Escape to Constantinople

"And I about you," Pyotr said. And, as Mikhail was turning to return to his Turkish caption, Pyotr reached out to hold him for one last question. "And Vasily Bestuzhev-Ryumin? He went into the water when you did."

"I'm sorry, Pyotr. I never saw him again. I have no idea whether he survived. I'm sorry. I know you and he—"

"Not really, Mikhail. No. I just wonder about all of the cadets I once knew. All of that seems like it was in some far off, separate life."

"I know what you mean. I must go, though, Pyotr. The best of luck for you for the future. I am so happy to know that you live."

"And I you as well."

As Mikhail went back to his table and to his Turkish captain, who put a possessive arm around his neck as he sat down, Pyotr's mind went back to all of those who had been in his life and had suddenly dropped out of it—his father and mother, and his siblings. And then, later, in Kazan, with the Imperial Military Academy, his fellow cadets, particularly Vasily and Mikhail, and, of course, Grigory Orlov, his professor and protector. The man who had initiated him and controlled him in such a similar, possessive way as Mikhail's Turkish captain was now controlling him. But, above all, Katya Betskoya, the Kiev beauty who had stolen his breath away in just a few moments of contact, but who was almost constantly in his thoughts now. What of her? Had she managed to escape Sevastopol? And, if so, where was she? Was she, even now, here in Constantinople, just a few blocks away from here? Would he stumble on her some day in the same manner as Mikhail had just appeared? And would there be a Turkish captain with his possessive arm around her shoulders when they did meet?

The Turkish captain and Mikhail left soon thereafter. But as they were leaving, a middle-aged Greek, obviously from his dress and demeanor very wealthy and important, came in for dinner. Pyotr was assigned to serve him, and the Greek showed interest in the young Russian man immediately—an interest that they did not need to define, as the Greek had seen Pyotr at Martin's Tea Room weeks before.

"I have seen you at Martin's," the Greek said, as Pyotr brought him his check.

"Yes, sir," Pyotr answered. There was no reason for him to lie.

"I missed you not being there. I came once explicitly to engage your services, and you weren't there."

"Sorry, sir."

"Perhaps you would be interested in going with me tonight?" He was doling out money on the tray Pyotr had provided to pay his bill—and he was doling out over twice the cost of his meal.

"If you wish, sir."

"You do not find me too old or repulsive?"

"No, sir. You look just fine to me, sir." And indeed, although old enough to be gray-haired, the Greek had kept himself in presentable shape.

The Greek, who turned out to be a merchant with interests across the Aegean region and into the Black Sea, was named Theo Maneates. He fucked Pyotr in the backseat of a big, black motorcar parked just down the street from the restaurant. Pyotr gave him exemplary servicing, and Theo Maneates was quite pleased.

"You have a fine car here," Pyotr whispered as he sat in Maneates's lap, and the Greek's cock was softening inside him.

"Would you like to drive it?"

"Drive it? I can't drive a motorcar."

"Would you like to learn?"

"Certainly. Someday. That would indeed be an adventure."

"Would you like to learn to drive someday soon—and come work for me as my chauffeur? Driving this motorcar? My chauffeur has died and I need a replacement—one who is as willing and entertaining as you. My wife does not like me to leave the house in the evening when she is in Constantinople. That's why it took me so long to come visit you at Martin's. She's very suspicious. But the chauffeur's room is just over the garage at my residence. You could drive me in my car during the day—and I would pay you well if I could drive you in the chauffeur's room at my whim and when I could manage it in the night."

"I can tell the idea is arousing to you," Pyotr said, with a low laugh. "You are rising inside me again."

"Yes, I want you again now. Are you interested in my business proposition?"

"Why not," Pyotr answered. And why not indeed, he thought. It would be a less taxing job, a full step up from waitering during the day and prostituting himself to whoever wanted him at night. The man was middle aged and a bit fat, but he was not bad looking, he fucked with vigor, he evidently had a full purse, and he had been able to go hard twice in the same evening.

