Escape to Constantinople

If he wasn’t so frightened; hot, even at midnight; and despairing of all the misery around him, Pyotr would have had to laugh. This was the third panicked evacuation he had been beset with within the last two years. And of the three, this one provided the least assurance that he would survive. Only the strong sea breeze coming in across the docks of the western Turkish harbor city of Smyrna was keeping the fires--and the blistering heat from the fires--in the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city from reaching where he and thousands of others were huddled on the city’s cobble-stoned quay, hoping for deliverance by Greek ships. They all had their faces turned to the sea to spy the promised Greek ships coming through the cordon that the Allied navies had established beyond the inner harbor to protect the evacuation ships--if they were ever to come.

It wasn’t the Bolsheviks he was fleeing now. It was the Turks and not because he was Russian but because he might be mistaken for a Greek or Armenian. Much of Turkey was held as an occupied nation by the Greeks--eternally hated on religious, ethnic, and traditional territorial grounds--at this time because the Greeks had been on the winning side of World War I and the Turks had not. Much of the Turkish animosity toward the Armenians in their midst--beyond the fact that Armenians were Christian--stemmed, much as the origin of hatred of Jews elsewhere in the world, from the Armenian community’s virtual family-based tight-fisted control of the economy. In the case of able-bodied young men like him, the Turks were striking first and asking questions never. Whenever the Turks were able to get the upper hand, they launched pogroms against both the Greek and Armenian communities. Pyotr had only gotten this far because others had spoken for him and miraculously had been believed.

He stirred restlessly, stifled by the long dress and all of the petticoats Katya had made him put on and by the heavy veil hiding--or at least he hoped hiding--his face. Katya was at his side again out on the crowded, open quay, holding him close to her, pretending that he was an ailing elderly woman relative, and doing everything she could to shield him from searching eyes that would recognize that he was not younger than eighteen nor older than forty-five and would mistake him for either Greek or Armenian. There was little reason for a young man of any other nationality to be here.

She had left his side soon after darkness had fallen over the milling crowd of refugees on the quay and as they were settling in for a summer of 1922 night when, yet again, no Greek ships had come into the harbor to start rescuing them. Pyotr knew what Katya was doing with the American relief service doctor in that waterfront building where the women in labor were being taken to give birth, and it drove him mad that she was doing it with the American and not him. But her connection with the American might be the only hope of survival for either one of them.

And he had no hold over Katya. She had never permitted him that close to her.

Because it was a pattern that had been going on for three nights, Katya was back at his side before midnight. Always at midnight, a great keening would go up across the packed harbor quay from the women camped out there. Most everyone out here was either a woman or a very young child or a very old man. None of the Greek and Armenian men who the Turks even suspected--in very broad terms--to be of military serviceable age were even let through the Turkish military’s blockade of the inner harbor to wait for evacuation. Any such man was, instead, if not killed on the spot, being “marched inland,” supposedly to holding camps, but in reality, just taken over the hills surrounding Smyrna, murdered, and shoveled into mass communal graves.

Each night the keening was met with the light of sweeping searchlights from the British, French, Italian, and American warships standing off from the harbor. Not knowing what was going on inside the harbor, the captains of the Allied ships believed that this sudden ghastly keening sound was some sort of mysterious phenomena that somehow could be quelled after several minutes by training the ships’ searchlights on the quay. What the crews of these foreign naval vessels didn’t realize about why their search lights were being successful in stopping the keening, however, was that the women in the crowds huddled on the quay were raising their voices in frightened chorus to stave off imminent danger.

This was the hour that raiding parties of the Turkish troops surrounding them were infiltrating the edges of the massed crowd of refugees. They were stealing onto the harbor quay to pull young woman--and sometimes boys--out of the mass and into the alleys behind their lines to have their way with them and then, with a flash of a knife, to thin out the “problem” of the Greeks and Armenians being “invited” to leave a now-liberated Turkey. The searchlights caused the soldiers to withdraw into their ranks, effectively meeting the keening women’s goal, even though the crews of the Allied warships assumed flooding the docks with light was calming the frightened refugees down.

The keening hadn’t started and yet both Pyotr and Katya sensed movement among the exhausted and sleeping groups of women, children, and infirm old men huddled around them. Katya pulled Pyotr close to her for mutual protection and they both barely were able to stifle their gasps as they realized that soldiers were stealing around the edges of the nearby groups, searching for prey. They had never come this far into the mass of the crowd before. Yet here they were. And they had seen that Pyotr--dressed as a woman--and Katya were awake, and were shrinking from them--and, in the dim light were more desirable and vulnerable than the other opportunities in the vicinity. There was no way that Katya could hide her beauty.

* * * *

Pyotr had marked his twenty-first birthday in late 1921 in the employ of the Greek merchant in various commodities, Theo Maneates. The Greek merchant lived with a wife, often absent in Athens, in a villa outside of Constantinople on a hill overlooking the Bosporus on the European bank of the city. When Pyotr moved into the small apartment over the stables, now turned into a garage for a big, black sedan, Maneates had a passage from the back hall of his villa to the garage enclosed with vine-covered trellising to mask his occasional nocturnal visits to Pyotr’s rooms. In the more than a year that Pyotr lived there, as much in fact Maneates’s chauffeur as in subterfuge, Pyotr settled into a life of relative comfort and security that he convinced himself was “enough.”

