able to say that Giroux' stuff was going into storage. Paul had initially thought that Giroux' disappearance somehow was because he hadn't come home to the loft on the night of the 28th, but Giroux hadn't shown jealousy before in Paul's occasional going with other men and he'd virtually thrown the man named Claude at him at the party. There was no reason for him to know about the SS officer. But then the workmen said that the move had been arranged several days earlier, so whatever caused Giroux to leave was decided before the party at the Ritz. And he had intended for him to be the one to leave. If he was mad at Paul, he could have just pitched Paul out of the flat. Well, fuck him, Paul thought as he trudged back to the loft from the bank. He'd left without telling Paul he was going and he'd been mysterious and secretive of late. The whole bit about going to the party but really wanting only to talk to the senior bartender at the Ritz bar was baffling to Paul. It mainly was baffling to Paul because he was completely apolitical. He hadn't seen Giroux' going underground ahead of time. He didn't anticipate that American funds would be cut off to occupied France. He hadn't even considered leaving France in advance of the occupation. And he was only mildly concerned that no sooner had the Germans arrived then he had had sex with a German military officer—and not just any German officer; a Gestapo captain. To the extent that there was concern there it was because it was a little hard, even for a young, prowling man like Paul, to have missed the reports of brutality by the SS Gestapo. But the German officer hadn't been brutal. He'd been rough and demanding at times but he had also been the best, most attentive lover Paul had ever had. And he'd been witty and polite and solicitous, even when taking Paul hard in taxing positions . . . and, yes, loving. And thinking of the German officer surfaced remembrance of the five-franc note he had left for Paul and Paul hadn't taken. He could use that five francs now. It would feed him for four days. What was he going to do for money and food now? * * * * The building concierge met Paul at the street door. "It's the first of the month," he said, smacking his lips and giving Paul a licentious stare. "The rent on the loft is due today." Leon Segal had long been adept at being in the hallway, smacking his lips and giving Paul a lustful stare when Paul was coming and going. Segal was a fat, hairy, sweaty pig—at least in Paul's eyes. And there was nothing artistic or literary about him. He gave the young American the creeps. He wore vests rather than shirts that exposed a V of matted black hair on his chest and hairy arms. Although fat, he also was muscular and a good foot taller than Paul was. Paul always felt intimidated in his presence. His intent could be seen in his sneer and he smelled of garlic and beer and cheap cigarettes. "I see that Noell Giroux has moved out. But he did nothing about the rent," Segal said. "This has been unexpected," Paul said. "I may need some time to cover the rent." "There is no time to give in these perilous days," Segal said. "But money is not the only way to pay the rent." Segal fucked Paul from behind over the dining table in his first-floor apartment with a cock that wasn't particularly long but was challengingly thick. The fuck was swift and brutal, with, at first, Segal grabbing a handful of hair at the back of Paul's head and arching the young man's back painfully to him, instructing Paul to jut his buttocks out to receive the penetration deeper and to provide a shelf for Segal to rest his stomach on while he pumped. As the fuck progressed, Segal released Paul's hair, but he grabbed both of the young man's wrists and jerked his arms back to maintain the bow in Paul's back. At ejaculation, the man brought his cock out to the surface to cream Paul's rim and just inside the hole and then slid back in for several more minutes of sucking-noise thrusts. Triggering a reserve of seed, he came again inside Paul's passage. Paul couldn't look the man in the face as he gathered up his trousers and undergarments. He wouldn't put them back on here. He couldn't stand to be here, in this apartment, with this gorilla for a second longer than he had to be. He was dejected and disgusted at what he'd already had to do to maintain his existence in Paris without even the opportunity to assess and plan. As he headed for the door, Segal said. "That's only good until the 15th. If you want to stay beyond that either bring me the money or come and knock on my door." Paul did look at the man now, showing him a flash of hatred. But Segal just stared him down with amusement in his eyes and smacked his lips. It was the tail he wanted. Paul didn't have to enjoy it as long as Segal got his rocks off on a cute young trick. The young man rushed upstairs and used all of the water in the apartment house's tank to try to wash the smell of the concierge off his body. Being fucked by the working classes wasn't nearly as much fun as by an artist. * * * * Two weeks. The 15th of September. That was how long Paul had to find someplace else to live and to find the means of living there. Nothing like the pressure of this had come down on him before. He'd never been poor and he'd never been backed into a corner to have to fight his way out of. But he'd never lie under a fat, smelly, pig like that concierge again. That he vowed, and the vow steeled his back and motivated him to plan. He had some paintings completed and he knew they were good. Maybe not quite good enough to get in most Paris galleries, but he also knew a gallery owner or two who had wanted to get into his pants. It would mean prostituting himself yet again, but it at least would be with an artist and he hadn't been hesitant to give it away when he wanted to when he was rich. There was no reason for him to hold back now that he was poor. The big-boned, pony-tailed Algerian owner of a gallery on the Left Bank fucked Paul up against a wall in the back of his shop after taking five canvases from the young man on consignment. But he did give Paul an advance of fifteen francs on the lot. Both Paul and the Algerian knew that Paul was being paid for the fuck the gallery owner had wanted to give him for months. The deal was that Paul was to come in monthly to check on possible painting sales, to go with the Algerian to the back of the shop, and to leave with ten francs in his pocket. It was a start. Paul was backed against a wall, his legs hooked on the Algerian's hips and his arms around the gallery owner's neck, while the Algerian pushed him up and down the wall with the strength of his cock thrusting up in Paul's ass passage. Afterward Paul stopped at a sidewalk café for a coffee and a pastry. He couldn't really afford it, but he at least had some money in his pocket and the first selling of himself by himself under his belt. Life was looking up, and he felt he needed the reward. He'd always been pampered; it was hard to switch dramatically from that. His luck held. "Are you alone? May I sit?" Paul looked up. It was Claude from Laura Mae Corrigan's party at the Ritz. "Yes, please, I'm alone," he answered. The man looked as good, elegant, and "together" in street clothes as he did in a evening clothes at the Ritz. The image of the man that kept coming up in Paul's mind, though, was nakedness, his body long, lean, wiry, his cock to match. Paul hoped that he himself could look as good and sexy at the man's age. Paul had no idea what it was, but the man was gray and, although he still was in good shape, there had been telltale liver spots on his hands and arms and a slight loosening in his muscle definition that Paul had noticed while the man was lying between his legs. There had been nothing wrong with the hardness, length, and strength of his cock, though. Puttin' on the Ritz It was disconcerting to be sitting here across the table from him at a sidewalk café when Paul's image of him was crouching, naked, between Paul's legs and feeding a long cock into his passage. "Yes, I heard that Noell has dropped out of sight," Claude said. He touched Paul's arm with two, long, sensuous fingers, his middle finger elegantly crowned with the thick gold ring he had punished Paul's rim with while finger fucking him, and Paul felt a slight charge go up his limb. How was one supposed to act, he wondered, in public at a café with an older man who was virtually a stranger, but who had been lying between your legs, both of you naked, and working your ass with his cock? The kicker was the stranger part. Paul knew nothing about this man. Before he had known his lovers fairly well before having sex with them. This man—this "no surname" Claude—was sitting there, almost a stranger, elegantly dressed and acting so proper and civilized, when the vision of him going through Paul's mind was of that silver ring in his right nipple and of him staring into Paul's eyes as he entered, entered, entered Paul's passage