Copyright 2000 by Luc Milne. All Rights Reserved. Downloading of one copy for personal reading allowed.
THE AIRSHIP by Luc Milne
Jack Upton, Jr. climbed the steep, narrow stairs up into the small opening in the belly of the Hindenberg. He would have preferred to be returning to America after his two years in Germany from Le Havre on the new Normandie, the most fashionable and the most elegant ocean liner afloat. But his father had arranged instead for his passage on the great airship's first U.S. voyage of the 1936 season, and since Jack had little money of his own, he took the $400 one-way ticket (he could have bought a new car for that kind of money!) and was just grateful that he would be on board the monstrosity for only two and a half days. On the Normandie he would have had over four days of constant pleasure among sophisticated people. On the Hindenberg he expected Germanic tedium among stuffy businessmen and Nazi boors.
He carried only one small bag because Hindenberg passengers were encouraged to travel light. It was his big steamer trunk that was going to get the sea voyage home! He climbed another flight of steps inside the ship to A and B decks where the passenger sleeping cabins were. There, a sour-faced steward led him down a corridor so narrow that his bag bumped along the walls to his room at the very end. At least he would have the noises of snorers on one side only. The walls looked thin and very insubstantial with their cream and peach-colored silky surfaces. The room was a closet-sized nightmare: two bunk beds with burnt orange covers, a single folding camp stool, a fold-down shelf about a foot deep and a fold-down sink barely large enough to wash one hand in. The clothing storage space was merely a shallow cubby hole curtained off in the corner. It was hardly possible for Jack alone to move around in the three feet of passage between the bunks and the sink, so he couldn't imagine how he was going to share this windowless box with a stranger.
"I'm sorry to have to report, Herr Upton, that you will be alone for this voyage. The other passenger who should have been in this cabin with you was taken ill and had to return last night to Berlin." The steward seemed genuinely sorry that Jack would have to be on his own in this "spacious" room. "These two switches here will regulate the heat. Please use this bell pull if you need me. I am available day and night." He closed the door somewhat abruptly, leaving Jack alone to settle in.
Grumpily, Jack tested the lower bunk, pushing the aluminum ladder to the upper bunk as far out of the way as he could. He noticed at once that the bed had only one pillow. Even with the one from the upper bunk, he was still going to need another two pillows, because he liked to read long into the night, although the single overhead light in the cabin's ceiling seemed to discourage that. He reached for the bell pull at the head of the bunk and gave it a sharp tug. Within seconds the steward appeared, frowning even more severely than before. When Jack explained his needs, he brusquely said that he would send "the boy" to take care of Herr Upton's "unusual request."
After two years in Germany, trying to finish off his education (at his father's insistence) at the University of Heidelberg, Jack recognized at once the petty officiousness that seemed to permeate all levels of German society. And now that the National Socialists were in complete control, that officiousness was accompanied and intensified by a fanatic attempt on everyone's part to prove that German discipline, and German rules, and German manners were the only correct codes for behavior. He couldn't wait to get back to New York where a request for extra pillows would not be made to seem a breach of ethics.
There was a single knock at the door and a boy entered--perhaps he was, at second look, almost a young man, but he had a boy's short stature and a boyish, fresh-faced manner. His fair hair was close-cropped far up onto the sides of his head, but then grew long and fell across his forehead in a soft wave.
"Your pillows, Sir," he said with a nervous smile, as he moved into the small space. Jack stood and they danced about in the narrow aisle, both moving the same way, then both correcting and moving back together the other way. They both broke out laughing, and Jack pushed back against the clothes cubicle, gesturing the lad toward the bed.
"Do you want all these pillow on one bed, Sir?" The boy looked sceptically at Jack.
"Yes, I do," replied Jack a little testily, "is that so strange?"
"No, no," the cabin boy stammered, "I'm sorry, Sir, I didn't mean to...I mean I wasn't trying to..."
"Please don't apologize," Jack interrupted, "I'm the one who should do that. What is your name?"
"My name is Henning, Sir, but on board ship they call me Henny."