If it were only Maneates, who made few demands on him in either transportation or the bed, in his life, Pyotr would probably have been discontent. But, first, there was the big, black town car Pyotr learned to drive and maintain and that continued to fascinate him and to be a matter pride, proving he actually had learned to do something useful in life.

And then there also was Kenneth O’Dell. Maneates insisted on paying Pyotr well, and Pyotr felt the guilt of being a Romanov enough that he passed on most of what he earned in some fashion or other to the Russian refugee community, which still was choking the streets, and to the relief efforts of the people of the diplomatic and relief agency community in Constantinople.

Theo Maneates was a devout Greek Orthodox Christian and he had a strict rule against going anywhere but church on Sunday, so, after driving Maneates home, Pyotr almost always was free for the rest of the day. One of the charitable tasks he fell into performing regularly then was going to Helen Bristol’s refugee soup kitchen at the Sirkidji train station in Stambul and helping out on the serving line.

Another habit he thus fell into was to go to a nearby hotel with O’Dell after they had served the meal, in need of a man younger and more vigorous and attentive than Theo Maneates to make love to him for a couple of hours in the late afternoon.

So smitten with Pyotr was O’Dell that he was continually trying to pull Pyotr more and more into the social swirl of the diplomatic community.

“You are refined enough to pass as a Russian count, Pyotr,” O’Dell whispered to him one afternoon. Pyotr turned his face around from his American lover so that he could hide the ironic smile that he could not quell.

“I am taking a sail next weekend on the Sea of Marmara with the Bristols on Admiral Bristol’s flagship, Scorpion. Helen has seen you at the soup kitchen and more than once has invited you to come along. I’m sure Maneates will give you a couple of days off. I don’t think you’ve had any time off since he engaged your services. What do you say?”

“I say it’s very hard to act refined when you are laying on top of me with your cock buried deep inside me,” Pyotr answered with a low laugh. He had been fending off similar invitations from O’Dell for months.

“I am being serious, Pyotr, and the Bristols need never know that I make love to you. I doubt that they know I make love to any man. The admiral can’t see beyond his own nose, and I doubt that Helen cares. You’ve put off the invitation for some time. Helen Bristol will take offense, I think, if you continue doing so very much longer.”

“I work, body and soul, for Theo Maneates. You know that, Kenneth. I can’t be a chauffeur and lead a social life in the local diplomatic community as well. It’s a false refinement that, you see--certainly not a social status that would accord me a place in your society.”

“I don’t think it is false refinement. You deport yourself as a member of the higher classes. Ask Maneates for permission. My guess is that he will be delighted to let you go on the cruise--for reasons of his own.”

“I will ask, if you insist. But when he denies me permission, you must see that as reason to stop pressing me on the issue. And my guess at this very moment is that you are preparing to fuck me again, so there are far more pleasant things for us to be entertaining ourselves with than talking of class distinctions.”

“That’s a brilliant guess,” O’Dell answered, as he wrapped his arms around Pyotr’s chest and began the rhythm of the fuck inside him with a newly hardened staff.

As it turned out it was as O’Dell said, and Theo Maneates was delighted for Pyotr to become a cruise guest of the Bristols any time they wished. Bristol was the commander of the U.S. Black Sea Fleet and the senior American diplomat in Constantinople as well. And Maneates was a provisioner to the fleets when he could be. He was overjoyed at the prospect of getting an employee of his inside the Bristol inner circle, and from that time forward, Pyotr became a successful and influential salesman for Maneates as well as his chauffeur.

Helen Bristol was equally delighted with Pyotr, because he showed that he was, in fact, an expert bridge player. He also was easy on the eyes for Helen and the single women from the diplomatic and relief agency community who she invited on her cruises to even out the ratio of young naval officers and diplomats and young women. Both O’Dell and Maneates made certain that Pyotr had the right clothes to wear. Occasional near-starvation and the hard use of his body had kept him in a trim that matched his years at the Spartan military academy and that tailors clucked over in admiration.

They were sitting on the deck of the Scorpion one afternoon on the calm Sea of Marmara as O’Dell was showing his swimming prowess to the guests by swimming laps around the ship, when Helen leaned over to Pyotr while serving tea--Prohibition being in full force then so that harder liquor had to be served on one of the businessmen’s yachts that sailed with the government-owned Scorpion and lashed to it during the evening to serve as a private bar--and said, “I hope the accommodations are not too cramped for you. You play a delightful hand of bridge, and I hope we will have you on a cruise again soon.”

“The accommodations are just fine, Mrs. Bristol.” Pyotr had to lift the teacup straightaway to his lips to keep from smiling. He was bunking with Kenneth O’Dell. So, the accommodations were delightful. He also was tempted to smile at the thought that O’Dell most probably would be having him again “soon” during the cruise.