with his long cock. "He didn't tell me he was leaving," Paul said. "He's left me in a bit of a lurch, I must say." "He introduced you to me at the party the other night at the Ritz, so he didn't really leave you in the lurch," Claude said, giving Paul a sympathetic smile. "That was no accident. He brought you to the party specifically to meet me. He was worried for you, but it would only be dangerous to you for you to have known he was leaving or where he was going or what he would be doing." "I don't understand," Paul said. "I recognize that you don't understand. You aren't French. This isn't your national disgrace. Noell said you were completely apolitical and naïve to the world as it is here now. He worried about you. He desperately wanted you to leave before the occupation, although he said he ached at the thought of losing you. He said you were the best lover he had—that it perpetually was like the first time with you. I must say I agree with him. He has to do what he has to do—and he was frustrated that you wouldn't leave before he had to." "You say he took me to the party specifically to meet you." "And my encountering you here today is no coincidence either," Claude said. "I know you are strapped for funds. I know your allowance has been cut off by events. That was quite predictable. If you come home with me now—for the night, to use as I want, with whomever else I want to use you—I will pay you fifty francs. How badly do you need fifty francs?" How bad and taxing could a night with this man be, Paul wondered. He indeed needed the money. Pretty taxing, as it turned out. Claude took him to an elegant townhouse where they were ushered in by a huge black attendant and where Paul could hear quiet conversation in men's voices coming from the closed-door parlors on either side of the foyer. Paul was taken to a sumptuously appointed bed chamber on the second floor and fucked both by Claude and the black attendant in more exotic positions than the SS captain had taken him in the Ritz. Paul was fucked in limb-challenging missionary positions, from behind with his legs in the splits, half way on and half way off the bed with his torso reclining toward the floor and with his shoulders on the floor taking his weight as Claude pile drived his ass, with Claude on his back and Paul riding his cock, in a crab position with Paul suspended over Claude's body, on the top of the dresser, his legs in splits, and on the floor, Claude taking him in reverse. When Claude needed a breather, the black attendant took over the fucking. And if this weren't enough, Paul was taken to the basement of the building, where there was a sexual torture chamber of a sort and where he was hung and bound and yoked and fucked by the black attendant and lightly whipped and fucked by Claude and his now-gaping passage invaded with graduated beads and dildos—nothing too painful or that would leave a mark, but far, far beyond where Paul had ever been taken before. He endured it all. Paul needed the fifty franks and he reveled in the variety and challenge of it—and especially in the jet-black cock of the attendant. Paul had never been with a black man before. He endured and responded in ways that visibly astounded and pleased Claude and that kept Claude hard and thrusting and spouting. Paul woke in Claude's bed in the morning to a side-split fuck and Claude whispering in his ear, "You did magnificently. You went through the paces like a seasoned champion despite your aura of youth and freshness. You could be the star of the stable—such yielding innocence. I can assign you to one of the best rooms, assure you of limited assignations with the most affluent and cleanest of men and half of the profit from your luscious body. Here you will live in the lap of luxury once more. The Germans and the occupation need not impinge on your life any more than it does on the lives of those at the Ritz whose assets, unlike yours, are still liquid. I will take care of you. Leave everything to me. Noell saw this as your best option. I see you as my best find of the year." Thus it was that Paul entered into a life of male prostitution at Claude's, an exclusive male-on-male brothel just steps—and a secret passageway—away from one of Paris' most exclusive private men's sports club. * * * * September 2 to November 21, 1940 Indeed, for more than a month it was as if the Germans and the occupation didn't exist. Most of the men Paul entertained were middle aged; nearly all were French. Some were older, some younger. Some were in good physical condition and some Paul had to handle gingerly. All had cocks; all put their cocks inside Paul—in his mouth or his ass or both. Some came more to have someone they could talk to intimately, but eventually they all put their cocks inside Paul. Some just held them there, expecting Paul to make them hard and flowing. Some were aggressive and demanding. They all came for Paul—in more ways than one. And most of them left satisfied, leaving behind generous gratuities. As the days went on, fewer of the men coming to the brothel were young. Paul hadn't a clue to link this with the occupation. It only took a few weeks for the novelist living in and observing and writing about the Ritz Paris, Michel Paquet, to find Paul. He fucked Paul missionary style, with Paul at the end of the bed, his legs raised and spread and held there by Paul's hands, while Paquet cupped Paul's head in his hands, looked intensely into his eyes and whispered poetry to Paul when he wasn't kissing him on the lips. Paul made the possible mistake of showing affection back and signaling with his body and moans and groans that he was enjoying the fuck more than he was. Paquet seemed to have become taken with him and was reacting more like it was lovemaking than sexual release. He came back once a week as long as Paul was there. Paquet asked Paul to move in with him and to service just him and his friends. Paul passed the offer off as if Paquet was joking. He wasn't, and the refusal smarted. In Paquet's wake came Count Jan Bukowski, athletic and demanding. If there had been a trapeze hanging from the ceiling, Bukowski would have wanted to have sex with Paul on it. Paul would have been game for that; he found the count's title an intriguing addition to his "men I have had" collection and his sexual prowess arousing. Bukowski put Paul in all sorts of contortion positions and fucked him hard and deep. The Pole had one of the biggest cocks in Paris, knew how to use it, and treated his partners like pillaged peasants. Considering all of the sex that Paul had to coax out of his older patrons, Paul enjoyed seeing the count walk through the door, and was stretched out on his bed moaning and purring when the count walked out the door. Even the hanger-on Jewish actor, Bres Moulin, slid in in the count's slipstream. He fucked from hurt and the anger of never being at the center of the attention, making Paul do lap dances for him only, at some point, grabbing Paul's waist and slamming Paul's passage up and down on his nearly adequate cock. All the time Paul had to act like he was enjoying the sex when what he wanted to do was to slap the man, tell him to wake up, and to give up being fully accepted by Michel and Jan and be his own man. But Paul's job was to make men feel masterful in their own terms, so he just groaned and kept telling Moulin how big and masterful his cock was—when it wasn't, really. Paul couldn't remember feeling the man's cut cock inside him at all. Claude had declared the brothel as a safe haven from the occupying Germans, but it was a promise he couldn't keep. Paul had been there no more than a month when German military officers began to appear at the door. They couldn't be turned away. Nothing could turn the Germans away from anything they wanted from Paris. Paris was slowly being raped by the Germans, and rape is no less rape when it happens over time. And it's no less rape when it is forcibly taken from those who normally would freely give it. Claude tended to try to divert them to his lesser stable, to men on their way out in terms of desirability and men who could endure more than others, because the Germans came with a reputation for brutality and cruelty. It wasn't a fully deserved stigma, which Paul well knew as he thought back to his night writhing under the German SS captain in the Imperial Suite bedroom at the Ritz. But there were enough of the Germans who were brutal to keep the legend alive. One of them was a tank commander, General Jürgen Bosch, who spied Paul wafting through one of the parlors when he was making his selection and who insisted that he would have Paul. And have Paul he did, demanding that they go immediately to the "special services" chamber in the basement—with Claude wondering how the hell the general even knew about the chamber—hanging Paul on a hook and whipping him harder than Claude did in the trials and then stretching him on the rack and fucking him into unconsciousness. It took