"Henny's a girl's name isn't it?" Jack spoke without thinking and realized how tactless he was when he saw the blush on the boy's face. "Or perhaps it's only in America that Henny is a girl's name. I'm sure it's perfectly normal for a man to have that nickname in Germany." Jack tried to smooth over his gaffe.
"No, you are right, Sir. Henny is a girl's name, but I have no choice in the matter." He seemed forlorn, making this admission.
"Well," said Jack firmly, "I shall call you Henning. And you may call me Herr Jack, when no one else is listening. Alright?"
"Thank you, Sir, I'd like that." He turned to arrange the four pillows on the lower bunk and to straighten the covers. He wore a short collarless striped jacket, buttoned firmly up to the throat and when he leaned in to arrange the bed, Jack's eyes fell to the round swell of his buttocks outlined by the blue trousers stretched across his ass.
Jack felt his penis begin to thicken and inch its way down his thigh. The flannel trousers he had chosen to travel in were full-cut in the best 1936 style, allowing plenty of room for the occasional tumescence even a gentleman was likely to experience in public when presented with a stimulating sight. But Jack's sexual equipment was exceptionally well developed and even the fullest, pleated trouser fronts were like to tent when his libido swelled up toward its full ten inches. That's why he always wore his underpants a little tighter in the leg than was strictly proper, but he needed that extra support to keep from disgracing himself. Of couse the tightness of the underwear only tended to make the swelling even more urgent. Now he felt a wet trickle of lubrication move its way out of his foreskin and stick to the hairs on his thigh.
As Henning worked on the bed he seemed unconsciously to move back a little into the narrow corridor. Suddenly his buttock cheeks were grazing Jack's fly-buttons. Jack had nowhere to go, except to step even further into the closet opening, but as he did so, Henning's ass seemed to follow him in, pressing even more insistently now against the tormenting hardness of Jack's cock.
"Uh, excuse me, Henning," he said huskily, "I'll just move out of your way here." As he crabbed sideways toward the door, Henning turned to him, so that their bodies were pressed against each other, face to face. Jack felt an answering bulge against his own swelling. Henning looked quizzically into Jack's eyes, a little smile playing around his broad, pouting lips.
"Please don't bother, Herr Jack," he murmured, "I'm just finished. Will there be anything else?" He thrust his groin forward even more firmly into Jack's and moved it from side to side making the two fleshy tubes rub over each other. Henning was several inches shorter than Jack, but his cock had stretched up in his tight trousers, rather than down, so it was the underside that pressed and rolled on Jack's downward arch.
Jack was frozen, unable to speak or move. He wasn't a complete innocent, sexually. He'd masturbated with his room mate at his prep school, and in Heidelberg one of his German friends had almost gotten his hand completely inside Jack's trouser front at a cinema, before Jack pulled away and crossed his legs like a girl trying to protect her virginity. But for the most part Jack Upton, jr., still hadn't admitted what he wanted in sexual matters. All he knew was that the flex of a man's buttock got him hotter than the swell of a woman's breast.
Henning seemed disappointed by Jack's inaction, and pulled away, reaching into his trousers to push his cockstand down into the leg of his pants. He moved to the door, turned and said, formally, "Good evening, Sir," and left.
Jack slumped against the curtain of the closet, hearing the hangers behind him fall to the floor as he closed his eyes and willed his penis to soften and leave him in peace.
*** Shortly after 7:30 on a balmy May evening in 1936 the Captain called "Up ship!" and the giant dirigible, 804 feet long, filled with flammable hydrogen gas in 16 enormous bags, the biggest, the most luxurious, and most dangerous thing ever to float in the air, rose silently above Frankfurt until the four engines were engaged and it began its journey to America.
On that first night, Jack Upton caused consternation among the dining room crew by staying unsociably in his cabin, asking that a roast beef sandwich be brought to him--something strictly forbidden, of course, by the rules of the ship, even though in the dining room itself, on the night of lift-off, only a light supper of cold meat and salad was served. The steward, nevertheless, brought him his illicit snack with a glass of milk and deposited it on the small bedside shelf with a disapproving air that suggest the honor of the entire German nation had been offended.