Pyotr did so well with subtly selling Theo Maneates wares to the U.S. community through his connections with the Bristols and Kenneth O’Dell that by the spring of 1922, he no longer was Theo Maneates’s chauffeur. He now was a trusted associate who Maneates wanted near him in his office. His remuneration improved, but only slightly, as the rich in Constantinople didn’t maintain wealth by giving any more of it away than they had to. But it did mean that Pyotr had a bit more to give in charity to the Russian refugee community in the city that didn’t seem to be decreasing any. Streams of White Russians continued to flow from the motherland, while only a trickle of refugees were leaving Constantinople for other lands.

Maneates’s businesses included, quite prominently, importing of copperware from Turkey into Western Europe. This segment of his trade was so profitable that he had an office and a small townhouse in the Turkish harbor town of Smyrna on the Mediterranean. He visited this office for a couple of weeks two or three times a year. In the summer of 1922, he visited Smyrna--and he took his newly minted and highly trusted associate Pyotr Apraksin, with him.

Smyrna was governed by the Greeks at the time, the Greeks having taken advantage of Turkey being on the losing side of World War I by gaining a foothold on the Asian territory of Turkey and slowly expanding their land control. The Turks and Greeks had traditionally been at each other’s throats back through time. Greece occupying Turkish territory had two major results--it caused the enmity between the two communities--and also the Turkish hatred for the more acquisitive and industrious ethnic group among them, the Armenians--to increase a hundredfold. And it also fomented a Turkish revolution in which upstart army officers under a colonel taking on the name Ataturk were well on the way to overthrowing the sultan of the rotting Ottoman Empire and creating a secular republic.

It was in the summer of 1922, when Theo Maneates took Pyotr to Smyrna, that the Turks defeated the Greek expansion and its army at Eskishehir. Within weeks Greek control of most of the Asian portion of Turkey, including in the city of Smyrna, had collapsed and the army retreated. Fast on the heels of their victory, the Turks, under the strong influence of Ataturk and his fellow army officers, were “inviting” Greeks and Armenians to emigrate immediately, and, increasingly, were forcing the issue with brutality.

But the Greeks and Armenians who did want to leave rather than be killed were not quickly able to do so. Once deciding they simply most go or die--albeit reluctant to do so because, under Turkish law, abandoned property vacated ownership--they fled, as possible, to coastal embarkation points. But initially there were no evacuation ships coming to pick them up. Greece didn’t want them to abandon their foothold in Turkey. Warships of the other Allies that had defeated Turkey’s side in the Great War, France, Italy, and England, as well as the naval contingent of the United States, which had not been at war with Turkey and thus wasn’t formally among the occupying Allied forces, were near whatever troubles there were. But these contingents considered themselves there only as observers. Slowly they became embroiled in the evacuations of Greeks and Armenians from coastal towns, but only slowly and only as the brutality mobilized public opinion in Europe and North America--much quicker than it mobilized action in Athens.

To “help” the Greeks and Armenians leave, “someone” started fires in the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna and started brutally herding women and young children and very old men to the inner harbor waterfront--and taking any male who could possibly take up arms out of the city, over the hill, and into mass graves.

When the fires started, Theo Maneates, a Greek, and Pyotr Apraksin, who quite easily could be mistaken for an Apollo-visaged Greek in the midst of chaos, were in Theo Maneates’s residence above his offices and shop five blocks from the Smyrna inner harbor docks.

* * * *

Prior to these events, Pyotr found Smyrna in the early summer of 1922 even more inviting than he’d found Constantinople with its fast-paced life. He had always found it easy to pick up languages, having been in a household in St. Petersburg that spoke English and French fluently as well as Russian and where he’d even encountered German-speaking relatives on occasion. He’d studied both Latin and Greek in his childhood and exposure to Theo Maneates was honing his Greek and adding modern idioms to his vocabulary. He had also endeavored to pick up Turkish since he’d arrived in Constantinople, and here, in Smyrna, in the slower-paced environment, he was spending time in the back garden of Theo’s townhouse improving his Turkish while watching the lithe, young Turkish gardener, Arief, bare-chested, sculpting a garden that had gone to the wild since Theo had last visited. As Arief worked, he and Pyotr bantered about in Turkish, with Pyotr’s facility with the language improving daily. Theo was quite particular about having all of his properties kept trimmed, so Arief was working virtually full time during the day tending to the garden. Many of the evenings Arief was spending in Theo’s bed on the third story of the small stone townhouse wedged in between other larger ones on a narrow street in the Greek quarter leading down to the Smyrna waterfront.

It was not that Theo was off Pyotr but, rather, that he liked variety and that the willowy, somewhat effeminate, dark Turk, Arief, was particularly arousing for a particular taste. Theo said that Arief, when swathed in veils and the candlelight of the night, reminded him of his wife when she was much younger and much less plump. Theo enjoyed fucking a young man dressed as a woman.

