Tea with the Prince

June 1929, Tokyo, Japan

I was straining for him to start. I ran my hands down his hard-muscled back from the shoulder blades to his buttocks, pushing his trousers down further on his buttocks and clutching at the orbs, willing him to start the stroking. He was inside me deep and I was panting hard for him.

He spoke from the hollow of my throat. “I . . . we need a favor of you.”

A favor? What in the hell was this? He had me on the floor of his hotel room, my legs spread and bent, him lying on top of me between them. My trousers and briefs off, my shirt open to the work of his lips and teeth on my nipples. He was inside me, goddamnit. Why wasn’t he fucking me? Why was he picking a time like this to speak of a favor?

“Fuck me,” I murmured. “Give me your cum.”

He continued, as if he didn’t hear me. “A prince, a professor at Tokyo University. We need his permission to get into the private art collection in Kyoto.”

Private art collection. He was speaking of the homoerotic art he wanted to see during this university study tour to Japan. This whole study tour was probably because he wanted to get into that collection of homoerotic art in Kyoto. That was what Professor Tyndale did on the side himself--sketches of men fucking. And Tyndale was good at it. He had shown me his art that first time, that old “Come up and see my etchings” ploy, and it had aroused me so well that I’d laid down and opened my legs to him then--and whenever he wanted me to since then.

“Fuck me,” I whined. The professor was old--maybe in his late forties--and gaunt and ugly. But he had a good cock. I wanted his cock now. Not just inside me. Stroking. To pump me deep. To fuck me. to blast me with his cum. To make me come too.

“He wants me to come to tea with him. To bring a young student with me. A willing young student. He says he likes young blond men.”

“Please do it; do me now,” I whimpered.

Tyndale cupped the side of my head, ran his fingers into my blond curls and kissed me on the lips. Coming out of the kiss, he gave me three slow, deep, long strokes. I buried my fingernails in his butt cheeks, arched my back, and, through pants, cried out, “Yes, yes, fuck me!”

But he held there. “I would be there too. He wants sketches done. Will you do us this favor? The study group needs to see this collection.”

“Fuck me and I’ll do anything you want.”

He began to stroke, establishing a steady, deep beat. Lost to him, I arched my back, as his lips went to my nipples, and ran my hand up and down his back from his shoulder blades to his buttocks, digging my claws in at the down thrust. I panted and set my pelvis in motion in a counterthrust, writhing under him, no thoughts in my mind of anything but that staff working my passage.

He tensed, held, and ejaculated in two bursts, holding for three after spurts, creaming me deep inside as I purred and sighed and ran my fingers up into his hair, pulling his face to mine for a deep kiss.

Tyndale went up on his knees between my thighs and looked down into my eyes.

“We meet him at the Meiji Shrine tomorrow at 3:00 and he’ll take us to wherever he wants to perform the tea ceremony,” he said, adding, “You haven’t come yet. Masturbate yourself for me, please. I want to see you come.”

Dutifully, I encased my own hard cock in my hand and began to stroke it. He slipped his hand under my buttocks, and I felt one, and then two, fingers enter my ass, search for, and finding, the prostate.

My eyes went to his now-slick cock, slick with his own cum. The best feature of him. It had only gone half flaccid and was thickening again as he watched me masturbate and he fingered my ass. I knew he was going to fuck me again. That knowledge drove my arousal, and minutes later I tensed, arched my back, and shot my load. Immediately, he was lowering his body to mine again, entering me, grabbing my knees in his hands, rowing my legs, moving them back and forth--pushing them wide apart as he thrust in, pulling them together as he drew back.

In ecstasy, I arched my back, threw my head back, and in a panting voice of total surrender, whispered to the ceiling, “Yes, yes, fuck me,” as the pumping of his cock picked up speed.

* * * *

The first indication I had that the man we were meeting was anyone of importance, even though Professor Tyndale had said he was a prince, was when our car was let through in front of the shrine when all others were being kept back. There were three black Duisenberg limousines lined up in front of the Torii--the ceremonial gate--of the shrine, and burly Japanese men in black suits cordoning off the area.

