Clouds over Antibes

I lay on the bunk in the cabin of my twenty-six-foot 1930 Elco Marinette cabin cruiser in the Antibes, France, yacht basin marina and tried not to scream as the Italian, Mateo Paoli, worked my channel with the oversized dildo. My wrists were tied and attached to the iron ring at the head of the bunk. I was on my back, legs splayed and bent, the soles of my bare feet flat on the surface of the bunk, a canvas ballast sack under the small of my back, lifting my pelvis, demonstrating my willingness to take the dildo.

The dildo was mine. I had agreed to this. He’d offered a lot of money to have his way with me like this and I needed money. The dildo was on the table when Mateo and I entered the cabin. He’d seen it as he was greasing up his gloved hand and decided to use that first. I couldn’t say I couldn’t manage it; it was my dildo. And I had agreed to be fisted too. I needed the money and he was a sexy man.

Mateo was tall, gaunt, hard-bodied, and distinguish looking, in his early fifties. His lion’s mane of hair gray made him look both patrician and commanding. We’d met on the clay courts of a tennis club not far from the Antibes harbor, with its yacht basin and extensive marina. Antibes, on the Côte d'Azur, the French Riviera, on the southern, Mediterranean coast, had been the playground of Europe since the 1920s, right up to two months previously, upon the German invasion of France in June 1940. Now it was becoming a refugee center, a stopping off place, still for the wealthy, but for those trying to move on to the United States and South America to escape the gathering storm of war. That’s what I was doing too, although I was trying to get back to the United States. I was an American, taking a year between my freshman and sophomore years at Dartmouth to do some sailing exploration in Europe. I augmented my travel funds by lying on my back for men for money.

My timing was just a bit off. I’d managed to get this far, but the money was running out. I’d need diesel to get any further away from the storm clouds floating over Europe, and the price of diesel was mounting with every passing day.

The Italian industrialist, himself taking the summer, as he’d always done, he said, to work from the French Riviera rather than Milan, had found himself looking for a tennis match at the club when I was finishing up giving a lesson there. I had no trouble discerning that he was shopping for more than a tennis partner.

I had money, but needed more to see myself home and my access to cabled funds had temporarily, I hoped, been cut off by the quick and unexpected fall of Paris to the Germans. I was giving tennis lessons here and there and lying on my back for men when I was particularly hard up for money. Mateo didn’t need tennis lesson—it was a chore for me to defeat him on the court. He was, however, quite interested in my lying on my back for him. He started coming on to me even before we got onto the court, and I didn’t discourage him. He acknowledged he’d be cruel and demanding, but I needed the money. He’d been up front about wanting to fist me. I knew that up front. He also looked like he was a stud for his age. He was certainly the best prospect at the tennis club that day.

He proved to be a stud for any age. He wasn’t my first Italian man. I’d always found Italians to be exceptional, and he didn’t change that observation.

I lay there on the bunk, staring at the wad of money on the table where the dildo had been, hoping that the money would last me until I could sail out of Antibes—for where, I wasn’t sure. Europe was in turmoil. Where I was now was still France, in name, under the Vichy government. But how long could the Vichy, under Marshal Pétain, be able to juggle supposed independence and German occupation? And where could I go from here to prepare to get safely back to the States?

Despite everything I had to think about, for now, this moment, I had to think about giving the Italian his money’s worth—about taking his fist. With luck, he’d want to pay me to take him again. He was sitting next to my prone body on the bunk, both of us naked, our tennis clothes mingling on the deck beside the bunk, the boat gently rocking against the marina pier, giving off a steady, dull thump, thump, thump cadence.

Staring at the wad of money, once more positioned beside the dildo the Italian had pulled out of my ass, I started panting and moaning as his fingers forced their way inside me, up to the knuckles, waiting for me to stretch to take him. His left hand was gliding over my body and he was leaning over me, looking intently into my eyes. He’d already explained that half of his pleasure in fisting a young man like me was to watch the youth’s facial expressions as he possessed and worked him with his hand.

I arched my back and head and gave a little cry as the greased knuckles breached my sphincter muscle. Mateo ran the fingers of his left hand into my blond curls and held my head to the surface of the bunk, leaning close over me, his face near mine, as he possessed me up to his wrist. He took my lips with his and I writhed and panted under him as the fist moved, slowly, in and out.

“Good, good,” he murmured. “Take it. Take it.”

At length, he pulled the hand out, moved over on top of me, and turned my body to where I was face down on the bunk. He put a hand on my belly and coaxed me up onto my knees, my cheek and chest pressed to the bunk. I didn’t fight him. I was cowed and exhausted from the fisting, even though it hadn’t lasted long. He positioned himself, mounted, on my raised ass, his thighs on either side of my hips. Still, I certainly knew he was there, thick, long, throbbing, teasing my hole by rubbing his mushroom cap around the rim. He slid inside me easily, having already opened me up with the dildo and his fist. He possessed me wholly, thickly, sure of his mastery. He was Italian. He fucked me to his ejaculation, breeding me, filling me deep, with his warm cum. Even in his fifties, he was a virile and vigorous man. The fucking motion augmented the natural thumping of the boat’s hull against the pier. His thrusts and my rocking against them had matched the rhythm of the thumping of the hull against the pier.

He was a stud. I had endured the fisting, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the cocking.

I held steady for him, giving him his money’s worth, hoping that what he’d paid would last me for two weeks or, better, that he’d enjoyed me enough to pay me to do it again. By the end of that two weeks, I needed to have moved on—toward home. Despite everything—despite how enjoyable and educational this trip through Europe in my cabin cruiser was—I needed to move on. War had arrived in France. The occupation was reaching out its claws toward me. The French Riviera wouldn’t be a playground for much longer.

Just as I’d learned that fascism and being gay didn’t mix well in Naples, I had the definite impression that being gay wouldn’t be safe here on the French Riviera if and when the Germans arrived.

