The three of them were sprawled out on the richly patterned Oriental carpet on the rise of the sand dune with the vista of the pyramids of Giza stretching out before them—and beyond that the Nile and beyond that yet the teeming city of Cairo, the sun shining on Cairo, giving it a false sense of cleanliness and purity. Below the dune behind them buzzed a phalanx of Egyptian servants, packing up the boxes from the meal the three had just eaten, holding the horses in check, and pretending they weren't watching the
effendis
—the foreigners—being outrageous.
The popular German courtesan, Claudia Beck, lay stretched out on her back, her ample breasts exposed and the silk panels of her riding skirt evocatively folded back to reveal her prominent and famous mons Venus and the trimmed triangle of strawberry blonde curls above it.
Sitting beside her, with one hand languidly stroking and patting her mound, the thirty-something dark and sultry Lebanese artifact dealer and rake, Philippe Bey Karem, dressed in the sparkling white thwab of the affluent Arab population, spoke in light tones with the young blond gentleman sitting at the other side of the carpet and sketching the pyramids. Gavin Barnett, third secretary of the British agent and counsel-general—and de facto administrator of Egypt at the time—Edward Missert, was Karem's excursion guest for the day. He incongruously was dressed in dinner kit, although his thin, boyish body helped negate the effect of the sun on Western costume. Each was overdressed for an excursion into the desert as the trio would be going straight to an evening at Shepheard's Hotel from the picnic.
Barnett, barely of age and recently come out to Egypt to train in the British foreign service, also, not incidentally, was the son of Missert's sister and the son of a lord. Karem, son of a French mother and a leading merchant and politician of an old Levant family father, had only recently come into contact with the young, handsome, and willowy English youth and was cultivating him for his influential contacts.
By degrees, Karem was pulling Barnett into his jaded world of pleasure and excess, and Barnett, although he so far had politely declined Karem's offers of directly imbibing of pleasures that would be unspeakable in London but were openly available to the rich and well-connected in Egypt—most easily if they were foreign—had not shrunk away from Karem or his international set. Instead, he had followed along on a series of debaucheries as voyeur without having become embroiled in them himself.
Karem quite definitely had other plans for the young Englishman, though.
"Would you like to fuck her?" Karem asked, indicating the red-haired beauty lying beside him by burying two fingers between her folds as she arched her back and purred for him, her eyes slitted from the drugs she had indulged in. Claudia was from one of the best houses on Sharia Wagh el Birker Street in Cairo, the brothels there able to operate almost openly for those with the means to attend them as each was protected by one of the foreign consulates in the city. Although Egypt ostensibly was ruled by Egypt's Khedive, Ismail Pasha, on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, the Khedive had run the country so far into the ground that the British had taken over all of the administrative controls. In the wake of this, the foreign government concessions in Cairo had become almost autonomous from any Egyptian control, and the British were too busy with possible revolutionary movements to provide and enforce a moral standard there.
"I would like to get this sketch done before the sun goes down. But thank you." Barnett's answer was a polite one, not showing any surprise or censure for the offer. But as yet Karem had not found the young man's vice. Karem's modus operandi was to discover a man's vice, feed it, and then milk it. But he would keep on trying to ferret out the young man's fetish. No one that handsome and sensual could be without a vice. It wasn't champagne, Karem had already found. Though Barnett joined him in swigging the bubbly from the bottle, he didn't drink in excess. It also wasn't drugs. Most of what they had brought on their desert picnic had gone into the German whore.
"Well, if you wouldn't mind then," Karem said.
"No, no, don't mind me," the young man answered, turning his attention back on the pyramids. "I'd like to catch this while the light is just right."
Brushing the hem of his Arabic robe up to his chest to reveal his masterful musculature, jet-black pubes and an up-curved erection, Karem lifted and turned Claudia onto his lap, impaled her on his cock, and raised and lowered her body rhythmically on his staff as she sighed and hummed and he continued talking with young Barnett about what life had to offer a handsome young blond European in the city.
Gavin murmured polite interest in every taboo and fetish mentioned, but nothing made him ask for a further description of the decadence. Philippe avoided telling him that young men like Gavin went for a premium among Egyptian men who preferred men, but that certainly was in his mind. Philippe's own sexual interests were universal and he was close to exploding inside the German whore's well-used passage. And then he did, afterward gently lowering Claudia's back to the ground in front of him, his cock still inside her. He reached over her belly and squeezed her breasts and thumbed her nipples as she purred in her drugged-out world and Gavin continued with his sketching.