Later he turned off the light and settled back on his four pillows. closing his eyes. Certain images of roundness and certain sensations of warmth seeped into his mind; one hand crept down to cup and squeeze his ripe balls, while the fingers of the other pulled lazily at the foreskin on his semi-hard meat, until he drifted off into a troubled sleep.
The next morning Jack ate breakfast in the airy silk-panelled dining room, with its out-slanted windows that allowed travellers to look down at the glistening sea below. With a passenger capacity of less than seventy, the ship had the atmosphere of a small residential hotel and there was a curious hush, with the sound of the motors only a soft drone in the background. Jack was seated at a table with a middle-aged German couple and an American woman who introduced herself as Mildred Wallace of Oak Park Illinois and proceeded to talk non-stop about her walking tour through the Black Forest. He looked casually about, trying to see if Henning was on duty in the dining room, but saw only solemn forty-year-old waiters who moved about their work with graceless efficiency.
Later he sat in the writing room at a small shelf-table beneath delicately painted scenes of life in exotic countries the Hindenberg had visited, preparing the report he had promised his father, giving his impressions of the state of everyday life in Germany during the past few months. His father had been surprised when Jack begged to be allowed to return to America, even before the summer Olympics in Berlin, but Jack knew that John Upton, sr., was as worried as he was about the worsening conditions in National Socialist Germany.
As the founder and owner of an investment bank that had only barely weathered the crash of 1929, Upton, sr., fretted constantly about the continual outflows of cash that his German Jewish clients were channelling through his Berlin branch. Only three months earlier he had written Jack in Heidelberg to tell him that he had decided to withdraw from operations in Germany, which meant that he would also lose a lucrative line of business he did for Nazi officials who used the bank to help convert confiscated properties and assets into untraceable funds for various government and Party projects.
Jack intended to try to convince his father that he was doing the right thing, by describing disturbing events that had happened to him at the University: excellent professors disappearing overnight, to be replaced by hacks who taught from strange manuals on racial purity and Aryan philosophy; vicious fights in the streets between Hitler Youth boys and aristocratic students with old Prussian backgrounds who still refused to join Party organizations and sneered at the earnest, middle-class taste of the Hitler Youth clubs; and worst of all, the public bullying and abuse of elderly Jews, pregnant Jewish women, and terrified Jewish children. He was so engrossed in his writing that he paid no attention to the luncheon announcement, so that by evening he was looking forward to his first formal meal on board.
At dinner he felt somewhat out of place in his daring new dinner jacket made up in a light-weight cloth of the shade called "Burma", a creamy tan that suggested tropical nights on a beach along the Indian Sea. Many of the stodgy businessmen wore plain dark suits and some of the women wore flowered tea gowns as if they were going to a garden party. At least he was spared more anecdotes about the Black Forest, as Miss Wallace of Oak Park Illinois was replaced by a Captain Bock, who had the cabin next to his and also seemed to lack a room mate. He was thirtyish, wiry, and watchful, with little to say. The quiet German couple seemed to Blossom in Mildred Wallace's absence and asked Jack an endless series of polite and boring questions about his family. When he jokingly said that if the "right girl" didn't come along soon, he might have to become a priest, the couple solemnly gave him the name of an excellent seminary in Stuttgart!
Then as an entree was put before him, Jack felt a slight pressure on his sleeve from the server's arm. He looked up to see that it was Henning, doing his stint as a waiter's helper. "Good evening, Herr Upton," Henning said, standing just a little closer to Jack's chairback than he should have. "I hope you had a good sleep last night. Or perhaps you would like for me to bring you some more pillows before you retire this evening?" This last was said with a cheeky sort of smirk which Jack found both annoying and attractive at the same time.
"No, thank you, Henny," he replied, giving a little jabbing emphasis to the girlish nickname, "my bed is quite comfortable now." He felt Captain Bock's cool hazel eyes on the two of them, and he quickly turned back to the litany of questions coming from Herr Dietz and his good wife Frau Dietz as Henning moved away to serve somewhere else.
