Clouds over Antibes

Mateo Paoli, in Antibes for his usual summer semi-vacation from his fabric manufacturing business in Milan, was sitting against the rail, facing the yacht basin marina, of the second-floor Oscar’s Bar porch on a weekday afternoon, trying to figure out how he was going to discharge what was demanded of him, when the opportunity fairly fell into his lap. He’d almost missed it. As he was thinking about his dilemma, he was looking out into the marina. But he wasn’t really focusing on what was happening there—that is not until he noticed the gorgeous blond hunk who popped up from one of the medium-sized cabin cruisers.

The young man was a god. He had a beautiful body, barely covered by a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. He looked around and then walked toward the quay, pausing right below the porch Paoli was sitting on. Tristian Alarie, the Oscar Bar waiter—and a submissive to Paoli and to the other dominant top men who frequented the bar at night—had been standing just below the porch, smoking a cigarette, so the Italian heard the blond god speak to him.

“Excuse me. Do you speak English?” the young man asked.

“Non, pouvez-vous parler en français?—No, you speak French maybe?”

“Je parle un peu, mais pas bien—I speak a little, but not well,” the young man answered, and, indeed, his French was rudimentary. Luckily, Paoli spoke both French and English, so he had little trouble following the short conversation that followed, as it proceeded in fractured English on Tristian’s side and rudimentary French on the young man’s, with, happily for Paoli, a bit of Italian thrown in. He knew that Tristian spoke Italian pretty well and the American must have picked some up as he cruised around Italy in his boat.

“You are English?” Tristian asked.

“No, American. I’ve sailed here from Rome.”

Paoli’s attention perked up. He was Italian. He had been alerted of interest in the movements of foreigners here two months after the Germans invaded northern France, a puppet Vichy government was set up in the south, and his own leader, Mussolini, was making covetous sounds of Italy sweeping around to and over the French Riviera where he now was. He was here because he always liked to summer here. He hadn’t come here this summer to gather information but he had suddenly become important to the Italians as an observer and informant in Antibes. He was asked, in particular, to report on the activities of Englishmen and Americans. Although he did enjoy the pleasures of covering young men, he’d only joined the group of men attending Oscar’s Bar in the evening because an Englishman, a novelist by the name of Mark Standish, came there. Paoli was quite sure that Standish was some sort of British agent here.

Thus far in the few weeks Paoli had been forced into his new role as informant to Rome, Standish was the only topic he had gathered any information on. The man was suspicious. Paoli had determined he just might be an English spy. But Paoli didn’t have any means yet to report back to Italy. He’d been given radio frequencies and a code book to use, but he hadn’t been given a radio and he was warned not to put one in his villa. He was not to be detected as an Italian agent. He, in fact, had no interest in being an Italian spy, but the men who had visited him had made ominous references to the safety of his family back in Milan, so he had no real choice in the matter.

“Perhaps you can tell me if there is a tennis club nearby,” the American was asking Tristian.

“A tennis club? Didn’t I see you come off one of the boats in the marina?”

“Yes, but I need to stop here and try to earn some money for enough diesel to continue on.”

“You are sailing in the Mediterranean—with what is happening in Europe—for pleasure?”

“I was,” the American said. “I was taking a year off from college to travel. But now I have to try to get back to the States while that is possible. I am a tennis player. I play in tournaments and I teach it. Perhaps if there is a club nearby, I could give some lessons there.”

“Yes, there is. Clay courts.”

“That would be fine.”

“Is that all you can do to make money?” Tristian was asking. “You are a handsome young man.”

“Women here would pay for that?” the American asked.

“And men too,” said Tristian, who had experience in what some men wanted from young, willowy men like Tristian.

“Am I that obvious?” the American asked. Selling his body to men had, over the last several weeks, been more of a money maker for him than the tennis lessons had been.

“To someone else who will do the same,” the answer came back. They didn’t say more on this, but Paoli picked up on the understanding that went between the two young men—evidently both registering as submissives to men—and this was something of great interest to Paoli as well.

And, while the two conversed below the porch about where the nearest tennis club was as well as other possibilities, Mateo Paoli was contemplating the possibilities for a solution here to his own problem. A cabin cruiser the size the American was sailing in the Mediterranean would have radio equipment. Paoli was an expert tennis player himself and now had an idea where the young man could be approached and that it could be managed through tennis. And just as important, Paoli, who was interested in covering beautiful young men, had the money to spend—money that the beautiful young American needed to continue his sail home.

