The Secret Tunnel

by Lear, James

  “No.”

  “You were, in fact, hoping to get a free ride to London.”

  He blushed and looked down at his feet.

  “Don’t worry, kid. I’ve done the same myself, riding the buses in Boston. But that’s a far cry from stowing away all the way to London.”

  “Yes, sir. I am ashamed.”

  “You didn’t really think you’d get away with it, did you?”

  “I did not know.”

  “That was very foolish. You must have a very good reason for going to London.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s none of my business, of course.”

  “I am supposed to see my uncle.”

  “Ah. I see.” I was relieved to hear that there was no talk of a sweetheart or wife.

  “He was to have given me news of my father’s will.”

  “Your father’s… Oh. I see. I’m sorry.”

  “He has been ill for many years, sir. It is a relief for us all. And I hope also he has left me some money.”

  I was taken aback by this pragmatic approach to bereavement.

  “You and your father were not…close?”

  “No, sir. He detested me.”

  “Ah. How unfortunate.” I could think of nothing more to say.

  “Thank you, sir, for your assistance.”

  “You’re most welcome.”

  “Now I will leave you in peace.” He stood up.

  “Au contraire, Bertrand,” I said. “I’m traveling alone. I would appreciate your company between here and London.” I uncrossed my legs and planted my feet a yard apart on the carriage floor. I could see his eyes flicking down toward my crotch.

  “With pleasure, sir.”

  I half thought of getting him to show his gratitude with a quick blow job right then and there, but there was too much traffic in the corridor to make this possible. Well, his time would come.

  “Now, sit down, make yourself comfortable, and let me go to the bathroom.”

  He did as he was told; I liked that.

  “And don’t run away.”

  “Of course not, sir. I am…à votre service.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  For a moment, I entertained the thought of inviting him to “serve” me in the bathroom, but I imagined he’d had enough rough treatment for one morning.

  When I returned, he was sitting neatly, patiently, his jacket sleeves pulled down to conceal his shirt cuffs.

  “I have been poor too, Bertrand,” I lied. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your clothes may not be stylish, but you look good in them.” And you’ll look even better out of them, I thought, imagining his solid little body, wondering if his heavy beard growth was a reliable indicator of overall hirsuteness.

  “Thank you, sir. It is true. I am poor.”

  “Tell me all about it.” I settled back again, legs apart. I intended to become erect as he was talking to me, and I wanted him to see.

  “I am Belgian,” he began.

  “No shit!”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re Belgian! Like Hercule Poirot?”

  “Qui est-il, ce Poirot?”

  “The detective—the hero of Agatha Christie’s novels.”

  He looked blank. “Je ne le connais pas.”

  “Forgive me. Continue.”

  “My family lives in Waterloo, the scene of a famous battle.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And I am the youngest of three sons.”

  I resisted the temptation to ask if they were all as fuckable as he was, but the thought alone was increasing the bulge in my pants.

  “I am sent to Scotland as an agent for my father’s business of export-import, as it is I who have the better English from the others.” That was debatable, I thought, but kept it to myself.

  “And for many months now, no money is coming from Belgium to me, and now I am… I do not know how to say. Fauché comme les blés.”

  “Flat broke.”

  “Flat broken,” he essayed. “Yes. My pockets are empty.”

  I put one hand into my pants pocket and plumped up my basket. He noticed the gesture; he could hardly fail to.

  “Now I hear from my uncle that father is died, and I must come to London to hear read the will.”

  “In the hope that there is some money for you?”

  “Bien sûr. And to discover what is my future.”

  “I see.” It was a sad enough tale, and I suspected that there was much more that he was not telling me. I had already painted his father as a cruel, coldhearted tyrant, his mother as a warm, passionate woman broken down by years of domestic bullying—poor Bertrand caught between the two, despised by a father who, perhaps, recognized that his youngest son would never carry on the family name…

  “And you, sir?”

  “Me?”

  “For what do you go to London?”

  “Ah. To see an old friend.”

  “Old?”

  “I mean, he’s young, but I have known him for a long time.”

  He was glancing down between my legs more frequently. “And he is your particular friend?”

  “No.” I thought the time had come for frankness. “I left my particular friend at home in Edinburgh.”

  “Ah.”

  “And you have his ticket.”

  “I see.”

  “And, perhaps, you can take his place in other ways.”

  “As I said, sir, I am very grateful to you.”

  “How grateful?”

  Checking the window—the blinds were still down—he knelt between my legs and looked up at me.

  “I see. You really are very grateful, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever sucked a man’s cock before, Bertrand?”

  “I…” He blushed and cast his eyes down. I took him by the chin and made him look at me.

  “Have you ever wrapped those pretty lips around a hard dick?” With my thumb I rubbed his mouth; he sucked on it, running his tongue in little circles around the sensitive pad. If he could do this to my thumb, then my cock was in for a first-class service. I gave him my index finger and then my middle finger, delighting in the way his mouth stretched to accommodate them. I could feel all around the inside of his face—his white teeth, his soft tongue and hard gums, the yielding lining of his cheeks. Grabbing hold of his lower teeth, I pulled him down into my crotch. He made no resistance, and was soon rubbing his face against the hardness that he encountered there.