At the top of the steps up into the first shrine hall stood a small-stature, mousy-looking Japanese man, graying hair, wearing wire-rim eyeglasses and a black, tailored suit, complete with vest and top hat.

Professor Tyndale leaned over and whispered, “Prince Satsuma,” in my ear.

It was obvious to me then that the man was of some import because a crowd had gathered behind the imaginary line the black-suited guards had set and were bowing their heads in the prince’s direction. This was a chore for them, because as soon as Tyndale and I stepped out of our car, I became another focus of attention, and those in the crowds were doing what they could to look at me too. I had grown used to the attention in Tokyo, because, with the exception of a contingent of jackbooted Nazi Party Germans roaming the streets of Tokyo during what later proved to be secret pact talks between the Japanese and Germans, blond young men were few and far between in Tokyo in the later years of the 1920s. And it was supposedly good luck to touch blond hair. So, I was getting a lot of furtive attention during this university art class study tour to Japan, the last, we were told what probably would occur in a while, as the flames of war were building in Asia.

So, this little man was going to fuck me in order for Professor Tyndale to have access to a collection of homoerotic art in Kyoto, I thought. Piece of cake; he was such a runt, I thought. He was all mousy diffidence and refinement as he showed the two of us through the shrine, with his guards clearing the spaces so that we had a private tour. During the tour I had to reassess my impression that he was a weak runt. He led me from space to space with a grip of steel on my arm that belied his looks and his weak, tinny-voice precise English that showed him to be a professor type as well as a prince.

As we stood in front of a massive reclining Buddha in polished wood, he stood close behind me. With one hand he pointed my attention to the fundoshi--the loin cloth--the statue was wearing and the subtle peeking out at one side of the bulb of a cock. He moved his other hand around my belly and down and was fondling my package. He also was holding me close into his body from behind.

I look sharply to the side to catch Professor Tyndale’s attention to what was happening, and he just smiled, shrugged slightly, and gave me a furtive palms-down signal. Obviously the permission to view the art collection wasn’t a done deal. There was a checking out of the goods phase. I stood there, dutifully, in front of the Buddha of the Peeking Penis, while the short and wiry Japanese prince felt up my body from my throat to my knees with strong, searching hands. Tyndale and the bodyguards stood, pretending not to be watching, as if nothing untoward was happening.

Satsuma grunted and turned, and we were making our way back to car park, the prince and Tyndale in front of me. I heard Tyndale lean over and ask, “Satisfactory?” and the prince answer, “Quite satisfactory indeed.”

* * * *

We were sitting on eight-inch-deep, silk-covered cushions with a low tea table between us. Professor Tyndale was sitting across from the prince and me, his sketch book and charcoals at his side. The prince was sitting very close beside me.

In addition to two ceramic tea pots and three cups for tea sitting on the table between us, other objects, one of which had me hyperventilating, were set off to the side. There was a bowl of fragrant oil, a six-inch strand of ivory beads with a tiny eyehook at one end--and a clear-glass knobbly dildo, very definitely a dildo, as it was slightly curved up with a vein on the underside running across the knobs and the head on the end undoubtedly was in the form of a penis bulb.

Nothing was said about the added implements. The conversation was quite refined, with the prince providing a step-by-step explanation of the tea ceremony. The surroundings were sparse, but richly appointed, the setting definitely Japanese, with shoji screens and niches with Ikebana--flower--arrangements in them. There were few pieces of art on the walls; what was there was homoerotic and was lit. A Roman-like bronze sculpture was in one corner of the room. It was of two torsos, rather than the usual one, armless and legless, accentuating the muscularity of the torsos. The torso in front was in erection, the bronze plate of this hanging low from the bottom of the torso plate. The torso in front was slightly turned so the root of the cock of the one behind could be seen buried in the ass of the one in front.