After dinner he sat up late, until he and Bock were the only ones left in the carefully sealed-off smoking lounge with its special airlock door and an electric lighter, chained to the wall. This was the only place on board where smoking was allowed since the Zepplin Company was fanatical in its determination to prevent fire on a hydrogen-filled ship. Bock was sitting closely beside him on the curved bench, smoking a cigar and sipping at his cognac. he was drawing Jack out about his attitudes towards Hitler's government, and at one point had seemed so interested in what Jack was saying that his arm went up behind the younger man's shoulders and lay along the blue leather seatback, so that Jack felt trapped by his body, held by his serious, probing gaze, light-headed from the smoke and dizzied from the cognac fumes. Occasionally, to make a point in rebuttal to one of Jack's careful criticisms of a regime which he knew that men like Bock were devoted to, Bruno (for they were now on first name terms) would lightly touch Jack's thigh with the edge of the hand that held his cigar, and once, to emphasize an argument he left it there, pressing down on Jack's leg.
Jack, who had from childhood always suffered a scarcely admitted attraction to men who smoked cigars, began to perspire as he felt the devilish intimations of swelling in his crotch. But Bruno Bock, seemingly oblivious to the effect he was having on his companion moved his hand away to tap the ash off his cigar and brought his other arm back to his side, breaking all contact. Jack was both relieved and disappointed a little later when Bock suggested that perhaps it was time to let the bar attendant get to bed. The pianist, who had tinkled away at operetta tunes on the aluminum piano in the main lounge had stopped long ago, and there seemed to be no one else awake as they walked back to their rooms. At his door Jack shook hands with the Captain, in the formal German way, and reached in to switch on his overhead light, but the small room remained in darkness.
"I guess the bulb has burned out," he said. "I'll have to leave the door ajar to have enough light to undress by."
"Don't be silly, my friend," chastized Bock, "we'll ring the steward to have it fixed."
Within seconds the steward arrived, looked accusingly at the dark light fixture, scowled at Jack as if he were responsible for this unbelievable failure in German technology, and went off to get a replacement. Bock bad him goodnight and went into his own cabin. A minute later Henning's familiar figure appeared at the end of the corridor carrying a small foot ladder and a fresh light bulb. As he approached Jack he broke into a grin and whispered "I knew you'd find a way to get me back to your room, Herr Jack."
Once they were inside, events moved with rapid pace toward an inevitable climax. With the door still open to give enough light to work by, Henning mounted two steps of the ladder and unscrewed the half-globe of the fixture. He handed it down to Jack who, naturally had to move more closely to take it. As the cabin boy changed the bulb he shifted his body so that his melon buttocks brushed the older man's face. When the room light came on, Jack found himself nosing into the musky cleavage of Henning's cloth-covered ass. Insanely, he left it there as he handed the globe back up to the boy, and insanely he let his hand then clutch the bulge in the front of the boy's trousers. Henning twisted on the ladder, losing his balance, falling into Jack's arms, and the two of them ended on the floor in a tangle of torsos and legs. Jack pushed the door shut with his foot and fumbled wildly at the buttons in Henning's straining crotch. He felt eager hands work his own fly buttons open and pull out his rising cock, weeping strands of lubricating juice over the fingers which urgently milked it.
Then Henning was suddenly bent over the edge of the lower bunk, his beautiful white ass cheeks invitingly pushed out toward Jack's iron-hard dick. Although he had never fucked woman or man before, Jack knew exactly what he should do. Yet it seemed more difficult than he could have imagined. The boy's pink hole was tightly shut and Jack's tentative probes at it with the slick torpedo head of his cock seemed to make no progress into the promised warmth
Henning gasped, "Lick me Herr Jack. Lick my arsehole to get it wet and make it open for you."
Jack froze in shock. Lick an asshole? Just the idea of it struck him like a body blow. Henning sensed the struggle in Jack's mind and turned immediately to the quivering slab of flesh that hovered before him. He licked it greedily, covering its moist head with even more lubrication, pushing the velvety foreskin back over the flare of the glans with his lips. Jack shuddered and instinctively thrust forward into the boy's throat, choking him, bringing up more saliva. Henning backed off, brought his own hand to his lips, coated his fingers with spit and then rubbed the hot liquid into his own asshole as he turned back into position against the bunk.