  “You’re going to be a very good traveling companion, aren’t you?”

  He mumbled something incomprehensible, possibly in French, and started burying his nose in my pants.

  This was going too far, too fast, I suddenly realized, as a breeze from the carriage window made the blinds billow, rendering us all too visible. Horny as I was, I was not suicidally stupid, and I knew all too well the penalties that attended the kind of activity we were about to engage in. Fortunately for us, there was no one around at that time, otherwise we might both have been met at Kings Cross by the police.

  “We’ll have to wait,” I said, removing my fingers from Bertrand’s warm, wet mouth. I wiped them on my handkerchief.

  He got up, brushed down his pants—which were already worn at the knee, perhaps from similar attempts—and sat opposite me again, this time with a big smile on his face.

  “When I see you, I hoped that you were like me. Another who loves men.”

  “Oh yes, Bertrand. I love men.” And I’ve loved plenty, I felt like adding, but I did not wish to ruin what, to him, was a special moment.

  “All my life I have waited for such a friend.”

  I really didn’t need the complication of this young Belgian falling in love with me. I was more than happy to fuck his brains out, to watch that handsome, trusting face skewered on my dick, but I did not want to break his heart.

  “You must know,” I said, laying a hand on his knee, “that I am not free.”

  “
Ah, for that,” he said, with that typical Continental puff of dismissal, “I know I can not hope. But for the present, I hope we can be…intime.”

  “Yes, Bertrand, I hope very much to be intime with you.” I lowered my voice. “If there was a sleeper car on this train, I’d take you there right now.”

  “And what would you do there, sir?”

  “I would fuck you.”

  “Yes,” he said, shifting in his seat as if he could already feel my dick up his ass, “you would.”

  “And I hope, somehow, that I will.” I was mentally calculating the chances of fucking Bertrand, and Arthur the porter, and perhaps that mean son of a bitch of a conductor, in the course of a one-way journey to London. I guessed that I could make it. My powers of recovery were still prodigious, and I was more than capable of getting hard and coming three times in 24 hours. Well, four, of course, if I counted Vince, whom I remembered with a guilty pang. Four times. Yes, I’d done it before. I could doubtless do it again. And there was something about a train trip, and the chance encounters that it threw in one’s way, that made me feel like I could do more if necessary. And then, of course, there was Boy Morgan to attend to in London… Could I manage five?

  Bertrand was staring raptly at me. “Avant Londres…” His mouth hung a little open, as he contemplated what was in store for him.

  “Yes. There’s a long way to go, yet.”

  Little did I know how long.

  When we were both sitting decently, I raised the blinds; no point in arousing suspicion so early in the trip.

  “You can start off by telling me exactly what happened in the toilet. What was that man doing to you?”

  Bertrand rubbed his chin. “ ’E ’it me.”

  “I guessed that. Anything else?”

  “I am ashamed.”

  “You mean there were things of a different nature?”

  “Yes. He is un monstre.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said, thinking of the conductor’s high-handed treatment of me and the porter even before we left Waverley. Well, if I was looking for an adventure, there was a ready-made villain. A sadist in uniform, taking advantage of young, defenseless men, to whose rescue I seemed destined to come… Already I was hard again at the thought of my own nobility.

  “When he come into the third-class carriage checking tickets, I run up here, and he follow me,” Bertrand said. “I hide in the toilette, I lock the door, but he ’ave a special key. The door open, and he come in and find me.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was pretending to have a shit, of course.” The vulgarity sounded almost elegant in his accent. “I sit with my pants at my… What are these? Mes chevilles?”

  “Your ankles.” The things you’ll be resting on my shoulders when I fuck you, I thought.

  “Bon, my ahnkles.”

  “So he found you there, bare-assed, without a ticket.”

  “And he take advantage of me.”

  “I can’t blame him.”

  “If it ’ad been you, sir, I would not ’ave minded.”

  “Please, don’t call me sir. My name is Mitch.”

  “Ah, thank you. Meetch.” He tried the name a couple of times, and seemed satisfied. “But from ’im, yeuch, dégueulasse …”

  “He’s not so bad-looking,” I said, and it was true: the conductor was tall and well made, with a strong jawline and heavy, masculine features.

  “Non, not so bad,” said Bertrand, “but he is cruel. He call me names, he call my mother names, he insult my country—not even my country, but France, even though I try to explain—”

  “There’s no point in trying to explain geography to that type.”

  “D’accord. Then he become violent, he push me back so I am exposed.” He blushed and looked down; I found the image of his nakedness under the cruel glare of the tyrannical conductor extremely arousing.

  “Then what?”

  “He get out his thing.”

  “His thing? You mean his cock?”

  “C’est ça. I did not mean his poinçonneuse.”

  “And he made you…touch it?”

  “He waved it at me, calling me names, making it hard.”

  “Was it very big?” Some detective I was, already speculating about the dimensions of my villain’s dick.