Paul the last two weeks of October to recover from that visit. Claude declared he was too valuable to be out of commission that long and told him to stay in his own bedroom whenever there was a hint of a German around. When General Bosch returned, asking for Paul, Claude told him that Paul had left the brothel. Thus it was that, when Paul saw his SS captain from the Ritz in the brothel, it was while peeking out of his door and looking down the corridor as the captain was following another one of the young male prostitutes into another bedroom. Paul shrank from the door with mixed feelings—with the urge to tear down the hall and leap into the man's arms and, at the same time, to hide under the bed so that there was no way the magnificent lover would know that Paul was here, doing this. Later that day, Paul asked Claude who the handsome, younger German officer had been and was told that it was SS Captain Garren von Kaube. At last Paul had a name. On the night of November 20th, there was one of a series of firebomb attacks on the Jewish sector of the city, with drunken German soldiers in the ranks taking up clubs and knives and going on a rampage that fanned out from the Jewish quarter across the rest the city. A group of the soldiers got into the brothel, tore it apart, and attacked any of the male prostitutes they could run down. Paul was one of the young men they cornered, beat brutally, and gangbanged. When he lost consciousness, he was suspended between two burly and snarling—and quite fit and virile—German soldiers, who were playing him like a calliope, with both of their cocks inside him. He woke on the morning of the 22nd, in a well-appointed bedroom—but not one in the brothel—with his head, an arm, and his chest bandaged. He was half out of it on drugs. He was lying on his back with a nightshirt on that was bunched up around his waist. He otherwise was naked. His legs were raised, bent, and spread. Michel Paquet was sitting in a straight chair next to the bed. His hand was stroking Paul's inner thighs and moved to encase Paul's cock. "You're awake," Paul heard Michel say as if from underwater. Paquet then stood, stripped off his trousers, climbed up on the bed between Paul's legs, slid inside Paul's channel, and slow pumped him to a creaming of his channel. The novelist was careful to prop his torso up on his arms so that he didn't press on any of Paul's wounds. As Paquet was fucking Paul, Count Bukowski stole into the room, came to the head of the bed, unbuttoned his trousers, freeing his cock, and turned Paul's face toward him. He waited momentarily to see what Paul would do, but, with a sigh, the young man dutifully opened his mouth to receive the thick cock. Michel left the room to be replaced between Paul's legs by Count Bukowski, who climbed up on the bed, thrust inside Paul's channel just as Paquet had done, and pumped him more vigorously to an ejaculation. Bres Moulin, whose cock replaced Bukowski's in Paul's mouth, followed up for tail-end thirds in the same vein. When Paul next woke, he was alone in the room, his legs were raised and spread, and he could feel the cum of the three men inside him—or so he thought, the more awake he became the less he was sure that the penetrations had happened at all. Ever since the first evening when the three of them pressed into at the rue Cambon bar, Paul had fantasized about being shared by the three at the same time. Perhaps he had just fantasized that encounter in his drug-induced delirium. He had no idea where he was. Although he thought he was becoming more aware of his surroundings, he feared he didn't when he looked up on the wall across the room from the foot of the bed and saw, hanging there, the charcoal sketch that Noell Giroux had made of him at the window in the loft on the day of the German invasion of Paris. * * * * November 22, 1940 to December 1943 As Paul's connection with the world started to solidify, the door to the bedroom opened and his blond god entered and came over and sat in the chair beside the bed. "Captain von Kaube," Paul murmured. "Auch, so you know who I am. And I know you. Paul Stainer, I am told. An artist, I am told. And a prostitute, I know. How are you feeling?" Paul bypassed this question for questions of more import. How he was feeling wasn't a very uplifting topic at the moment. He felt like he'd been put through the ringer. "Where is this place and how do you and I come to be here?" "This is my bedroom at the Ritz. Yes, it is different from the one I first used you in. As soon as Reichsmarschall Göring arrived, I was kicked out of the Imperial Suite. I was only there, preparing for his arrival, for the time before he came to Paris. I am one of his aides. This one is rather Spartan compared to others in the hotel, but I like it more for that. It's a man's room. It's a soldier's room. I'm told that this is where Ernest Hemingway stays when he comes to Paris. Room 31. Although, if he comes now, he will have to fight me for the room." Von Kaube laughed at his little joke. "So you are here with the Reichsmarschall. Why is he here?" Paul didn't have to ask who Göring was. Everyone in Paris spoke of him in hushed tones. "He is a cultured man. Paris is the heart of culture. He comes to collect art." Von Kaube recited these phrases as if by repeating holy doctrine—not necessary to believed, only to assert as if by dictate from a higher power, which it no doubt was. "I come at those times and at others on other business. I will be here frequently. And you will be here with me, in my bed when I'm in Paris. I care not who you fuck when I am in Berlin, but here, when I am in Paris, you are mine. I just ask that you are careful not to pick up a disease." "I am yours?" Paul didn't seem particularly upset at that prospect. "How did I get here? The last I knew, I was—" "Being assaulted at Claude's. Yes, I know. I intervened. The soldiers were disobeying orders. They were not told they could rampage against French civilians who were not Jewish. You are not Jewish, are you?" "No, I'm not Jewish," Paul said. "But then what—?" "That is good, then." Paul could see the relief in the man's face. "I was within my authority to shoot the soldiers then." Oh. A shiver went down Paul's spine. How could the man make love so tenderly—otherwise, as well, but tenderly at surprising moments—and always solicitous of his partner's pleasure—and be so . . . so . . . much like Paul had heard the SS Gestapo was like? "Would you not bed me if I were Jewish?" Paul asked. "Yes, of course I would. Jews can be prostitutes too. I would fuck a Jew if he were as desirable as you are. It just would not have been right for me to intervene between German soldiers and a Jew. If you had been Jewish . . . but then I never supposed you were. You are not circumcised, so the thought never occurred to me. But you asked why you are here. You are here, at the Ritz, because I brought you here for your recovery and your safety—and because I want you in my bed. I bought you from Claude." "Bought me from Claude?" Paul hadn't realized that Claude owned him. The thought of being owned gave him a little thrill, but men didn't own other men in this day and age. "Yes, and he drove a hard bargain. He wanted a fortune for you, but I negotiated the price down because you were used goods—badly used goods at that moment." So cold blooded about it, but then the captain had believed from the beginning that Paul was a male prostitute. How could he think otherwise now when he had found Paul being a prostitute in a male brothel? "You say the Reichsmarschall is in Paris to collect art. French art?" "Not your national art. Most of that seemed to have disappeared before we arrived. Art from private collectors—primarily Jews no longer needing it." "He buys it or he just takes it?" "Move over please; provide me room," the captain said, as if he hadn't heard the question. He stood and began taking off his uniform. "You're going to sleep here?" "Warum nicht? Why not? This is my bed. I bought you to keep it warm for me. I understand if you are still sore from the beating. We need not have sex until you are feeling better. Not if you tell me you can't take it. I will just hold you if you cannot have sex now." There seemed no question that the captain intended to have sex with Paul at some time soon—now if Paul didn't tell him it would be too painful. Maybe even then. The captain was sporting an erection. Garren climbed into bed, naked, and stretched his body along Paul's back. Paul rolled over on his side, with a groan. The captain wrapped his arms around Paul's torso and planted his lips in the back of Paul's neck. He was hard, his erection pressed into the crease where Paul's right leg folded into his groin. Paul reached back and took hold of the captain's cock. Garren let out a long breath as Paul pushed the foreskin of the cock down under the glans and pressed his index finger into the piss slit, which was leaking precum. "You should not do that if you