Chapter 11 – Chapter 11

August 27, 1944

Having taken confession on his knees at the hem of the Catholic priest, with the jailer standing by, Paul rose to his feet. He flinched again at the sound of another salvo of gunshots from the courtyard.

"Just a minute. Not today for this one." Paul looked up sharply. He recognized the voice.

Noell Giroux, looking like any of the other French Resistance fighters and grayer but slightly slimmer and more muscular now than when Paul had slept with him, was handing a document to the jailer. Antoine was standing behind him.

"He's not a collaborator," Giroux said. "And he's an American. You couldn't do it like this for an American even if he was a collaborator." He turned to Paul, "Why in the hell didn't you tell them you are an American?"

"You took my documentation," Paul said, his voice shaking from how close he'd come to death. "And I didn't know it mattered that I wasn't really French."

"Of course it matters. How do you think the Duke and Duchess of Windsor made it out of France alive as vocal as they were as Nazi sympathizers? There's a process for foreigners. We can't simply shoot them. We're not the Germans."

The next afternoon, in a guest room of the Ritz, Giroux heaved his more muscular, but still meaty, body up from between Paul's bent and spread legs and, with a huffing sound, rolled over to the side. "Shit, I'm getting too fat for this," he said. "But I fucked you good, didn't I?"

"Yes, you fucked me good," Paul answered. And Noell had fucked him good. There was nothing wrong with Noell's cock or his technique. Noell had fucked him repeatedly in this room at the Ritz since the previous afternoon.

Paul figured he'd owed Noell the night of fuck for having saved him. Although it was really Antoine who had ultimately saved him by affirming that Paul had known things the Resistance was doing—and even had been saving French-owned artwork himself—and hadn't passed the information on to the Germans. And there was no reason to believe he told the Germans anything of importance to the Allied interests. Noell's declaration—as a resistance unit chief—that Paul was an American would have kept him alive but not free and out of trouble in the short run.

"I need to go thank Antoine now," Paul said. He rose from the bed before Noell could object and pulled on trousers and a shirt. He found Antoine in his room, stripped off the clothes again, pushed Antoine down on his back on the bed, and rode his cock for over an hour in a variety of positions and giving Antoine two ejaculations.

He dressed again and went down to the rue Cambon bar where, despite all of the Resistance work the bartender, Frank Meier, had been in, he was still overseeing the bar service.

"I wouldn't entrust this to anyone in the days that the old crew are gathering again," Frank told Paul.

"The old crew?" Paul asked.

"I think you've met Papa Hemingway already in some sort of frenzied introduction," Frank said, pointing out the table where the writer was describing how he personally had liberated Paris. "Sitting with him are the writers Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir," Meier said. "They arrived this afternoon. By tonight, this place is going to be back up to its game in famous hotel residents."

"I left something with you. Do you still have it?" Paul asked.

"Yes, right here, along with half of the other secrets from every spy agency and news organization in the world," Meier said, fishing a packet covered with oilskin from a pile of other packets and envelopes.

As he left the bar, Paul wondered what Frank Meier would have thought—or done—if he'd known that the packet contained Paul's safe conduct from wherever there was a German presence to Berlin—to Garren von Kaube.

That evening he searched the bars of the lower class neighborhoods where the victory of liberation was being celebrated until he found a farmer displaced from Alsace-Lorraine who was determined to set out in his truck that evening to return to his home. Paul let the man fuck him in exchange for a ride to as close to the retreating Germans as the man was willing to get.