Nothing was being hidden about the reality that this was the house of a man who fucked other men and that I was going to be fucked.

The house itself was a conundrum and screamed of refinement, wealth, and power in Japan. The estate took up a whole block in a bustling downtown area of the city. The grounds were so covered in manicured and landscaped foliage that the house could not be seen from beyond the grounds and the city could barely be heard from the house. The house itself was set on a small man-made hill in the center of the property. The surprise was that the house obviously was the design of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The prince explained that Wright had accepted the commission to design it, the original house having burned down, while he was building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which had been completed six years earlier.

Once inside, the blending of Japanese tradition and Wright’s style was shown to be perfection.

After we entered the house, both Professor Tyndale and I were led off to a room walled with shoji screens, floored in tatami matting, and overlooking a walled pocket garden with a small pond surrounded by rocks and foliage. The pond turned out to be a tub of fragrant, steaming water, where we were bathed (and embraced, kissed, and fondled each other) before being dressed in silk yukatas--robes--Tyndale in white, me in a rich red--with only one-material-length fundoshi wrapped and knotted underneath.

The tea ceremony was long and involved, and my tea came from a separate pot than the one the prince served Tyndale and himself from. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. Almost immediately upon drinking the tea, I began to feel all tingly, warm, weak, and ultra sensitive to the touch all over my body.

The ceremony over, servants, with well-formed, muscular bodies, and wearing only fundoshis, appeared, heads bowed and not looking at any of us, and turned the tea table so that it was at the opposite side of the prince from me. They took away the tea implements. They left the bowl of fragrant oil, the string of beads, and the glass dildo.

Tyndale rose and I started to do so as well, assuming he’d take the lead in showing me what I should do. But he motioned me to stay in place, and the prince put an arm around me, in which I again was surprised at the strength of him, and held me in place, pulled close into his side. The servants carried the bolster Tyndale had been sitting on to the far side of the room, and he settled down there with his sketch book and charcoals.

As pedantic as the prince had been about explaining every aspect of the tea ceremony--other than the drug he was using on me--and as long as the ceremony had taken, I expected a longer phase of getting down to sex. But it didn’t happen that way.

It started with a kiss on the lips, but while that was happening, the prince was brushing his blue-silk yukata open--only to expose his cock and groin. He already was in erection. With a hand cupping the back of my head, he made my eyes lower as we came out of the kiss to ensure that I saw what he had uncovered. I shivered and gave a little moan. He may be a small man, but there was nothing small about his cock. It wasn’t thick, but it was long, long, long. It was upcurved, in angry erection, accentuated as it was stained red; and it had a thick Prince Albert ring in the bulb.

Upon being assured I’d seen the cock, which he could have told from my intake of breath, the start of light panting, and my low moans, he grasped my left hand and pulled it around, nudging me to take the cock in my hand, which I did. Directing me only by movement, not by spoken command, he signaled that my fist should be open and loose, so that he could stroke his cock in the fist, which he started to do.

The fingers of the hand he had at the back of my head--his left--were buried in my blond curls, gripped my hair, and pulled my head cruelly back. With his right hand, he brushed my yukata open at my breast, and he possessed my left nipple with his mouth and teeth. His right hand then brushed my yukata open at my crotch and, with one deft pull at the knot of the fundoshi, he stripped that away and took my cock in his hand. His hand was slathered in oil, and I realized that he must have dipped it in the bowl of warm oil on the tea table. After slick-stroking my cock for a minute or more, he dipped his hand in the oil again and slathered it over my balls, letting it drizzle down between my crack, my pelvis rolled-up, and entering my ass with oiled fingers

I lay, trapped in his strong embrace, breathing heavily, all of my senses, sexually energized but feeling physically weak from the drug he’d given me, pinging on what his hands, lips, and teeth were doing to my body.

“Fuck me, fuck me please,” I softly whimpered.

