INFAMOUS TRADE by Andrej Koymasky (C) 1998 - 2002 written the 20th of July, 1995 translated by the author English text kindly revised by Jer
USUAL DISCLAIMER
"INFAMOUS TRADE" is a gay story, with some parts containing graphic scenes of sex between males. So, if in your land, religion, family, opinion and so on this is not good for you, it will be better not to read this story. But if you really want, or because YOU don't care, or because you think you really want to read it, please be my welcomed guest.
FIFTH
London - December 7th
The fax annoyed Rowland Preston since it forced him to change his plans at the last moment. The fax from Yung Chem reached his Victorian style mansion in the elegant neighborhood of Chelsea, Cheyenne Walk, at six p.m. That was just a little before Rowland was about to leave for the premiere of The Magic Flute at Covent Garden. As he concluded his business in Rome and Paris, Clown was arriving in London a day ahead of schedule. And he had to meet him at once. A telephone call would come really soon and inform him about the time and place of their meeting.
The man read the fax a second time, really annoyed, before throwing it into the living room fireplace, where a log was cheerfully burning. Then he called his twenty year old Irish valet, Neal, a former hustler that Rowland had hired to relieve the nights he was alone, to tell him he didn't want to be disturbed. Rowland picked up Neil in Piccadilly two years ago. He really enjoyed the youthful, thuggish impetuosity of the boy who rode him all night long, without any sign of tiredness. So he fascinated Neil with his wealth and made the boy a devoted and obedient pet. One always ready to satisfy him, and without any strings attached. To the boy, it didn't seem true being able to at last to eat very well and regularly. He lived in an elegant house, with a room all to himself, working as a valet with a good salary. And then there were the energetic rides of his master, rides that the boy performed with obvious pleasure -- Neal always loved having mature men as bottoms.
Rowland fervently wanted to attend the Mozart premiere, at which the guest of honor would be nothing less than the Prince of Wales; but to disobey Yung Chem's order was out of the question.
Still, in front of the fireplace, wearing only a white caftan embroidered in gold, under which he was completely naked, Rowland was slowly sipping his coffee with chocolate and whipped cream, as he considered the consequences of disregarding the Korean's request. There were two points to consider. First, meeting Chem one day earlier, meant to receiving one hundred and twenty five thousand pounds sooner. Second, challenging Chem was, so to say, not really healthy. Therefore it was just convenient and wise to be ready for the meeting.
Rowland at once called Lord Winston Mallard to tell the bad news to the paunchy, seventy year old politician, whose guest he was understood to be.
"Forgive me, Winston! Unhappily we have to cancel our engagement. You will have to go to theater without me..."
The Lord did not object, showing again, he was devoid of any personality, as usual. After all he was the man who inherited a fortune worth two hundred million pounds when he was twenty-two years old, and who had lost it all before his twenty fifth birthday, making rich not a few obliging big boys. To Rowland, the fascination of the old Lord resides in his rare strength of character and in his obligingness in taking him into the most exclusive milieus of the United Kingdom.
Rowland James Preston was almost sixty. He was a tall, slender Englishman with a long face. He looked much younger than his age thanks to the Gerovital and sheep cell treatments he took twice a year in a prestigious and exclusive clinic in Switzerland. His hair was always carefully dyed, and the care with which he eliminated any white hair. He was a talented man with great intelligence, able to pick out immediately the weak points of a person and to take advantage of them. Behind a fascinating facade, he was always on guard and revealed very little about himself to others.
He was the owner of Blackberry, a boutique selling clothing and accessories in the elegant area of Beauchamp Palace, that became a stage for the young fashion designers from both England and the Continent, mostly the Italian ones. The fact that a large part of the designers were fresh out of school, allowed Rowland to pay them cheaply. Notwithstanding that, the prices of his boutique remained outrageously high.