* * * *

I went to bed on the boat early that night, feeling a bit alone and at odds because I had no clear plan on where to go from here. I was working my way from east to west in the Mediterranean with some loose plan to break out of the Med and sail to England or directly back to the States—or maybe the Caribbean, if I could be convinced that was safe in these uncertain times. I’d sailed over to England from Boston early the previous fall, with another guy, who was long gone now. I’m sure I could pick up someone else trying to get back to the States—but where? So far, I’d heard that Portugal would be my best bet—or maybe the Azores. Also, until I had a clear idea of what to do, I was husbanding my funds. I couldn’t afford to go carousing in the bars in the town above the yacht basin, although, from the sounds coming from the town, there was a lot of carousing going on.

So, I tried to sleep. But it was no use. I got up, pulled on cotton trousers, a T-shirt, and my sandals and decided to walk the lower streets of the town until I was drowsy enough to come back to the boat and sleep. I had half a notion that maybe I could pick up another guy who would pay for it. Maybe he would take me to a bar before.

I only made it to the street above the yacht basin, though. Looking up at the second, covered-porch story of a bar with a “bar and inn” sign out that was the source of considerable convivial boisterous noise, I spied two figures, entwined, in silhouette, backdropped by the light of lanterns under the ceiling of the porch covering. When they came apart, I saw—or thought I saw—that one of them was a small, trim woman—and the other was the Italian who’d fucked me for a fee that afternoon, Mateo Paoli.

So, maybe bisexual. OK, I didn’t mind. I hadn’t even known what a bisexual was when I’ve shoved off from the pier in Boston. I knew now, though—all part of the education of taking a gap year. It had just been men who had financed my travel across Europe. There were some women—usually older but still sexy—who contributed in exchange for my favors.

Paoli, seeing me coming up onto the quay from the marina piers, called out the magic words. “There you are, Brent. Come up and join us. We are celebrating the uncertainty while we can. Come up, lad. I’ll stand you your drinks. There are men here you’ll want to meet—and who will want to meet you.”

It was the “I’ll stand you your drinks” that had me entering the building and mounting the stairs to the second-floor porch, which seemed to be a private party area. There was a sign above the foot of the stairs that said “Oscar’s,” so I presumed I was going up to what was sort of a separate, specialty bar of the inn. And from what I’ve seen up the upper porch from the ground, I gathered that the “Oscar” probably stood for Oscar Wilde and signaled a literary men-for-men bar. That, in fact, was what I found.

Of course, there was that figure who had looked to be a woman.

By the time I got to what was obviously a private party, the “small, trim woman” who had been kissing Paoli had moved to the lap of a handsome Nordic blond guy with blue eyes, who had his hands all over her—and she wasn’t a “she.” She was a cross-dresser or a transvestite.

“Her name’s Louise—well, tonight it is. Tomorrow, with the town looking, she’s likely to be Louis,” a voice next to me said, in high-drawer British English. “Come, sit next to me,” the man continued.

He was a few years older than I was—not quite handsome, but with an interesting, angular face, and a mop of ginger-colored hair. “Mateo has been telling me about you—at least I think it’s you. An American, having floated in from Rome, with a cabin cruiser parked in the yacht basin. True? My name’s Mark Standish, by the way. I would so love to float away from here with you.”

“Yes, I’m an American. Brent Danforth,” I said.

“Mateo says you take it rough—that he had a good time with you. Says you let him use his fist.”

“A stupendous time,” Mateo said, as he took two beers from a young, French waiter, almost more beautiful than handsome, and with a ring in his right ear. If that meant here what it meant in New York at the time, the waiter was my competition at the table. And there were six men at the table—a very diverse group—and another guy who must be the innkeeper, hovering over the table—in addition to the transvestite, Louis or Louise, sitting on the blond man’s lap. All of them were being boisterous. Mateo sat at my right, next to the railing overlooking the yacht basin and pushed a beer in front of me.

“We aren’t usually this raucous,” Mark Standish, sitting to my left, leaned in toward me and practically yelled over the noise at the table.

“That’s right,” Mateo said, “we’re celebrating desperate times coming. We all, those of us at this table—a club that you have proven you will shine in—are intent on blazing our torches despite everything coming toward us.”

“A club? One I belong in?” I asked.

“Yes, you handsome young man,” Standish said. “We’re all of differing nationalities and talents, but we all share one thing—and with you, I presume. We’re all queer, and we’re all in the target sights of the gathering horde.”

Oh, I thought. Well, I couldn’t claim not to be gay—not after spending the afternoon with Mateo’s fist up my ass. And he seems to have shared that information with the men at this table.

Mateo took up the conversation. “Let me reveal our friends to you, most of whom will pay you to let them lay you, as I have done—as I will be happy to do so again. Our friend Mark here, indeed is English. He’s a novelist—not too bad, I’ve been told. No telling how much longer he can call Antibes home. He’s quite notorious among the lads in the town, not all of them of legal age. The Nazis will love playing with him, I think. And across from us, the blond and very fit young man who is playing with Louis. He’s German, an actor, quite possibly not of the religion the German’s prefer, I don’t think, or he might still be in Germany. Gunter Achten by name. Like Mark, I think he’ll be looking for some way to move on from Antibes within days. The older priest eyeing the waiter, who is near to topping out in his sexual interest, is Père Bernard. You may be a bit old for him. He’s French, as are the dark, brooding men sitting next to him, Jean-Paul Jardienne, an artist, and our innkeeper, Maurice Gagnon, definitely a member of the Oscar’s club and bedpartner and pimp for the waiter, Tristian Alarie, both, of course, French. I’m afraid those three are stuck here for the duration and may not see their way clear for another gathering of the gays here for quite some time. The older, gray-haired man with the medals on his chest, sitting there and looking so solemn, is our Spanish general, Juan del Campo. He apparently is royal—a Bourbon. Having opposed Franco in the Spanish Civil War is what has brought him to us. But I’m afraid that, since Hitler backs Franco in that war and the fascists don’t have much respect for royalty, Juan must be planning to move on from here as soon as possible. There, I think you’ve met them all. Let’s see how long it will take them all to have bedded you. Ah, another beer?”