He made me come with his hand stroking my cock. Across the room, Professor Tyndale was sketching like crazy, tearing one sheet off when he was done, and moving on to the next, capturing each change of position initiated and controlled by the prince.

The prince moved into the next major change, turning me to face him more, with my groin totally exposed down and under to my hole, with my pelvis rolled up, my weight on the small of my back. My left leg was bent, the sole of that foot buried in the tatami matting. My right leg was raised straight up his chest, my ankle hooked on the back of the prince’s neck. We were still mostly covered, with only his crotch, his pubic bush hair; a darker black than the grayer hair on his head, and his angry, long, upcurved cock still in hard erection, exposed. My left pec, with its puckered nipple, and my crotch area were exposed.

I watched, mewing softly, past the unavoidable screaming erection on the man, to the tea table, where he was spinning the head of the glass dildo in the bowl of oil. I watched in fear, and arousing anticipation, as he slowly brought the dildo out of the bowl, moved it to my hole, slowly penetrated me with it, and fucked me. At first in a slow stroke seeking out every surface inside me and then hard and vigorously until, me straining against an embrace I couldn’t escape, I gave him another ejaculation.

I was still trying to bring my pulse under control from that when I was forced to watch him pick up the string of ivory beads, dip them in the oil, and attach them to the ring in the bulb of his cock. With no further preparation and certainly no explanation and no time for me to try to relax to it, the prince turned his pelvis toward mine; dipped his hips; came back up with his beads-enhanced cock head, deftly targeting my entrance; and plunged up inside me. The dildo had opened me up to where I easily took the girth of him, but my eyes popped open from the effect of how deep he could get up into me.

I cried out and tried to writhe out from under him, but he was too strong for me. One hand was arching my head back with a grip in my head hair. The other was gripping my left thigh and holding my leg out. His cock, the beads aswirl, was pumping my passage hard and deep.

Tyndale was busily sketching on his pad. I knew that the resulting sketches would become part of the prince’s homoerotic art collection--and maybe find their way eventually into the Kyoto collection that Tyndale was so hot on seeing.

I didn’t really care at that point. The little Jap was giving me the fuck of my life.

He moved me to the position of kneeling over the bolster, my elbows on the tatami matting on the other side of the bolster. My yukata was pulled up and gathered around my waist. The prince was naked, except for his glasses, his body wiry and thin, but his muscles hard, and his small size accentuating the angry length of his cock, the beads drooping down to the tatami. Kneeling at an angle behind me to give Tyndale a shot of my buttocks and erection and drooping balls between my spread thighs, the prince leaned over and ate out my ass, distended and squeezed my balls, and milked my cock through my legs. He mounted my ass and finished me off in a good ten minutes of stroking and swirling the ivory beads inside me.

He left us then, Tyndale finishing up his sketches and me laying in a heap, belly over the bolster, and moaning and purring having been finished royally--in more ways than one.

When a servant came to usher the professor out of the room, I started to rise, having difficulty doing so because of how deeply I felt the prince still inside me in the form of my rippling passage walls and his cum seemly in my stomach. But Tyndale signaled me to remain.

“You are staying here until we return from Kyoto,” he said. “You are to help the prince in a project of his own.”

If his project included more of his cock work inside me, that didn’t bother me a bit, I thought. But then I looked up to watch Tyndale being escorted out of the room, I saw, entering the room, one of the jackbooted German Nazi generals who had been roaming around Tokyo. He had a big smile on his face, he was lightly slapping his leg with a riding crop, and he was unbuttoning his brown uniform shirt.

* * * *

December 9, 1937, Nanking, China

I moved the pillow from underneath the small of my back and placed it under the other pillows behind my head. After reaching for the cigarettes and lighting up, I looked down the line of my naked body, my legs still spread and bent, and watched the German colonel dress in the black uniform of the Nazi Party. This was the first time I’d seen Heinrich Krentz dressed thusly. He’d told me that it was for expediency. The less-dressy khaki uniform of the Chinese Nationalist Army that he had been wearing as a secret German adviser to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist military was folded into a suitcase set on a nearby chair.