Pyotr also found Arief attractive--when he was working stripped down to his loin cloth in the garden--and Arief obviously was aroused by Pyotr, but Pyotr was not quite as much enticed with Theo’s invitation to join the other two in the bedroom on the third floor. When Theo asked why this was so, wondering if it was the effeminate nature of Arief and the costumes of the night, Pyotr said that this wasn’t the problem. He searched his brain for a reason even though he said he was unable to give Theo an explanation and decided that, indeed, he was not unaroused by the thought of fucking a transvestite. It was more that, when Pyotr observed the couplings, Arief played his role as an unwilling victim in these costume nights with Theo. It seemed to enhance Theo’s ardor to play a game of taking Arief by force, with Arief playing the game because he was trying to please Theo. However, for some reason, this brought to Pyotr’s mind how Mikhail had been passed around among the cadets in the academy barracks. Pyotr had had no particular trouble fucking Mikhail when the young man had begged for it--but he didn’t find the group using Mikhail by right and without consultation arousing.

Pyotr assured Theo that he didn’t find Arief unattracting, and it wasn’t long before he proved that.

It was a sunny day in the back garden the afternoon that Pyotr fucked Arief. Much of the attraction of the small, dark-haired Turk was that he looked much like Pyotr recalled that Katya looked in the ways that attracted him so. Perhaps it was in the way he moved as he worked in the garden.

Pyotr was laying on his back, only in shorts, on a grassy patch beside a summer house hidden from view of the townhouse by tall bushes, and Arief, covered only by a loin cloth, was working on reweaving the vines of a rose bush on the trellising around the summer house. Arief was looking particularly provocative to Pyotr, whose shorts were tenting up and who was groaning inwardly at the effort not to give himself relief. As he worked Arief was drilling Pyotr on Turkish idioms.

Not being able to help himself and almost not realizing he had done so, Pyotr had moved a hand to his crotch and his voice, in responding to Arief’s questions, had become thick and low. Arief stopped tugging at the vine and turned and looked at Pyotr.

“Why is it you stay away when old master invites you when I’m there in the night?” he asked. Pyotr could discern a bit of hurt in the young Turk’s voice. He called Theo old master and Pyotr young master. “Do you not know I would wish you to be inside me too? Do you not know how I ache for you? Do you not find me attracting?”

“I find you particularly attracting, Arief. But I normally lay with Theo as you do with him. That is why I am here--why Theo keeps me with him.” This, in fact, was part of the reason Pyotr had not joined in a threesome, but he didn’t want to tell Arief the main reason. He didn’t want to spoil Theo’s arousal in the arrangement that both he and Arief appeared to accept as satisfactory.

“But you don’t always go with a lover that way, do you?”

“No . . . not always.” Pyotr was thinking of Mikhail, and despite himself, he was being aroused. He encased his hard cock through the material of his shorts--he could not help himself from doing so.

“Please, let me do that.” The voice was barely a whisper, but it came from very near. Pyotr opened his eyes to find Arief kneeling beside him. Arief laid a hand on Pyotr’s belly. “Please,” he repeated, almost plaintively.

Pyotr didn’t answer, but he removed his hand from his crotch, and placed his arm around the kneeling Arief. His hand went to the small of Arief’s back, just above where the crevice started, and he sighed and stroked Arief there as Arief’s hand glided under his waistband and pushed Pyotr’s shorts down to his knees. As Arief’s mouth opened and slid down Pyotr’s shaft, Pyotr groaned, dug his heels into the grass, and raised his pelvis, groaning again as the sensual fingers of Arief’s hand wove into Pyotr’s ball sack, separating and pulling the young Russian’s testicles apart and gently rolling them with his fingers. Pyotr knew now why Theo groaned for Arief in the dark of the night in that other bedroom in ways that he didn’t for Pyotr when he was giving the Greek suck.

Arief too groaned as Pyotr moved his hand across Arief’s exposed buttocks cheeks where the loin cloth did not cover them and found and entered the young Turk’s passage with his finger, searching for and finding the young man’s prostate.

“Take me into the summer house, please. Now,” Arief moaned when he pulled off the cock that had been stroking up into his mouth cavity from the leverage Pyotr was using off the heels of his feet in the grass.

Arief was begging for it, just as Mikhail had done. This was different from the role playing Theo and Arief engaged in in the night. For this, Pyotr was in high arousal.

Arief was bent over the rail at the back of the summer house on his belly, as Pyotr covered him close from behind, nibbled on his ear, and fucked him slowly and deep. Pyotr was mumbling as he fucked. Arief, lost in a world he had dreamed about ever since Pyotr had arrived in Smyrna, didn’t pay attention to what Pyotr was mumbling beyond the occasional catch of a phrase referring to beauty and softness. If he had been listening, he most likely would have been curious why Pyotr was repeating the name “Katya.”

After that, sometimes Theo fucked Arief in the night, before Arief went off to his own home somewhere in the Turkish sector of the city, and Pyotr fucked him during the day in the back garden. And more than once Pyotr responded to Theo’s invitation to join Arief and him in Theo’s chamber and Theo would watch Pyotr fucking Arief while Arief was expertly sucking Theo hard, whereupon Theo would come behind Pyotr and fuck him from behind, while Pyotr was fucking Arief.

To his shame, Pyotr found that, increasingly, he was able to become lost in the world of taking an unwilling, female Arief with as much lust as Theo did.

