Puttin' on the Ritz

"Ja, das ist sehr gute"—"Yes, that is very good," Garren murmured in response to the attention Paul was giving his cock with his hand. "I am in need. I must use you if . . ."

Paul provided his answer in action, lifting his left leg and moving it over on top of Garren's thigh. He guided the cock to his hole with the hand grasping it. With a grunt, Garren thrust his hips forward slightly and was inside Paul.

"You are so sweet. Tight. A surprise for a whore," Garren whispered.

"Fuck me. I am yours. Take me," Paul whispered. "I am your whore." Paul understood that that was what the German wanted to hear. Paul felt like there was a much closer bond between them than that. In time, he was confident that captain would feel that way too.

Garren stroked deep inside Paul's channel five times, Paul's passage walls yielding more and Garren's cock thickening more with each pull back to the surface followed by the long glide in, each glide taking the cock deeper. On the fifth slide, Garren came. Paul sighed at the realization he had. Garren pulled the cock out to the surface and glided in, deeper, again, and shot off more cum. And then again. Paul had ejaculated into the sheets as well.

Garren cupped Paul's head and turned his face toward him and they kissed deeply. "Gute, sehr gute—that was very good," Garren murmured.

"Yes, it was," Paul answered in French. He'd almost used English, but something inside him told him not to reveal that he was an American. Claude apparently hadn't told Garren he was an American. Had Claude known that? Had Noell told him? Maybe not.

As they cooled down, Paul remembered what he'd seen in the room that had surprised him. "That charcoal sketch on the wall at the foot of the bed. Was that here when you took the room?" It was too dark now for either of them to see it, but Garren answered as if he knew what Paul was asking about.

"I bought it at a gallery on the Left Bank. The day after the party where I first . . ." He seemed at a loss for words.

"Where you first fucked me to heaven?"

"Yes, that. Where you first surrendered totally to me and taught me what heaven was. Sweeter than any whore I've had in Germany. It reminded me so much of you that I had to have it."

"It is of me." Paul almost went on and said that the artist, Noell Giroux, had been his lover at the time, but something told him he shouldn't reveal this. There was more than one aspect to the SS officer, and Paul was quite unsure of who he was out of the bed.

"I hoped it might be. Perhaps I would have known for sure if your genitals weren't hidden. You should have thrust them out proudly. They are very nice." He was fondling Paul's dick and balls as he said this, and Paul was arching his back and sighing at the attention.

"The pose was what it was," Paul said.

Garren nuzzled Paul's neck with his nose. "I am in erection again."

"Yes, I can feel you."

"And so are you."

"Yes."

"Do you feel well enough to take the cock again? Perhaps more vigorously and longer this time? I want you again badly. You've taken it once . . ."

"Yes, please. I want it again. And hard. Fuck me hard into tomorrow. Take me like a master takes his slave. That's what we are. You are my master and I am your slave." Paul rolled over onto his belly and went up on his knees. Garren mounted, entered, and began to vigorously fuck him deep, being careful to keep his hands on Paul's hips, away from the bandages on his chest and arm.

* * * *

Paul woke, more alert and feeling less pain than the day before, to the sight of Garren von Kaube, in uniform, packing a duffel bag.

"Are you going away?" Paul asked.

"Just for four days. I'm flying to Berlin. Maybe when I come back you'll be well enough for me to do you better."

"You did me just fine," Paul said.

"I'm more aroused and can do better with more athletic positions. What really turns me on about you is that you look so delicate but that you can take it as I like to give it."

You once whispered that you loved me, Paul thought. Is that what love means to you? It means more than that to me and I fear I'm falling for you—at least one side of you. He dare not say that aloud, though. What he said was, "I'll miss you."

"We'll have to learn to make the most of the time we're together," the captain said. "I'll probably be gone half the time. But I'll want you here for when I'm in Paris. The waiters here at the Ritz are very helpful. I've engaged one, Antoine Boudin, to take care of you when I'm not here—to take care of you in every way. He is bringing you a breakfast today and will bring all of your meals until you can go to the dining room. He'll also change your bandages and will bathe you."

"But he won't be you," Paul said.

"No, he won't. But he has a big prick and he fucks men. He'll be better than nothing. He is certified clean. You may have him as often as you want and need it—except when I'm here."