  “Yes. It was big and very dark and angry. He take my hair and pull me toward it, and when I keep my mouth shut and will not suck him, then he hit me, comme ça.” He mimed a vicious backhand across the face. “It make me to bleed at the nose.”

  “But all you had to do was suck his dick and you’d have got a free ride to London.”

  “Jamais, for such as he.”

  “Was he so repellent to you?”

  “I never will, for one that I do not first like well.”

  I felt somewhat chastened, as I had frequently obliged men whom I liked far from well, if they were not entirely repulsive to me. I thought it best not to tell Bertrand this just yet, as he seemed to be developing a slight case of hero worship.

  “Of course not. That would be very wrong. But under other circumstances…?”

  “For you, I give everything. Ma bouche, mon cul.”

  I did not need a dictionary for this. Oh, for a sleeper car…

  I was about to pull down the blinds again, when a bell rang in the corridor.

  “Coffee! Fresh coffee!”

  “Ah! Enfin!” said Bertrand. “Perhaps the coffee will be drinkable, no?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “But it is necessary in any case. Shall we?” He stood up, and I could see that he was just as hard as I was. In standing and adjusting my pants and getting out of the carriage, I managed to ascertain it with a good squeeze.

  “No, you go first,” I said, as he held the door for me. “I want to know what I’ve got to look forward to.”

  He blushed again, but smiled, and preceded me to the dining car, deliberately stopping in his tracks so that I had no choice but to bump up against him.

  III

  THE COFFEE WAS FAR FROM BAD, ALTHOUGH BERTRAND made all sorts of faces while forcing it down. I hoped he wasn’t so fussy about swallowing other things. We were lucky to get a seat in the dining car—the smiling steward showed us to the last remaining table, thoroughly annoying the married couple with three children, who preceded us in the queue. He claimed, entirely falsely, that we had “made a reservation.”

  “You’re very busy this morning,” I said. “What’s the special occasion?”

  “Don’t you know, sir?” He lowered his voice. “We have stars on board.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ah!” He gestured toward a lavishly set table at the front of the carriage, gleaming with crystal and silver, dazzling with white linen. “Wait and see!”

  He busied himself with other passengers, occasionally looking over his shoulder to give us a wink and a twinkle.

  “He is a nosey Parker,” said Bertrand. He was obviously proud of his idiomatic English, and beamed at me. I wanted to fuck him right there on the table, ruining the steward’s pristine place setting. I pressed my leg against his, and enjoyed watching him blush.

  “So,” I said, “who do you think they are? These stars?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “That would explain the newspapermen.” I remembered the pair in the flashy suits. “I thought there was something going on.” I thought nothing of the kind, actually, and had been entirely engrossed in imagining all sorts of nonsense about perfectly innocent passengers, while there was headline news under my very nose. “But why,” I said, determined to sniff out a mystery, “are they eating in the public dining car, when doubtless they have their own private carriage?”

  A voice, surprisingly close to my ear, answered.

  “They wish to be seen.”

  I turned my head quickly, and caught a flash of steel-gray hair, a clear blue eye, the faint scent of citrus—soap, or cologne.

  “Excuse me?
”

  “We’re going to take some photographs of them having their lunch. I hope it won’t inconvenience you too much.”

  He was a tall man, powerfully built, in a well-tailored navy-blue suit. His hair was neatly cut, his face clean-shaven and slightly tanned. He was, perhaps, 45 or 48—at least 20 years my senior—but he was in impressive shape, from his broad shoulders to his solid midriff and powerful thighs.

  “Forgive me for eavesdropping,” he said, his voice suggesting upper-middle-class south-of-England origins. “It’s rather hard not to overhear conversations in such close quarters.”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  He gave me a card; his hand was large, square, and brown, hairy on the back, his cuffs immaculate.

  THE BRITISH-AMERICAN FILM COMPANY LIMITED

  Wardour Street, London

  PETER DICKINSON

  Publicity director

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dickinson.” And I was pleased, already wondering if he could be persuaded to join me in the enjoyments I had planned. While I am, by instinct, more inclined to fuck than be fucked, I have a weakness for masculine older men, a type which Peter Dickinson epitomized. And to tell the truth, I was also somewhat excited by the fact that he was part of the movie world.

  The steward brought more coffee, which we drank while Mr. Dickinson hovered around our table, being a little more attentive (to me, at least) than the occasion really demanded. Bertrand looked sulky; like most Europeans, I guessed, he thought that the movies were beneath him.

  “Do you have any objection to being in photographs, Mr.…?”

  “Mitchell. Edward Mitchell.”

  “Mr. Mitchell. And your…friend?” He said the word as if he had only just decided not to say “servant.”

  “This is Bertrand. Say bonjour, Bertrand.”

  Bertrand managed to offer a hand and mumble, “Bertrand Damseaux.”

  “So, who do we have the pleasure of dining with today? Janet Gaynor? Ivor Novello?”

  “You like Ivor Novello, Mr. Mitchell?”

  Even Bertrand perked up at this point.

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Sadly, no. Mr. Novello is not working with us at present.”

  “No,” said Bertrand, “he is at this moment making a film of The Vortex, for Gainsborough Studios.”