Theo occasionally mentioned the possibility of Pyotr and him fucking Arief together--and Arief showed no reluctance to doing this. But the occasion never arrived. This arousing threesome, satisfactory to them all, was short lived.

For several days after the results of the battle at Eskishehir reached the ears of those in Smyrna and loud praises to Allah were being almost continuously sung from the minarets in the Turkish section, there was no apparent change in the city. The surreptitious departure in the night of most of the Greek government officials and the movement into the streets of the Turkish soldiers that had been encamped nearby went largely unnoted by the populace, although what didn’t go unnoticed was the subtle failure of some of the Greek and Armenian shops and cafés to open on expected mornings when they should be opened.

Theo Maneates, largely a stranger to the city, didn’t notice the subtle differences occurring. Wholly unaccustomed to the ways of Turkish, Greek, and Armenian balancing in life, Pyotr made no note of it either. If the two were curious why Arief simply did not appear for two days, they said nothing to each other, and both were so sexually exhausted from their most recent threesome that they each welcomed the respite. Theo might have noticed the paucity of business in his office downstairs and the absence of several of his Greek employees and nervous whisperings among the rest, but he was preoccupied with planning his near-term return to Constantinople.

Thus it was with some surprise that Pyotr ran across his former cadet friend, Mikhail Shevemetev, and his Turkish army captain sitting at a café table on the quay of the Smyrna waterfront. Pyotr knew that Mikhail and the Turk were somewhere about Smyrna, but the last Pyotr knew, the Turkish army was encamped outside the city and not permitted to enter it. Thus, he was surprised to see them.

Mikhail seemed even more surprised to see Pyotr here, because they had last met in Constantinople in circumstances that made Pyotr’s presence in Smyrna highly unlikely. Still, it was Mikhail who saw and hailed Pyotr first. But Pyotr noted that his friend seemed somewhat disconcerted when Pyotr came over, greeting them, and asked if he could join them.

After a bit of “what brings you here?” chitchat in Turkish, Pyotr slowly started throwing in phrases in Russian until he’d been able to work up to a question in Russian that he wanted to ask Mikhail without Edom Yilmaz, the Turkish captain, understanding it. The Turk, other than looking hard at Pyotr from time to time, had had little to say, and Mikhail’s reticence had not decreased. In fact, he increasingly looked like a scared rabbit. A wounded rabbit, as Pyotr could see some bruising on his small friend’s face and at his neck.

“Is something wrong?” Pyotr asked in Russian, using a tone that would suggest that he wasn’t saying anything serious. “You seemed scared--not completely happy to see me. While I can assure you that I’m very happy to see you again and to see that you are . . .” He almost said “all right,” but he swallowed the end of that sentence, because Mikhail didn’t really look all right. He was bruised and had lost weight. He looked gaunt.

“I had never expected to see you again,” Mikhail whispered after a brief pause. “I’m sorry. I thought never to encounter you again.”

“What is it?” Pyotr pressed.

“It’s the captain,” Mikhail said, obviously avoiding repeating the man’s name. “He fancied you when he saw you in at the restaurant in Constantinople. He knew the waiters and waitresses were available. And he pressed me until I admitted that you and I had made love--and that you laid with the professor and let him have his way with you--that he took you rather than the other way around. The captain is only interested in taking.”

“Yes, and?”

“He wants to fuck you too. He made me promise to arrange it if we ever met again.”

They sat and looked into each other’s eyes for a few moments. Pyotr could see the distress and fear--and genuine regret and concern--in Mikhail’s eyes.

“Is it he who beat you?”

A pause and then, “Yes. It was not bad at first. Not when the Greeks had the upper hand here. But now that the Turks are taking over again, he has become more aggressive. And more cruel. I’m . . . I’m afraid that one day he will kill me. And there will be no one in authority here who cares if he does.”

“Would it help you if I slept with him?”

Mikhail didn’t answer at first. He just looked away, toward the gathering naval ships of the Allied nations on the horizon out to sea. But that, of course, was an answer to the question.

“Will it help?” Pyotr repeated.

“I can’t ask you to do that. He is a cruel lover. He would bind you and use you roughly. I think he is obsessed with you. He has mentioned often that he wants to have you.”

“I have known cruelty and rough taking,” Pyotr answered in a low voice. He cleared his throat and turned his face toward the stony-aspected Turkish officer. “Mikhail tells me that you fancy me, Captain Yilmaz. Even before he said that, I was telling him what a handsome man you are, that I envied Mikhail, and that I wished I had someone handsome and virile like you to fuck me. And he told me that you are built like a stallion and might be interested. I know I am.”

The captain inclined his head, gave a little grunt, and Pyotr could see a smile that was as much a sneer as a smile forming on his lips. He obviously was pleased by the flattery.

Mikhail broke in with a strangled voice. “But I don’t think--”

“Mikhail tells me you like to fuck rough, a giving no quarter and taking-no-prisoners approach. I like that in a man,” Pyotr said. “I want a man to show me he’s a man. I want a man who will break me and use me to exhaustion. I think you might be that man. I think Turkish men dominate the best. I want to see you naked, to feel your teeth on my skin.” Mikhail collapsed into his chair with a deep sigh of resignation, and Pyotr could see Yilmaz’s eyes light up like a forest fire. A low growl was rising up from inside the Turkish soldier. Pyotr could see the man trembling, fighting hard to control himself from slamming Pyotr down on the café table top and having him right there.