can't have sex with me now," Garren whispered. Paul continued playing with the glans of Garren's cock. "Do you feel well enough to take slow cock? If not, just keep doing that and stroke it a bit and I will come. Then I can sleep." What was this about not having to have sex, Paul wondered. But he didn't wonder it to be critical. He was hard himself and was stroking his own cock with the other hand, that bandaged arm painfully out of the sling it had been in—but with his sexual needs more insistent than the level of pain in his arm. A master. He had a master who owned him and couldn't keep his hands off him. A man who had shot two soldiers for him and paid a small fortune for his body. Paul's arousal from this was overwhelming. Puttin' on the Ritz "Ja, das ist sehr gute"—"Yes, that is very good," Garren murmured in response to the attention Paul was giving his cock with his hand. "I am in need. I must use you if . . ." Paul provided his answer in action, lifting his left leg and moving it over on top of Garren's thigh. He guided the cock to his hole with the hand grasping it. With a grunt, Garren thrust his hips forward slightly and was inside Paul. "You are so sweet. Tight. A surprise for a whore," Garren whispered. "Fuck me. I am yours. Take me," Paul whispered. "I am your whore." Paul understood that that was what the German wanted to hear. Paul felt like there was a much closer bond between them than that. In time, he was confident that captain would feel that way too. Garren stroked deep inside Paul's channel five times, Paul's passage walls yielding more and Garren's cock thickening more with each pull back to the surface followed by the long glide in, each glide taking the cock deeper. On the fifth slide, Garren came. Paul sighed at the realization he had. Garren pulled the cock out to the surface and glided in, deeper, again, and shot off more cum. And then again. Paul had ejaculated into the sheets as well. Garren cupped Paul's head and turned his face toward him and they kissed deeply. "Gute, sehr gute—that was very good," Garren murmured. "Yes, it was," Paul answered in French. He'd almost used English, but something inside him told him not to reveal that he was an American. Claude apparently hadn't told Garren he was an American. Had Claude known that? Had Noell told him? Maybe not. As they cooled down, Paul remembered what he'd seen in the room that had surprised him. "That charcoal sketch on the wall at the foot of the bed. Was that here when you took the room?" It was too dark now for either of them to see it, but Garren answered as if he knew what Paul was asking about. "I bought it at a gallery on the Left Bank. The day after the party where I first . . ." He seemed at a loss for words. "Where you first fucked me to heaven?" "Yes, that. Where you first surrendered totally to me and taught me what heaven was. Sweeter than any whore I've had in Germany. It reminded me so much of you that I had to have it." "It is of me." Paul almost went on and said that the artist, Noell Giroux, had been his lover at the time, but something told him he shouldn't reveal this. There was more than one aspect to the SS officer, and Paul was quite unsure of who he was out of the bed. "I hoped it might be. Perhaps I would have known for sure if your genitals weren't hidden. You should have thrust them out proudly. They are very nice." He was fondling Paul's dick and balls as he said this, and Paul was arching his back and sighing at the attention. "The pose was what it was," Paul said. Garren nuzzled Paul's neck with his nose. "I am in erection again." "Yes, I can feel you." "And so are you." "Yes." "Do you feel well enough to take the cock again? Perhaps more vigorously and longer this time? I want you again badly. You've taken it once . . ." "Yes, please. I want it again. And hard. Fuck me hard into tomorrow. Take me like a master takes his slave. That's what we are. You are my master and I am your slave." Paul rolled over onto his belly and went up on his knees. Garren mounted, entered, and began to vigorously fuck him deep, being careful to keep his hands on Paul's hips, away from the bandages on his chest and arm. * * * * Paul woke, more alert and feeling less pain than the day before, to the sight of Garren von Kaube, in uniform, packing a duffel bag. "Are you going away?" Paul asked. "Just for four days. I'm flying to Berlin. Maybe when I come back you'll be well enough for me to do you better." "You did me just fine," Paul said. "I'm more aroused and can do better with more athletic positions. What really turns me on about you is that you look so delicate but that you can take it as I like to give it." You once whispered that you loved me, Paul thought. Is that what love means to you? It means more than that to me and I fear I'm falling for you—at least one side of you. He dare not say that aloud, though. What he said was, "I'll miss you." "We'll have to learn to make the most of the time we're together," the captain said. "I'll probably be gone half the time. But I'll want you here for when I'm in Paris. The waiters here at the Ritz are very helpful. I've engaged one, Antoine Boudin, to take care of you when I'm not here—to take care of you in every way. He is bringing you a breakfast today and will bring all of your meals until you can go to the dining room. He'll also change your bandages and will bathe you." "But he won't be you," Paul said. "No, he won't. But he has a big prick and he fucks men. He'll be better than nothing. He is certified clean. You may have him as often as you want and need it—except when I'm here." It sounded so bald, so clinical . . . but as long as the captain said he wanted Paul here, waiting for him . . . Antoine did come into the room shortly after Von Kaube had left. Despite his intention not to like the man, who was only a few years older than Paul, Paul liked him and his smooth and polite ways from the beginning. He was from the Mediterranean Riviera part of France. He was dark and sultry and easygoing. The first day he chatted with Paul, passing on gossip, as he fed him and changed his bandages. It was from Antoine that day that Paul learned more about the residents of the hotel during the occupation period, which included most of the military officials of the German occupation. Since Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was resident in the hotel when he was in Paris, the headquarters and staff for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, which he commanded, for the Paris region was located here too, including the Luftwaffe officer and writer (later eaten by a crocodile in the Congo River when he served as West German ambassador there), Hans-Jürgen Soehring, who was living in the hotel with the French movie actress Arletty. Several other German generals, as well as spies, gravitated around the hotel, including Hans Speidel, Ceasar von Hofacker, and Carl von Stülpnagel, who were among the generals in Paris who later were to be fingered for planning the failed bombing attempt on Adolf Hitler's life, in the Valkyrie Operation, which they planned in the Ritz bar. The spies included the hotel resident, Hans von Dincklage, who was the lover of another famous hotel resident, Coco Chanel. Paul had frozen at the mention that the German tank commander Jürgen Bosch had a room here, "although he isn't in residence much." This had been the German general who had tortured and sexually assaulted Paul so badly at Claude's that it had laid Paul up for weeks. "We'll just have to keep him away from you," Antoine said breezily when Paul told him why he was disturbed. But he said it in a way that made Paul feel the handsome waiter would protect him. And, with Paul, being protected was only a couple of steps away from being dominated, which aroused Paul and urged him to open his legs to the man. Because this talk of protection made Paul think, while Antoine was changing his bandages, of Garren's remark that the waiter had a big dick and that Paul was free to use him, Paul hardened. Upon observing this Antoine said, "Tomorrow is your bath and a massage. We take care of that tomorrow." He touched Paul erection with a finger so that his meaning was quite clear. "I will take very good care of you. I have my instructions from the German captain." Paul shuddered in anticipation. Antoine was off in conversation, though. "Several of our famous women residents have taken up with the Germans," he said. "Arletty is being fucked by a Luftwaffe officer and Coco Chanel by a German spy. There may be hell to pay for that some day." If this was a veiled warning to Paul for being kept by a German SS captain, it went completely over Paul's head. And indeed, both Arletty and Chanel suffered some consequences of the fraternization after the war, although not nearly as much as French women without fame did. Arletty even spent time in a camp for collaboration. Both women toughed the fraternization out, though, with Arletty unrepentantly