Puttin' on the Ritz

It was disconcerting to be sitting here across the table from him at a sidewalk café when Paul's image of him was crouching, naked, between Paul's legs and feeding a long cock into his passage.

"Yes, I heard that Noell has dropped out of sight," Claude said. He touched Paul's arm with two, long, sensuous fingers, his middle finger elegantly crowned with the thick gold ring he had punished Paul's rim with while finger fucking him, and Paul felt a slight charge go up his limb.

How was one supposed to act, he wondered, in public at a café with an older man who was virtually a stranger, but who had been lying between your legs, both of you naked, and working your ass with his cock? The kicker was the stranger part. Paul knew nothing about this man. Before he had known his lovers fairly well before having sex with them. This man—this "no surname" Claude—was sitting there, almost a stranger, elegantly dressed and acting so proper and civilized, when the vision of him going through Paul's mind was of that silver ring in his right nipple and of him staring into Paul's eyes as he entered, entered, entered Paul's passage with his long cock.

"He didn't tell me he was leaving," Paul said. "He's left me in a bit of a lurch, I must say."

"He introduced you to me at the party the other night at the Ritz, so he didn't really leave you in the lurch," Claude said, giving Paul a sympathetic smile. "That was no accident. He brought you to the party specifically to meet me. He was worried for you, but it would only be dangerous to you for you to have known he was leaving or where he was going or what he would be doing."

"I don't understand," Paul said.

"I recognize that you don't understand. You aren't French. This isn't your national disgrace. Noell said you were completely apolitical and naïve to the world as it is here now. He worried about you. He desperately wanted you to leave before the occupation, although he said he ached at the thought of losing you. He said you were the best lover he had—that it perpetually was like the first time with you. I must say I agree with him. He has to do what he has to do—and he was frustrated that you wouldn't leave before he had to."

"You say he took me to the party specifically to meet you."

"And my encountering you here today is no coincidence either," Claude said. "I know you are strapped for funds. I know your allowance has been cut off by events. That was quite predictable. If you come home with me now—for the night, to use as I want, with whomever else I want to use you—I will pay you fifty francs. How badly do you need fifty francs?"

How bad and taxing could a night with this man be, Paul wondered. He indeed needed the money.

Pretty taxing, as it turned out.

Claude took him to an elegant townhouse where they were ushered in by a huge black attendant and where Paul could hear quiet conversation in men's voices coming from the closed-door parlors on either side of the foyer. Paul was taken to a sumptuously appointed bed chamber on the second floor and fucked both by Claude and the black attendant in more exotic positions than the SS captain had taken him in the Ritz. Paul was fucked in limb-challenging missionary positions, from behind with his legs in the splits, half way on and half way off the bed with his torso reclining toward the floor and with his shoulders on the floor taking his weight as Claude pile drived his ass, with Claude on his back and Paul riding his cock, in a crab position with Paul suspended over Claude's body, on the top of the dresser, his legs in splits, and on the floor, Claude taking him in reverse.

When Claude needed a breather, the black attendant took over the fucking.

And if this weren't enough, Paul was taken to the basement of the building, where there was a sexual torture chamber of a sort and where he was hung and bound and yoked and fucked by the black attendant and lightly whipped and fucked by Claude and his now-gaping passage invaded with graduated beads and dildos—nothing too painful or that would leave a mark, but far, far beyond where Paul had ever been taken before.

He endured it all. Paul needed the fifty franks and he reveled in the variety and challenge of it—and especially in the jet-black cock of the attendant. Paul had never been with a black man before. He endured and responded in ways that visibly astounded and pleased Claude and that kept Claude hard and thrusting and spouting.

Paul woke in Claude's bed in the morning to a side-split fuck and Claude whispering in his ear, "You did magnificently. You went through the paces like a seasoned champion despite your aura of youth and freshness. You could be the star of the stable—such yielding innocence. I can assign you to one of the best rooms, assure you of limited assignations with the most affluent and cleanest of men and half of the profit from your luscious body. Here you will live in the lap of luxury once more. The Germans and the occupation need not impinge on your life any more than it does on the lives of those at the Ritz whose assets, unlike yours, are still liquid. I will take care of you. Leave everything to me. Noell saw this as your best option. I see you as my best find of the year."