How much worse could it be than it was with Nikolai, Pyotr wondered. He soon was to find out.

Pyotr was surprised to find out that Yilmaz had quarters right here in the city. He had assumed they would go to a hotel near the harbor--and that there would be a limited capability for bondage under such a situation. It wasn’t until just now that Pyotr realized fully that the center of power in Smyrna had already changed. And as soon as they entered Yilmaz’s bed chamber, Pyotr immediately understood the extent of the Turk’s fetishes. Whips and chains were openly displayed on the chamber walls.

The bed was a four poster, with lengths of roping and leather restraints hanging off each post and from the center of the headboard. While Mikhail watched with concern from a chair nearby, Pyotr, naked, sat on the end of the bed, with Edom, naked, standing between his spread thighs, and Pyotr sucking his cock hard.

When the captain was ready, he roughly pulled Pyotr up to his feet, punched him in the mouth with a fist, which sent Pyotr flopping onto his back on the bed, stunned. Before Pyotr had come out of his haze from the surprise blow, Edom had tied his wrists together to the lead from the headboard over his head and was working on spreading and raising his legs and restraining them high on the posts at the foot of the bed.

He briefly used a whip on Pyotr until red welts had been raised on his chest, belly, and thighs. This made Yilmaz hard as a rock and his face contorted in a mask of lust and cruelty. Grabbing Pyotr’s buttocks in a painful grip, the Turk raised the Russians pelvis to his throbbing cock, thrust deep inside him in one long slide, and fucked him hard to a prodigious, three-jerk ejaculation while he slapped Pyotr’s face, chewed on his nipples, and beat him with fists on the torso and thighs. Pyotr gave him the mixed noises of hurting but still wanting Edom Yilmaz pounding inside him that he knew the Turk would find arousing.

When Pyotr was released, he surprised the captain by pushing him back on the surface of the bed, mounting the cock Pyotr had brought back to hard with his mouth, and riding him hard, throwing his head back and begging Yilmaz for the cock between gaggings from the rhythmic chocking Yilmaz was giving his neck.

When it was done and Yilmaz acknowledged it was the best sex--at least the best willing sex--he’d had in a long time and that he wanted to see Pyotr again, Pyotr took the initiative to say that he didn’t think that Mikhail could withstand the taking that he could, and perhaps if Yilmaz was more gentle in fucking Mikhail, Pyotr would return to him as he wished.

The next night, Pyotr was awakened by the sound of angry voices in the floor below the bedrooms. He realized that it was light as day in the chamber as he rose from his bed, and then he could see through his window that the Greek quarter was on fire.

He was half way down the stairs when he was accosted by armed and angry Turks coming up toward him. They grabbed him with holds on his arms, legs, and nightshirt and dragged him down the stairs.

At the foot of the stairs, he recognized the sound of Arief, the gardener’s voice, in high, panicked pitch.

“Not Greek, not Greek,” he was crying out to the men manhandling Pyotr. “He is Russian. A Russian diplomat. Visiting Smyrna and looking to buy goods. We must not. We must not. A friend. A buyer.”

As quick as he had been seized, Pyotr was released and left in Theo’s living room. All alone. Theo was nowhere to be found in the house. Arief was gone as well.

There was no sense of being in safety, however. Flames were dancing beyond every window. Pyotr raced upstairs to throw on some clothes and then down two stories and out into a narrow street clogged with screaming people running in every direction and being accosted here and there by bands of Turkish thugs.

* * * *

Pyotr stumbled down the smoke-filled street, headed toward the harbor. It seemed that that was where Arief had screamed at him to go, before the young gardener was swept out of Theo’s house with the bloodthirsty band of Turkish vigilantes. He wondered if Theo had already gone there, although even while he thought about it, he’d realized that this wasn’t the case. He’d heard Theo’s screams. That had been what had awakened him. And he saw the blood on the living room carpet as he was struggling with the Turkish hoodlums. There was too much blood there.

This couldn’t be happening. But it was happening. And it was happening all around him. Out of the swirls of smoke, Pyotr saw tragedy all around him. He moved as if in a separate, surreal world. No one had accosted him--yet--but he wasn’t so delusional that he had any faith he’d ever make it to the harbor alive. Here there was a middle-aged man, clutching a canvas bag to his chest, protecting it, even as he was surrounded by Turkish youths--not more than boys, really--beating him to a pulp with clubs. On the other side of the street, even as Pyotr cleared by the first tableau, there were other Turks, with knives, who had cornered an elderly woman. Pyotr saw the gleam of the golden rings on her hands as she threw them up to block the look of horror on her face--and then, as he stumbled past, he saw the flash of a knife and her disembodied hand hit the cobblestones, as the Turks crouched down to retrieve the gold rings. Further on, a family was struggling down the road, and Pyotr heard the scream of one of their young daughters being snatched and pulled into an alley. A man stopped in his tracks and turned to the alley, with the rest of the family scurrying ahead. He didn’t reach the opening to the alley before he disappeared under a pile of bodies slashing at him with clubs and knives.

