Escape to Constantinople

He had looked expectantly at Pyotr, but Pyotr had given no such gushing commentary on his past nor did he pursue the nuances of what O'Dell had said to him. He just thanked O'Dell for the cigarettes and expressed appreciation that the Americans were running a soup kitchen for the refugees.

"The Bristols take marvelous boat outings up the Bosporus and out into the Sea of Marmara," O'Dell said. "He's commander of the American Black Sea Fleet too, you know—and has the greatest ship to sail on. I often get invited to go with them. Helen Bristol is always looking for handsome young men to play bridge on their outings. Do you play bridge?"

"Alas no," Pyotr answered, although he, in fact, played an expert hand of bridge. He had learned that back in his sloth years as a teenager with no purpose rambling around a St. Petersburg palace. "And that all sounds like an entirely different world."

Kenneth O'Dell followed Pyotr out of the refugee camp that night, saw him soliciting sailors on Horhor Street, and obviously understood what Pyotr did in life in Constantinople.

The next time they shared a smoke in the shadow of the soup kitchen building, O'Dell was more direct.

"You aren't like the other male prostitutes."

Pyotr looked at him in surprise. O'Dell had been so matter-of-fact in saying it. This would probably mean he would be dismissed from working with Helen Bristol's soup kitchen effort, Pyotr thought.

"You know then."

"I've seen you in the alleys of Horhor Street—with other men. Furtively against the walls. I wanted to tell you that you didn't have to do it . . . to degrade yourself that way."

"We refugees do what we must do to survive," Pyotr answered. He wasn't about to show embarrassment or to apologize. But he couldn't resist adding, "So, you see how impossible it would for me to go to Mrs. Bristol's bridge outings with you."

"I would still take you, gladly," O'Dell answered. "I didn't mean to say that you shouldn't go with men if you want. I meant that, with your good looks and regal bearing, you should not have to be having sex with sailors in alleys."

"As I said, we do what we need to do to survive," Pyotr said. And then he walked off, fully expecting to receive notice not to appear at the soup kitchen the next Sunday. But the dismissal didn't come.

The two had little to say to each other the next Sunday. But that evening, when Pyotr took to the streets, he expressed surprise when O'Dell walked up to him and asked Pyotr to go with him.

"When I said you need not do it for sailors in alleys, I was saying that I would gladly pay the price to take you some place safe and clean. I was saying that I very much want to fuck you."

At that moment, Pyotr felt that whatever relationship there had been building between the two had been tarnished, but a paying client was a paying client. O'Dell hadn't batted an eye when Pyotr told him how much he would cost—and for what.

O'Dell could tell that Pyotr was embarrassed and reticent as O'Dell was asking about the various hotels, picking out the most presentable Pyotr could be made to identify, and paying for a full night at the hotel desk, which caused the hotel clerk's eyebrow to raise as much as it did Pyotr's. Both were equally surprised when O'Dell enquired about shaving toiletries, lubricant, and a large supply of condoms and paid for them. Of those items, the shaving gear took the longest for the clerk to produce, although when O'Dell asked for skin condoms, the clerk said that they, regrettably only had the cheaper, latex, variety.

"Next time I'll bring my own," O'Dell said, and Pyotr felt a shiver travel down his spine.

O'Dell hadn't shown the slightest indecision or furtiveness. When he had told Pyotr straight out in a matter-of-fact way that he wanted to fuck him—using that word rather than a euphemism, his blunt directness had shaken Pyotr. He knew then that O'Dell, a suave diplomat, was also a man of considerable experience in these matters and that he had probably discerned in Pyotr exactly what he wanted in a sex partner the first time Pyotr had walked through the food line he was serving.

Once inside the door, O'Dell didn't make Pyotr face him for the first fucking—nor did he turn on a light. He pulled Pyotr's back into his chest, wrapped his arms around the young Russian, and used his hands not only to disrobe them both, but to work Pyotr's body into high arousal. Pyotr panted as he felt O'Dell's hard cock stroking up the small of his back. Pyotr could tell the man was large and thick. He spread his thighs and began to moan as the man's cock head started rubbing back and forth over his entrance. This already was more foreplay and preparation than Pyotr had gotten during a sexual encounter since he'd left Kazan. He groaned and buried the back of his head in the hollow of O'Dell's neck as the older man's lubricated fingers began to open his channel up.