Later, Karem raced across the desert for the Nile crossing to the city on his blooded stallion, as Barnett and Claudia Beck did what they could to try to keep him in sight. Gavin could have kept pace with him. He was an expert horseman. But he also was a gentleman. Servants on slower horses were doing what they could to keep the German prostitute in the saddle of her mare, and Gavin stuck with her to ensure her safety.
Once across the Nile, having left the horses on the west bank, they transferred to Karem's Wolseley-Siddeley Tourer motorcar for the run to Shepheard's Hotel, the Mecca of European society in Cairo, where the evening already was in full cry. Most of the foreign diplomatic corps and non-Egyptian merchant class were there. Claudia had sobered up enough not to be out of place—and would not have been out of place anyway, as half the male dinner guests—and some of the women as well—had indulged in her charms during her reign on Sharia Wagh el Birker Street, which promised to be all too short. Courtesans were welcomed at Shepheard's as long as they were Europeans. Almost anyone was welcome at Shepheard's if they were rich and/or well-placed as long as they weren't Egyptian.
This membership restriction was illustrated on this evening when the Khedive's own principal adviser, Ahmed Aziz, was turned away at the dining room door. He had, in fact, received an invitation to attend from the British Agent's office and had shown up, assuming that the "No Egyptians" rule was being relaxed, but the invitation had been sent in mistake. He had been anxious to attend because he had a liaison to set up, but it was not to be. The best he could do was to consign a note to an embarrassed Egyptian waiter to be delivered for him.
The various societies within the international society in Cairo took up separate stations in the Shepheard's dining room. Philippe Bey Karem was the center of the racy set, and Gavin Barnett initially went to the section of the room where Philippe was holding court, but he soon gravitated to the more stalwart administrative section, where his uncle was the focus of attention. Although Karem watched Gavin drift off, still a little perplexed that he hadn't found the young man's vulnerable sin, he was content to work on that another day. He didn't want the Agent's third secretary to incur the wrath of his uncle. He certainly didn't want Barnett to be sent back to England in disgrace with his tail between his legs. He wanted to suborn and use the young man to his own business and political power advantage in Cairo.
Gavin didn't stay long with his uncle's group either. Having checked in and played court to Missert until the next supplicant snuffled along, Gavin drifted into the shadows of the room and, eventually, left Shepheard's and walked slowly into the Arab quarter, with its close alley-like streets, still alive with vendors, food merchants, hashish hawkers, and women of the night plying their trades. Gavin was a golden-haired sensation wherever he walked. He had been in Cairo long enough to know how alluring a well-proportioned young blond—male or female—was to the Egyptians. He had many an offer as he walked the alley, but he was official-looking enough—and known by many to be related to the all-powerful British Agent—that he wasn't accosted physically. He walked in a cleared space bordered by appreciative onlookers no matter how crowded the street was. Once or twice he extracted a slip of paper from his pocket and looked at it to check where he was going. He had a goal.
After walking into the Arab quarter for twenty minutes, he reached his goal, a copper shop open to the street and with candles set around that used the copper pots, plates, and utensils hanging here, there, and everywhere as reflective mirrors to give the shop a quiet glow. Gavin entered the shop. A merchant came forward, dressed in a blue thwab and all smiles. Gavin leaned over and whispered something in the man's ear. The merchant's smile broadened and he guided Gavin to the back of the shop, through a beaded curtain-covered doorway, to the base of a dark staircase. He gestured upward, and Gavin climbed the stairs, turned right, and opened the door into a room that was sumptuously decorated with carpets—on the floor and the walls—a line of lit candles in tall, copper candlesticks, and a divan covered in damask and silken pillows.
Slowly, methodically, Gavin took off his clothes, folded them, and placed them on a chair in the corner of the room. When he was naked, he padded over to the divan and sank on his back onto the pillows—and waited.
After several minutes, the door to the room opened and Ahmed Aziz, the Khedive's principal counselor, entered the room. He stood there momentarily, taking in the visage of the gorgeous, young, blond Englishman sprawled naked on the divan, now with a hand encasing his cock and slowly masturbating it.