"It is the fascination of snobbism, my dear Thomas. The real snobs have an uncontrollable desire to always pay excessively for what they buy. Such people have always been exploited, don't you think so?" He was used to saying to his present partner, an arrogant America, twenty four years younger than himself. Towards whom he was feeling an intense, but badly placed, love. Thomas often exploited Rowland, rather his behavior was the basis of their relationship starting eight months previous. It was a real business contract -- He stayed with Rowland for money and the man kept Thomas for sex. The most recent present he gave him was a Mercedes 560 SL with telephone, TV, fridge and bar. In exchange, Thomas promised Rowland to spend a full five days with him and to give him paradise...
Thirty five year old, Thomas Bronson was an athletic, massive man, half body builder, nimble, with sleepy eyes, a big nose and blond hair tied in a pony tail. He was fascinating, witty, and full of gentle enthusiasms. The kind of behavior typically American, that made him irresistible in the eyes of the English people, generally bored with the detached manners void of warmth of their fellow countrymen, but that at the same time made them feel superior. Besides this aspect, Thomas had revealed himself to be a failure, and this since the times he was a basketball player at the Miami University. Rowland had to admit that his man was superficially void of ethics and as human as a banana. But in the field of sex, the self-assurance that Thomas had, didn't know limits. Rowland took happy advantage of that. He never met a man before able to give him such satisfying orgasms, and consenting so totally to all his requests. Thomas' erotic exuberance became a reward for Rowland's unusual generosity with money. And the Englishman was totally satisfied with this situation -- Thomas made him feel youthful, and for this he was ready to pay any price.
Anyway the Blackberry was not his main money source. The boutique just allowed him to show the tax office employees that he had a legal money source, and allowed him to travel abroad, presumably to find new promising designers and new clients. It also allowed him to keep a respectable appearance, hiding the real source of his earnings, which in reality came from his trade in sexual boy slaves. With the pseudonym 'Mister Fox', he recruited and sold boys and adolescents to a wealthy clientele all around the world. Once a year he also held an auction where he offered his more docile and handsome slaves. The next one was planned in New York, three days later.
Rowland was also the President of the Lesley Foundation, a charitable society created to assist run away adolescents (strictly males), abandoned or victim of sexual abuse and violence. It had been founded by the grandfather of his previous lover, and had been enlarged by his father. When he decided to open it to include the little exiles or refugees without family from all over the world, he made it a corporation recognized and backed up by the UNO and the British Crown. Like the boutique, the Foundation was useful to him to recycle the dirty money he earned in his auctions and to recruit the best of his future little sex slaves. Among the clients using his Foundation to wash dirty money, there was also Yung Chem. All this was unknown to Thomas. Only the saints and the roman catholic priests are able to keep secrets, and Rowland's man was for sure neither of these.
Rowland had asked Chem to get him a certain, really expensive object from Rome, to add to the price that Chem would pay him for the new American boy that he wanted from Mister Fox and his American partner Dan Firestone. The boy's name was Terry, and was now in New York under the careful watch of Firestone. The pictures described him as an adolescent of an unripe and fresh beauty, with golden hair and an enticing fascination made of a mix of innocence and mischievousness that many men find absolutely irresistible. And mainly to the Clown, who preferred white boys.
The pictures, sent by air mail to Chem, had so excited the man that, on the phone, he had difficulty talking. Rowland had no difficulty understanding that with Terry, he had Chem completely in his hand.
"A quarter million pounds. Take it or leave it. Otherwise, I will have to sell him at auction."
"No! I want him! I'll buy him. I absolutely want him."
"With pleasure, darling. Two hundred and twenty five thousand pounds and the kid is yours."
Chem's voice rose an octave: "Are you crazy? I'll give you one hundred thousand, and this is already much more than I've ever paid for a boy. One hundred thousand."
"There is something akin to physical pain seizing me when somebody tries to bargain and seems he wants cheat me..."
"One hundred and twenty five thousand. I want that boy!"