"You frighten me," Pyotr whispered. "You are a man of such standing and responsibility—and respectability. And yet you are so expert at this. You know the difference in condoms even."

"When I take you, I would wish nothing less than not to use them . . . for us to be so closely bound that not even that came between us. Perhaps in time, but. . . . You think that men of standing and respectability don't fuck other men?" O'Dell asked. And then he laughed. "In many ways you are an innocent, Pyotr. You don't seem to realize how desirable you are. How many 'respectable men,' as you say, want to fuck you from the moment they see you. And now I have you. What shall we do with you now?"

Pyotr turned his face to O'Dell's and they kissed. "Please, now. Take me . . . fuck me," he murmured when they came out of the kiss. "I want you inside me."

"It's what I want too. But I think you need some loving attention, not just sex and your money," O'Dell whispered. "And making love to you is what I want to do."

Pyotr felt O'Dell's arm go around his stomach and his feet were being lifted off the floor. O'Dell was taller and heavier than Pyotr. The young Russian tried to find the floor with his toes, but O'Dell just gave a little laugh and kept pulling Pyotr's buttocks cheeks up into his crotch. The cock head was in position and slightly, to the rim of the head, lodged inside Pyotr's hole.

"Relax. Just let yourself go, bend toward the floor, and let me control. You will enjoy this, I think—giving yourself entirely to my control."

Pyotr did so, and he moaned as O'Dell stood on the floor, holding Pyotr's jackknifed body to his crotch, and entered him to the point where his cock head was resting against Pyotr's prostate.

"Oh . . . my . . .god," Pyotr whimpered as O'Dell started to worry the prostate with his bulb—and continued to do so as Pyotr melted to his focused attentions. After Pyotr had shot off on the floor below them, O'Dell started to fuck him in earnest without changing position—until Pyotr came a second time and O'Dell came the first time.

After a brief respite on the bed, O'Dell fucked Pyotr again, slowly and languidly and completely, this time crouched facing Pyotr and hanging over his body, with Pyotr asking that the light be put on so he could watch O'Dell's muscles ripple in the act of sex. After a brief sleep, O'Dell did it again. And then in the early morning hours, yet again. He took nearly an hour each time, forcing Pyotr to be so aroused that he was begging for the cock. Pyotr could do so on demand for a client, but this was the first time that he involuntarily did so, completely lost to what Kenneth O'Dell could give him and whimpering for it.

"You seem to enjoy the sex," O'Dell said as he was standing at the basin, shaving early in the morning. He was looking at Pyotr through the mirror over the basin to where the young, glassy-eyed Russian, lay on his back on the bed. "Or is that just a well-developed act? I haven't quite figured out why men do it for money, whether some actually enjoy it."

"With you I enjoy it."

"But you don't want to be doing what you're doing—out on the street?"

"It's a way to survive."

"But you wouldn't want to be doing it if you had other options? Letting men bed you?"

"It depends on the man. It's not so bad. I haven't had other options for so long that I haven't considered it."

O'Dell returned to concentrating on his shaving. He was working on the area around his Adam's apple. It wasn't a good time to also be carrying on a conversation. But Pyotr could see the man was thinking about something, and when he finished, he spoke again.

"I know a house, near the top of Horhor. It's a very private, rather refined place. It's called Martin's Tea Room. But it's not really a room, and they don't serve tea there. And there is no one named Martin involved, although they like to keep both their employees and clients in the Westernized, refined vein. If you go there and give them my name and tell them I recommend you—which I will do if they ask me—I think you could be off the streets and out of the refugee tents."

"Do you go there?"

"I have been known to do so. If you are there, I may do so again."

Pyotr didn't answer for a while. He just lay there and watched O'Dell finish up his shaving.

When he was done, Pyotr said, in a low voice, "Come here and let me feel how smooth you are. And are there any condoms left?"

"The skin ones are nicer. They give a more natural feel to both. Raw, natural, of course, is the nicest by far. Perhaps with someone handled as carefully as they do at Martin's . . ."

"Then next time you might bring some of the skin ones? You said something like that to the hotel clerk." Pyotr was desperately fishing for an indication that O'Dell had liked the sex enough to want to do it again.

O'Dell didn't answer that, and, as it turned out, he never visited Martin's Tea Room while Pyotr was living there. But at this point, Pyotr was in no position to ask again, because he was sitting on the side of the bed, legs spread, with O'Dell standing between them, Pyotr gripping the older man's buttocks cheeks with the palms of his hands, and sliding his mouth slowly down and up O'Dell's shaft.

