Escape to Constantinople

The merchant earlier tonight, Gurgen Petrosian, wanted to control him. But perhaps not as much as others did. Perhaps what he was offering was Pyotr's ticket out of a more dreary and controlling situation. That older daughter really was a pretty little thing, and in time, Pyotr would be head of the household and merchant house. Petrosian looked like he could keel over from living too richly at any moment.

Pyotr felt the need of the latrine. He rose from the bed and moved down on the corridor between the banks of bed as quietly as he could. He was hunched over a urinal when the strong arms enveloped his chest.

"You have made me wait too long. You need to be punished for that."

The voice was low, gruff. Nikolai Saltykov.

Pyotr knew that if he resisted the result would be the same. Nikolai would just beat him into submission. He sighed and spread his legs as he felt the cock head at his entrance. And then he cried out—knowing that it didn't matter, that the cadets were accustomed to hearing and ignoring such cries from the latrine in the middle of the night but not being able to stifle the cry—as Nikolai thrust a thicker cock than Orlov had up inside him and began to pump him hard.

* * * *

Pyotr was walking down into the city of Sevastopol from the hill, one of three the city covered, that the barracks was located on. Grigory Orlov had arranged a dinner engagement for him at the home of Prince Artomon Toubetskoy, a cousin to the father of the tsar on a different branch than Pyotr was on. Toubetskoy had moved to the Crimea from St. Petersburg many years earlier amid scandal of pedophilia and had been a recluse ever since. Pyotr knew of him in whispers and frowns within the family, but of little less. He was not someone Pyotr had heard of for years. But Prince Artomon had heard of Pyotr through Orlov's speaking around that a Romanov prince was in the city. As an actual Romanov prince in the city, Toubetskoy had expressed interest in seeing another one—one he'd never heard of as far as his memory could tell.

Toubetskoy was said to be fabulously wealthy still and to lay a lavish table. So, naturally Orlov was interested in him—and in fulfilling the prince's request to see Pyotr. "He has said that if you accommodate him, he will send you away with a basket of food," Orlov had said to Pyotr. "So, of course you will give him anything he wants."

"Yes, professor," Pyotr had dutifully answered. If rumors held, though, he didn't think he could please the prince. He was too old.

Pyotr had made a contact of his own. He had sent a message to Gurgen Petrosian that said he would be pleased to return to the merchant's house for another evening—and to dine with Petrosian and his eldest daughter.

Beyond making the contact, Pyotr still didn't know what he wished to do. The cadets would be leaving in two days' time for duty at the land bridge to the mainland and he didn't know when—or if—he'd ever get back to Sevastopol if he went with them. There were the attentions that Orlov demanded, but now there too were the rougher assaults of Nikolai Saltykov, who became crueler and more brutal with each stolen encounter. Vasily had been a gentle lover in relationship to what Nikolai demanded of him.

Pyotr had left the barracks early—without permission, although Orlov would cover for him as long as he showed up for his dinner with Toubetskoy—and returned with the promised basket of gourmet food. He'd walked down into the town, lost in thought, although his eyes moved across the city, delighting in the pink- and yellow-painted buildings down near the Grafs Yilmaz Quay that dominated the western side of the long, narrow finger of water bisecting the city. The sun came out from behind a cloud and lit up the onion steeples of the intricately designed churches dotting the old city.

Pyotr could live in a city like this, he thought—as long as it remained in the hands of the White Russians. And there was no reason why it shouldn't as naturally protected as it was from the mainland. There were signs that the Bolshevik advances across several fronts were slowing to a halt. Russia was just too big to gobble up whole.

He had felt an affinity with the city from the time his ship sailed into the inner harbor and he spied the fifty-foot-marble column topped by the two-headed eagle of the Romanovs, the symbol of the tsar, towering over the rocks guarding the inner harbor entrance. He took that as an omen that here, in this city, the White Russian presence would take hold—and would, eventually become a springboard to retaking the country.

