"Are you sure? You don't have to go through with this."
But, who was I kidding. Julio's choices had been shut down that first night—the night I'd found him supposedly by chance, but with chance having nothing to do about it. He'd been had even before I approached him at the Noobai Café, the discreet little gay hookup bar in the Restele district of Lisbon, not far from the Cuban consulate.
"I've done what you told me to do, Frank," Julio said. He was looking as much like the innocent and the deer in the headlights here on the street in Restauradores Square at the Pirata open-air café as he had that first night when he realized I was going to fuck him. "I have it all on a couple of CDs. It's in the hotel room you said I should book across the street."
I looked up at the façade of the Hotel VIP Executive Suite Eden as Julio gestured across the street. As I did so, I noticed two pair of eyes at a nearby table involuntarily follow Julio's gesture and my line of sight. Ours or theirs? They could be almost anything. American, Canadian, Cuban, Russian even. Not Chinese, though. Thank god for little favors. The Chinese were all over Lisbon with their ferreting. It was a gold mine. They understood that better than most.
I had a brief vision of nervous, luscious little Julio, all delicate beauty and noticeably dark skin, flashing dark eyes, and that curly black hair cascading around his face, standing at the desk of that expensive hotel and making reservations. I should have told him to check into a fleabag. So much of this had gone wrong. And so much was my fault.
"Get him to bring it to a hotel room, not the apartment," Peter, my handler, had said. "The safe house will not do for this. Meeting at a nearby café and casing it beforehand would be the best. You can have drinks—iced coffee or something—ordered from there to take up to the room."
That's when Peter had told me why we should have a drink—something that would cover the taste.
"Is that necessary, Peter?" I'd asked, shocked that it was coming to this. "He's just an innocent young man. Raw at the job. Isn't it enough that the Cubans will find him out?"
"You're our asset, Chaz," Peter had said—the name I'd given Julio of course not being my real name. Chaz wasn't my real name either, for that matter, any more than Peter was the name of the man giving me these horrifying instructions. "You're the one we must protect. You're a Canadian importer of Portuguese Vinho Verde wine here, making excellent local contacts. You are too valuable to us in this role. He must not be able to identify you."
"But he's barely grown," I said again—nonsensically, as I knew that wouldn't do a bit of good. But it meant something to me. It meant a whole lot to me. I'd never felt this way before in doing the job I had to do.
He'd been so shy and vulnerable—and, yes, I had to admit it, desirable—when I had pulled in beside him at the bar that first time. He obviously had only now worked up the courage to come to a gay bar, starved for the attention he needed and frightened silly by the risk he was taking, by the choice he was making just by being there.
It had taken three drinks to calm him enough that I could put my hand on his thigh and lean over and whisper into his ear what I could do for him. He trembled and his nostrils were flaring like that of a skittish thoroughbred race horse.
He had cried quietly when I covered his body and fucked him on the bed in the safe house apartment. I lay fully sheltering him under my body, as he shuddered and writhed. I kissed him in the hollow of his neck and whispered to him how wonderful his body was and how much it meant to me that he'd given himself to me, as I let my fingers stroke his scalp through his luxurious black curls.