"Darling, do you remember general Abuja? That Botswana midget who spent a fortune to introduce bullfighting in his land? It seems to me you always did business with him, didn't you? Well, he came to see me a few months ago, and it seems that he was looking just for a subject like Terry. Then there is an Italian prince, a generous man... And I don't need to tell you how many emirs and Arab kings of oil who just crave for a kid like that to bend to their yen. I would be better to take him to the auction, first bid two hundred. I think it would not be easy for you to win the auction and anyway you would pay a lot more for him, right? Moreover, you will get a lot for Elton. What are you complaining about?"
"You really are ungrateful. Are you forgetting all the money you earned thanks to me, up to now?"
"Nobody is aiming at your head with a gun, darling. You are free to look elsewhere..."
"No, I want him! You have a devilish ability to make people understand that you have what they need... All right, two hundred. Not a pound more!"
"Well, then an advance when you come to London and the rest in New York, at the consign. Ah, while you pass in Rome, will you be so kind to get for me a small object very important for me? Just a small extra to the sum we just agreed about..."
"Do you know, Rowland? I think you'll be able to sell your own piss, if you could."
"How vulgar, darling! It seems that you are forgetting it was me who introduced you to our precious Dan Firestone. It is thanks to him that your livestock movements became highly safe and that you earn now mind-boggling figures! Is it not so?"
"Forgetting? As if you'd allowed me to!"
"The same Firestone who inquiries about your potential clients avoiding your annoyances and complications. And who opened to you the South-American channel. You can offend me, if you like it, but pay me."
"You are a real bitch, Rowland."
"Yes, love, that's why we fit so well together. Now listen carefully what I want you to fetch me from Rome..."
Rowland left home a little before eight p.m. and took the taxi waiting for him. It was raining. Rowland hated the rain. It reminded him of the terrible events that put an end to the best period of his life. For six years, he and his adored Roger lived happily in South Africa. It lasted until Roger, a true idealist, decided that it was no longer possible to ignore apartheid. One rainy evening, in Cape Town, a killer shot him as he publicly backed up the leader Nelson Mandela and his party., the African National Congress. Roger died, never recovering consciousness, in Rowland's arms, victim of a hysterical crisis.
Rowland had grown up alternating periods when he had been kept by older men, with periods when he had been so poor he was on the edge of starvation. At that time, Rowland did not have his own activities, with which to extract himself from that crisis. Roger's death forced him to face a merciless world. He had been compelled to react in his own way. Roger left him everything as sole heir, thus he opened the Blackberry.
Rowland decided that if in human life a lasting love was impossible, then nothing else had importance. Human kind was nothing but a toy in the hands of Fate, insensible and indifferent to his destiny. And thus, one had only to fight for his own well-being, with no holds barred, without looking anybody in the face. Anything is fair, and permitted.
Reaching Waterloo station, he left his taxi in front of the main entrance, paid and bypassed kiosks and stands of books, tired and bored porters, Jamaican ticket collectors standing at the tracks' entrances, mainly closed, and continued to walk to the Waterloo Road entrance. Out from this one, he stopped then several feet from the line of the waiting taxies.
He hated rain. It was raining at Cape Town when a man, dressed like a priest, shot his man. And rained also on the day when he definitively left South Africa to return to England with his Roger's ashes. His love for that man had been so intense that for several months after his death he went to bed wrapped in Roger's shirt still stained with blood, and cried. Cursed rain -- it was unbelievable the quantity of tears that Rowland poured on rain evenings like that one.
A taxi cruised taking the lane, towards him. To avoid it, the man pushed flat against the wet wall until the car passed. Then he hurried towards the limousine waiting with the engine on. Opened the back door, Rowland sat at Chem's side. The Korean raised a glass of champagne.
"Good, I guess we can go, Naoki."
The Japanese driver gently started and stopped near the first taxi in line, who honked his horn -- three short strokes, then two. Starting his engine, the driver left the line driving his empty coach, and the 'taken' sign on. The limousine followed it out of the station. In his travels to London, Chem followed a strict routine of precautions. For the safety of both, he refused to meet with Rowland at his home, or at the boutique or at the Foundation. They always meet in night, in a rented car, and settled their business along the way. As Naoki was not familiar with London, a taxi driver was hired to lead the way.