The young Russian himself didn’t make it too much further before he ran into the back of a horse-drawn cart with a thin, Western-clothed man atop flicking a whip and repeatedly yelling “American relief doctor; make way” in broken Turkish.

Amazingly, everyone in the street was making way for the cart. Pyotr was about to try to move around it when the canvas sacks at the back of the cart were raised far enough for him to see a face of an angel appear and two thin arms reaching out toward him. A voice was crying out, “Pyotr. Here. Climb under here. Quickly.”

And numb from surprise and shock, Pyotr felt Katya Betskoya drawing him into the cart and pulling canvas sacking over his body.

* * * *

“I don’t know how the Petrosians are faring,” Katya answered. “I fear the worst. Gurgen saw what was happening in Sevastopol and had his own ship there. We sailed a few days before the Bolsheviks invaded the Crimea and came here, to Smyrna, where Gurgen had family and part of his business in the Armenian quarter.”

“I was with Samuel at the American relief agency camp when the fires, killing, and looting started in the Armenian quarter. I couldn’t go back to the Petrosians’ house, and Samuel was coming down to the harbor to open a clinic in a house down on the harbor and said it was best if I came with him. I have been helping at his clinic and he said this was where the help would be needed.”

Pyotr and Katya were sitting off to the side of where the American doctor, Samuel Covington, and the aid workers who had already arrived at the small house opening directly onto the Smyrna quay were setting up cots and examination and treatment stations. Each of the relief workers wore a badge of safe passage with their name, age, and gender penned on them, issued by the Turkish army, to give them whatever safety was possible in the pandemonium around them. Katya had such a badge. There was none for Pyotr.

As yet there were no refugees who had found a clinic was opening in the harbor, although the wailing that could be heard from beyond the stone walls of the house indicated that crowds of frightened and wounded Greeks and Armenians were already arriving at the quay and it would not be long before the clinic would be swamped with business.

Katya had brought food and water to Pyotr and had said she could sit with him for a few minutes before she was needed. She listened calmly to Pyotr’s explanation of why he too was in Smyrna and the two spoke of the coincidence of circumstances that had brought them together again--and avoided talking about the probable fate of the Petrosians and Theo Maneates.

Samuel Covington came over to them as Pyotr was finishing the simple meal Katya had given him. Pyotr and the American doctor had already met briefly, and Covington was more focused on Katya now than on the young Russian who had suddenly appeared and with whom, Covington had been told in brief terms, Katya shared some sketchy past.

As Covington and Katya conversed quietly about preparations for the onslaught of patients, Pyotr had time to look the American over. There was familiarity between the two that warned Pyotr that their relationship wasn’t a casual--or even just a professional--one. The American doctor was tall and thin, wore glasses that apparently he would be nearly blind without, and had sandy-colored hair and a receding hairline. He seemed both patrician and severe in aspect and clearly was on edge from the great responsibility facing him within hours.

“We all need to get some sleep, for as long as we can,” Pyotr heard Covington say to Katya in a louder voice than he had been speaking to her in as Pyotr gave him the once over.

“There are rooms upstairs, Pyotr,” Katya said. “The cots there will be needed by patients soon enough, but you should take one in the room at the back of the building until it is needed. We also will need to think of some way to keep you safe but away from here until you can board one of the evacuation boats that should arrive at any time.”

“Some way to keep me safe?” Pyotr asked.

“Yes. The Turks are unlikely to pay much attention to whether you are Russian rather than Greek or Armenian, and they are taking away all Greek and Armenian men of serviceable age. Samuel tells me the Turkish authorities will be searching through this building every couple of hours to ensure we aren’t harboring any Greek or Armenian men. You have no badge, so there is no protection for you here--and not much for the rest of us if the Turks think we are harboring a fugitive. It won’t be safe for you to be out on the quay either without some sort of disguising of your age and gender. I will try to think of something. For now, try to get some sleep and gather your strength.”

Pyotr went to the room as assigned and slept fitfully enough that not more than an hour later he heard the sounds from the room to the front of the building--sounds that were familiar. Without thinking he rose from his cot and moved quietly out into the hallway and to the slightly open door of the room at the front.

By all rights he should have been shocked and angry and disillusioned all at once, but his life so far had become so taken up in turmoil and his attraction to Katya was so strong that, other than being surprised, he did not lose any of the ardor he had for her.

Katya was on her back on the edge of the cot, her skirt-covered legs reaching to the floor, and Samuel Covington, thin, wiry-muscled, naked and in full arousal, was crouched over her. She was nestled in one of his arms and his other one was up under the front of her skirt, up to his elbow. From the rustling movement of the material of Katya’s skirt, Pyotr could tell that Covington was working the center of her. His face was plastered to hers and they were kissing deeply and moaning almost in harmony. As Pyotr watched, Covington pushed Katya’s skirt up to her waist, exposing her well-turned calves, thighs, and naked pelvis. Pyotr gave a little cry, which the couple didn’t hear above their own sounds of lustful arousal, and sank to the floor, his eyes wide and unable to look away. Covington was masturbating Katya’s cock, which was hard and long. Nothing could pull Pyotr’s attention away from seeing the cock on Katya. He remained, collapsed on the floor, as their lovemaking continued and climaxed. There was no question that Covington knew who and what he was coupling with--or that he too was in high arousal, his cock, not as long as Katya’s, curving up in a hard arc from his groin. The American lowered his head to Katya’s belly, and to her audible sigh, opened his mouth over her shaft and slowly descended on it as she began a slow, rhythmic thrusting of her slim hips and reached for and encased Covington’s shaft in her small fist.