Everything was coming together to make possible the task that had been set for Paoli by Mussolini’s generals in Rome.

After he knew the American had gone to find the tennis club, Paoli went down to the marina and, making sure no one saw him, boarded the American’s cabin cruiser. The young man hadn’t locked anything up. There, on top of an inset desk between two lockers in the cabin was a radio set. And it was one Paoli knew how to operate. If he could get into a relationship with the American, he’d have access to communications back to Rome that couldn’t be directly linked to him. The American needed money and Paoli had plenty of that. It sounded like the American would let himself be fucked for money. That suited the Italian as well.

* * * *

Paoli met the American, introduced to him as Brent Danforth, “by accident” on the tennis club courts.

“The club manager tells me you are giving tennis lessons. My name is Mateo Paoli, by the way. I live and work in Milan, except that, during the summers I operate from the French Riviera.”

“Yes, I am here temporarily, giving lessons. Are you interested?”

“In the lessons? No, I think I have developed my skills as far as they will go. But interested in perhaps playing a friendly match with you and interested in you as a young man? Yes, definitely.” Paoli gave Brent a look that would be hard for the young American to misconstrue if there were a possibility he understood the signaling—and he did understand the signaling and he was interested. The man was pushing fifty at least, but he was fit and extremely handsome. And he looked like he had money, which proved to be a correct assumption. Paoli assured him of that by putting his hand in his pocket and pulling his wallet out far enough for Brent to get the message.

“It wouldn’t be a lesson, but I would pay you to play a match with me—and for other services, if you are interested.”

Brent didn’t call the man off on possibilities. They played tennis and Brent found that Paoli was an expert at that. He complemented the Italian afterward as they cooled down in the club bar.

“That isn’t the only thing I am an expert at, I believe,” Paoli said, touching Brent’s knee under the table. “I have other expertise in the ability to give and take pleasure, for which I would pay well, if you are interested.”

Brent was interested.

“I am a demanding lover. I have my fetishes. My young men suffer for the pleasures I give and take.”

Brent was still interested. Paoli showed his fist and flexed it, leaving little doubt in what way he could be demanding, and still Brend didn’t back off from showing interest.

“You say you came here on a boat,” Paoli said, “and that it’s moored in the Antibes yacht basin marina. I would enjoy seeing it, I think.” And, with that, the venue of their first fucking was established.

When they got to Brent’s cabin cruiser, the first thing Paoli saw, on a nightstand beside the bunk, was a dildo, so he was confident the young American was a player. Brent was stretched out on the bunk, legs splayed and bent, the soles of his fee flat on the surface of the bunk, a canvas ballast sack under the small of his back, lifting his pelvis for easy access, and his arms over his head and bound to an iron ring at the head of the bed, gagged with the ball gag Paoli had found next to the dildo, and worked over with the rubber phallus. Brent endured that. Brent endured the fist fuck that came after that as well, and, eventually, he endured Paoli mounting and fucking him to a barebacked ejaculation.

It began with Paoli sitting next to Danforth’s prone body on the bunk, both of them naked, their tennis clothes mingling on the deck beside the bunk, the boat gentling rocking against the marina pier, giving off a steady, dull thump, thump, thump cadence.

Paoli had placed the wad of money he was paying the young American on the nightstand next to the dildo he used at the beginning. Staring at the wad of money, Brent started panting and moaning as the Italian’s fingers forced their way inside the American’s ass, up to the knuckles, waiting for the channel to stretch to take him. His left hand glided over Brent’s body and he was leaning over the young American, looking intently into his captive’s eyes. He’d already explained that half of his pleasure in fisting a young man like Brent was to watch the youth’s facial expressions as he possessed him with his hand.

Danforth arched his back and head and gave a little cry as the greased knuckles breached his sphincter muscle. Mateo ran the fingers of his left hand into Danforth’s blond curls and held his head to the surface of the bunk, leaning close over the American’s prone body, his face near Danforth’s, as he possessed the anal channel up to his wrist. Paoli took Danforth’s lips with his and the American rocked his pelvis as the fist moved, slowly, in and out.

At length, Paoli pulled the hand out, moved over on top of the American, and turned Danforth’s body to where the younger man was faced down on the bunk. He put a hand on Danforth’s belly and coaxed him up onto his knees, the American’s cheek and chest pressed to the bunk. Danforth didn’t fight the Italian who was taxing him to the limit. He was cowed and exhausted from the fisting, even though it hadn’t lasted long.