Thus it was that Paul entered into a life of male prostitution at Claude's, an exclusive male-on-male brothel just steps—and a secret passageway—away from one of Paris' most exclusive private men's sports club.

* * * *

September 2 to November 21, 1940

Indeed, for more than a month it was as if the Germans and the occupation didn't exist. Most of the men Paul entertained were middle aged; nearly all were French. Some were older, some younger. Some were in good physical condition and some Paul had to handle gingerly. All had cocks; all put their cocks inside Paul—in his mouth or his ass or both. Some came more to have someone they could talk to intimately, but eventually they all put their cocks inside Paul. Some just held them there, expecting Paul to make them hard and flowing. Some were aggressive and demanding. They all came for Paul—in more ways than one. And most of them left satisfied, leaving behind generous gratuities.

As the days went on, fewer of the men coming to the brothel were young. Paul hadn't a clue to link this with the occupation.

It only took a few weeks for the novelist living in and observing and writing about the Ritz Paris, Michel Paquet, to find Paul. He fucked Paul missionary style, with Paul at the end of the bed, his legs raised and spread and held there by Paul's hands, while Paquet cupped Paul's head in his hands, looked intensely into his eyes and whispered poetry to Paul when he wasn't kissing him on the lips. Paul made the possible mistake of showing affection back and signaling with his body and moans and groans that he was enjoying the fuck more than he was. Paquet seemed to have become taken with him and was reacting more like it was lovemaking than sexual release. He came back once a week as long as Paul was there.

Paquet asked Paul to move in with him and to service just him and his friends. Paul passed the offer off as if Paquet was joking. He wasn't, and the refusal smarted.

In Paquet's wake came Count Jan Bukowski, athletic and demanding. If there had been a trapeze hanging from the ceiling, Bukowski would have wanted to have sex with Paul on it. Paul would have been game for that; he found the count's title an intriguing addition to his "men I have had" collection and his sexual prowess arousing. Bukowski put Paul in all sorts of contortion positions and fucked him hard and deep. The Pole had one of the biggest cocks in Paris, knew how to use it, and treated his partners like pillaged peasants. Considering all of the sex that Paul had to coax out of his older patrons, Paul enjoyed seeing the count walk through the door, and was stretched out on his bed moaning and purring when the count walked out the door.

Even the hanger-on Jewish actor, Bres Moulin, slid in in the count's slipstream. He fucked from hurt and the anger of never being at the center of the attention, making Paul do lap dances for him only, at some point, grabbing Paul's waist and slamming Paul's passage up and down on his nearly adequate cock. All the time Paul had to act like he was enjoying the sex when what he wanted to do was to slap the man, tell him to wake up, and to give up being fully accepted by Michel and Jan and be his own man. But Paul's job was to make men feel masterful in their own terms, so he just groaned and kept telling Moulin how big and masterful his cock was—when it wasn't, really. Paul couldn't remember feeling the man's cut cock inside him at all.

Claude had declared the brothel as a safe haven from the occupying Germans, but it was a promise he couldn't keep. Paul had been there no more than a month when German military officers began to appear at the door. They couldn't be turned away. Nothing could turn the Germans away from anything they wanted from Paris. Paris was slowly being raped by the Germans, and rape is no less rape when it happens over time. And it's no less rape when it is forcibly taken from those who normally would freely give it.

Claude tended to try to divert them to his lesser stable, to men on their way out in terms of desirability and men who could endure more than others, because the Germans came with a reputation for brutality and cruelty. It wasn't a fully deserved stigma, which Paul well knew as he thought back to his night writhing under the German SS captain in the Imperial Suite bedroom at the Ritz. But there were enough of the Germans who were brutal to keep the legend alive.

One of them was a tank commander, General Jürgen Bosch, who spied Paul wafting through one of the parlors when he was making his selection and who insisted that he would have Paul. And have Paul he did, demanding that they go immediately to the "special services" chamber in the basement—with Claude wondering how the hell the general even knew about the chamber—hanging Paul on a hook and whipping him harder than Claude did in the trials and then stretching him on the rack and fucking him into unconsciousness.

