It was quick. He gestured to me. I drank. I ate. I could not control my appetites. There was a surge of sexual pleasure stronger than anything I had ever felt, more powerful even than the erotic rush I had felt when Danilo re-awakened me.
We dropped what was left of the young man’s body overboard.
No one had seen. I almost asked Danilo what would have happened if someone had seen us, but I knew the answer. “They will find a note in his cabin, in his writing. A suicide note.” He looked down at the water, but the boy was already gone. “He asked me not to tell his mother.”
We went back to our cabin and made love. He did things to my body—I felt things—I had never known before. The wave of pleasure was almost tidal, so intense I forgot everything else in the world.
Later there was a storm. The ship tossed wildly. I didn’t care. It was not as wild and exciting as what I felt with Danilo.
In the grey morning light, I saw myself in the mirror. I was 20 again.
* * *
That night’s storm passed, but the fourth day of our crossing there was another one, much larger and more ferocious. The ship rocked in waves taller than itself. Ice coated everything. We passengers were warned to stay in our cabins. Danilo and I made love for what seemed like the hundredth time that week.
When the storm finally passed the sun was brilliant, blinding in the afternoon sky. I looked out our porthole, and the entire ship was encased in gleaming ice. We sailed into Southampton in bright sunlight on a crystal ship.
* * *
The European winter was one of the worst on record. London’s streets were mostly abandoned. Everything was grey; everything was gloomy. There were practically no other tourists. The Brits had sense enough to stay in out of it. Not us. We were hungry.
Our hotel was in a little street north of Hyde Park called Craven Terrace. Just where it intersected the Bayswater Road, a young man had a newsstand. He was handsome and boyish, with green eyes and bad teeth and that rosy complexion Brits often have. Danilo bought a copy of the Guardian from him.
He smiled. “Thanks, sir.” I could see he was looking us up and down, trying to get our range. To my eye, wrapped in his heavy winter things, he looked like a boy.
Danilo got him into a conversation. I didn’t pay much attention; I was looking at the enormous park. Even in ice and snow it was impressive. Finally, the newsboy agreed to come to our hotel room that night.
When we left him, I was alarmed. “Danilo, we can’t. Not in our room. The police will—”
“No, they won’t. Not if we’re careful. After we have sex with him, we’ll suggest walking to a pub to buy him a drink. We can leave the body in the park. It’s so large, if we hide it well enough, they won’t find it till we’re out of the country. And it’s supposed to snow more tonight.”
He had a lean, pink, beautiful body. He didn’t fight us, not that Danilo would have permitted it. I think he wanted to die. When I produced the golden knife and held it to his throat, he looked at me, smiled faintly and whispered something I couldn’t quite hear.
The next day we went to the British Museum. I asked if there was another depiction of the Kissing Kings there, but Danilo said he didn’t know of one.
But there was so much else. Mummies, sculptures of lean, handsome pharaohs, the Rosetta Stone. And it wasn’t only Egyptian things. The Ishtar Gate from Babylon stood tall and impressive. Danilo pressed his hand against it, as if he was trying to convince himself it was quite real. I thought it an odd gesture, and I said so.
“Gilgamesh and his lover Enkidu passed through this gate. They held hands, and the entire population greeted them as heroes. Gilgamesh the immortal.” That was all he said for a long time.
In another suite of rooms was the most magnificent collection of Greek vases and cups. They were not something that would normally have interested me, but Danilo knew which ones would catch my eye.
They had figures of men. Loving. Making love. Touching, kissing, stroking. Hercules and Hylas. Idas and Lynceus. Pericles and an unnamed boy. There were hundreds of them, rooms full of them, a vast shrine to love like ours. Their bodies were trim and muscular and quite beautiful. And quite enflamed with sexual passion. They coupled in every imaginable position, even one or two Danilo and I hadn’t tried. After the first moment I stopped talking, stopped asking questions and simply basked in the wild sea of male love.