“Yes, please.” It may chiefly have been the beer offer that kept me at the party. I could well understand with the political clouds moving in, that being a member of a gay man’s club in Vichy France, with the Germans looking over their shoulders, might not be the safest use of my time. Beyond that, as long as Mateo kept the beer coming tonight, and even with him and the English writer touching me from both sides and making cow eyes at me, I would stay. They were right. This might be the last night for many nights that I or any of them would think of wanting to party—or that any of them would be interested in taking a young American to bed for money.

I would always stick around if there was that chance I could make money from it.

Over the next hour, I talked—or, rather, share yells over the din—with those at the table enough to remember what nationality and specialty they were, whether they were tops or bottoms, and, in most cases, at least their first names. As the night lengthened, the Oscar’s club crowd thinned out a bit. The German actor, Gunter, took the transvestite, Louis, away. The Spanish general, mumbling something about packing, bowed out. And when I went to the pissery, I saw that the French cleric, Bernard, had the waiter, Tristian, up against a wall at the end of a passage. Tristian returned to the table on the porch afterward. The priest didn’t.

On my way back to the table, the innkeeper, Maurice, stopped me and showed me a small wad of franc notes. My first thought was that he wanted to fuck me and was putting in his bid before any of the other men—only Mateo, Mark, and the French artist, Jean-Paul, still being at the table, with the possibility that all of them would pass out drunk there—could get to me that night. But I was wrong.

“Mateo tells me that you are in the need of money and are willing to work on your back for it,” he said to me in low tones at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the inn rooms.

“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t in the position to be choosy and, although he was large and heavy and ugly, the innkeeper’s money would be as good in the dark of one of his rooms upstairs as any other man’s.

“Juan. The Spanish general,” Maurice said, his eyes looking up the stairs. “He is quite despondent at what has come to pass here. I wish to cheer him up. Do you think it possible that you could—?”

“Which room is he in?” I asked, taking the banknotes he was holding in his hand.

* * * *

In addition to the nominal fee Maurice gave me, which I didn’t question because I wanted to be in his good graces and I’d already earned enough for today, I was given a small bottle of cognac, with the explanation that it was the general’s favorite, and two wine glasses.

If the general was surprised to see me show up with the cognac, he didn’t reveal it. He seemed despondent and there were a couple of suitcases out on the bed half filled with clothes. He was a soldier; everything was folded with precise, straight seams.

“Maurice asked me to bring this to you,” I said. “He also asked me to give you anything else you might want from me. He’s paid me.” I wasn’t going to lie about where this gift was coming from.

“As you can see, I’m packing to go,” he said. He was sitting on the foot of the bed.

“You’re taking a vacation?” I asked. “Maurice says you live here.”

“Yes, it’s been a little over a year. I came here directly from the defeat in Spain. I knew that Franco wouldn’t let me live. But now it’s time to move on.”

“Move on where? And why do you need to leave here?” I asked, as I poured him a glass of the cognac and handed it to him. He accepted it and took a couple of sips before answering.

“I’m an old man. You don’t have to be here with me.”

“I like older men. There’s no place else I want to be.”

“I’ll try to go across the sea to Morocco, I guess,” the general said, returning to the question I’d asked. “Franco is a fascist. If he has a friend in this world, it’s Hitler. And I don’t believe in the independence of the Vichy government that’s here now. I don’t know where I’ll go from there. But there is a colony of my men and their families there, near Tangier, and Tangier has long been welcoming to my kind—to our kind.” He looked at me and smiled when he said that. “You are a beautiful young man,” he said, saluting me with his glass. “Mateo tells me that you went under him.”

“Yes,” I said. “And if you want, I could—”

He touched my cheek with the fingers of his free hand. His thumb stroked my lips and I opened them and took the thumb in, giving it suck.

“You are such a handsome young man—very fit. You could have been one of my soldiers. One of my special soldiers. Could you give me a memory?”

“Of course. What?”

“Could you become naked for me and let me see you—make love to you with my eyes?”

I poured him more cognac and put my own glass down on the top of the bureau next to where I’d put the bottle. Then, slowly, smiling at him, I disrobed until I was standing there, naked, posing for him, turning this way and that.

“Oh, my. Magnificent. Thank you. It will be something to remember.”

I took the glass from his hand and knelt before him.

“What are you doing? You don’t need to . . . I’m such an old man. I don’t deserve . . .”

“Shush,” I said. “I want to.” I slowly unbuttoned his fly. He was so old school that he had buttons rather than a zipper. I found that he had hardened up, watching me. It was fortunate that he could do so. I took his cock in my mouth and gave him slow head, as he gripped my head between his hands, moaned and almost sobbed for me.

When he was as hard as he was going to be, I rose, came back down in his lap, holding his cock, which was a presentable one, up with a hand to put it in position and to steady it and give it extra strength as I sank on it. He buried his face in my chest, and I rose and fell on his cock until he ejaculated. It was all done slowly, both of us savoring the experience. The flow was slight, but he had managed an orgasm.

I then undressed him, and as he sat and watched me with worshipful eyes, I carefully cleared the suitcases off the bed, helped him into the bed, turned out the light, and entered the bed myself, stretched out beside him. An hour later in the dark, I felt him moving his hand on my body and raising his torso beside me. “¿Puedo tenerte de nuevo? Excuse me. May I have you again?” he whispered.

“Yes, of course,” I answered.

I didn’t help him other than spreading and bending my legs and moving a pillow under the small of my back. I knew it was a matter of pride for him that he do this himself. He was unusually strong—very much the soldier still—as he moved a leg over me and took a sit-up position of stiff arming the mattress on either side of my shoulders and going up onto his toes, his body remaining ramrod straight, as he penetrated and pumped me. He was thick, if not terribly long, and he was harder this time than the previous one. I grasped his waist between my hands, arched my back, and moaned in genuine pleasure as he fucked me. We came almost together. He lowered his body on mine and we both, I’m sure, concentrated on him going flaccid inside me. Sometime in the night he’d rolled off to the side of me and was snoring contentedly.