Now Jack's dick had no trouble pushing past the sphincter muscle into the hot channel beyond. He sank his prick deeply into Henning's ass and reamed the clutching tube by moving his hips in an ecstatic, voluptuous grind. Henning cried out with pleasure, breathing out a long, dying "aahhh!" as he pushed back against the meat stuffing him.
The door to the cabin smashed open. Lights flashed.
Startled, Jack looked to his right. Bruno Bock's body filled the entrance; he was rapidly snapping pictures with the small camera held to his eye. Jack pulled out of Henning's ass, his cock making a wet sucking sound as it popped free. Bock stepped into the room, kicked the door shut with his foot, continued to snap pictures, capturing Jack's stupefied look, his shiny cock arching from his groin, his trousers down at his knees, Henning's scared face, wide-eyed toward the lens.
Then Captain Bruno Bock stopped, lowered the camera, and said "We have you now, Herr Upton."
After Henning had been sent away, Jack heard what Captain Bock and the "Agency" he worked for had in mind. They knew about his father's plans to shut down his banking operation in Germany. They couldn't allow that. Upton, sr., and his Berlin employees knew too much about the private business affairs of certain highly placed Party officials, Herman Goering among them. And there were no other U.S. banks willing to cooperate in the planned siphoning-off of Jewish assets. It would be Jack's job to convince his father not to close down the Berlin branch. If he couldn't, then his father, and a great many other bankers around the world, would receive a set of very interesting photographs. It might not ruin the business completely, but it would certainly tarnish it, and it would destroy Jack's reputation forever. Even the sophisticated classes in 1936 weren't willing to openly admit that there were homosexuals amongst them, although everyone knew that certain artists and "bachelors" had private lives no one cared to think about.
Jack tried desperately to explain that he had no influence over his father in matters of this sort, that he knew little about the banking business, that it would be a completely unbelievable change of face on his part now to suddenly appear to support the Nazi government.
But Bruno Bock had answers to every objection. he knew, apparently from having read all Jack's correspondence, that father and son were very close and that Jack would be joining the New York office on his return. As to the problem of appearing to "change his mind" about the National Socialists, that was no problem. He didn't have to change his mind; in fact he could be even more critical of the regime, but play upon his father's natural sympathies for the Jews, convincing him that by keeping the Berlin branch of The Upton Investment Bank open, he would be helping good people who were frantically trying to salvage their fortunes as they left the country. The diversion of their funds into the accounts of decent Aryans would follow gradually, once Upton, sr., had become so embroiled in quasi-legal arrangements that he couldn't possible refuse to go along with the extortion of the Jews.
All the next morning Jack kept to the claustrophobic cabin going over and over in his mind the sequence of events that had led to the catastrophe. He went out only to take a quick lunch at a table by himself in the dining room. Henning was not in view. About 5:00 o'clock in the afternoon there was a soft knock on his door, and Henning stepped quickly into the room. Before Jack could order him out, he broke into tears, begging Jack's forgiveness. Captain Bock had forced him to betray Jack. Bock had threatened to make his Pappi lose his job as a floor waiter in a hotel if Henning didn't seduce the rich American, to make him help Germany in her struggle to take her place in the world again. The boy pressed himself against Jack's body, hugging him, asking him to take his ass now, fuck him again, but this time for real, not as a plot arranged by Captain Bock.
With nightmarish familiarity the door crashed open again, only this time Bock stood in the entrance without camera in hand. He entered silently, staring at the boy and the man who held him, carefully closed the cabin door and leaned back against it with a cruel little smile on his face.
"Your job was finished last night, Henny. there was no need to carry on the charade today," he said wryly.
Henning shivered against Jack's chest. "I was just trying to explain to Herr Upton that I had no choice about what happened...that I was sorry he might have thought I didn't really like him."
Bruno Bock moved closer to them, putting one arm around Jack's shoulder and patting Henning's cheek with his other hand.