At the moment of penetration, Samuel Covington was laying on his stomach on the cot, with his hands dragging the floor on either side and his head lolled to the side. The expression on his face was one of ecstasy, and he was panting hard and moaning in a low drone. Katya, her skirts gathered up around her waist and her legs and hips naked, straddled Samuel’s hips and began fucking him in long, deep, masterful thrusts. Katya’s balls were slapping against Samuel’s buttocks cheeks in a tattoo that sounded like jabs of a shovel in mud to Pyotr’s ears. The man was groaning and grunting and writhing under her, begging her to fuck deeper and faster, as she reached back through his thighs, pulled his cock through, and pumped it with her fist. There was no question who mastered who. The act of Katya fucking the American sent a current of electricity through Pyotr’s body.

Where one day there may have been disbelief and disgust, Pyotr now, once the shock had passed, only felt arousal and the wish that Katya would be fucking him like the transvestite was fucking the American doctor. After Katya arched her back, gave a little cry, ejaculated inside the doctor, and collapsed on his back. Covington turned his face to hers and the two were kissing deeply, Pyotr gathered himself up from the floor in front of the door, returned to his cot in the other room, and masturbated himself to a fitful sleep in which he dreamed of Katya doing to him what she had done to the American doctor. There had been no question that the American had thoroughly enjoyed the coupling, nor that he was under Katya’s full control.

On the morrow, Pyotr found that Katya’s plan for him was to dress him in women’s clothes--which gave him a little thrill of being as close to her emotionally as possible--and to send him out on the quay to wait, in disguise, with the women, young children, and old men out there in the hope of getting on an evacuation ship--if and when they arrived in the harbor.

Katya spent as much time as she could out there with him to help him avoid contact with other people who might discover he wasn’t a woman. And thus it came to be that they were there together, at midnight, the night that a Turkish unit of soldiers raided into the crowd in search of women, girls, and boys to kidnap, defile, and send off into another world.

Two soldiers saw the beautiful Katya and each leaned down and grabbed an arm and started to pull her in two different directions. A third arrived and started to organize an effort to pull her toward the edge of the crowd. Other refugees were stirring, and the women were beginning to keen their warning of the presence of vultures. Pyotr leaped up and grabbed the men who were struggling with Katya. He managed to break their hold enough that Katya pulled free and melted into the crowd as the searchlights from the Allied naval vessels started to pan over the crowd.

The soldiers piled on Pyotr and manhandled him toward the edge of the crowd and the dark shadows of the buildings bordering the open quay. They had not yet discovered that he wasn’t a young woman. As they got to the edge of the crowd and the opening of a road up into the Turkish quarter, though, an officer appeared, barked orders, and the soldiers released Pyotr and evaporated into the shadows. They had ripped away enough of Pyotr’s clothing, though, that he was revealed to be a young man.

Other soldiers stepped forward prepared to take hold of him and start his way into the afterlife as they were doing with all other Greek and Armenian men of his age, when the officer barked orders again.

The officer was Captain Edom Yilmaz. He took possession of Pyotr, marched him up into the Turkish quarter in a quick step to his quarters, where he pushed Pyotr up the stairs to his bed chamber, bound him firmly to the bed, whipped him into whimpering submission, and fucked the stuffing out of him.

* * * *

“Pyotr, thank god you’re alive. But we haven’t much time. The Turk could come back at any moment.”

Pyotr struggled to open his eyes. Both were swollen from the beating the captain had given him while he fucked him over the hours--Pyotr had no idea how many. He was still tied to the bed, but Katya, Mikhail, and the American doctor were each at a corner, cutting the bounds away with knives.

“Wha . . .?” was the best that Pyotr could manage. He was bruised and in pain in every muscle.

“Shhh, conserve your strength,” Katya hissed. “I saw you being taken away and I sent one of the Turkish relief workers to follow you. The clinic has been closed down. The Turks see no need to give health care to the refugees on the quay; they’d prefer all of the refugees died. Samuel will take us back to the encampment in the cart. An American destroyer is off the coast there to evacuate the relief team, and Samuel is saying that you, Mikhail, and I are part of the team.”

She paused and looked down at Pyotr’s face. It was evident to Pyotr that she expected him to ask why the American would do this for her. But Pyotr knew why. He didn’t ask, and he didn’t judge. He only envied. Instead, he mumbled, “Mikhail too?”

“Yes, he’s going with us. The American ship will take us all back to Constantinople. Now don’t exert yourself further; you’ll need what’s left of your strength for the journey under sacks in the cart.”