He was asleep, still snoring, when I woke as the fingers of early-morning light were filtering through the slats of the shutter covering the window overlooking the yacht basin. I thought that Maurice must have given him the best room in the inn, as the view of the marina and sea would be magnificent from here. I nudged my way out of bed, cleaned myself with a washcloth in the tiny bathroom off his room, and left him sleeping.

I didn’t see the Spanish general in Antibes after that. He didn’t show up to the Oscar’s club meeting the next evening and it seemed that everyone was avoiding mentioning him at all.

During the evening I agreed to go with the French artist, Jean-Paul Jardiennes, and he took me upstairs to the room that had been the Spanish general’s but that had no evidence of him remaining now. There Jean-Paul fucked me like I was a whore, slapping me around, dominating me, and pumping me vigorously and cruelly, causing the bedsprings to complain and bouncing the headboard off the wall to the rhythm of his thrusts. It was nothing like the near lovemaking of the Spanish general, but it was a wiping out of Juan del Campo’s existence for the previous year in this room. If anyone came looking for the general here, trying to follow his trail on Franco’s behest, no one here would acknowledge ever having met the man.

Henceforth, for the time I was in Antibes, this was where the men brought me to fuck me. The night that Jean-Paul had me here, the innkeeper Maurice, himself, fucked me on this bed. He let me move in and use the room. The first thing I did was to fling the shutters open so that I could take in the magnificent view of the Antibes yacht basin and the Mediterranean beyond whenever I wanted to.

* * * *

“There, enough of the painting for now, I think,” the French artist, Jean-Paul Jardiennes said, as he came over to where I was posed, naked, save for a black leather bomber jacket spread open on my torso, on a white silk-draped studio couch in his art studio. My torso had been propped up by my left arm, the hand cupping my head, with my right hand cupping my cock and balls. He had paid me to both pose for him and lie under him.

We had completed the posed part and I wasn’t all that surprised that, when he came over to the couch, he backhanded me, sending me crashing to the surface of the divan, and was on top of me, unzipping his fly, choking me with one hand as he positioned himself, and then inside me and pumping. He had been rough with me the first time too. He had been quite clear that he saw sex as war, and that he needed to conquer and subjugate.

When I had a chance—when he had gone off, after taking his pleasure with me, to clean his brushes—I rolled off the divan and went to look at what he had painted. I had to admit that he was a good artist. But he was moody and more than a bit crazy, I thought.

He also had grilled me about who I was, where I was coming from, where I planned to go and when, and why I was here in Antibes—just as a policeman would do. I answered all his questions. I didn’t have anything to hide. Maurice had done the same with me. I decided that it was just the French way. I was a stranger in France and France was in turmoil. The French were on edge. I had seen it in all of them coming to the Oscar’s club the handful of nights I’d been in attendance: Jean-Paul, Maurice, Tristian, the priest—even the transvestite, Louie—all of the Frenchmen, those who actually belonged here in Antibes.

He had been downstairs at what I came to think of as the club table, in Maurice’s inn, that morning when I came down for breakfast. That had become the deal with Maurice. He fed me at the inn and covered my drinking in the evening if I let him sleep on top of me in the Spaniard’s room at night. He took Louis to his room, but not me. All the time I was there, I didn’t see the flat Maurice kept on the top floor.

I could entertain any other man I wanted in the room as well. The Spaniard’s room was more comfortable than the bunk in my cabin cruiser, and I had to eat, so I agreed. I was accumulating moving-on capital faster than I thought. The biggest expense in moving on would be covering the diesel fuel needed for the cabin cruiser. And the cost of diesel was rising so fast, I wasn’t sure I’d ever save enough to cover the run to North Africa or Portugal.

The German actor, Gunter Achten, had been breakfasting at the inn as well, and, between Gunter and Jean-Paul, offering to pay me to pose for him, my date card for the morning was filled in when I’d had no idea what I would do that day at all.

I posed for Jean-Paul and was mauled by him until nearly noon, upon which time I returned to the inn to pick up the picnic basket Gunter had arranged with Maurice to have ready for us, and then I cycled on an inn bicycle along the coast to the east, toward Nice, where Gunter said there was a villa above the beach where we could swim and become better acquainted. The German didn’t offer to pay me, and I assumed he would want sex from me, but I didn’t have to charge everyone. He was a beautiful man, near my own age, with a sunny smile, golden hair, and mesmerizing blue eyes. I would enjoy the afternoon with him.

It was more of a pleasant anticipation than the session with the brooding Frenchman, Jean-Paul, who I knew would treat me cruelly and in that I wasn’t wrong. But Jean-Paul paid well and the political tension in the air told me that I needed to move on as soon as I could. I just didn’t really know where I could move on to that was any safer than Antibes.

While I was picking up the picnic basket, I saw the priest, Père Bernard in the back passageway with the waiter, Tristian, again. That was a peculiar arrangement, I thought, the waiter always being somewhere covered by the priest when I’d been told that the waiter and the innkeeper, Maurice, were a pair. But the innkeeper was sleeping with me most nights.

A strange, hedonist place this French Riviera was.

And then there was the Spanish general. I had asked Maurice that morning when Juan del Campo would be wanting his room back, and Maurice had given me a stern look and had said, “There is no Spanish general here. Do not speak of him again.” No one else was speaking of Del Campo either, so I tried just to forget about him.

* * * *

“It used to be so carefree here, but now there is menace—a malignance—in the air. Do you not feel it?”