Chapter Six: Smyrna

If he wasn't so frightened; hot, even at midnight; and despairing of all the misery around him, Pyotr would have had to laugh. This was the third panicked evacuation he had been beset with within the last two years. And of the three, this one provided the least assurance that he would survive. Only the strong sea breeze coming in across the docks of the western Turkish harbor city of Smyrna was keeping the fires—and the blistering heat from the fires—in the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city from reaching where he and thousands of others were huddled on the city's cobble-stoned quay, hoping for deliverance by Greek ships. They all had their faces turned to the sea to spy the promised Greek ships coming through the cordon that the Allied navies had established beyond the inner harbor to protect the evacuation ships—if they were ever to come.

It wasn't the Bolsheviks he was fleeing now. It was the Turks and not because he was Russian but because he might be mistaken for a Greek or Armenian. Much of Turkey was held as an occupied nation by the Greeks—eternally hated on religious, ethnic, and traditional territorial grounds—at this time because the Greeks had been on the winning side of World War I and the Turks had not. Much of the Turkish animosity toward the Armenians in their midst—beyond the fact that Armenians were Christian—stemmed, much as the origin of hatred of Jews elsewhere in the world, from the Armenian community's virtual family-based tight-fisted control of the economy. In the case of able-bodied young men like him, the Turks were striking first and asking questions never. Whenever the Turks were able to get the upper hand, they launched pogroms against both the Greek and Armenian communities. Pyotr had only gotten this far because others had spoken for him and miraculously had been believed.

He stirred restlessly, stifled by the long dress and all of the petticoats Katya had made him put on and by the heavy veil hiding—or at least he hoped hiding—his face. Katya was at his side again out on the crowded, open quay, holding him close to her, pretending that he was an ailing elderly woman relative, and doing everything she could to shield him from searching eyes that would recognize that he was not younger than eighteen nor older than forty-five and would mistake him for either Greek or Armenian. There was little reason for a young man of any other nationality to be here.

She had left his side soon after darkness had fallen over the milling crowd of refugees on the quay and as they were settling in for a summer of 1922 night when, yet again, no Greek ships had come into the harbor to start rescuing them. Pyotr knew what Katya was doing with the American relief service doctor in that waterfront building where the women in labor were being taken to give birth, and it drove him mad that she was doing it with the American and not him. But her connection with the American might be the only hope of survival for either one of them.

And he had no hold over Katya. She had never permitted him that close to her.

Because it was a pattern that had been going on for three nights, Katya was back at his side before midnight. Always at midnight, a great keening would go up across the packed harbor quay from the women camped out there. Most everyone out here was either a woman or a very young child or a very old man. None of the Greek and Armenian men who the Turks even suspected—in very broad terms—to be of military serviceable age were even let through the Turkish military's blockade of the inner harbor to wait for evacuation. Any such man was, instead, if not killed on the spot, being "marched inland," supposedly to holding camps, but in reality, just taken over the hills surrounding Smyrna, murdered, and shoveled into mass communal graves.

Each night the keening was met with the light of sweeping searchlights from the British, French, Italian, and American warships standing off from the harbor. Not knowing what was going on inside the harbor, the captains of the Allied ships believed that this sudden ghastly keening sound was some sort of mysterious phenomena that somehow could be quelled after several minutes by training the ships' searchlights on the quay. What the crews of these foreign naval vessels didn't realize about why their search lights were being successful in stopping the keening, however, was that the women in the crowds huddled on the quay were raising their voices in frightened chorus to stave off imminent danger.

This was the hour that raiding parties of the Turkish troops surrounding them were infiltrating the edges of the massed crowd of refugees. They were stealing onto the harbor quay to pull young woman—and sometimes boys—out of the mass and into the alleys behind their lines to have their way with them and then, with a flash of a knife, to thin out the "problem" of the Greeks and Armenians being "invited" to leave a now-liberated Turkey. The searchlights caused the soldiers to withdraw into their ranks, effectively meeting the keening women's goal, even though the crews of the Allied warships assumed flooding the docks with light was calming the frightened refugees down.

The keening hadn't started and yet both Pyotr and Katya sensed movement among the exhausted and sleeping groups of women, children, and infirm old men huddled around them. Katya pulled Pyotr close to her for mutual protection and they both barely were able to stifle their gasps as they realized that soldiers were stealing around the edges of the nearby groups, searching for prey. They had never come this far into the mass of the crowd before. Yet here they were. And they had seen that Pyotr—dressed as a woman—and Katya were awake, and were shrinking from them—and, in the dim light were more desirable and vulnerable than the other opportunities in the vicinity. There was no way that Katya could hide her beauty.