On a narrow shopping street leading down toward the quay, Pyotr was drawn up short at seeing the officer from the ship he'd come to Sevastopol on, the officer who had brought Katya Betskoya on board. Pyotr looked around, expecting to see Katya as well, but he didn't see a young lady with the officer. Instead, he saw a young man, or who Pyotr decided was a young man, but only because he was wearing men's clothing. The youth was slight and willowy and moved with effeminate gestures and mincing steps. The officer was being very protective of him, and was letting himself be guided from window to window as the youth exclaimed his excitement at the wares on display. They went into a confectioner's shop, and Pyotr quickly moved down the cobblestoned street and onto the quay.

This was where he found Katya. She was sitting on the wide granite staircase that descended from the open-sided Greek-temple-styled open market building crowning the upper terrace of the quay. She held a flower basket and was hawking flowers. Pyotr stood, as much in shock at seeing her thus as for any other reason, and watched her work. She was good at it. She didn't try to sell them to the woman. Rather, she gave the passing men shy smiles and talked to them in low tones. And invariably they were charmed by her beauty and her flirting ways and would buy a flower from her. Her hand lingered in that of a few of the men while receiving the bloom, and they whispered to each other. Pyotr was afraid to know what might be passing between the young beauty who had captured his heart and these few men.

He waited until there were no other possible patrons nearby and then he slowly walked down the stairs. She looked up at him with a ready smile, the same smile she was giving any man who passed her by and gave her a second glance. But as he drew nearer, he could see that her smile became broader and more genuine, and her eyes twinkled. He was elated by the thought that she remembered him.

"You have taken to selling flowers?" he asked, as he drew near and crouched down on this haunches on the stairs so that they were on the same level. He didn't want to tower over her—he felt that her proper position was in the heavens, looking down on him.

"A girl has to make a living."

"You can make a living from selling flowers?"

"You can when you do it my way. Would you like a flower for your special lady?"

"Yes, of course. Perhaps two, because my lady is very special indeed."

He noticed that the smile faded from her face when he said this—but only momentarily. She spent a few moments picking out what seemed to be the best of the paltry bunch of flowers remaining in her basket, and Pyotr gave her far more than they were worth, he knew, in return. Then he leaned over and pushed the stems of the flowers into her cascading brunette hair over one of her delicately formed ears. He looked into her eyes, which were glistening with tears, but she lowered them, and he felt he lost a connection with her that had been fashioned without either one of them speaking.

"Where is your naval officer?" he asked, not mentioning that he had just seen him on the street of shops. "On the sail here from Novorossiysk he seemed ever by your side."

"We have parted ways," she said simply.

"And so you are truly alone . . . to make your living selling flowers on the quay."

"Yes, I'm afraid so. As I said, one does what one needs to do to survive."

"How well I know that." Pyotr's mind went to all that he endured—how he let himself be used—to survive. While he was thinking, though, a new thought—a new possibility—entered his mind.

"If you were to be offered a more stable job—one that took you off the street and gave you a roof over your head and enough to eat—would you be interested?"

"You wish me to go with you?"

"Not exactly. Not in the way you might mean," he answered. He said this, but his heart was pounding. There was nothing he would like more than if she did just that. But that wasn't the plan he had devised. "Come with me for an hour and we shall see what is possible. I cannot promise, but it is worth a try."

"And what would you want in return if I came with you?" She said it as if she still suspected that his intent was to take her to one of the cheap sailor's hotels fronting the quay for the hour that he'd asked.

He contemplated that for a moment. "If my plan works out for you, it would cost you this basket of flowers."

She looked down at the basket and the rapidly wilting small bunch of flowers and then she laughed—a somewhat bitter laugh. "That seems cheap enough of a risk. Yes, I'll go with you."

Petrosian's eldest daughter, Silva, opened the door of the merchant's house to them. Her eyes lit up and her mouth curved into a wide smile when she saw that it was Pyotr. Her eyes narrowed, however, and the smile dimmed as she saw Katya standing in his shadow. She seemed a bit rattled and uncertain when Pyotr asked to see her father in private if he was available, but she stood aside and let the two enter the foyer.