“I’ve just gotten here,” I answered the German actor, Gunter, as we sat on the terrace of Mark Standish’s small villa at the top of a short cliff overlooking a sandy beach and the Mediterranean. I did, in fact, feel the tension, at least, in the air, but I didn’t want to add to the man’s melancholy mood. We were eating the lunch Maurice’s kitchen had provided. I had been surprised that where Gunter had told me to meet him would be the English writer, Mark’s, seaside villa. Nor did I expect that the young French transvestite, Louis, would be here too, a lip-sticked face, ruby-red painted fingernails, and willowy body. Mark was here as well, but not lunching where we were. He took his baguette, cheese, and glass of wine off to the other side of the terrace, where he insisted he had to reach the end of writing a chapter before he could frolic with us.

“You feel it particularly oppressively?” I asked. “Because you are German? As the Germans increasingly take over, won’t you be in an increasingly better position here?”

Gunter seemed almost to quake from the topic that neither of us wanted to discuss but that we kept gravitating to. And it was only the two of us talking. Mark was lost to his clacking typewriter, and Louis didn’t speak English. He—or she, whatever—just sat, plastered to Gunter, touching him here and there with ruby-red fingernails, looking worshipfully at him and guardedly at me. Gunter must have some talented dick, I thought, and I would have no trouble giving my ass to him if he asked for it.

“I’m getting it both coming and going here in southern France,” he said.

“How is that?”

“I’m German in a section of France where Germans aren’t viewed with a whole lot of affection just now—except to their face.”

I laughed. “Granted.”

“But I’m also a Jew, a communist, and queer to boot. I left Germany, and then Paris, just ahead of the knives. They will find me here eventually—and the French here will cheer them on.”

“None of the men I’ve met here—none of those gathering a Maurice’s inn at night—feel that way toward you, Gunter,” I said, reaching over and touching his forearm. Louis gave me a nasty look. I could almost feel the transvestite’s snarl of jealousy and possessiveness.

“I’m not so sure of that,” Gunter said. “Not all of the men at Oscar’s are what they seem to be, I don’t think.”

“At least Louis will protect you to the death,” I said. I tried to smile, but I realized that bringing “death” into the discussion was not helping.

“We shall see,” Gunter said, and, happily the conversation and mood was changed then, because Mark had stopped typing and was standing by us, saying, “Anyone for the sea?”

“I didn’t bring a suit,” I said.

Both Gunter and Mark laughed at that. “Oh, you innocent babe,” Mark said.

We, of course, all stripped down then and ran, naked, down the wooden steps, across the sand, dropping towels that Mark had supplied en route, and into the Mediterranean.

I was a strong swimmer and swam vigorously, with powerful strokes, straight out into the sea, presuming the others would do the same. But they didn’t. The other three, Mark, Gunter, and Louis, remained just outside the foam of the waves rolling onto the shore and frolicked there together. When I saw I was alone, I turned and swam back, past them and to the sand. I saw them, touching each other and kissing, as I drew closer. I could have joined them, I’m sure, but in that moment, I felt a separation and I continued on past them, stumbling out of the surf and up to where I had dropped the beach towel I’d been given.

I shook myself like a dog shedding rainwater and sat on the towel, looking out toward the sea—watching Mark and Gunter work Louis together, both of them embracing him between them, both of them penetrating him, Mark from the front and Gunter from behind, and both of them fucking him, together, as Louis writhed between them and squealed whatever he was feeling—pain or pleasure—certainly satisfaction at the attention.

When they were done, Mark pulled away and came up onto the beach, laid his towel out beside me, and sat down. Gunter carried Louis up in his arms and laid the young man on one of the towels a bit of a distance from where Mark and I now sat, close together. Rather than staying there with Louis, though, Gunter picked up his towel and brought it over to where Mark and I sprawled. He put it down on the other side of me from Mark.

I knew what they wanted from me. They were touching me from either side with their hands, and when I turned from one to the other, we kissed. I took their cocks in my hands and stroked them, as they reached over and shared my cock with their hands.

“I want—” Mark murmured.

“And I too,” Gunter interjected.

“I know,” I answered.

“Have you ever?” Mark asked.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“So, you will—” Gunter asked.

“Yes.”

I had seen what they had done with Louis in the sea. I rose, turning to Mark, who was sitting up now with his legs stretched out in front of him. I saddled myself in his lap, facing him, and held his erection in my hand as I centered over it—and descended on it. Mark let out a long sigh, and I was lightly panting as I used my knees pressed into the sand as leverage to rise and fall on his cock. He embraced me with his arms, tilting me into his chest, rolling my buttocks up, as Gunter came in behind me.

I panted harder, and groaned, and gave a long moan, as Gunter’s cock entered me, sliding in on top of Mark’s.

And then they fucked me—together, the three of us establishing a harmonious rhythm with our lips, our hands, and our arms—our bodies moving in concert as one. Louis sat on his towel, watching us fuck—glowering at me.

* * * *

Late that afternoon I decided to check in on the cabin cruiser in the yacht basin before going to the inn. I found the Italian industrialist, Mateo Paoli, there on the bunk, sleeping—or, I later suspected, pretending to be sleeping. He had his eyes scrunched shut too tight and his breathing didn’t sound natural to me. Looking around the cabin, I saw that it wasn’t as I had left it. Someone had been searching my boat. My thoughts didn’t go immediately to Mateo. He had had several opportunities before now to search my boat, if he wanted to do so. It was more the French here who I’d thought of wanting to ensure I wasn’t someone they should be wary of. Jean-Paul had certainly given me the third degree about who I was and why I was here. For that matter, so had the inn keeper and the priest.

Mateo opened his arms to me, holding the toys I had gotten in Istanbul—wrist and ankle restraints and the dildo Mateo had used before—in his hands. He wanted to fuck. I was beginning to feel like a whore from what I’d already done that day. I was doing it for money more times than necessary just for my enjoyment or for basic needs. But his billfold was on the table within reach of the bunk and he put the dildo down and pulled several franc notes out of it. I hadn’t taken pay from either Gunter or Mark, and the price of diesel was already skyrocketing in the area.