That evening we went to the theater, a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. It seemed to me that the actors played the love scenes between Edward and his lover Gaveston with special heat and energy. During the interval Danilo noted dryly, “Marlowe. Edward II. Double whammy.”
And, of course, that night we coupled again, more ferociously than we ever had before. I was more and more in love, and it surprised me, because I had thought the love I already felt was the strongest, deepest love imaginable. But there was more.
In the lobby of our hotel there was a concert grand piano. During the busy hours, lunchtime and dinnertime, a hired musician played lounge music. Sanitized Gershwin and Porter, that kind of thing. Mid-morning, the day we were to check out, I sat down and played a few bars of Chopin. The pain in my fingers was less than it had been. It wasn’t gone, but I could tell they were healing. Danilo had given me my life. Now he was giving me this. Outside, a snowstorm raged.
I played a waltz, then one of the preludes. I played a Schubert impromptu. Everyone in the lobby stopped and listened. They seemed almost to freeze, as if I were casting a kind of spell over them. After a few minutes my fingers began to stiffen a bit, and I stopped. They all broke into spontaneous applause. I blushed and made a slight bow for them.
I remembered what Danilo had said once. “The blood is the life, and the power.”
All the death was healing me.
* * *
The Seine was frozen. There were ice skaters just below Notre Dame. Snow and ice were everywhere, piled up in streets and on sidewalks, filling the parks. Vendors sold hot chestnuts. Paris had never looked like this in an Audrey Hepburn movie. In them it was always bright spring. We had winter storms.
There was so much to see. Danilo showed me Poulenc’s house, and we went to Versailles, to see the magnificent palace started by Louis XIII. “One of us.” We said the words together and laughed; “one of us” had become a private little joke between us, the kind of thing lovers share. Danilo told me about the grand balls Louis used to hold in his “hunting lodge” for his male courtiers.
Next day we visited the Louvre. Wonderful building, magnificent contents. We saw Leonardo’s work, and Caravaggio’s, Donatello’s, Botticelli’s, and on and on. “The Renaissance,” he said, “was one of our gifts to the world.”
There was a suite of rooms with what I thought was fairly dull art. But Danilo looked around nostalgically. “This was a palace before it was a museum. These are the rooms where Henri III quartered his various lovers.” A twinkle in his eye, he added, “He was even better at lovemaking than at making war.”
Finally, at the end of a long day, we went to the Egyptian wing.
Without reading the labels I knew which objects came from which period. I could even identify the royal ones by the pharaoh’s names on them. Danilo was pleased that I was able to identify so much. “You’ve learned such a great deal.”
“I have a sexy teacher. That always helps.”
There were huge rooms of things from the Amarna period. In one were colossal figures of Danilo’s father. I recognized them at once. The features were unmistakable, high cheekbones, large sensuous lips, the family resemblance was impossible to miss. I thought the long-dead pharaoh looked sad.
“He does. He was. I think he knew how he would end. People prefer superstition, fear and hysteria to the truth.”
I looked up into Akhenaten’s face. “He must have been a beautiful man.”
“He was, Jamie. These figures don’t do him justice. His body was so lean and lithe and supple. When he moved it was like bronze flowing.
Just the touch of him, the sight of him even, excited me more than anything ever has.” As he said it, he took my hand, then put an arm around my waist. “Till you.”
For what seemed an eternity we stood in passionate embrace under the protecting gaze of the king whose blood we shared. And in the next room we kissed again, under a huge relief of Danilo and his father doing the same. Each city, it seemed, brought us closer to our true home.
We stayed in Paris longer than we’d planned to, and we went back to the Louvre three more times. I could not get enough.
There was one more thing I wanted to see before we left Paris. “Isn’t Oscar Wilde buried here?”
Danilo’s expression soured. “For what it’s worth, yes. Oscar was a fool.”
“‘One of us’?”
“Most emphatically not. He tried to deny what he was instead of embracing it. And you know how he ended.”
It was an unexpected thought.
“Some of us tried to persuade him to acknowledge his true nature. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He was protecting Bosie Douglas, or so he thought.”