It took Paul the last two weeks of October to recover from that visit. Claude declared he was too valuable to be out of commission that long and told him to stay in his own bedroom whenever there was a hint of a German around. When General Bosch returned, asking for Paul, Claude told him that Paul had left the brothel.

Thus it was that, when Paul saw his SS captain from the Ritz in the brothel, it was while peeking out of his door and looking down the corridor as the captain was following another one of the young male prostitutes into another bedroom. Paul shrank from the door with mixed feelings—with the urge to tear down the hall and leap into the man's arms and, at the same time, to hide under the bed so that there was no way the magnificent lover would know that Paul was here, doing this. Later that day, Paul asked Claude who the handsome, younger German officer had been and was told that it was SS Captain Garren von Kaube. At last Paul had a name.

On the night of November 20th, there was one of a series of firebomb attacks on the Jewish sector of the city, with drunken German soldiers in the ranks taking up clubs and knives and going on a rampage that fanned out from the Jewish quarter across the rest the city. A group of the soldiers got into the brothel, tore it apart, and attacked any of the male prostitutes they could run down.

Paul was one of the young men they cornered, beat brutally, and gangbanged. When he lost consciousness, he was suspended between two burly and snarling—and quite fit and virile—German soldiers, who were playing him like a calliope, with both of their cocks inside him.

He woke on the morning of the 22nd, in a well-appointed bedroom—but not one in the brothel—with his head, an arm, and his chest bandaged. He was half out of it on drugs.

He was lying on his back with a nightshirt on that was bunched up around his waist. He otherwise was naked. His legs were raised, bent, and spread. Michel Paquet was sitting in a straight chair next to the bed. His hand was stroking Paul's inner thighs and moved to encase Paul's cock.

"You're awake," Paul heard Michel say as if from underwater.

Paquet then stood, stripped off his trousers, climbed up on the bed between Paul's legs, slid inside Paul's channel, and slow pumped him to a creaming of his channel. The novelist was careful to prop his torso up on his arms so that he didn't press on any of Paul's wounds. As Paquet was fucking Paul, Count Bukowski stole into the room, came to the head of the bed, unbuttoned his trousers, freeing his cock, and turned Paul's face toward him. He waited momentarily to see what Paul would do, but, with a sigh, the young man dutifully opened his mouth to receive the thick cock.

Michel left the room to be replaced between Paul's legs by Count Bukowski, who climbed up on the bed, thrust inside Paul's channel just as Paquet had done, and pumped him more vigorously to an ejaculation. Bres Moulin, whose cock replaced Bukowski's in Paul's mouth, followed up for tail-end thirds in the same vein.

When Paul next woke, he was alone in the room, his legs were raised and spread, and he could feel the cum of the three men inside him—or so he thought, the more awake he became the less he was sure that the penetrations had happened at all. Ever since the first evening when the three of them pressed into at the rue Cambon bar, Paul had fantasized about being shared by the three at the same time. Perhaps he had just fantasized that encounter in his drug-induced delirium.

He had no idea where he was. Although he thought he was becoming more aware of his surroundings, he feared he didn't when he looked up on the wall across the room from the foot of the bed and saw, hanging there, the charcoal sketch that Noell Giroux had made of him at the window in the loft on the day of the German invasion of Paris.

* * * *

November 22, 1940 to December 1943

As Paul's connection with the world started to solidify, the door to the bedroom opened and his blond god entered and came over and sat in the chair beside the bed.

"Captain von Kaube," Paul murmured.

"Auch, so you know who I am. And I know you. Paul Stainer, I am told. An artist, I am told. And a prostitute, I know. How are you feeling?"

Paul bypassed this question for questions of more import. How he was feeling wasn't a very uplifting topic at the moment. He felt like he'd been put through the ringer.

"Where is this place and how do you and I come to be here?"

"This is my bedroom at the Ritz. Yes, it is different from the one I first used you in. As soon as Reichsmarschall Göring arrived, I was kicked out of the Imperial Suite. I was only there, preparing for his arrival, for the time before he came to Paris. I am one of his aides. This one is rather Spartan compared to others in the hotel, but I like it more for that. It's a man's room. It's a soldier's room. I'm told that this is where Ernest Hemingway stays when he comes to Paris. Room 31. Although, if he comes now, he will have to fight me for the room." Von Kaube laughed at his little joke.