saying later, "If you hadn't let them in, I wouldn't have slept with him," and the better known, "My heart is French, but my arse is international," and with Chanel putting up the defense that, given the chance of a lover at her age, she wasn't going to ask to see his passport. Paul, instead, focused on Chanel's lover being called a spy. "Everyone here is spying on someone for someone," Antoine answered, repeating, "Simply everyone," a statement that also went over Paul's head. "It's not a question of who is a spy here; the question is who are they spying for this week," Antoine added. "Garren says that General Göring comes here to buy art." "Yes, he does. His broker, Karl Haberstock, is in residence. The art is delivered to the basement of the hotel and Haberstock goes over it to determine what is worthy for the Reichsmarschall to . . . acquire and ship back to Germany. The captain tells me you are an artist too." "Yes, I'm a student of it." "Pablo Picasso is arriving for a visit next week. We must arrange for you to meet him. He strictly fucks women, though, so don't get any ideas there. And, if you like, I can find space for a small studio for you if you want to paint. There will be long spans of time that your captain isn't in residence. You'll want something to occupy your time. But I have been engaged to occupy your time and energy. I know that a young man like you"—a promiscuous whore, Paul knew the waiter was—admittedly justifiably—thinking—"needs attention." Over the next few days, before Captain von Kaube reappeared, Antoine Boudin gave Paul attention. On day two of Von Kaube's absence, Antoine gave Paul a bed bath and a hand job. On day three, he gave him a massage and a blow job, at the end of which Paul returned the favor by giving Antoine a blow job. On day four, Paul was tense and bitchy. Antoine fucked him and then fucked him again, revealing to Paul just how nice the waiter's cock was and leaving him purring for the captain's return on the fifth day. * * * * For the next three years, until he was almost twenty-three, Paul led an idyllic life largely in total isolation to the deepening threat of the occupation of Paris that festered beyond the walls of the Ritz. When the captain was there, Paul was continuously and well fucked. Von Kaube maintained magnificent fitness and, as promised, fucked with athletic positions and astonishing stamina, bouncing Paul's body up and down on his cock three and four times of an evening and night and still being able to rise and do whatever he was doing out in the city as an SS officer during the day. When he wasn't there, chatty and sexy Antoine was there, and, on occasion, the writer-dilettante-actor trio would visit Paul, Paul starting off riding Count Bukowski's cock, with Michel Paquet coming in for a double possession of Paul's channel, segueing into Paquet fucking Paul—and then the actor, Moulin pumping Paul when the other two left. They had been patrons of Claude's brothel, and as long as they didn't make any demands when Von Kaube was there, Paul gave them access. He was mildly surprised when Moulin stopped coming with the other two, but he just assumed the Jewish actor was off in a play out of the city or something. Paquet and Bukowski just gave him sad faces when he initially asked about the actor, so he stopped asking. Increasingly, Von Kaube brought Paul out with him to the parties in the hotel—most of them ones given by the Germans, for the Germans, and at the Ritz hotel's expense. Paul was being accepted by the other Germans as being with Von Kaube, everyone knowing what the relationship was but treating it as if it were invisible. The captain increasingly showed affection to him public—and even more increasingly in private as they fucked—more frequently making love rather than engaging in athletic and demanding fuck. And Garren was whispering the heart-melting "Ich liebe dich" after sex with greater frequency. Paul returned the declaration at every opportunity. He had no trouble doing so. He believed it. The captain had changed Paul's parameters of sexual satisfaction and of the emotion of intimacy. Before Von Kaube, Paul had thought of intimacy with another man as having that man's cock inside him, hard and pumping, and receiving his release of seed. Paul could think of no more intimate and satisfying relationship with a man than that. Intimacy was moving a man to desire him so much that he had to be inside him, possessing him fully, with Paul feeling fully possessed by the man's throbbing cock and taking his release. He didn't see other aspects of the man entering into the quality of intimacy. Now, through the attentions of the German captain, not just during sex but also in their sleeping together and in their evenings of being with each other, being owned by the captain, who could have any other man he wanted—and, just as much, Paul's feeling of absence when the two were apart—Paul had, he believed, a higher understanding of what it meant to be intimate with and fully satisfied by another man. Once and only once, in May of 1941, Garren and Paul set off on an evening in the city with Arletty and Coco Chanel and their German lovers. But on their way into the city, they were pelted with screams of "collaborator" and "whore," and had to duck down in the car to avoid being struck by crumbling bricks. Antoine treated Paul for a glancing blow off his brow when they returned to the hotel. When Paul described being set upon and an inability to understand why, Antoine said, "I'm afraid there will be hell to pay for those women some day for taking German lovers." Once again his obvious attempt to connect that with Paul being with Garren didn't sink in with Paul. Antoine continued, "The Reichsmarschall has informed the hotel he is coming on an art hunt at the end of this week. There will be a party of the Germans. If you prefer, I can help you appear to have a cold too severe to attend." "Why would I do that?" Instead of answering him directly, Antoine passed on gossip about Göring. "You know he has furs and dresses up there in the Imperial Suite—ones cut to his size. I've talked with some of the waiters who are summoned to the suite to dance with him to a record player, with him in a silk dress. He tells them there's nothing to it but that he likes the feel of silk on his skin. They say that's all he wears—the silk dresses. He's a very good dancer, they say. He leads." "Just a dance?" Paul asked. "So the waiters he calls to the suite say," Antoine answered. The look he gave to Paul was meant to be meaningful, but it, along with the thrust of what Antoine had changed the subject to, was yet another warning that went over the young man's head. Paul attended the party and was introduced to Hermann Göring, who declared he was utterly charmed by the young man and who, upon introduction, held his hands for the longest time before he released them. Paul had become comfortable with the generals and therefore was effervescent and enjoyed the party until late in the evening, when the tank commander Jürgen Bosch arrived and saw Paul talking art with Göring's art dealer, Karl Haberstock. Sensing he was being watched, Paul almost went into shock when he realized that General Bosch was there. Paul excused himself from the discussion with Haberstock in which he was surprised to find that Hitler—and therefore Göring as well—had no interest in the art of Pablo Picasso. Picasso had continued visiting the Ritz as well as Paul's studio in the hotel basement, where he gave useful advice to the young artist. The Führer, Haberstock said, raising his eyebrow, has said that anyone who paints the sky green and the fields blue should be taken out and shot. Apparently Picasso never heard this, though, as he continued to visit occupied Paris. Paul went to Garren and begged off the rest of the party, saying he had a headache. When the captain returned to their room that night, he looked a bit perplexed. He made love to Paul, holding him in a close embrace and kissing him while he fucked him slow and deep in a side split. The lovemaking was so tender that, after they'd come, Paul asked Garren what he was thinking, fishing, he realized, for another declaration of love—or possibly for some deeper pledge of union than that. "The Reichsmarschall wants you to come to his suite and dance with him tomorrow at 8:00 p.m.," Von Kaube said. "I wish you didn't have to . . . but, of course, you do." "Of course," Paul said. "I've heard that the waiters do this with him and that it's just a dance. Peculiar, though." "You mustn't indicate you think that in any way—don't even think that it's peculiar," Garren said, holding Paul in a vice grip. "Remember the power the man wields. I am thinking of your safety here." "Yes, of course. Don't worry. It will be fine." Göring met Paul at the door to the suite, ushering out his attendants as he ushered Paul in. The Reichsmarschall was wearing a red silk dress that buttoned down the front and red high heels. He