Gurgen Petrosian met them in his study. He could hardly keep his eyes off Katya, and his face became animated and his demeanor turned unctuous when Pyotr informed him that Katya was the daughter of the novelist, Fydor Betskoy. Pyotr didn't assume that the merchant would have any recognition at the mention of novelist, but he was careful to emphasize the phrase, patronized by the tsar's court, and Petrosian responded just as he had assumed he would. At that point Pyotr thought Petrosian would agree to anything Pyotr proposed, but, even though it might not have been necessary, Pyotr carried on with the totality of the plan that had entered his head when he was talking with Katya on the quay.

"You said you could not find a suitable governess for your daughters," he said. "As the daughter of a member of court, Katya has learned all of the noble women's virtues that you could possibly wish to have taught your daughters. She is an old friend of my family's, and I regret to have found out that she is here alone, one of the thousands of refugees in the city, and without a sponsor. If you were to offer her the position of governess with a modest stipend and a room and board, she could teach and chaperon your daughters—and it would be, I think, to all of our benefit."

Katya smiled at how easily the lie of family connections rolled off Pyotr's lips, but he got the impression that she approved of his use of guile.

"All of our benefit?" Petrosian asked, although Pyotr could tell that the man was already sold on the idea.

Pyotr took a deep breath and continued. "Yes, I am so interested in seeing Miss Betskoya safe and settled that I can pledge an interest in your earlier proposal to me. I must go to the front at Perekop in two days' time. But when I return to the city from there, I would be interested in discussing arrangements to join your family more intimately."

When Pyotr left the merchant's house, Petrosian was beaming with pleasure as he introduced his daughters to a somewhat bemused but willing Katya and was arranging for a manservant to go with her to her lodging to retrieve what little she had in the way of possessions.

Pyotr descended the stairs to the merchant's residence holding Katya's basket of bedraggled flowers in his hands. It already was time for him to start out for the home of Prince Toubetskoy. A harried-looking matron pushing a perambulator buggy with a baby in it and wearily responding in a monotone to the jabbering of two other small children at her side approached him as he reached the pavement. With a flourish and a smile, he handed the basket of flowers to the flabbergasted woman and melted into the crowd on the street without a look back.

It was time for not looking back, he thought, as the not-so-pleasant possibilities of the evening ahead of him flooded into his mind.

"I knew your father very well," Prince Toubetskoy said as they sat close together at a table stretching for what seemed like miles into the shadows of a dimly lit, but heavily brocaded dining room in the prince's palace. "You look quite a bit like him, although he was much younger at the time than you are now." Their initial introductions had been a bit awkward, but it hadn't taken Toubetskoy long to connect who Pyotr was after he'd seen him or for Pyotr to express surprise and an apology that Orlov had inflated his title.

Pyotr jerked slightly and trembled at the inference in the prince's voice when he said that he'd known Pyotr's father—and especially when Toubetskoy mentioned how young Pyotr's father was when he'd known him. It didn't help that the fly to Pyotr's trousers was unbuttoned and spread and that the ancient man, hunched over in a wheelchair and fishing nuts and berries off his plate with one hand, was slowly masturbating Pyotr with the other hand.

Pyotr had already eaten a lavishly presented meal and a large basket of food was sitting on the top of the table, not far from where they were positioned, as if a symbol of obligation for Pyotr to let the prince have his way with him.

"You are such a beautiful young man. Older than your father when I knew him, but a beautiful young man anyway," the old man murmured as he hunched lower over Pyotr's lap and lost interest in the food, such as it was, that was on his plate. "You will visit me again, of course."

"We go to the front in two days," Pyotr said, "but if you wish me to, I will visit you again when we return." Orlov's instructions were firm; Pyotr could do no other than accept any return invitation the prince extended to him.

And then he groaned because the prince's face was in his lap and the old man's withered lips opened over his cock head. Pyotr moaned, recognizing that, even as old as he was, the prince was still an expert at sucking cock. Some things are never unlearned especially when, as was likely with the prince, they weren't allowed to go out of practice.

* * * *

The Imperial Military Academy cadets had been in the field, on the front line at Perekop, for three months. It was a particularly cold and blustery early November, and General Pyotr Wrangel, commander of the troops there, had just given the order that the cadets were to return to Sevastopol, because they didn't have warm enough clothing for the elements.