"So you are here with the Reichsmarschall. Why is he here?" Paul didn't have to ask who Göring was. Everyone in Paris spoke of him in hushed tones.

"He is a cultured man. Paris is the heart of culture. He comes to collect art." Von Kaube recited these phrases as if by repeating holy doctrine—not necessary to believed, only to assert as if by dictate from a higher power, which it no doubt was. "I come at those times and at others on other business. I will be here frequently. And you will be here with me, in my bed when I'm in Paris. I care not who you fuck when I am in Berlin, but here, when I am in Paris, you are mine. I just ask that you are careful not to pick up a disease."

"I am yours?" Paul didn't seem particularly upset at that prospect. "How did I get here? The last I knew, I was—"

"Being assaulted at Claude's. Yes, I know. I intervened. The soldiers were disobeying orders. They were not told they could rampage against French civilians who were not Jewish. You are not Jewish, are you?"

"No, I'm not Jewish," Paul said. "But then what—?"

"That is good, then." Paul could see the relief in the man's face. "I was within my authority to shoot the soldiers then."

Oh. A shiver went down Paul's spine. How could the man make love so tenderly—otherwise, as well, but tenderly at surprising moments—and always solicitous of his partner's pleasure—and be so . . . so . . . much like Paul had heard the SS Gestapo was like?

"Would you not bed me if I were Jewish?" Paul asked.

"Yes, of course I would. Jews can be prostitutes too. I would fuck a Jew if he were as desirable as you are. It just would not have been right for me to intervene between German soldiers and a Jew. If you had been Jewish . . . but then I never supposed you were. You are not circumcised, so the thought never occurred to me. But you asked why you are here. You are here, at the Ritz, because I brought you here for your recovery and your safety—and because I want you in my bed. I bought you from Claude."

"Bought me from Claude?" Paul hadn't realized that Claude owned him. The thought of being owned gave him a little thrill, but men didn't own other men in this day and age.

"Yes, and he drove a hard bargain. He wanted a fortune for you, but I negotiated the price down because you were used goods—badly used goods at that moment."

So cold blooded about it, but then the captain had believed from the beginning that Paul was a male prostitute. How could he think otherwise now when he had found Paul being a prostitute in a male brothel?

"You say the Reichsmarschall is in Paris to collect art. French art?"

"Not your national art. Most of that seemed to have disappeared before we arrived. Art from private collectors—primarily Jews no longer needing it."

"He buys it or he just takes it?"

"Move over please; provide me room," the captain said, as if he hadn't heard the question. He stood and began taking off his uniform.

"You're going to sleep here?"

"Warum nicht? Why not? This is my bed. I bought you to keep it warm for me. I understand if you are still sore from the beating. We need not have sex until you are feeling better. Not if you tell me you can't take it. I will just hold you if you cannot have sex now."

There seemed no question that the captain intended to have sex with Paul at some time soon—now if Paul didn't tell him it would be too painful. Maybe even then. The captain was sporting an erection.

Garren climbed into bed, naked, and stretched his body along Paul's back. Paul rolled over on his side, with a groan. The captain wrapped his arms around Paul's torso and planted his lips in the back of Paul's neck. He was hard, his erection pressed into the crease where Paul's right leg folded into his groin. Paul reached back and took hold of the captain's cock. Garren let out a long breath as Paul pushed the foreskin of the cock down under the glans and pressed his index finger into the piss slit, which was leaking precum.

"You should not do that if you can't have sex with me now," Garren whispered.

Paul continued playing with the glans of Garren's cock.

"Do you feel well enough to take slow cock? If not, just keep doing that and stroke it a bit and I will come. Then I can sleep."

What was this about not having to have sex, Paul wondered. But he didn't wonder it to be critical. He was hard himself and was stroking his own cock with the other hand, that bandaged arm painfully out of the sling it had been in—but with his sexual needs more insistent than the level of pain in his arm.

A master. He had a master who owned him and couldn't keep his hands off him. A man who had shot two soldiers for him and paid a small fortune for his body. Paul's arousal from this was overwhelming.