* * * *

Pyotr had marked his twenty-first birthday in late 1921 in the employ of the Greek merchant in various commodities, Theo Maneates. The Greek merchant lived with a wife, often absent in Athens, in a villa outside of Constantinople on a hill overlooking the Bosporus on the European bank of the city. When Pyotr moved into the small apartment over the stables, now turned into a garage for a big, black sedan, Maneates had a passage from the back hall of his villa to the garage enclosed with vine-covered trellising to mask his occasional nocturnal visits to Pyotr's rooms. In the more than a year that Pyotr lived there, as much in fact Maneates's chauffeur as in subterfuge, Pyotr settled into a life of relative comfort and security that he convinced himself was "enough."

If it were only Maneates, who made few demands on him in either transportation or the bed, in his life, Pyotr would probably have been discontent. But, first, there was the big, black town car Pyotr learned to drive and maintain and that continued to fascinate him and to be a matter pride, proving he actually had learned to do something useful in life.

And then there also was Kenneth O'Dell. Maneates insisted on paying Pyotr well, and Pyotr felt the guilt of being a Romanov enough that he passed on most of what he earned in some fashion or other to the Russian refugee community, which still was choking the streets, and to the relief efforts of the people of the diplomatic and relief agency community in Constantinople.

Theo Maneates was a devout Greek Orthodox Christian and he had a strict rule against going anywhere but church on Sunday, so, after driving Maneates home, Pyotr almost always was free for the rest of the day. One of the charitable tasks he fell into performing regularly then was going to Helen Bristol's refugee soup kitchen at the Sirkidji train station in Stambul and helping out on the serving line.

Another habit he thus fell into was to go to a nearby hotel with O'Dell after they had served the meal, in need of a man younger and more vigorous and attentive than Theo Maneates to make love to him for a couple of hours in the late afternoon.

So smitten with Pyotr was O'Dell that he was continually trying to pull Pyotr more and more into the social swirl of the diplomatic community.

"You are refined enough to pass as a Russian count, Pyotr," O'Dell whispered to him one afternoon. Pyotr turned his face around from his American lover so that he could hide the ironic smile that he could not quell.

"I am taking a sail next weekend on the Sea of Marmara with the Bristols on Admiral Bristol's flagship, Scorpion. Helen has seen you at the soup kitchen and more than once has invited you to come along. I'm sure Maneates will give you a couple of days off. I don't think you've had any time off since he engaged your services. What do you say?"

"I say it's very hard to act refined when you are laying on top of me with your cock buried deep inside me," Pyotr answered with a low laugh. He had been fending off similar invitations from O'Dell for months.

"I am being serious, Pyotr, and the Bristols need never know that I make love to you. I doubt that they know I make love to any man. The admiral can't see beyond his own nose, and I doubt that Helen cares. You've put off the invitation for some time. Helen Bristol will take offense, I think, if you continue doing so very much longer."

"I work, body and soul, for Theo Maneates. You know that, Kenneth. I can't be a chauffeur and lead a social life in the local diplomatic community as well. It's a false refinement that, you see—certainly not a social status that would accord me a place in your society."

"I don't think it is false refinement. You deport yourself as a member of the higher classes. Ask Maneates for permission. My guess is that he will be delighted to let you go on the cruise—for reasons of his own."

"I will ask, if you insist. But when he denies me permission, you must see that as reason to stop pressing me on the issue. And my guess at this very moment is that you are preparing to fuck me again, so there are far more pleasant things for us to be entertaining ourselves with than talking of class distinctions."

"That's a brilliant guess," O'Dell answered, as he wrapped his arms around Pyotr's chest and began the rhythm of the fuck inside him with a newly hardened staff.

As it turned out it was as O'Dell said, and Theo Maneates was delighted for Pyotr to become a cruise guest of the Bristols any time they wished. Bristol was the commander of the U.S. Black Sea Fleet and the senior American diplomat in Constantinople as well. And Maneates was a provisioner to the fleets when he could be. He was overjoyed at the prospect of getting an employee of his inside the Bristol inner circle, and from that time forward, Pyotr became a successful and influential salesman for Maneates as well as his chauffeur.