“Do you really have to go, Heinrich?” I asked. “Is it really not safe here?”

“The Generalissimo left two days ago. The Japanese 10th Army is closing in on the city on two sides. I haven’t been released by Berlin as adjunct to the Chinese yet. I must follow them to Chungking. You should come as well, Wilhelm. I can guarantee your transport.”

“Can I leave on the 15th?” I asked “The university is being packed out to go to Chungking. I have students I’m responsible for.”

“That might work. But not much longer after that--especially for your Chinese students. The reports say that the Japanese march from Shanghai has been brutal. No prisoners taken; no one left alive along the track.”

“Surely that’s just propaganda.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. In fact, I think you should leave with me today.”

“I have responsibilities. But I’ll miss you until I can catch up with you in Chungking,” I said.

And the strange thing was that I would miss him. He was my third lover--no, master--in the eight years since I’d been forcibly taken back to Germany from Tokyo after Prince Satsuma had given me to the Nazi generals who had ravished me mercilessly. I had been beaten so much into submission that I raised no objection when I was hustled back to Berlin with them--I had come to accept and then to seek the rough sex. In time, I’d been given more freedom by the general who controlled me and even permitted to go to the university in Heidelberg to complete my art degrees.

When Heinrich brought me out to China with him on his adviser tour, I was given a professor position at the University of Nanking, and we lived together as partners. I’d almost completely forgotten that I was once an American with free reign of my life. I even was more used to my German name, Wilhelm, now than the name I’d been given, William. And the Toliver surname never was used anymore. I was documented as Wilhelm Krentz, Heinrich’s son. For social purposes the father and son relationship was established. Only a few of the Chinese servants knew I slept in Heinrich’s bedroom, under him or that sometimes he lashed me to a pillar, flogged me, and then fucked me still tied to the pillar.

We were believable as father and son, I suppose, if you considered that Heinrich had been quite young when I was born. We were both Teutonic blonds, qualified for the master race. And qualified in more ways than hair color too. Both of us were blue-eyed and of strong, handsome features. Our body styles were different--his tall, solid, muscular, hung, and mine more lithe and trim and on the shorter side, but we were similar enough for me just to be considered to favor my mother more than my father.

That he was muscular, hung, virile, and vigorous was enough to keep me satisfied with the third German Nazi Party member who had virtually owned me for the last eight years. At twenty-seven, I was lucky to have a god of a man of forty-four, like Heinrich, serving as my protector and master.

His manner changed when I said I’d miss him. In some ways I was more master of him than he of me. I could arouse him quickly, and as I lay there, naked, reaching for my half-hard cock, and giving him a “come hither” look, I could see his resolve on leaving me melt. He had fucked me twice after we had awakened that morning--more times the previous night--as if he couldn’t pull away from me and leave me here in Nanking.

“Do you really have to leave right now? You don’t have another half hour?” I asked.

When his trousers hit the floor, I saw that he already was in erection. I barely had time to snuff out my cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand before he was upon me, turning me, coaxing me up on my knees at the end of the bed.

“Yes!” I cried out as he entered me strong and deep from the rear, grabbed the hair on the back of my head, arching my torso up toward his face. He fucked me hard and brutally, as all of the Germans had.

Just like the Japanese marching on Nanking from Shanghai--taking no prisoners.

* * * *

December 13, 1937, Nanking, China

“Professor Krentz? Wilhelm Krentz?”

“Yes,” I answered, standing at the door, maintaining a position between me and the students in the art studio who were packing up art supplies. A Japanese officer, backed up by several soldiers, all with rifles drawn with bayonets attached to them. There had been sounds of gunshots and screaming as the Japanese soldiers had spread out across the university campus, having easily broken through the city defenses, such as they were, that morning. The government and most of the Nationalist army had already drawn off into the interior of the country.

“You are Wilhelm Krentz, German citizen?” the Japanese officer asked again.