The Red army troops, under the command of generals Semyon Budennyi and Mikhail Frunze, had been massing on the mainland across from Perekop for two months. They now outnumbered the White Army forces under Wrangel at least ten to one by Wrangel's estimation. Although no one in the White Army forces would voice it, apparently the Red Army wasn't spread quite as thin as rumor had reported. Still, the land bridge was so narrow that the approach could be defended by even fewer troops than Wrangel had at his disposal.

November 7 marked the third anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, and Wrangel's staff had determined that the Reds would probably launch a suicide assault on that date to try to take the Crimea. In many respects the defending soldiers wished they would and would get their defeat over with.

On the night leading into the 7th, a weather phenomenon occurred that happened less frequently than every fifty years in the northern Crimea. A strong wind blew across the marsh separating the mainland from the peninsula with such force that it forced the shallow water of the salt flats eastward, exposing the mud flats that the temperatures had now frozen.

Wrangel saw what this meant before the Red Army realized it. He knew that when and if the Bolsheviks recognized they could move across the full stretch of the width of the peninsula, a line that the White Army couldn't hope to hold, with impunity they could overrun Wrangel's forces and race down the 120-mile length of the peninsula to Sevastopol within a matter of days.

Wrangel determined to start moving his forces back and preparing a holding action immediately but also to send couriers back to Sevastopol to urge the acceleration of an evacuation. The evacuation had already commenced, but few had taken it seriously yet.

"A few cadets are to speed back to Sevastopol and raise the alarm," Grigory Orlov said to the cadets surrounding him. He called out the names of those who were to go. Pyotr's name was called. Nikolai Saltykov's was not. Orlov also announced that he himself would be staying on the line.

"I don't understand," Pyotr said when he was alone with Orlov. "You've always insisted that I stay close to you."

"And now I am insisting that you leave. And I also insist that as soon as you've reported to the authorities in Sevastopol that you get on any ship that will take you away from Russia—I understand that the ships of the Allied powers are willing to help with the evacuation of the city. I advise that you get as far away from Russia as possible."

"But . . ."

"I have not forgotten my promise to your father—to protect you as well as I could. I may not have done it as your father imagined until now, but I take the pledge I made seriously. Now go. Not another word, and do not tarry. I'm afraid that every hour is precious at this point. And here is a letter from General Wrangel attesting who you are and requesting accommodation immediately upon presentation of the credentials on any vessel you try to board to evacuate. This should be enough to get you a berth."

When Pyotr reached Sevastopol, he did his duty. He delivered the documents reporting General Wrangel's fears and strongly worded suggestions on an accelerated evacuation to the authorities of the city. But then, rather than go directly to the quay as Orlov had bade him to do, he ran to Gurgen Petrosian's house. When he got there, the doors to both the shop and the house were open, and both were not only deserted but also stripped of their furnishings and wares. There was no hint of where the family had gone or if they had managed to take the furnishings and goods with them—Pyotr knew that Petrosian owned one of the small ships that had been in the harbor the previous summer—or whether the house and shop had been looted in their absence.

With a heavy heart, he turned his eyes toward the quay. He had already passed the prince's palace upon his entry into the city, and it had also appeared deserted as well.

Chapter Four: Into the Black Sea

Pyotr went directly from the Petrosian house down to the Sevastopol quay. An evacuation was under way, and, in contrast to what he had experienced in Novorossiysk, this one appeared to be orderly. Ships hadn't come in directly to the quay but were standing out in harbor and being fed by small boats and tugboats drawing up to the quay in various places along the waterfront to board refugees standing in queues supervised by soldiers.

When Pyotr approached what looked like the shortest of the queues, the officer on duty, after examining the letter from General Wrangel, said that there was no question of not letting him on an evacuation ship of his choosing—and even being given priority boarding, but he advised Pyotr that it would be best for him to come back the next morning because all of the passenger ships in the harbor were already nearly full to capacity, that they were all derelict tubs, and that better-appointed ships were expected to be there the next day.