Paoli positioned himself, mounted, on Danforth’s raised ass, his thighs on either side of the American’s hips. He slid inside the young man’s channel easily, having already opened him up with the dildo and his fist, and he fucked the American to his ejaculation, breeding him, filling him deep, with warm cum. Even in his fifties, the Italian was a virile and vigorous man. The fucking motion augmented the natural thumping of the boat’s hull against the pier. His thrusts and the young American’s rocking against them had matched the rhythm of the thumping of the hull against the pier.

For the money—and, he said, the pleasure of it—Brent endured it all. Paoli had done all of this for the opportunity somehow to use the cabin cruiser’s radio equipment to maintain secret communications with Rome, but he found that the beautiful young American prostitute gave him quite a lot of pleasure, as well.

He found times to come back to the boat alone, either during the day when he knew Brent was giving a tennis lesson or at night when he knew Brent was lying under a man. The first night after he had fucked Brent so roughly and completely in the boat, he had arranged for Brent to join the Oscar’s Bar gay men’s club overlooking the marina and he had encouraged other men in this group to sign on for services from the young American—and it certainly wasn’t hard for him to convince them to have sex with Brent or to convince Brent into going with them. This gave Paoli plenty of opportunity to be on Brent’s boat alone to use the radio. And if Brent surprised him by returning to the boat while he was still there, he always managed to just stretch out on the bunk as if awaiting the return of a lover. The American was quite laid back—and easy to lay. He gave Paoli the run of the boat without questions.

It was a “have your cake and eat it too” opportunity for Paoli. As long as he had money—and he had plenty of that—he had both access to communications back to Rome and the use of a young honey’s sweet ass.

The ideal situation just didn’t last for long. The reality of the political climate on the French Riviera set in, and the French Resistance, in the guise of an unlikely Resistance unit chief, the bar waiter Tristian Alarie, intervened, as they cottoned on to what Paoli was up to on Brent’s boat, they bugged the boat’s radio equipment, and Tristian monitored Paoli’s transmissions from the neighboring boat.

* * * *

During an evening meeting of the men at Oscar’s Bar, Mateo Paoli saw that Brent Danforth was being guided up the stairs at Maurice’s inn by the German actor, Gunter Achten, with the small transvestite, Louis, in tow. Feeling the American was safely occupied for the next hour or so and with some information in hand about an impending raid on Jewish families in the city who were transferring their wealth and preparing to depart, Paoli decided to make a night venture to Danforth’s boat and relay a message to Rome.

He got there and set up communications with just a dim light on from a flashlight he’d brought and laid on the desk top with the lamp masked to give him just enough light to see the keys he needed to work with. As he was signing off, though, his flashlight fell off the desk and rolled under it. When he knelt down to retrieve the light, he was shocked to find that a microphone, with wires leading back into the cabin wall had been planted on the under surface of the desk top.

Someone was bugging the boat’s radio equipment. Chances were good someone here was monitoring the American—but they would have picked up Paoli’s transmissions as well, and if they’d been able to decrypt them and knew they were going back to Rome, with the Italians now being seen as a military threat from the east, he was in big trouble.

As quickly and stealthily as he could, Paoli climbed out of the boat and onto the pier. He had not gone far, peering around to see if he was being observed, when he saw Tristian emerge from the boat that had been moored next to Danforth’s cabin cruiser.

There was no plausible reason the waiter from the Oscar’s Bar would be on a boat in the yacht basin unless he was the one who was bugging the communications equipment in Danforth’s boat. Paoli had half suspected that Maurice, the innkeeper and employer and lover of Tristian, and maybe the French priest who came to their gay men’s group, Père Bernard, were connected with the French Resistance. But the waiter Tristian?

He picked up his pace but was aware that Tristian did so as well, and, from seeing the flash of reflected light on steel, he realized the Tristian had a knife in his hand. If this wasn’t meant to be a physical attack, why didn’t the waiter just hail Paoli down?

No, it was a physical attack. Paoli and his role had been uncovered by some other intelligence entity. Perhaps Tristian worked for the French Resistance after all. Reaching the street of shops on the yacht basin quay, Paoli slipped into an alleyway, staying there until he’d seen Tristian passing by, tracking a trail that had gone bad. Racing then to his own villa, Paoli wasted no time in taking his car and very little else and racing for the Italian occupied area around Nice and Monaco to save his life.

[To be continued]