“I think I’d still like to see his tomb.”
“Go alone then.”
I did. It was covered in snow and ice. I found myself wishing I hadn’t gone. The clouds above me were ominous, pregnant with more snow.
* * *
Berlin.
I wanted it to be familiar, I wanted it to look like The Blue Angel or maybe Metropolis. But all of that was gone, burned or blown up in the war. It was a new city, a modern one. I was disappointed.
There were a few things I recognized, not many. Unter den Linden. The Brandenburg Gate. I tried to see myself strolling on the Kurfürstendamm with Sally Bowles. I found myself humming Kurt Weill as our taxi driver showed us the city under a dark sky in a harsh winter wind. Danilo listed an itinerary of places for the driver to show us; then when we had seen the city, he asked him to take us to the Hotel Bismarck.
“You mean we’re not staying at the Grand Hotel?”
He seemed a bit preoccupied. “What Grand Hotel? There is no Grand Hotel in Berlin.”
“There is a Grand Hotel in every city.” I put on my most tragic Garbo. “I vant to be alone.”
“Keep that up and you will be.”
The city made Danilo uncharacteristically quiet. I think it was haunted by sad memories for him. At the State Museum we saw another depiction of the Kissing Kings, the original of the one I had first seen in Danilo’s office. They seemed to be everywhere. I wondered why I had never heard of them before Danilo.
“Because our lives and our history and our bloodline have been denied. Erased. The ones who hold the power now can not countenance the fact that anyone else ever did, or ever could.” He looked away from me. “Or ever will.”
“A conspiracy, Danilo?” I found the idea amusing.
“No, hardly that. Denying power to others is the essence of maintaining power.”
“Power.” I smiled. “Germany would make you think this way.”
But he was too distracted, or too sad, for there to be much fun in goading him. “It isn’t simply that they don’t want to know who we are, Jamie. They don’t want us, ourselves, to know who we are. You must be ready to fight for your birthright.”
Also, in the museum was the famous bust of Nefertiti. It was even more beautiful than all the photographs of it suggested. Sleek beautiful woman, long graceful throat, huge sad eyes, full lips, perfect features. Danilo’s mother.
He stood and stared into her face for a long time. Then he reached out to touch it.
“Danilo, no. There are detectors. Alarms.”
“They will not go off.”
“But—”
He touched the statue. He stroked its cheek gently, almost lovingly. At one moment he leaned forward slightly, almost as if he was going to kiss it. But he took a step back away from it. “They branded her a witch, Jamie. They did everything they could to expunge her memory, as they did with my father, my brother, myself. That this survived, intact, is a small miracle.”
He took my hand and we left.
The city was nearly abandoned. People were indoors, hiding from the cold; that seemed to be the pattern all over Europe. The sky was so dark it seemed always nightfall, even at high noon. When, now and then, the sun broke through the clouds, its light was cold and cheerless. It would have been better if we hadn’t seen it.
We walked the streets, saw where the Reichstag had been, saw the ‘36 Olympic stadium. “There was so much evil unloosed here, Jamie. I knew Ernst Röhm and some of his officers. A lot of them were…” He didn’t have to say it: us. “All of them massacred by Hitler. The Night of the Long Knives, they call it in the history books. I was there. I saw the blood. I heard Himmler tell the nation that men like them must be slaughtered. Jamie, we must be prepared to fight, always and everywhere. We must be as ruthless and as vigilant as they have always been. Or our bloodline will die out, and that will be that.”
* * *
We did not stay in Germany very long, only long enough to see the things in the museum and a bit of the city. It was time for Egypt. We were to cross the Mediterranean on a steamer, bound for Alexandria.
I was aging again. There was a young German man in the steamer’s crew, blond, blue-eyed, Aryan I imagined.
“Call me Horst.”
We did. The three of us made love in an unused cabin.
And before long I was my 20-year-old self once more.
As we crossed the Mediterranean the weather warmed and cleared.
* * *
Alexandria. City of Alexander.