It sounded so bald, so clinical . . . but as long as the captain said he wanted Paul here, waiting for him . . .

Antoine did come into the room shortly after Von Kaube had left. Despite his intention not to like the man, who was only a few years older than Paul, Paul liked him and his smooth and polite ways from the beginning. He was from the Mediterranean Riviera part of France. He was dark and sultry and easygoing. The first day he chatted with Paul, passing on gossip, as he fed him and changed his bandages.

It was from Antoine that day that Paul learned more about the residents of the hotel during the occupation period, which included most of the military officials of the German occupation. Since Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was resident in the hotel when he was in Paris, the headquarters and staff for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, which he commanded, for the Paris region was located here too, including the Luftwaffe officer and writer (later eaten by a crocodile in the Congo River when he served as West German ambassador there), Hans-Jürgen Soehring, who was living in the hotel with the French movie actress Arletty.

Several other German generals, as well as spies, gravitated around the hotel, including Hans Speidel, Ceasar von Hofacker, and Carl von Stülpnagel, who were among the generals in Paris who later were to be fingered for planning the failed bombing attempt on Adolf Hitler's life, in the Valkyrie Operation, which they planned in the Ritz bar. The spies included the hotel resident, Hans von Dincklage, who was the lover of another famous hotel resident, Coco Chanel.

Paul had frozen at the mention that the German tank commander Jürgen Bosch had a room here, "although he isn't in residence much." This had been the German general who had tortured and sexually assaulted Paul so badly at Claude's that it had laid Paul up for weeks.

"We'll just have to keep him away from you," Antoine said breezily when Paul told him why he was disturbed. But he said it in a way that made Paul feel the handsome waiter would protect him. And, with Paul, being protected was only a couple of steps away from being dominated, which aroused Paul and urged him to open his legs to the man. Because this talk of protection made Paul think, while Antoine was changing his bandages, of Garren's remark that the waiter had a big dick and that Paul was free to use him, Paul hardened.

Upon observing this Antoine said, "Tomorrow is your bath and a massage. We take care of that tomorrow." He touched Paul erection with a finger so that his meaning was quite clear. "I will take very good care of you. I have my instructions from the German captain." Paul shuddered in anticipation.

Antoine was off in conversation, though. "Several of our famous women residents have taken up with the Germans," he said. "Arletty is being fucked by a Luftwaffe officer and Coco Chanel by a German spy. There may be hell to pay for that some day."

If this was a veiled warning to Paul for being kept by a German SS captain, it went completely over Paul's head. And indeed, both Arletty and Chanel suffered some consequences of the fraternization after the war, although not nearly as much as French women without fame did. Arletty even spent time in a camp for collaboration. Both women toughed the fraternization out, though, with Arletty unrepentantly saying later, "If you hadn't let them in, I wouldn't have slept with him," and the better known, "My heart is French, but my arse is international," and with Chanel putting up the defense that, given the chance of a lover at her age, she wasn't going to ask to see his passport.

Paul, instead, focused on Chanel's lover being called a spy.

"Everyone here is spying on someone for someone," Antoine answered, repeating, "Simply everyone," a statement that also went over Paul's head. "It's not a question of who is a spy here; the question is who are they spying for this week," Antoine added.

"Garren says that General Göring comes here to buy art."

"Yes, he does. His broker, Karl Haberstock, is in residence. The art is delivered to the basement of the hotel and Haberstock goes over it to determine what is worthy for the Reichsmarschall to . . . acquire and ship back to Germany. The captain tells me you are an artist too."

"Yes, I'm a student of it."

"Pablo Picasso is arriving for a visit next week. We must arrange for you to meet him. He strictly fucks women, though, so don't get any ideas there. And, if you like, I can find space for a small studio for you if you want to paint. There will be long spans of time that your captain isn't in residence. You'll want something to occupy your time. But I have been engaged to occupy your time and energy. I know that a young man like you"—a promiscuous whore, Paul knew the waiter was—admittedly justifiably—thinking—"needs attention."