smiled at Paul and made small talk as he handed Paul a flute of champagne. He started up a record of a waltz, refilled Paul's glass, and talked of the Renoir he had seen that day and wanted. Taking the empty glass from Paul's hand and putting both Paul's glass and his own on a nearby table, he turned and opened his arms. "Dance with me." They went through a couple of waltzes. Paul found that, indeed, Göring led, despite the dress, and was very light on his feet for such a big, rotund man—and in heels. During the fourth waltz, Göring turned Paul around, embracing the young man close into his chest, and they just swayed to the music for a couple of minutes. Eventually, one of Göring's hands went to Paul's belt buckle and then his zipper, and he pushed Paul's trousers and underdrawers down to his knees. Paul realized that the man had unbuttoned his dress at the crotch when he felt the bulb of Göring's cock at his hole. Bowing to the inevitable, Paul arched his back, pressing the back of his head into the hollow of the tall German's shoulder, and raised and jutted his buttocks back into the Reichsmarschall's crotch in the way he'd learned to take in as much of a fat man's cock as he could. The entry wasn't demanding, but it was total of whatever length the man was. Paul knew he was all in because he felt the tickle of pubic hair on his buttocks. They held steady there, in a standing embrace, swaying against each other to the rhythm of the waltz on the phonograph, with Paul, fulfilling the expectations of a male courtesan now, moving his buttocks on Göring's buried shaft, until, with a sigh, Göring came. Paul felt the dribble of the man's seed trickle down his inner thigh. Göring kissed him on the back of the neck. Paul then was released from the embrace and readjusted his own clothing while Göring rebuttoned his dress, turned Paul around again, and danced the fifth waltz as if nothing had happened. But then Göring held out his hand again, as if there would be a sixth waltz. When Paul put his hand in Göring's, the Reichsmarschall led him down a hallway to his bedroom. Forty-five minutes later, a German enlisted man opened the door of the bedroom, released Paul's wrists from the bindings on the headboard, and motioned Paul out. Göring was lying on his back on the bed, naked, like a beached whale, and snoring away. Göring had said nothing after the initial "Dance with me." Paul took his departure in silence as a signal. Nothing had happened. Just like with all of the waiters who had been summoned for a dance with the Reichsmarschall in his suite, nothing happened but a dance. Puttin' on the Ritz Von Kaube was lying on his back when Paul returned. The captain was magnificently naked in comparison to the vision Paul had just left. His back was propped up by pillows, and he was smoking a cigarette, his trembling hand betraying his worry. Paul sat down on the edge of the bed, took the cigarette out of Garren's mouth, inhaled three deep drags on it, and returned it to Garren. There was no way he'd tell the captain, though, that he'd done so to take the taste of the Reichsmarschall's cum out of his mouth. "What—?" Von Kaube asked in a quiet voice and an expression of concern. "It was just a dance," Paul said, putting on the best smile he could. "He just wanted to dance." He rubbed his cheeks on Garren's inner thighs and he placed his head between them and took the captain's cock in his mouth, working it up, and then sitting on it and riding it to a mutual ejaculation. Göring was in Paris and at the Ritz for five more days. Twice more he summoned Paul to his suite to "dance" with him. Garren could choose to believe that Paul would be gone for an hour and a half at a time just to dance, but General Bosch became a challenge that Paul couldn't keep from Garren. While the captain was away in Berlin the next time, Bosch tracked Paul down, took him to the room in the basement of the Ritz that the SS had equipped for interrogations and beat him. And when Paul was completely cowed, Bosch put him on all fours on the stone floor and mounted and fucked him hard. He then stretched Paul on a rack on his belly and stood over him, smoking a cigarette and leering, until he was hard again. Then he mounted Paul's ass and fucked him again. When he'd gone to another room to take a piss, Antoine stole in, released Paul, and carried the moaning young man to the staff floors. Entering this floor, Paul thought he was hallucinating when he thought he saw a bookcase move and the actor Bres Moulin start to come out and then pull back, with the bookcase going flush against the wall again. Antoine took Paul to his own room and tended to this bruises. Luckily he hadn't been stretched to the point of breaking any bones—yet. The next morning, still in Antoine's room, Paul asked about what he had seen the previous night. "I can't help that you saw that," Antoine said. "But if you whisper a word of it, it will be known by all sides of the spying that's going on in the building. I won't be able to help you, and no one will be able to help the hotel or its staff—or even your precious captain. No one will believe he doesn't know whatever you know." "I'll say nothing. I've no interest in political affairs," Paul said. "But was that Bres Moulin? He's been missing for weeks." "He's a Jew. Increasingly, you can't be known to be Jewish in Paris and live. Ask your precious captain. No, don't. We all will go down—including you and Von Kaube—if you do. There's a whole level of servants' rooms between floors here. Every Jew who is associated with the hotel—and some others—are being hidden here. And God help you if you ever reveal that." It was never mentioned again between the two of them and never came out until after the war—which led Antoine to be more open and trusting of Paul. And protective of him. He kept Paul hidden from Bosch in his room until Captain Von Kaube returned. Paul didn't say anything to Garren about the tank corp general, and he had no idea whether Antoine told the captain or not. But two nights after Captain Von Kaube was in residence in the Ritz again, he went out of the hotel one evening. So did Jürgen Bosch, to a favorite restaurant of his. Bosch was shot dead coming out of the restaurant, an act that was claimed by and thus credited to the French Resistance. Göring returned to Paris to consult with Karl Haberstock on artwork in September of 1941. He summoned Paul to dance with him three times during that visit. Each time Paul told Garren it had just been a dance, each time Garren had chosen to believe him, and each time the two had made wild and cleansing love afterward. Their bond had become complete. Paul didn't willingly lay with anyone after that beyond the "dancing" with the Reichsmarschall when he chose to visit Paris—not with Antoine and not with Michel Paquet or Jan Bukowski. Paul applied himself to painting in his studio while Garren was away in Berlin, although Garren was finding excuses to be in Paris—and with Paul—more and more of the time. It was while Paul was painting in his studio one day that he discovered that the delivery of art work for Karl Haberstock to assess for Göring's acquisition was being made to a basement room next to his studio. He went out in the hallway and observed that it was regular German soldiers who were hauling it into the room from canvas-covered trucks. Neither Haberstock nor a German official seemed to be there cataloging what came in. When they left, he entered the storeroom and surveyed what was there. There were works by some of the greatest artists Paul knew of. He picked up canvases and turned them over and found Jewish-sounding names on the backs of most of them. Paul didn't understand politics—nor did he want to—but he understood art and art preservation. Without thinking further, he culled through the artwork and pulled some aside on the basis of two criteria: The work must be of outstanding artistic value in comparison with everything else in the storeroom and it must have a name of ownership on the back of it. As much as he felt he could carefully carry and wouldn't be missed he shuttled back to his studio. He took canvases of his work off their frames and covered the treasured art works he had "liberated" with his own canvases. "You what?" Antoine said when he next visited the studio. "I just can't let them take these out of France. They must be returned to their owners," Paul said. Antoine looked at Paul in surprise—and with some other sentiment that Paul wouldn't be able to understand but that almost brought tears to Antoine's eyes. Paul probably didn't even know the step out of self-absorption he'd taken or the trust that he had shown to Antoine. "The owners of these paintings are probably dead," Antoine said as Paul showed him how he had hidden the canvases. "These would have belonged to Jews who have disappeared one night." "They must have family somewhere. Regardless, this is the heritage of France. It should stay in France. I can't