"I find you very well -- I'll say that your American stallion does good to you. Yes, I'll say that he decidedly is good for you. You seem again a man in his thirties."
"A passionate, hot and faithful man is the elixir of life," Rowland lied with a fake satisfied air.
In reality Thomas gave him deep sexual satisfaction, but he continued to drink and smoke grass, and to stay out too late. Only God knew where Thomas was at that moment, and what time he would be back. But anyway he would wake him up, already stark naked and in heat, and would make himself forgiven for everything, penetrating him for a long time, with hot passion. Certainly, he didn't give him tenderness like Roger, but about enjoyment, nobody was able to arouse it in him as much as Thomas. He was a real stallion in heat, and he knew how to touch and fuck him; making him completely lose his head. Even if he wasted money like a drunk sailor on leave, Rowland was happy with that.
The two cars crossed Westminster Bridge, bypassed Parliament and Saint James Park, then drove towards Constitution Hill at the center of Green Park.
Chem pointed excitedly to Buckingham Palace on his left: "It's too dark to tell, but... is the Queen here?"
"Yes, the Royal Flag is flying on Buck House, this week."
Chem seemed happy, almost as if being in London at the same time as the Queen gave him a peculiar pleasure.
"Champagne?" he offered cheerfully.
"Yes, thank you."
Opening his briefcase, Rowland pulled out two wide sealed envelopes. While Chem was opening one of them, Rowland sipped his champagne -- Chem for sure knew wines. The Korean extracted some sheets from the envelope and looked through them.
Rowland let pass some minutes, then said: "Dan faxed them this morning."
Chem nodded and put them back. They were coded news, as Rowland knew, to be decoded in private. They were the most recent information about people to which, in various cities around the world, Chem had to deliver some groups of kids recruited from various parts of the world. Chem had organized a practically perfect mechanism. Several autonomous groups gathered the boys -- refugees from Laos and Bangla Desh, from Mozambique, "ninos da rua" from Brazil, from the favelas of Colombia, refugees from Bosnia, run away boys from various countries in Europe, kidnapped boys from China, India, Russia... and all of them, after they were selected and bought by Chem's men, were shipped and sent to Roturoa Island, a small island in the Fiji, that a Chinese man of straw bought for Chem. Here there was the Reception Center, managed by an International staff personally chosen by Chem.
They were all men and boy-lovers, coming from the Chinese, Italian, Russian, American Mafia, the French organized crime, a former Medellin's drug dealer and so on -- the cream of the crop that had two roles, keeping the useful contacts with their original organizations, and "weaning" the boys. In other words they had to teach the boys to bend to any sexual desire of a man towards them, readily and skillfully. Gradually the boys were divided into three groups -- AAA, the more handsome and acquiescent, who were sold at the auctions or sold at catalogue to the more wealthy men of the world. The AA or not so handsome, or not so acquiescent, who were sent to various "rent a boy" or "escort" agencies who undercover gave also a service of minors to their chosen clients, or even to elegant brothels more or less disguised as holiday resorts or hotels, where they worked as waiters and "bed-boys" for the clients. Last, the A group, the most restless and difficult, the rebels, who were sold in stock to the various brothels of lesser level in the Middle and Extreme East, and some African nations, brothels from where anyway they would never come out alive. The staff members worked on the island in shifts of six months, and were well paid. Besides taking their fun...
The Lesley Foundation often collaborated about the AAA group. The selected boys, with skillfully forged documents, were entrusted to the Foundation that took care to bring them to the auction's cities, and to fill out all the "International Adoption" documents for the buyers, so that those men could cross the borders with their little slaves, without any problem.