Egypt.
We were there.
Modern city. Modern traffic, congestion, noise, overcrowding. And blessedly warm, kept so by the sea, which was a deeper blue than I would have thought possible. To go about in shirtsleeves seemed wonderful. I tried to imagine Alexander walking the streets, with Hephaestion at his side, laying out the city. “Put the library here, and the temple of Zeus over where those streets cross…” But the images were impossible to conjure. Everything was too new.
There wasn’t much of the ancient city left. At one place we saw an enormously tall column, remains of what must have been a titanic public building. “The great Library of Alexandria,” Danilo told me with a bit of awe, “where all the world’s books were kept.” He shrugged. “Burned by the Christians. It is the kind of thing they’ve always done well.”
At the waterfront we saw the place where the famous lighthouse had been; it was now occupied by a small stone fort. Danilo showed me where Cleopatra’s temple had stood and, several hundred yards from it, where Antony had built his “Timonium,” where he went to brood or be alone. “He disliked humanity,” Danilo told me offhandedly. “Except for women who could give him power. And boys who could give him pleasure.”
“That can’t be, Danilo. He and Cleopatra were one of the most famous couples in the world. They still are.”
“He loved boys. He was notorious for seducing them. We have the word of any number of ancient authors for it. There are records of high officials refusing to let Antony anywhere near their teenaged sons.”
I was beginning to understand what he meant about all the things that were kept hidden from us, obscured by a, more or less, willful silence. “I’ve been wrong to rely on movies for my sense of history.”
He laughed. “You can’t help it. You are an American.”
“But… but…” I tried to find words for what I was feeling. “It’s all the dead past, Danilo. Does it really matter?”
“The past is never dead, Jamie. It is not even past.”
As we strolled the waterfront, I couldn’t get over the deep vibrant blue of the sea. We ate at a little café, the best seafood casserole I had ever tasted, more delicious than I can say. The waiter fussed over us; it was fairly clear he wanted more than a tip. We took him to our hotel, and, to my surprise, Danilo let him leave again when we finished coupling, or tripling. Neither of us needed h
is blood or his flesh. Danilo said he only wanted to taste the taste of an Egyptian man again. “Just as an appetizer.”
The thought of the main course upset me. This business of living off the flesh of others… I had not really adjusted to it yet, except as a necessity. I changed the subject. “Let’s go out and see more of the city.”
I think he was amused at my reticence, but what could I do?
It was late afternoon. He showed me the Greco-Roman Museum, which held the city’s few mementos of Alexander. He emphasized that most of them probably weren’t genuine. “Nothing is, anymore.”
“Where was Alexander’s tomb?”
He hesitated. “The city has changed so much. But if tradition is accurate, we are there.”
“This building? It’s on the site?”
“I think so. Every last atom of his tomb is gone now, of course. Good heavens, we can’t have monuments to powerful pagans here. Especially not one who loved men and boys.”
I looked around and tried to imagine what it must have been like. Danilo knew my thoughts and described it, a magnificent temple in black marble. In the sanctuary lay Alexander in his royal armor, preserved in honey, in a glass sarcophagus. Augustus had stood sighing before it. Caligula shattered the glass and stole the breastplate.
His voice turned soft. “I think that may have been the spot.” He walked to the rear of the gallery we were in. “You should have seen him. Stunningly handsome man. Perfectly confident of his ability to rule the world. His poise was almost unsettling, till I got used to it.”
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the image. I knew he had been blond, athletic, handsome. But the thought of him lying dead in a tomb covered in honey… it seemed too grotesque. “Why, of all the men you’ve known, didn’t you give him what you’ve given me, Danilo?”
He circled the spot. I could tell that he was trying to imagine it too, that his thoughts were 2,000 years in the past. “I offered. I wanted to.” He looked at me. “Think of the glories he could have accomplished. But he refused. When Hephaestion died, I believe he wanted to stop living too. His grief was as imperial as his love and his ambition.”
The Blood of Kings Page 20