save them all, of course, but any saved are that many not lost. I just don't know what to do with them now." "I do," Antoine said. "Leave it to me. I'll take them away. And paint more of your own canvases—many more—so there will be that many more that can cover the paintings you identify to save from the storeroom as they arrive. Let me know when you see a delivery and I'll make sure that Karl Haberstock is otherwise engaged until you have had time to examine what was brought in and can save the best." * * * * On December 7, 1941, Antoine appeared in Paul's art studio, where he was working on a painting. "Where are your papers—your identity papers?" "I don't know. Let me think. Why, I think my former lover last had them. Why are you asking?" "Noell Giroux has them?" Antoine asked. "Yes, I think so. I haven't had need to show them I've been here at the Ritz so long. But, you know Noell Giroux and that I lived with him before the captain?" "Have you not heard the news. Japan has attacked the United States and war between them has been declared." "So? No, I don't understand. Why are you so agitated, Antoine? This is bad news for the United States. But what does it have to do with France—or me, really?" "Japan, Germany, and Italy are in a pact. Germany and Italy will declared war on the United States now. You won't be a neutral here. You'll be a belligerent. You haven't told the captain you're an American, have you?" "It hasn't come up. I'm sure he thinks I'm French. My French isn't the greatest, but his is atrocious. He has no idea I speak it with an American accent. Nor do any of the other German military men here, I'm sure." "Good. Then you must become French." "I don't know how to do that," Paul said. "I do. Come with me. We must see Frank Meier." "The hotel's senior bartender?" "Yes. Don't ask. Just come. Now." "How the hell do you know all of these things?" Paul asked. Antoine didn't answer that. * * * * Ten days before Christmas of 1942, Paul and Garren lay exhausted on the bed in Room 31 of the Ritz Paris. Paul had come back from a dance in the Imperial Suite, and Garren had made wild love to him. Paul's buttocks were glued to Garren's crotch, pinned there by Garren's buried cock. Paul's torso was otherwise twisted, his legs in the splits, with the ankle of his right leg lodged behind Garren's neck and the ankle of his left leg trapped between Garren's calves. Garren released Paul from the demanding athletic position, pulled his body in to be stretched beside his own, and reaching over, opened the nightstand drawer and took out a packet covered by oilskin. "Here. I want you to take this and use it when I leave for Berlin at the end of this visit. You can't fly back to Berlin with me, but this will get you safe conduct to Berlin. It's time. The war isn't going well. I fear we will lose Paris—that I may not be able to come back." "What are you saying?" Paul asked. "I'm saying I can't live without you. I may not be able to come back to Paris. I want you in Berlin with me." Paul sucked in air. He was here with false papers now. He was an American, and the United States was at war with Germany. If Garren found out . . . if anyone else found out, the repercussions would be on Garren . . . his lover . . . his love. "It can't be that bad." * * * * The book was all the rage in the summer of 1943—at least for underground reading. It had to be kept out of the reach of the Germans. Antoine volunteered to keep Paul's copy in his room, lest Garren see it, and Paul had readily agreed. Antoine had seen it immediately, but then so had Paul. It was entitled The Collaborator and was set in Brussels' Hotel Metropole, the Belgian equivalent of the Ritz Paris. The previously unknown author was Hugh Lemaire. It was about a young American trapped in Belgium by the war and forced to go into prostitution, where he winds up living in the Hotel Metropole with a Gestapo lieutenant. The Americans contact him to spy on the Germans, but he is so lost to his officer that he spies for the Germans instead. Neither Paul nor Antoine were fooled. They knew the book was about Paul and had been written in revenge by Michel Paquet because Paul had stopped letting Paquet fuck him. Paul had come a long way in understanding the danger of his liaison with Von Kaube, especially in the Ritz, as riddled with spies as it was. But now he was lost in the relationship. He wouldn't escape from it even if he could. He knew enough about the war to know that the Germans would lose, but he was a fatalist. He didn't care as long as he could be with Garren for as long as possible. The book would be devastating to Paul if read by the wrong people. Both Paul and Antoine walked around as if treading on glass into the fall of 1943, but it didn't appear that anything would become of the book. It certainly didn't encourage Paul to sleep with Paquet again, though, and Paquet became confused, quiet, and morose when Count Jan Bukowski's body was found floating in the Seine. More than once he asked Paul what he'd had to do with Bukowski's death, which, of course, was nothing. * * * * December 15, 1943 Paul had come down from the Imperial Suite as quickly as he could get away. Garren, naked, drew the young man into his body, stripped away his clothes, and covered his face and nipples with kisses, pushing Paul's shoulder blades on to the floor by the bed, with Paul's back rising up the side of the bed. Garren grabbed Paul's legs, split them wide from his body, placed his feet beside Paul's torso, and pile-drive fucked, in reverse down into Paul's hole. Cleansing. Fucking Göring out of Paul; fucking Göring out of Paul. Neither could verbalize this. Both knew what this wild fucking was about, though. Before he came, Garren pulled Paul's body up his chest, set his legs in a crouch, and brought the young man's passage back down on his cock. Throwing his arms behind him and arching his back to counterbalance Garren's crouch, Paul opened his mouth and murmured, "Yes, yes, fuck him out of me," as, arms under the small of Paul's back, Garren slammed him up and down on the cock to a mutual ejaculation. There, at last, it had been said. But neither of them would admit it. Holding him close on the bed afterward, Garren whispered, "The end is coming. I can't speak of it louder, but we won't be able to hold Paris. This is his last trip to Paris. He's said as much. You must use the safe passage documents and come to me in Berlin. I won't be able to come back. I'll leave you what money I can, but you must come. Promise me you'll come." "I promise," Paul answered, having no idea how he could honor that promise—not being able to tell Garren what danger he himself could be in if Paul came to him and was discovered to be an American. "But there is something you need to know," he said, swallowing hard. "All I need to know is that the two of us need to be together at the end." "Will it come to that? In Berlin?" Paul asked. "Will it be the end?" "When and if it is the end, I can promise you that you won't suffer." Instinctively Garren was holding Paul by the throat with both hands. He was a strong man, trained in such arts. One snap and it would be over. Paul halfway wished he would do it now, with Garren's cock still hard, inside him. While they were still where they'd been happy—at the Ritz Paris. * * * * July 21, 1944 Men from the SS were swarming through the entrance of the Ritz Paris into the cavernous lobby, with small teams of men peeling off in several different directions. An SS captain marched up to the reception desk. "Are the German residents General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander of Paris, and his liaison, Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, still registered here and on the premises?" the officer demanded in a booming voice. Paul, who was coming down the stairs at the time, with Antoine behind him, froze. The SS officer was Captain Garren von Kaube. He hadn't told Paul he was coming back to Paris. In fact, he'd told Paul he wasn't coming back to Paris. And Paul had believed him this time. When Garren had left for Berlin the last time, he'd taken the sketch of Paul with him. "Come back up the stairs and across to the rue Cambon side of the hotel," Antoine whispered insistently in Paul's ear. "Go to the bar and tell Frank Valkyrie has been compromised." "What? Valkyrie?" Paul asked, dumbly, not able to take his eyes off Garren. He was within two days of leaving Paris to use the passes Garren had given him to go to him to Berlin. But Garren was here. As an SS officer. Evidently to arrest other German officers both he and Paul had socialized with here at the Ritz. "I'll tell you later, if there's a later," Antoine hissed. "I can't go. They can't find Frank and me together. Now go. Do this to prove I can trust you." Not taking his eyes off Garren until he had turned in the curve the staircase, Paul moved quickly through the labyrinth of halls of the old hotel that he had come to know so well and