“Yes,” I answered, not really lying anymore, I suppose, as I had been in German hands for the last eight years and no American had come looking for me. I handed over the papers that Heinrich had made sure I had documenting me as a German with German government and Nazi Party connections.

I’d asked Heinrich before he left why he was so adamant that I have these papers.

“If the Japanese see these before they shoot you, you should be safe--if you don’t leave Nanking in time. The Chinese don’t know, but Germany--the Nazi Party--has a secret pact with the Japanese. We’re allies. Our leaders in Berlin just want to be seen backing both horses in this war until we can see who will win.”

I obviously hadn’t left Nanking in time.

“Yes, these papers are in order. Come with me, please.”

“My students. I have a responsibility for my students,” I said. But soldiers had already stepped forward, taken me in hand, and were dragging me down the hall. Other soldiers entered the art studio. I was only half way down the stairs when I heard the shots and screaming, the screaming quickly cut off. I nearly collapsed on the stairs, screaming myself in despair, anger, and frustration, but strong hands carried me out of the building and loaded me onto the back of a canvas-covered truck.

I was taken into the foreign quarter, which was nearly deserted, except for the scurrying about of Chinese civilians, most being pursued by Japanese soldiers--and most being run down and dispatched within my sight until I pulled back from the back of the truck and also in my hearing, which I couldn’t deaden and was forever after haunted by.

The truck stopped at a stone villa, built in the Western style, and, dejected and my wits dulled, I was taken up the stairs and to a dining room. The table had been pulled to the wall and a low table supporting a Japanese tea set was in its place. Cushions were spread on the other side of the table, and at one side of these sat an elderly Japanese man in a blue, billowy silk yukata. He lifted his head and I sucked in air. It was Prince Satsuma. He was grayer now, in his early sixties, but he still was trim and his back was ramrod straight. He was nearly bald.

“Come, take tea with me, William,” he said simply, gesturing to the cushion beside him, as the Japanese soldiers who had brought me here melted out of the room. “Please take off your clothes and put that yukata on before you sit by me,” he said.

“How . . . why . . . ?” I stammered.

“It doesn’t matter. It only matters that I found you in time and that you are safe with me. Come over to me. We’ll take some tea and then I will be inside you again. I’ve often thought of you, the sweetness and yielding nature of you. I have a room back in Tokyo lined with drawings of you being taken by me and other men. Very sweet and invigorating. They had helped keep me young--my chinko hard and vigorous. You’ll be interested to know I still can fill and seed you.”

And he could. Resigned to giving him what he wanted, I sat by him, brushed the folds open at his groin, and found him still capable of an erection and with the Prince Albert ring in the head of his cock. As he rolled over on top of me, I brushed my yukata open, bent and spread my legs, rolled my pelvis up, and took him deep inside me.

We stayed in the villa--in hiding it seemed--as the city died around us. Satsuma never left the villa in the five weeks we were there. He wore a general’s military uniform but I could see no invasion or occupation force that he commanded and later could testify he was at the Rape of Nanking but couldn’t attest to him having had any part in it--quite the contrary. He rarely was anywhere but on top of and inside me. I could hardly say at a military inquest that he was that close to me all of the time, though.

After five weeks of looting and raping across the city, the pillage seemed to die down. There really was no one left to rape or rob. Only then did he say, “I think it’s safe for us to leave now.”

We did, in a staff car, taking us all the way back to Shanghai and then by ship to Japan. In Japan, after enjoying my body for two more weeks in the room he told me about where sketches of me being fucked were hung, he had me driven to the American embassy and repatriated to my home country.

After what I’d seen and heard in Nanking, there was really only one thing I could do from there.

* * * *

September 15, 1945, Tokyo, Japan

I sat, ramrod straight, in the passenger seat of the jeep, while the soldiers jumped out of the canvas-covered truck behind me, pulled open the leaning gates of the park-like block in the middle of the bombed out Japanese capital, and then fanned out over the grounds, avoiding the cavernous holes dug out by Allied bombs.