I let him fuck me. He was as cruel this time as the last, binding both my wrists and my ankles together and also tying a rope around my thighs to keep them together and my channel tight for his games—with the dildo and his cock, me bent over the bed and he covered me from behind and above, not penetrating me, though, until he had beat me on the buttocks, back, and thighs with his leather belt.

It didn’t seem like sex—more like war—more with the need to conquer that Jean-Paul also displayed. He was Italian, the Italians combining with Germany, and I was an American, with the United States neutral but leaning ever more, with its dormant power, toward the Allies. He was Italy, defeating the United States even before it could enter the conflict. That square-jawed, sour-faced Mussolini leader in Italy. Didn’t he make Italian men want to lean to the macho and the cruel?

I don’t know why I was thinking that, though. Mateo hadn’t said or done anything that didn’t indicate that he had sympathy for the plight of the French and for our little band of queers meeting at Maurice’s inn each night, banding together to buck each other up. Perhaps it was because of the news that came through that day—that Italy had occupied both the principality of Monaco and the French city of Nice, not that far to the east from here. The fascists were moving closer.

And the Vichy government was doing nothing to stop them.

* * * *

Despite everything—not just the news of the Italian advance from the east but also the rumors that men were disappearing from the town for various reasons, including politics, collaboration, failure to collaborate, and sexual offenses—the gathering of the Oscar’s club that evening on the upper porch of Maurice’s inn was boisterous, bordering on the edge of hysteria. It was as if this was the last night of the world as the men gathered knew it—and in many respects it was.

The men were giddy and moving around, swaying with the music, which was turned up loud. It only occurred to me later that it was turned up that high to obscure eavesdropping on a gathering that had become a very dangerous activity in the tension that was hanging over the virtually occupied French Riviera. The beer also was flowing and we all became at least a bit intoxicated—and frisky with each other.

I agreed to a request from Gunter Achten to see the room in the inn above that the Spanish general had vacated and the innkeeper, Maurice, was letting me use. The transvestite, Louis, who had become giggly drunk, was plastered to Gunter, so he came too. In his drunkenness, Louis forgot that I was unwanted competition, and we wound up, the three of us, on the bed, naked and entwined. Louis and I hovered over Gunter’s beautiful prone body and shared the German’s cock with our mouths, my lips meeting with the little transvestite’s, his lipstick on my lips as well as being smeared on Gunter’s cock.

With Gunter placing Louis and me in position and guiding us with his hands, I fucked Louis. Louis no doubt only complied because Gunter asked him to do it and he was nearly dead drunk. And then Louis stretched out beside Gunter and me, stroking Gunter’s back with his fingers, as the German actor fucked me in the missionary position.

I think for all of us it was an escape from the rumors being whispered about of the activity in the town that day—people disappearing, being taken away, without anyone being sure if it was by partisans of the French resistance, German or Italian adherents, or just an assortment of other grudges and prejudices being able to surface in this chaotic atmosphere. For us in the club, that we were all gay in a world increasingly not tolerating that, that worry predominated. I know I was turning to sex for moments of not remembering where I was and what the political climate here was.

We showered together, and I was still only covered with a towel around my waist when Gunter and Louis were dressed and returning to the party downstairs, where the decibel level was decreasing.

I went to the window overlooking the yacht basin and watched the play of the moonlight on the water of the Mediterranean beyond. As I watched, I saw a slim young man—it looked like the waiter, Tristian—move somewhat surreptitiously out onto the piers of the marina and enter the boat moored next to my cabin cruiser. I had little time to think about the import of that—if it really was Tristian and, if so, what he was doing in the marina, and near my boat, when a knock came at the door.

The door opened without me moving toward it, and there stood the English writer, Mark Standish, with two glasses of beer in his hands.

“You weren’t coming back to the party, so I thought the party should come to you,” he said. I welcomed him in and we sat, me in my towel on the foot of the bed, and he in a straight chair facing me, and drank our beers and talking about anything but what was on our minds—firstly the poisoned atmosphere in Antibes at the moment and, secondly, of sex, sex with each other.

He spoke of the novel he was writing, and I expressed interest in that. He was surprised that I was as glib as I was about creative writing, but it was what I was studying at the university.

“Do you know how to type too?” he asked. He had finished his beer and moved his chair forward, to where he could place his hands on my knees, which he did. Both of us knew we would fuck, but neither of us was in a hurry to get there. We were just enjoying talking about a subject that had nothing to do with where we were and the danger we were in.

“But of course,” I said.

“Would you like to become a reader for me—and a typist for the drafts of the novel I’m writing? I have reached the stage where I need logistical help—and a fresh pair of eyes on the novel. Perhaps you could come out to my place for the afternoons.”

“Yes, I think I would enjoy that,” I responded. “Is that what you want to do now, though?” I looked down at his hands on my knee just under the bottom edge of the towel. He had spread my knees apart and glided his hands along the inner surfaces of my thighs. If he thought that would arouse me, he was quite correct.

“No, that’s not what I want now,” he murmured, and he reached up, unknotted the towel, and brushed edges off my now-fully naked body. Of course I was in erection. He came down on his knees between my spread thighs, and I reclined back on the bed as he took my cock in his mouth. He took his time, making love to my shaft and balls, as I moaned, arched my back, reached my arms out straight from my body in a sacrificial stance, my fists bunching up wads of the sheeting as the need and release rose inside me, and he eventually took my ejaculation in his throat.

While he was giving me head his fingers were working my anal entrance, opening me up for him, so that, after I came, he merely rose up, hovering over me, put his cock head in position, grasped my ankles, raising and spreading my legs in a V, penetrated, and fucked me slowly to heaven.

Later, after he was gone, I went back to the window to watch the moon hovering over the marina. Once more I saw activity down there. The Italian, Mateo Paoli—I was sure it was Mateo—entered the marina, moving furtively. Did everyone move furtively in Antibes these days, I wondered. But of course they did, I answered myself. I was surprised to see that he entered my cabin cruiser. I wasn’t too surprised, though. These days it seemed like he was sending a lot of time on my boat—and with no regard to whether I was there or not. No doubt, I reasoned, he was so drunk from the party that was winding down downstairs that he thought he couldn’t make it any further than my boat before collapsing in a drunken stupor to sleep it off.