Helen Bristol was equally delighted with Pyotr, because he showed that he was, in fact, an expert bridge player. He also was easy on the eyes for Helen and the single women from the diplomatic and relief agency community who she invited on her cruises to even out the ratio of young naval officers and diplomats and young women. Both O'Dell and Maneates made certain that Pyotr had the right clothes to wear. Occasional near-starvation and the hard use of his body had kept him in a trim that matched his years at the Spartan military academy and that tailors clucked over in admiration.

They were sitting on the deck of the Scorpion one afternoon on the calm Sea of Marmara as O'Dell was showing his swimming prowess to the guests by swimming laps around the ship, when Helen leaned over to Pyotr while serving tea—Prohibition being in full force then so that harder liquor had to be served on one of the businessmen's yachts that sailed with the government-owned Scorpion and lashed to it during the evening to serve as a private bar—and said, "I hope the accommodations are not too cramped for you. You play a delightful hand of bridge, and I hope we will have you on a cruise again soon."

"The accommodations are just fine, Mrs. Bristol." Pyotr had to lift the teacup straightaway to his lips to keep from smiling. He was bunking with Kenneth O'Dell. So, the accommodations were delightful. He also was tempted to smile at the thought that O'Dell most probably would be having him again "soon" during the cruise.

Pyotr did so well with subtly selling Theo Maneates wares to the U.S. community through his connections with the Bristols and Kenneth O'Dell that by the spring of 1922, he no longer was Theo Maneates's chauffeur. He now was a trusted associate who Maneates wanted near him in his office. His remuneration improved, but only slightly, as the rich in Constantinople didn't maintain wealth by giving any more of it away than they had to. But it did mean that Pyotr had a bit more to give in charity to the Russian refugee community in the city that didn't seem to be decreasing any. Streams of White Russians continued to flow from the motherland, while only a trickle of refugees were leaving Constantinople for other lands.

Maneates's businesses included, quite prominently, importing of copperware from Turkey into Western Europe. This segment of his trade was so profitable that he had an office and a small townhouse in the Turkish harbor town of Smyrna on the Mediterranean. He visited this office for a couple of weeks two or three times a year. In the summer of 1922, he visited Smyrna—and he took his newly minted and highly trusted associate Pyotr Apraksin, with him.

Smyrna was governed by the Greeks at the time, the Greeks having taken advantage of Turkey being on the losing side of World War I by gaining a foothold on the Asian territory of Turkey and slowly expanding their land control. The Turks and Greeks had traditionally been at each other's throats back through time. Greece occupying Turkish territory had two major results—it caused the enmity between the two communities—and also the Turkish hatred for the more acquisitive and industrious ethnic group among them, the Armenians—to increase a hundredfold. And it also fomented a Turkish revolution in which upstart army officers under a colonel taking on the name Ataturk were well on the way to overthrowing the sultan of the rotting Ottoman Empire and creating a secular republic.

It was in the summer of 1922, when Theo Maneates took Pyotr to Smyrna, that the Turks defeated the Greek expansion and its army at Eskishehir. Within weeks Greek control of most of the Asian portion of Turkey, including in the city of Smyrna, had collapsed and the army retreated. Fast on the heels of their victory, the Turks, under the strong influence of Ataturk and his fellow army officers, were "inviting" Greeks and Armenians to emigrate immediately, and, increasingly, were forcing the issue with brutality.

But the Greeks and Armenians who did want to leave rather than be killed were not quickly able to do so. Once deciding they simply most go or die—albeit reluctant to do so because, under Turkish law, abandoned property vacated ownership—they fled, as possible, to coastal embarkation points. But initially there were no evacuation ships coming to pick them up. Greece didn't want them to abandon their foothold in Turkey. Warships of the other Allies that had defeated Turkey's side in the Great War, France, Italy, and England, as well as the naval contingent of the United States, which had not been at war with Turkey and thus wasn't formally among the occupying Allied forces, were near whatever troubles there were. But these contingents considered themselves there only as observers. Slowly they became embroiled in the evacuations of Greeks and Armenians from coastal towns, but only slowly and only as the brutality mobilized public opinion in Europe and North America—much quicker than it mobilized action in Athens.