Pyotr had told O'Dell that he'd enjoyed the night so much that O'Dell need not pay him, but when the American embassy officer left for work that Monday morning, Pyotr found enough money on top of the bureau that he didn't have to go out on the street for the rest of the week—indeed, not before he mounted the steps of the brick townhouse at the top of Horhor with a brass plaque beside the door identifying it as Martin's Tea Room, and pressed the buzzer.

* * * *

"We don't usually go out, but this is an important client, and he can't come to us."

"That's all right, Marcel," Pyotr answered. "I haven't been out of the house for some time. If I can find it, I'll be happy to go."

"Jamir will accompany you there and back."

Pyotr knew that Jamir wasn't going along with him just to guide him. Once set up with Martin's Tea Room, Pyotr had learned, it took dynamite for a young man to pull free of it, even for a few hours, before he no longer was desirable. Martin's provided complete assurance of cleanliness and exclusively for the use of gentlemen for its clients, and a single mishap or indiscretion could shut the operation down.

Marcel was who passed for Martin. Pyotr didn't have the vaguest idea who really owned the house, and none of the other young men who serviced the clients claimed to know either. But Marcel ran it like a velvet prison. Still, Pyotr knew that Kenneth O'Dell had done him a favor by guiding him here. The men here ate well, their time with clients was regulated—indeed the quality of their clients was regulated—they were well clothed, and they each had a private room of their own. If Pyotr had stayed out on the street, he would probably be dead or diseased or hopelessly deformed by now. So, he had every reason to be grateful to Kenneth O'Dell for his introduction. The bad that came with the good, however, was that O'Dell hadn't visited Martin's and Pyotr couldn't see him outside Martin's.

Jamir escorted Pyotr to what must once have been a palace but now was cut up into apartments. Still, the apartments were large and the building was located in a wealthy part of the city and sat high on a slope overlooking the Bosporus and had delicately carved stone-latticed balconies designed to let the breeze in from off the water without permitting anyone to look in. Staring up at the wall turned toward the water before they entered, Pyotr wondered if this had once been one of the sultan's harems. The building was only in a mild stage of disintegration—as opposed to the perpetual advanced stage suffered by most of the other Constantinople palaces of past sultans.

The elderly man who answered the door of the third-floor apartment looked vaguely familiar, but Pyotr couldn't locate him in his mind until he entered a room with a long dining table and saw sitting near the far end of it, in a wheel chair, Prince Artomon Toubetskoy, the cousin of his father's who he had attended to in Sevastopol.

"Oh, it is you," the prince said, as surprised to see Pyotr as Pyotr was to see him, and almost simultaneously, both enquired of the other, "How did you manage to escape Sevastopol?"

The prince recovered first. "An old Armenian lover was kind enough to give me and my faithful retainer, Boris, passage here on his own ship. And you?"

"On the Rion."

"The Rion? I heard that was one of the worst crossings."

"I would hope there were none worse, cousin. But as you can see, I now work at Martin's Tea Room. You sent for someone. But if this is an unfortunate coincidence, I can always return and send back someone who—"

"No, no. You will do splendidly. I found you to be a sweet young man. If you were only ten years younger . . ." He sighed, no doubt at the memories of many years past. "Come sit close to me here—very close. You do look so much like your father—or what he grew to look like years after I first knew him."

After the prince had unbuttoned Pyotr's fly and readjusted the covering over his own naked lap, he expertly sucked Pyotr to an ejaculation and then leaned back—before indulging a second time—and ordered up wine and stuffed figs for them both.

"You enjoy it at Martin's, do you?" he asked Pyotr.

"It keeps me alive. I perhaps wouldn't be if Martin's hadn't taken me in."

"I am surprised that Marcel allows a Romanov count outside of the walls of his best bedchamber."

"He does not know I'm a Romanov—or a count."

"Ah, and you'd prefer he didn't? You don't want the Romanov name dragged down to this? You are ashamed of—?"

"I am ashamed of nothing, cousin. We all do what we have to do to survive, and the Bolsheviks have cut the Romanovs down to a more human size, I would think."

"You would think that, would you? I would not count the Romanovs out so quickly, I don't think. I prefer to think of these Reds as a nasty interlude—that the Russian people will come to their senses when they see how these Bolsheviks rule."