Over the next few days, before Captain von Kaube reappeared, Antoine Boudin gave Paul attention. On day two of Von Kaube's absence, Antoine gave Paul a bed bath and a hand job. On day three, he gave him a massage and a blow job, at the end of which Paul returned the favor by giving Antoine a blow job. On day four, Paul was tense and bitchy. Antoine fucked him and then fucked him again, revealing to Paul just how nice the waiter's cock was and leaving him purring for the captain's return on the fifth day.

* * * *

For the next three years, until he was almost twenty-three, Paul led an idyllic life largely in total isolation to the deepening threat of the occupation of Paris that festered beyond the walls of the Ritz. When the captain was there, Paul was continuously and well fucked. Von Kaube maintained magnificent fitness and, as promised, fucked with athletic positions and astonishing stamina, bouncing Paul's body up and down on his cock three and four times of an evening and night and still being able to rise and do whatever he was doing out in the city as an SS officer during the day.

When he wasn't there, chatty and sexy Antoine was there, and, on occasion, the writer-dilettante-actor trio would visit Paul, Paul starting off riding Count Bukowski's cock, with Michel Paquet coming in for a double possession of Paul's channel, segueing into Paquet fucking Paul—and then the actor, Moulin pumping Paul when the other two left. They had been patrons of Claude's brothel, and as long as they didn't make any demands when Von Kaube was there, Paul gave them access. He was mildly surprised when Moulin stopped coming with the other two, but he just assumed the Jewish actor was off in a play out of the city or something. Paquet and Bukowski just gave him sad faces when he initially asked about the actor, so he stopped asking.

Increasingly, Von Kaube brought Paul out with him to the parties in the hotel—most of them ones given by the Germans, for the Germans, and at the Ritz hotel's expense. Paul was being accepted by the other Germans as being with Von Kaube, everyone knowing what the relationship was but treating it as if it were invisible. The captain increasingly showed affection to him public—and even more increasingly in private as they fucked—more frequently making love rather than engaging in athletic and demanding fuck. And Garren was whispering the heart-melting "Ich liebe dich" after sex with greater frequency.

Paul returned the declaration at every opportunity. He had no trouble doing so. He believed it. The captain had changed Paul's parameters of sexual satisfaction and of the emotion of intimacy. Before Von Kaube, Paul had thought of intimacy with another man as having that man's cock inside him, hard and pumping, and receiving his release of seed. Paul could think of no more intimate and satisfying relationship with a man than that. Intimacy was moving a man to desire him so much that he had to be inside him, possessing him fully, with Paul feeling fully possessed by the man's throbbing cock and taking his release. He didn't see other aspects of the man entering into the quality of intimacy.

Now, through the attentions of the German captain, not just during sex but also in their sleeping together and in their evenings of being with each other, being owned by the captain, who could have any other man he wanted—and, just as much, Paul's feeling of absence when the two were apart—Paul had, he believed, a higher understanding of what it meant to be intimate with and fully satisfied by another man.

Once and only once, in May of 1941, Garren and Paul set off on an evening in the city with Arletty and Coco Chanel and their German lovers. But on their way into the city, they were pelted with screams of "collaborator" and "whore," and had to duck down in the car to avoid being struck by crumbling bricks.

Antoine treated Paul for a glancing blow off his brow when they returned to the hotel. When Paul described being set upon and an inability to understand why, Antoine said, "I'm afraid there will be hell to pay for those women some day for taking German lovers." Once again his obvious attempt to connect that with Paul being with Garren didn't sink in with Paul.

Antoine continued, "The Reichsmarschall has informed the hotel he is coming on an art hunt at the end of this week. There will be a party of the Germans. If you prefer, I can help you appear to have a cold too severe to attend."

"Why would I do that?"

Instead of answering him directly, Antoine passed on gossip about Göring. "You know he has furs and dresses up there in the Imperial Suite—ones cut to his size. I've talked with some of the waiters who are summoned to the suite to dance with him to a record player, with him in a silk dress. He tells them there's nothing to it but that he likes the feel of silk on his skin. They say that's all he wears—the silk dresses. He's a very good dancer, they say. He leads."

"Just a dance?" Paul asked.

"So the waiters he calls to the suite say," Antoine answered. The look he gave to Paul was meant to be meaningful, but it, along with the thrust of what Antoine had changed the subject to, was yet another warning that went over the young man's head.