"I know, liebchen, you don't have to be afraid. Herr Jack understands, don't you Jack? Sometimes we have to do things we'd rather not. But we're lucky when the things we think we'd rather not do, are actually things we secretly want to do very much, aren't we?"
By now he had engulfed both of them in his arms, pinning Henning between the two larger bodies. As he talked, his hands roamed over buttocks and into crotches, squeezing and groping.
Shamefully, wondering at his own weakness, Jack gave in to the rough caresses, pressing his groin into the stomach of the boy between them.
"I think it's time for a little 'National Socialist fun', don't you Jack?" Bruno murmured lewdly. "Let's seal last night's arrangement in the hot mouth of this handsome lad, shall we?" He began to strip off Henning's clothes, pulling Jack's hands into the work as well. Soon the compact body of the cabin boy was nude between them, writing and twisting beneath the mauling attention of ass probes and tongue lashings. Bruno pushed Henning down to his knees between their two groins and took Jack's rampant cock in one fist, while he slowly jacked his own shorter, thick prong in his other. He brought both uncircumsized crowns together at Henning's open mouth and mingled their copious golden honey on the boy's lapping tongue.
Jack allowed his cock to be pushed into the opening, along with Bruno's hard meat, feeling the taut stretch of lips and the light pressure of teeth as Henning struggled to take the massive invasion. Bruno kissed Jack, and for the first time in his life the American experienced the rush of pleasure that comes from having a strong male tongue explore the yielding warmth of a wet, drooling mouth.
Before they could control themselves, they shot simultaneously down the throat that sucked them, gagging the channel with their flood of cream so that Henning coughed and tried to pull away. Jack let his cock slip out of the heaving mouth, but Bruno pressed his hands hard against the sides of the boy's face and thrust fiercely down his gullet again and again until sperm leaked from his nostrils and he began to slump for lack of air.
"For God's sake, Bruno, let him go, you'll kill him," cried Jack prying Henning's head out of the man's grip.
"No, no," Bruno panted, "this one likes it rough. This one's a favorite at SS parties. He likes his throat fucked until he passes out, don't you little suckboy?" He laced his fingers behind Henning's head and pulled the boy's face into his crotch, basting his flesh with the last dribbles of semen from his penis.
Henning's eyes rolled back in his head and his lips gaped obscenely; Jack saw that what Bruno said was true. The boy was lost in a glut of sexual desire. He'd had many cocks down his throat and sucked the sperm out of many plunging dicks. What had before seemed like a freshness in his face, now looked like a mocking, lascivious innocence. Jack sat heavily on the bunk and buried his face in his hands.
Bock gripped Jack's hair in his fist and pulled his head back. He stepped forward and rubbed the sticky meatus of his fat dick back and forth across the American's lips. "Welcome to the Third Reich, Mr. Upton."
From that point on, the evening and night passed in slow motion ecstasy.
Henning's soft tongue slavering deep into Jack's ass crack. Bruno's slow thrusting into his hole, as Henning stuffed his fat balls into Jack's lips, puffing out his cheeks. Henny's struggles to avoid the slashes of Bruno's wide leather belt on his arse, while Jack pulled and twisted his boy nipples until they swelled like ripe cherries. Jack pissing down Henny's throat. Jack eating his own sperm from Bruno's lips after shooting into the Captain's ravaging mouth. Slapping Henny's face with their leaking dicks until it was covered with juice, then slurping it off with rasping tongues. Then bending the boy like a pretzel so they could plunge together into his semen-slick hole at the same time. Making him beg, holding his nostrils shut so he had to open his throat wider, making Henny gasp, making him squeal, chewing his tits as he gagged around the four fingers reaming his throat, making him spurt again and again.
Towards daybreak, after hours of orgy, with Henning sprawled on the floor, his arms tied over his head to the leg of the bunk, the two men lay with their heads on the boy's thighs, gnawing and feasting like sated dogs on the fat, wet, semi-hard shaft of the his spent cock, lazily nipping and tongue-probing his swollen cocklips for the last drops of sweetness, heedless of the grunts coming from his gagged mouth.