At least he hadn’t gotten into his mind to join the progression of men who were coming to my room this night for solace and comfort from the fears that gripped them. And thinking of that, I knew it was near time that the innkeeper, Maurice Gagnon, would come to spend the night covering me. I remained at the window, watching the yacht basin, waiting for Maurice to come.

But Maurice didn’t come that night and, finally, exhausted and spent, I went to the bed, lay down, and went immediately to sleep, dreaming of a slick of oil slowly covering the earth.

* * * *

When I went down to the tables on the porch late the next morning, Maurice wasn’t yet in evidence, but Père Bernard was there, and Tristian was serving lunch, although it would be breakfast for me. I joined the priest, who had rarely said anything to me before but who addressed me now.

“You have missed the excitement of the morning,” he said. I’m sure he knew what sort of evening I had had, entertaining the men of his group, opening my legs for all comers—which made me wonder why he hadn’t fucked me yet. I would let him do so. He was a handsome man and looked fit under that habit he was wearing. And I had no aversion to having sex with men of the cloth. It had been a priest who had deflowered me. But he seemed only to have the hots for Tristian, the waiter.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“It’s more what’s not happening,” Bernard said. “There were raids in the early morning. Some of our group are not accounted for as yet.”

“Who?” I asked, fearful of the answer.

“Gunter Achten—and Louis, of course. And the artist, Jean-Paul Jardiennes. All cannot be found.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“That’s life in Antibes at the moment,” he said. “Actually, I have been waiting for you to arise. Mark Standish tells me he has invited you to work with him on his novel in the afternoons. True?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I think you should move out to his villa. I think an Englishman and an American together will still be safe for a few weeks here. But you both need to be thinking about moving on. I suggest it would be good for you to gather your things from your boat and I could accompany you to Mark’s to ensure you get there safely. I have discussed it with Mark and he agrees.”

Somehow it didn’t sound like a request, and although the priest was calm in talking to me of this, the direness of the situation here was obvious in what he was saying—and not saying. And if someone would know what conditions were really like here, it would be a local French priest like Père Bernard.

I didn’t argue. When I’d done eating, I rose from the table. “I will go to the boat and collect my things,” I said. “You will—?”

“I will wait for you here. It’s best you not tell anyone you see what you are doing and where you are going.”

“I understand.” And suddenly I did understand. There were undercurrents here I didn’t understand—and there were people I thought I knew here who were something different than I supposed. I worried about Gunter and Jean-Paul and even Louis. I hoped they were OK. I hoped they were still alive. I thought of Maurice then too. I hadn’t seen him yet this morning and he hadn’t come to my bed the previous night.

I wondered as I walked down to the marina whether Mateo Paoli would still be in the cabin cruiser, sleeping a drunk off. I hoped whatever happened to Gunter and Jean-Paul hadn’t happened to him as well.

He wasn’t in the boat, but, as I gathered my clothes and a few personal belongings up and dropped a bottle that rolled under the desk that my radio equipment was on, I had new, deeper, more sinister worries forming. I found, affixed to the under surface of the desk, below the array of radio equipment, a microphone, with wires going into the separation of the wood planks in the wall.

My boat had been bugged. My thoughts went back to when I thought the boat had been searched. In addition to that, did someone put in bugs as well? Did someone think I was worthy of keeping track of that way? If so, they must be disappointed, as I had spent very little time on the boat since I’d hooked up with the gay men’s club up at Maurice’s inn. I hadn’t used the radio either. Until and unless I went to sea, I had no one to call—I couldn’t even now, at this juncture, say where I planned to go from here.

I left the bug in place and went back to the inn, carrying two duffel bags of my possessions. I told Père Bernard about the bug. He didn’t react with surprise.

“You knew about it? You know who put it there, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered, with a sigh. “I suppose you have a right to know—if only so you fully understand how dangerous it is for foreigners like you here now. We checked you out, but we decided you were an innocent. Your boat isn’t, though. You didn’t encounter the Italian, Mateo Paoli, down there at the boat this morning, did you?”

“No. I saw him go into its last night, but he wasn’t there just now.”

“Good. You must avoid him from now on. By all means, don’t let him know you have moved to Mark’s villa.”

“You are with the French Resistance, aren’t you?” I asked. “Mateo is who you are watching—why the bug is in my boat. I know he spends time there, but why my boat?”

“You have radio equipment in your boat. Paoli has been using it to report back to Italy.”

“Who to in Italy?”

“We have no idea, but we wish we did. Perhaps we will.”

“And you’re just monitoring him? You aren’t stopping him?”

“Better the devil you know,” Bernard said. “With the bug in the boat—”

“Monitored by Tristian in the boat next to it,” I interjected.

He gave me a sharp look. “Yes. With the bug in the boat, we can keep track of what he’s reporting. In time he will be stopped. Until then, at least we know who is spying for Italy even if we don’t yet know who he reports to there.”

“And the others? Is Gunter spying for Germany?”

“No, Gunter is antifascist. We learned he was about to be arrested last night, and he—and Louis—should be in Switzerland now.”

“And how did you learn he was about to be taken? This doesn’t have anything to do with Jean-Paul or Maurice, does it?”

“Jean-Paul was an informer for the Vichy and perhaps the Germans as well.”

“Was? Do you know why you refer to him in the past tense?”

“We won’t hear from Jean-Paul anymore. Maurice should be back soon—from a trip part way to the Swiss border, guiding Gunter and Louis onto the right road leading up to Switzerland. But I think that is enough information for you to have—more than enough. It is not safe for you to know even this much. Shall we go to Mark’s villa now?”