Paul attended the party and was introduced to Hermann Göring, who declared he was utterly charmed by the young man and who, upon introduction, held his hands for the longest time before he released them. Paul had become comfortable with the generals and therefore was effervescent and enjoyed the party until late in the evening, when the tank commander Jürgen Bosch arrived and saw Paul talking art with Göring's art dealer, Karl Haberstock. Sensing he was being watched, Paul almost went into shock when he realized that General Bosch was there. Paul excused himself from the discussion with Haberstock in which he was surprised to find that Hitler—and therefore Göring as well—had no interest in the art of Pablo Picasso. Picasso had continued visiting the Ritz as well as Paul's studio in the hotel basement, where he gave useful advice to the young artist. The Führer, Haberstock said, raising his eyebrow, has said that anyone who paints the sky green and the fields blue should be taken out and shot. Apparently Picasso never heard this, though, as he continued to visit occupied Paris.

Paul went to Garren and begged off the rest of the party, saying he had a headache.

When the captain returned to their room that night, he looked a bit perplexed. He made love to Paul, holding him in a close embrace and kissing him while he fucked him slow and deep in a side split. The lovemaking was so tender that, after they'd come, Paul asked Garren what he was thinking, fishing, he realized, for another declaration of love—or possibly for some deeper pledge of union than that.

"The Reichsmarschall wants you to come to his suite and dance with him tomorrow at 8:00 p.m.," Von Kaube said. "I wish you didn't have to . . . but, of course, you do."

"Of course," Paul said. "I've heard that the waiters do this with him and that it's just a dance. Peculiar, though."

"You mustn't indicate you think that in any way—don't even think that it's peculiar," Garren said, holding Paul in a vice grip. "Remember the power the man wields. I am thinking of your safety here."

"Yes, of course. Don't worry. It will be fine."

Göring met Paul at the door to the suite, ushering out his attendants as he ushered Paul in. The Reichsmarschall was wearing a red silk dress that buttoned down the front and red high heels. He smiled at Paul and made small talk as he handed Paul a flute of champagne. He started up a record of a waltz, refilled Paul's glass, and talked of the Renoir he had seen that day and wanted. Taking the empty glass from Paul's hand and putting both Paul's glass and his own on a nearby table, he turned and opened his arms. "Dance with me."

They went through a couple of waltzes. Paul found that, indeed, Göring led, despite the dress, and was very light on his feet for such a big, rotund man—and in heels.

During the fourth waltz, Göring turned Paul around, embracing the young man close into his chest, and they just swayed to the music for a couple of minutes. Eventually, one of Göring's hands went to Paul's belt buckle and then his zipper, and he pushed Paul's trousers and underdrawers down to his knees. Paul realized that the man had unbuttoned his dress at the crotch when he felt the bulb of Göring's cock at his hole. Bowing to the inevitable, Paul arched his back, pressing the back of his head into the hollow of the tall German's shoulder, and raised and jutted his buttocks back into the Reichsmarschall's crotch in the way he'd learned to take in as much of a fat man's cock as he could. The entry wasn't demanding, but it was total of whatever length the man was. Paul knew he was all in because he felt the tickle of pubic hair on his buttocks.

They held steady there, in a standing embrace, swaying against each other to the rhythm of the waltz on the phonograph, with Paul, fulfilling the expectations of a male courtesan now, moving his buttocks on Göring's buried shaft, until, with a sigh, Göring came. Paul felt the dribble of the man's seed trickle down his inner thigh. Göring kissed him on the back of the neck. Paul then was released from the embrace and readjusted his own clothing while Göring rebuttoned his dress, turned Paul around again, and danced the fifth waltz as if nothing had happened.

But then Göring held out his hand again, as if there would be a sixth waltz. When Paul put his hand in Göring's, the Reichsmarschall led him down a hallway to his bedroom.

Forty-five minutes later, a German enlisted man opened the door of the bedroom, released Paul's wrists from the bindings on the headboard, and motioned Paul out. Göring was lying on his back on the bed, naked, like a beached whale, and snoring away. Göring had said nothing after the initial "Dance with me." Paul took his departure in silence as a signal. Nothing had happened. Just like with all of the waiters who had been summoned for a dance with the Reichsmarschall in his suite, nothing happened but a dance.