Then, suddenly, Jack had a revelation: he was at that moment as happy, and as ashamed, as he had ever been in his life.
By the time Bock finally pushed the dazed boy out of the cabin, and gave Jack one last possessive kiss, the young American had lost all his sexual naivete and all his romantic illusions. He was in the grips of the Nazi agent in every way.
For the following eight months things worked out just as Bock had directed. Jack began working in the New York office, having convinced his father that it would be unforgiveable to close down the Berlin operation and abandon so many of his good Jewish clients who needed his services now more than ever. Sexually, he seemed to "close down," even letting his mother push him into a round of engagements with eligible debutantes. There was vague talk of where he would live after he was married. Only occasionally would he wake at night with the pants of his pajamas wet from the sperm gushing out at the climax of a disturbing, suppressed dream.
Then in January of 1937 his father suddenly changed his mind and decided that he had to get out of the German scene, no matter what it did to his Jewish clients, many of whom had by now already left the country anyway. His resolve was hardened at the first intimations from Nazi customers that it would be "politic" to divert Jewish assets illegally into party accounts if he wanted to stay in business in Berlin.
Jack was in a panic for the next two months, wondering every day if a packet of shocking photos had arrived on his father's desk with a letter threatening broader distribution if the closure wasn't halted and certain demands weren't met. But it was he who got the first communication in late April: a letter addressed privately to him from Bruno Bock:
"Dear Jack. I will come to New York in early May on this season's first voyage of The Hindenberg. I'll have some pictures that will amuse you and we'll talk over old times--also discuss urgent business that must be taken care of in light of recent developments. Your young friend will also be on the ship. Since your last meeting with him, he has gained a great deal of new experience as a "laboratory assistant" at the SS Training School. Perhaps the three of us could spend a long evening together so you can hear about some of the new skills he has acquired. Yours in friendship. Bruno"
For two weeks he lived in a daze, trying to imagine what he could say to get his father to change his mind about closing the bank in Berlin, trying to get up the courage to tell his father what had happened to him a year before on the voyage home, trying to think of anything except the horror of being revealed to his family and to his father's business associates as a perverted pansy who had raped a cabin boy on the Hindenberg. He knew that Bock's power over Henning was so strong that he could, if he wished, even get the boy to make a formal accusation to the police in Germany, or worse, here in New York.
By the morning of the day the ship was due, he had decided that he would simply stall--not meet the arrival, not answer telephone calls or telegrams, refuse to meet Bock at all--let him do his worst, and damn the consequences!
Feeling a little proud of this "courage" when he hadn't heard from Bock by 4:00 p.m., almost ten hours after the ship was supposed to have docked, he left his Wall Street office to go to the Athletic Club for a swim and a massage. Looking up into a cloudy sky, he was horrified to see a giant silver ship passing overhead, its black swastikas flashing briefly in the sun which just broke through the overcast. Bock wasn't even here yet. The Hindenberg was late!
Still, he resolved to keep to his plan of inaction. But after his swim, as the handsome, young, muscular masseur pummeled and kneaded his body into a languorous trance, images began to float in his mind: Henning's ripe buttocks rising toward him from the edge of the bunk bed, Bruno's face moving toward his, a boy's gleaming eyes looking imploringly up past a swollen cock, arching heavily downward toward his sperm-wet lips.
He looked at his watch. there might still be time to get down to the Lakehurst airfield if he left now. He took a taxi to the family apartment on Park Avenue, rushed to the garage and ordered the attendant to bring out his new supercharged 812 Cord speedster, bought with the Christmas bonus from the bank. He drove feverishly through a rainy dusk, reaching Lakehurst just as the last rays of the sun broke once again through the clouds.
The massive phallic shape was hovering near the mooring mast, ballast water gushing down, soaking the men below who scrambled to catch the two mooring cables dropped from the bow.
A newsreel photographer was peering through his camera from the top of a car in the parking lot. Jack got out and started toward the field.
It was 7:25 p.m. on Thursday, May 6, 1937.
The End.