My driver drove me up the winding road that had once trailed artfully through landscaped gardens, gardens that now were both overgrown and beaten down by bombs. I took in my breath and nearly teared up as we got within view of the palace that had once been a breathtaking Frank Lloyd Wright creation. Only one wing stood now, the central part of the building having taken a direct hit from an Allied bomb.

As I got out of the jeep and motioned a couple of the soldiers to come with me, the irony didn’t escape me that I now was doing what had been done to and for me back in Nanking eight years previously. I had come for a prince, to escort him safely through a city in turmoil.

We entered the building and I felt I knew the place. Indeed, I had been held prisoner in this wing for weeks as the German generals were given free rein in ravishing my body to their brutal needs and desires. Halfway down the corridor I brought the escort to a halt and spent a few minutes in the room where, sixteen years earlier, I had repeatedly been hung from an overhead beam and flogged and imprisoned in stocks and fucked. The prince had occasionally taken me as well, but he had me taken to more comfortable quarters to fuck me, and his attentions were almost soothing and love-like in contrast to the German generals he was trying to impress by gifting me to their sexual pleasures. I, of course, had never heard from or about Professor Tyndale again. For all I knew he was still roaming the private collection of homoerotic he had sold me to access.

My thoughts were conflicted. I could do an ineffectual search and let the prince go uncaptured. He had saved me in Nanking. But would that be doing him any favors? I doubted he would be the focus of military trials. He quite possibly would be examined and then let free. But perhaps he should be put on trial for having given me to the Germans in the first place. I never revealed how I had gotten from Tokyo to Germany and then back to China.

Prince Satsuma was right where I assumed I would find him. He had described his “William” room to me well enough in Nanking that I could walk directly to it. He was sitting on cushions behind a tea table in the center of the room.

I stopped the accompanying soldiers just outside the door, as a lieutenant announced, “Major William Toliver, of U.S. Army Intelligence”--a position I had risen too based on my facility with German and personal knowledge, which was put to good use, of the hierarchy in the Nazi Party. After that introduction, I told my escort they could go back to the jeep, that we would be out in a few minutes. I had spied something that settled my quandary on what to do here.

“You’re looking divine, William,” Satsuma said in a crackly voice. “The uniform becomes you, although I always preferred you naked.”

“I’ve come to take you back to our headquarters, prince. I have no idea whether you will be kept or for how long. But you must understand that there will have to be an investigation of your wartime activities.”

“I understand,” he said. He sounded so tired--and old. And he suddenly, at seventy-two was, in fact, at-the-end-of-his-rope old. Despite how he had used me, I found I no longer felt any bitterness toward him. He also had saved me in Nanking and, most important, hadn’t, as far as I could see, had anything to do with the Japanese carnage there.

“Do you understand, completely?” I asked. “You were in Nanking, as a general. It’s a matter of record. If you go with me, I will do what I can to separate you from what happened there, but you were there, so the questioning will be difficult.”

“I do understand. But I don’t think it will matter. Not unless your justice is swift. Come, can you come sit by me one last time and take tea with me?”

“We don’t have much time,” I said.

“No, there isn’t much time,” he said. “But, please, one last time.”

I went over and went down, cross-legged on the cushion beside him. There were two tea pots and he poured our tea from separate pots. That there were two tea pots and that he served us separately made all the difference in what I would do here. He was taking the responsibility and decision out of my hands. We drank.

In the silence that followed, I could hear him sniff back a tear. “If only . . . one more time.”

I reached into the folds of his yukata. As old as he was, he still could achieve an erection. As he softly moaned and sighed, I stroked him to a dribbling ejaculation that didn’t take long to accomplish. As he came, though, he coughed, sighed, slowly collapsed back onto the cushions, and expired.

I knew I’d have to make sure the tea in the two pots was carefully preserved and analyzed--and I would have to ensure that I expressed surprise at what had transpired here.