We left. I was trembling in fear. Had I, in fact, learned too much? The priest had given me a hard look when I showed that I knew Tristian was monitoring my boat from the one next to it. Was this more than the French Resistance could afford for me to know? Were we really on our way to Mark’s villa? And what did Mark Standish know about all this? Did he have a role in all of this?

At the door of the inn, the waiter, Tristian, intercepted us and he and Père Bernard conversed, standing a bit away from me. I heard Bernard murmur, “Oui, mon capitaine—Yes, my captain,” to the young man. The revelation hit me that it was the young waiter, not either the priest or the innkeeper, who was the leader of this resistance unit. I would not reveal I knew this, of course. That surely would seal my fate.

As the priest pulled two bicycles from the wall outside the inn’s door and we distributed my duffel bags between them, I couldn’t resist asking, “You and Tristian? Lovers?”

Bernard laughed. “Oh, my no. Tristian is my nephew.”

“So, you aren’t—”

“Not that I will reveal to any of my flock here. I must be here to support and comfort them despite anything and everything that could befall us here.”

So, those nose-to-nose meetings in the shadows of the back corridors of the inn—they hadn’t been sexual in nature. Something much deeper, more sinister had been going on here.

I felt so stupid. I also felt more in fear for my life than I ever had felt before. Would I make it to Mark’s alive? Would I be safe there even if I made it there?

* * * *

I’ll have to say that the next two weeks were the happiest I spent at Antibes, despite everything that happened and the danger that floated just below the surface, never far out of my mind. I lived in splendid isolation at Mark Standish’s seaside villa. We worked on his novel during the afternoons, during which I surfaced so much of my interest in writing that I started taking my hand at it too. And I learned quite a bit of the process of writing and editing and rewriting and preparing a manuscript, that all served me well in years to come.

And we set into a routine. Mark would rise before me in the morning—yes, of course, we slept together and engaged in sex throughout the nights—and be off to do whatever he did in the area. I learned not to ask. He’d come back with our food for the next day, though, which was all I needed to know. Père Bernard had told me not to appear in public, to make people forget a young American man was here. Mark was doing what he could to ensure I stayed hidden.

Getting up after Mark left in the morning, I swam in the sea. In the afternoons we worked on the terrace on his book, which dealt with the Antibes in a more festive and amicable time than this and depicted the unraveling of a marriage by a love triangle that only obliquely revealed an affair on the side by the English husband and the male French gardener. It was written in a time when homosexuality could be there, but not explicitly depicted.

I did my own writing a bit later in the morning, and our evenings were spent in Mark reviewing what I wrote and the two of us discussing both that and his writing. My writing technique was improved significantly by these critique sessions.

What we didn’t discuss was Mark’s background, how he had come to be in Antibes, and what he planned to do from here when the occupation eventually overwhelmed the French Riviera. There was no hiding that we both knew that the Vichy government in the region was only a fig leaf administration and that eventually the Germans and Italians would split the region between them. It would then be untenable for either an Englishman or an American—especially gay ones—to still be here at that time.

Later in the night we, of course, drank and danced, trying to forget what was happening around us—and fucked.

At some point near the end of the first week, I came to realize what I already had suspected—suspected before Père Bernard, who obviously was part of an underground French Resistance movement, had brought me to Mark—that Mark was part of the fabric of the resistance here too. I surmised that he represented the British intelligence interests here. One evening he sent me to the cellar for more wine, and I found that he’d left a door ajar to a small room I hadn’t known was there before. That’s where he had been keeping an elaborate radio communications center. Mark was reporting to someone just as I knew I was here and not on my boat because the Resistance was monitoring the Italian, Mateo Paoli, reporting back to Italy using the radio equipment on my boat.

Mark was in whatever spying was going on in Antibes, and, by association and cooperating in the use of my cabin cruiser, so was I.

This all came to a head at the end of two idyllic weeks learning that I did, indeed, want to become a writer, that Mark thought I was good at it, and I’d learned so much I needed to in the mechanics of it—more practical experience than I could have attained in a college course.

One early morning, before dawn, we were awakened by a pounding on the villa’s kitchen door. Père Bernard had arrived to start us into the next phase of our life.

“Conditions are best for you two to make the run to Morocco today,” he said, as we sat around the kitchen table, drinking coffee. “And we have no more need for your boat, Brent, so you are free to escape. We want you to take Mark with you. It’s too dangerous for him to stay here and work anymore. I know diesel is precious, but we will help you get what you need for a run to North Africa.”

So, that was it. Mark was part of the fabric of their underground work here—probably their current link with London. And, although I was aching to ask what had happened to Mateo Paoli, I didn’t dare. If the need for my compromised radio equipment on board my cabin cruiser was no longer needed by the Resistance, I must surmise that Mateo either had fled or no longer existed.

I realized that, after today, my presence and that of Mark’s in Antibes no longer will have existed either. I wondered how long it would be for Bernard, Tristian, and Maurice to join the rest of us in nonexistence and that fascist Nazism will have swallowed up the world.

The priest had brought a young woman with him. He said her name was Laura and that her mother was English and her father French. Mark took her away to the basement, leaving Bernard and me alone in the kitchen. I knew then that she was Mark’s replacement here, that he was downstairs, showing her the radio equipment. This indeed meant Mark was leaving. I had a brief moment of fear that I had become expendable—that I was destined for a grave in the villa’s garden, but then I realized I was still needed—what I apparently had been needed for all along. I had a boat that could make it across the Mediterranean to the African shores, and I could sail it. I was still needed to help Mark escape.

Bernard assured me that someone would be waiting to take us in hand in Morocco and that Mark would handle everything. I could leave it in Mark’s hands. I asked if I would be seeing the Spanish general, Juan del Campo, in Tangier, but the priest just smiled at me and put a finger to his lips.

It, indeed, was Tangier where Mark had me sail the boat, and we were, indeed, met by a group of like-minded Englishmen—gay like Mark and me, and, I surmised British intelligence, like Mark. I was never to hear whether Del Campo made it to these shores or what had happened to him, though.

[To be continued]