to the more modern wing off the street behind the Place Vendôme. "Thank you," Frank said calmly when Paul passed on the message from Antoine at the rue Cambon bar. He continued polishing the glass he was holding, but Paul could see his hand tremble a bit and the muscles of his neck tense up. "You'd best go to your room now. Stay out of this," Meier said. Garren was in the room when Paul got there. "I didn't know you were coming," Paul said, trying to contain his mix of concern and joy. "There's been an attempt on the Führer's life," Garren said. "We are after the conspirators in Paris—here, at the Ritz. I can only stay an hour while my men search for them." He was stripping off his uniform. He fucked Paul in hard, strong strokes, with the two facing each other on the bed, Garren's knees pushed under Paul's buttocks and Paul's legs wrapped around Garren's hips. Paul's torso was arched back, his face toward the ceiling, his arms dangling from his side in supplication, moaning and crying out in pained ecstasy, as, arms embracing Paul under the small of his back, Garren slammed his cock hard and deep up into Paul's passage, again and again and again. He fucked Paul in anger at the crumbling of his world. An SS Gestapo captain at war, taking no prisoners. Continuing to piston hard and deep long after Paul had come and totally surrendered. After the SS captain had come in a hot flow, he let Paul's body fall back on the bed in a heap. Paul watched through mournful eyes, not bothering to move his limbs from where they had fallen, while, without a word, Garren quickly dressed back in his uniform and walked out of the room. Two days later, Paul received an abject apology in terse words in a telegram from Berlin from Garren. Not from the SS Gestapo captain this time, but from the Garren Paul was in love with. Garren had been overwrought with the situation he wrote in a form of code—not just with the assassination attempt on Hitler but also with the number of high-ranking military men, many of whom were known and had been respected by Garren, who were implicated in the plot—including here at the Ritz. And he'd had to arrest some who had been friends of his. And who knew whether he would be implicated at some time as well? He had known nothing about the plot, but he had been here. He was just sorry that he had taken his anger and frustration out on Paul. He never would do that again, he declared. The telegram ended in the words that had come increasingly easy to Von Kaube: "Ich liebe dich." Paul couldn't bring himself to believe that Garren would never be violent like that again—and on some level, Paul melted to the violence in Garren. Paul gloried in being fucked roughly. He couldn't deny that Garren was two very different men, however. The intensity and brutality with which Garren had taken him two days previously had been no different in anger, force, and control than the double-penetration fuck of the two soldiers at Claude's brothel Garren had shot. It didn't make a bit of difference that Paul had loved it. He was confused. He put his trip east on hold. * * * * August 25, 1944, 4:00 p.m. Paul had been napping. Antoine had told him to stay in his room all day. The Americans and British were set to enter the city from the north and the Free French from the south. The Ritz was holding its collective breath. He was awakened by the bells starting up all across the city. He started to rise from the bed, when the door burst open and what looked like a madman in fatigues, his shirt open to reveal a hairy chest bounded into the room. He was carrying a British submarine gun slung under one arm, and two champagne bottles under the other. A gun holster drooped off a thick black belt around an also thick stomach. He was so rumpled that Paul doubted the man had slept in days. "This is my room. You got ten minutes to move your shit out of it," the man barked and then he was gone. Antoine appeared in the doorway in the wake of the wild man. "Who the hell was that?" Paul asked. "That was Ernest Hemingway. He's liberating the Ritz. And this is his room. I think I told you that. You'd best clear out as directed. We have other rooms. I hear he's a dangerous shot when he's drunk." "He's liberated the Ritz?" Paul said. "The Germans all left yesterday and the staff put up the tricolor right after they were gone—and there were British soldiers in here already before this guy showed up." Puttin' on the Ritz "True, but men like Hemingway write history," Antoine answered. "Tomorrow's headline will read that the Ritz Paris was liberated by Ernest Hemingway. Now, scrape your clothes together and come on up to my room until—" He didn't get any further, as crowding around him and into the room were three rough-looking Frenchmen. Resistance fighters. "Paul Stainer?" the one who appeared to be their leader said. "Come with us." He was holding a copy of The Collaborator. * * * * August 27, 1944 Having taken confession on his knees at the hem of the Catholic priest, with the jailer standing by, Paul rose to his feet. He flinched again at the sound of another salvo of gunshots from the courtyard. "Just a minute. Not today for this one." Paul looked up sharply. He recognized the voice. Noell Giroux, looking like any of the other French Resistance fighters and grayer but slightly slimmer and more muscular now than when Paul had slept with him, was handing a document to the jailer. Antoine was standing behind him. "He's not a collaborator," Giroux said. "And he's an American. You couldn't do it like this for an American even if he was a collaborator." He turned to Paul, "Why in the hell didn't you tell them you are an American?" "You took my documentation," Paul said, his voice shaking from how close he'd come to death. "And I didn't know it mattered that I wasn't really French." "Of course it matters. How do you think the Duke and Duchess of Windsor made it out of France alive as vocal as they were as Nazi sympathizers? There's a process for foreigners. We can't simply shoot them. We're not the Germans." The next afternoon, in a guest room of the Ritz, Giroux heaved his more muscular, but still meaty, body up from between Paul's bent and spread legs and, with a huffing sound, rolled over to the side. "Shit, I'm getting too fat for this," he said. "But I fucked you good, didn't I?" "Yes, you fucked me good," Paul answered. And Noell had fucked him good. There was nothing wrong with Noell's cock or his technique. Noell had fucked him repeatedly in this room at the Ritz since the previous afternoon. Paul figured he'd owed Noell the night of fuck for having saved him. Although it was really Antoine who had ultimately saved him by affirming that Paul had known things the Resistance was doing—and even had been saving French-owned artwork himself—and hadn't passed the information on to the Germans. And there was no reason to believe he told the Germans anything of importance to the Allied interests. Noell's declaration—as a resistance unit chief—that Paul was an American would have kept him alive but not free and out of trouble in the short run. "I need to go thank Antoine now," Paul said. He rose from the bed before Noell could object and pulled on trousers and a shirt. He found Antoine in his room, stripped off the clothes again, pushed Antoine down on his back on the bed, and rode his cock for over an hour in a variety of positions and giving Antoine two ejaculations. He dressed again and went down to the rue Cambon bar where, despite all of the Resistance work the bartender, Frank Meier, had been in, he was still overseeing the bar service. "I wouldn't entrust this to anyone in the days that the old crew are gathering again," Frank told Paul. "The old crew?" Paul asked. "I think you've met Papa Hemingway already in some sort of frenzied introduction," Frank said, pointing out the table where the writer was describing how he personally had liberated Paris. "Sitting with him are the writers Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir," Meier said. "They arrived this afternoon. By tonight, this place is going to be back up to its game in famous hotel residents." "I left something with you. Do you still have it?" Paul asked. "Yes, right here, along with half of the other secrets from every spy agency and news organization in the world," Meier said, fishing a packet covered with oilskin from a pile of other packets and envelopes. As he left the bar, Paul wondered what Frank Meier would have thought—or done—if he'd known that the packet contained Paul's safe conduct from wherever there was a German presence to Berlin—to Garren von Kaube. That evening he searched the bars of the lower class neighborhoods where the victory of liberation was being celebrated until he found a farmer displaced from Alsace-Lorraine who was determined to set out in his truck that evening to return to his home. Paul let the man fuck him in exchange for a ride to as close to the retreating Germans as the man was willing to get.