"And most likely will then find a third way, cousin, I think. There are many who think the Romanovs were not much better."

"But still, I would think a better position for you would be more in keeping with your heritage, even if you have foresworn the Romanov name. Perhaps I can help you there."

Pyotr wanted to shrink from this shriveled up old man living in the past and of no use to anyone in the present. He had a vision of the prince telling him that he could come live here and be sucked off by this dried-up prune twice a day. As good as Toubetskoy was at blow jobs, Pyotr couldn't imagine of a life such as this until the old man chose to die—which then, no doubt—would mean that Pyotr would be tossed out on his buttocks. And then he'd be in no better circumstances than he was now—just older and less desirable. He could not see letting Prince Toubetskoy use up the best years of his remaining life.

"I believe I can help you obtain a waiter's job at the Parizen. Vladmir Smirnoff is an old family friend, you know."

"A waiter's job?" Pyotr asked in disbelief. "And that is a better position than the stable at Martin's."

"Yes, much. You would be more visible there. Its clientele is even more discrete than that of Martin's, and the waiters and waitresses—nearly all Russian nobles, as you are, despite your disclaimer—are free to go with whomever is attracted to them after they have finished their daily shift. I know of several of our kind who have gone on to better places from Constantinople with the help of patrons they have served there."

"Vladimir Smirnoff? He will know who I am. I'm sure we met in St. Petersburg."

"It won't matter. He will tell no one—except perhaps to your benefit—if you do not wish him to."

* * * *

One balmy night in May of 1921, two momentous changes in Pyotr's life were set in motion within an hour of each other as he was helping to serve dinner to a full room at the Parizen. The restaurant was crowded more than usual this night because the most popular night spot for the European, Russian, and American community of diplomats, naval officers, and expatriate community, the Le Grand Circle Moscovite—known in short as the Moscovite—was closed for a private function.

The first event was the sighting of the Imperial Military Academy cadet friend of his, Mikhail Shevemetev, who Pyotr had last seen flailing around in Novorossiysk harbor when the barge taking cadets out to an evacuation ship had turned over. Pyotr had been sure that Mikhail, who couldn't swim, had drowned in that incident.

Pyotr still couldn't believe it was Mikhail sitting with a severe-looking, but handsome and imposing, Turkish army officer until Mikhail saw Pyotr as well, almost broke into tears, and rose and ran to him.

"Pyotr?"

"Yes, it is me. Mikhail?"

In parody with what Pyotr had shared in first question with his father's cousin, Prince Toubetskoy, only a couple of months earlier—a question blurted out by many a White Russian refugee upon meeting someone unexpectedly they had known before escaping to Constantinople—the two asked in harmony, "How did you escape and come to be here?"

"You first, Mikhail," Pyotr said.

"I was pulled back onto the dock at Novorossiysk half drowned and put on a ship that went to Smyrna on Turkey's western, Mediterranean Sea coast. I was taken in by that Turkish army captain at the table there—the one who obviously wants me to come right back to him; he's really so possessive. His name is Edom Yilmaz and we are in an encampment not far outside Smyrna, which, you probably don't know, the Greeks now hold. He's in Constantinople on some sort of military strategy conference—and he doesn't trust me to be away from him alone."

"He is your protector?"

"Yes. In every sense of the word. It's a good arrangement for me, Pyotr. I wasn't cut out to be a soldier myself."

"I do not sit in judgment on such things, Mikhail. Not anymore. I would have no reason to do so, considering what I have had to do to survive."

"Were you in the Crimea at the fall?"

"I left just before everything collapsed. Professor Orlov made sure I got out, although I don't think he made it. The cadets were on the line facing the mainland when the Bolsheviks managed to cross."

"God certainly wasn't with us when the wind blew the water away and the mud was frozen," Mikhail said.

"I do not think God has been with Mother Russia and the tsar for several years, Mikhail, maybe longer. I am beginning to think that all of the gossips who said that the tsarevitch's blood disease and the hold that mystic, Rasputin, was able to have over the Romanovs was a harbinger of God's wrath on Russia were right. I have changed my name to Apraksin. I am Pyotr Apraksin now, the son of simple country teachers."

"I will try to remember that Pyotr, although I don't know if we ever will meet again. Captain Yilmaz is signaling me insistently to return now—and we leave again tomorrow for western Turkey. It is such a relief to know you are alive, though. I worried about you."