Chem insisted with Firestone that he carried out two separated inquiries about his potential clients. The reports had to contain news on their personal, professional and financial history. The first inquiry was a preliminary investigation that happened when the clients, or their men, contacted Chem. The second one was carried out from another group of people forty eight hours before the auction or catalogue sale. Both the reports were then compared with the utmost care about changes, discrepancies, and if obscure points emerged, even about trivial details, Chem would at once cease any contact with that subject. Firestone's reports allowed Chem to seem almost clairvoyant. Yung Chem paid Firestone dearly since his information allowed him to avoid any problems or difficulty.
In the second envelope, the information was not coded. A short page about the good health conditions of Terry Dos Santos, and another one about the official searches for the disappeared kid. Rowland let him read them to the end.
Once done, the Korean smiled and said, putting away the two envelopes: "Good. It is time to pay the debts."
He opened a small panel and pulled out several wads of pounds that he gave to Rowland one after the other, almost slowly: "Fifty. The first installment for Terry."
"Thank you so much, darling."
The Korean's hand went back into the panel and extracted a flat box of the size of a book, closed in a black velvet envelope. The English man had a short sigh and took it with trembling hands. He extracted it from the envelope, opened it and pulled out some pieces. It was a chess game, all the pieces in ivory and onyx, representing splendid miniatures of naked males in erotic, provocative, lustful poses. It was a chess game that in 1600 the cardinal Colonna had carved by Pietro Bernini. The erect members of the pawns could smoothly enter between the buttocks of the other pawns, and the erect members of towers, horses, bishops, king and "queen" could fit in each other asses or in the open mouths of the pawns. A real jewel of erotic art.
The previous owner of that masterpiece was the old prince Stefano Della Torre of Rome, a man who had a real passion for boys sixteen-eighteen year old that he bought, imprisoned in the underground of his renaissance mansion in the center of Rome, used until he got tired of them then sold, usually in bad shape, to a Tunis brothel. The prince, having to face to some heavy losses in his Stock gambling, had to sell several family jewels and also that rare piece for which Rowland paid him a really low price (in reality Chem paid it) accompanied by the promise to send him as a gift, every two years a new boy. He didn't need at all to give him one of his best boys, as the prince was interested above all in having a boy in his complete power and was not interested in the boy's beauty.
To protect himself from thieves and profiteers, like his beloved Thomas, Rowland kept in a safety box at the Shepherd Market Deposit Center all his valuables, the bulk of his money, and also his precious handbook with all the data on the transactions of boys he'd had, data about his clients and their sexual preferences about the boy-slaves, records of the recycling operations of dirty money through the Foundation and his boutique.
The Deposit Center was open three hundred sixty six days a year (sixty six in the leap years, the Center was proud to underline) and twenty four hours a day and offered very good safety guarantees. It also allowed its clients to avoid the usual bank restrictions and above all the inquiries from the tax office. Rowland could have access to his safety box just showing a picture and giving his fingerprints that were compared by a computer with those on file. Then he had to enter his secret number. To open the box were needed two keys, one in Rowland's hands, the other in the Deposit Center hands. The clients were not registered at the center with their names, but just with a four digit number, that was changed by the computer after each visit and given to the client when he left the Center, in a sealed envelope.
Rowland gave Don Firestone and Jacques Roux a copy of the sexual preferences of his clients, but after having changed their real names to a three digit number, to allow them to find American or South American adolescents fitting the requests of his clients. It was that way Firestone came to know what Chem desired and the figure he would pay to have an adorable kid like Terry. So he kidnapped him.
"Can we conclude the rest of our business, now?" Rowland asked.
The Korean took up a suitcase from the floor of the car and deposed it at the Englishman's side. He opened it and turned it so that Rowland could see the content -- wads of a hundred dollars, orderly placed inside.
"Eight millions." he simply said.
Rowland took a note from the suitcase and examined it with a magnifier. He repeated the same operation with nine other notes slipped out here and there. Then he closed the suitcase containing Chem's earnings for the sale of the boys of the groups AA and A, a sale that had to save his life.
Chem kept secret his problems with the general Kim Jong. Dan Firestone, some how, learned about it and informed Rowland. Dan, who knew everything about everybody, and that Rowland found rather likable in his primitive rudeness, treated with a certain amount of deference Mister Fox, possibly also because of his accent and his manners of an English gentleman.
Rowland was going to "wash" Chem's money through his Foundation. Officially a certain Real estate Company in Hong Kong was making the Foundation a short term loan of eight million dollars. The sum would be deposed in the Foundation's bank on Jersey Island, in the Channel. Later the bank would send back the money to the Hong Kong Real Estate, and the interest, around eight hundred thousand dollars, would be shared in equally between Rowland personal account and the Foundation's.
"Drop me at my Deposit Center. I want to immediately put everything in a safe place. Tomorrow morning the money will be in its way to the Channel. And tell the taxi driver to wait for me at the entrance. Call me tomorrow at the boutique. When are you planning to leave England?" Rowland asked to Chem.
"If the information Firestone sent is all positive, and all goes well, I think I'll leave the day after tomorrow. I still haven't decided if I want to leave my money here or to bring it with me."
Stupid little Shit, Rowland thought, you really think I don't know your secrets? Chem had three ways to take money out of England and he knew all three of them, including the one that the Korean had so carefully hidden. Chem had the help of the Korean government to move his huge sums from one country to another, thanks to the Embassies and Consulates and to the Secret service -- he simply could use the diplomatic bag. Rowland knew that because Don discovered it. When Dan Firestone knew that Chem, in his visits abroad went to his Embassy or Consulate, called his contact at the CIA and through the expert of the Korean Consulate in New York, a man infiltrated by the CIA, the Korean government being unaware of that, he came to know about all Chem's money movements.
"Will you go to New York as scheduled?" Chem asked.
"Yes, twenty four hours after you. I heard that Elton, your ex-boy, is already in New York for the auction. I think you will get a wonderful sum on him. Ah, you know, I was planning to held next year's auction in Sidney. What do you think of that?"
"And Thomas?"
"I just told him the usual pretext I am going to see some young designers and also that I am planning to open a branch of the Blueberry in New York."
"Is he all right, anyway, your big American male?"
"Certainly yes. Always healthy like a fish. He is trying a new method to become rich, I think. But I really have no idea how. He has been really vague. In my opinion, as always, he has no head. They have to be just fantasies. Oh, by the way, I have a little thing for you."
He extracted from his suitcase a big envelope of green paper that he handed to Chem. He opened it curiously and pulled out a big, old black and white picture, slightly yellowed in a corner.
He remained silent for a few moments, then whispered: "Impossible... I can't believe it!"
He was holding in his hands a snapshot, somewhat blurred by the enlargement, an 8 by 10, where James Dean was lying, his head on the chest of a young man of his same age. They both were completely naked on a lawn, and James was caressing his companion's member, and his own rose, hard, straight up. Both were smiling towards the camera. In a corner was written an autograph of the star: "James, to his stallion Derek, in remembrance of the wonderful nights of passion."
Chem's voice was deeply stirred when he said, caressing the picture: "It's priceless. So then, it is true what was whispered about him. How did you get it?"
"From a Canadian young man who draws my models. He bought it from the stallion in the picture, now and old man, who badly needed money to buy drugs."
"And you bought it for me?"
"Exactly for you, darling."
This was another lie. In reality Rowland stole it from the young designer who had unwisely left it near an open window... The young Mathew was heartbroken at the loss of the relic he was so proud to own, as he was a fan of James Dean.
"You can't know how much this means to me. I adore the immortal James, I have all three his movies in original version." He murmured continuing to caress the picture.
"My poor Roger, may God bless his soul, said that one is always rewarded for being kind..."
"His movies are eternal... as I wish you to be with your love for your Thomas..."
Rowland, suddenly far away, didn't catch the sarcasm in Chem's words. Eternal love. A deep sadness hit him suddenly. Turning his head towards the car window he looked through the darkened glass, the Serpentine, the artificial lake of Hide Park, where a strong wind was pushing the moored boats one against the other.
CONTINUES IN CHAPTER SIXTH
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