I decided that if I was going to add Haiti to my list of countries visited, disembarking for a day's frolic in the fenced and well-guarded Disneyesque pleasure enclave of Labadee was the way to go. I was trying to push my collection over the hundred-country list, and, thanks to Henry Goslan the Third's money and patronage, I was well on my way. Henry was pu...
Preface For fifty years men come to the island of Cyprus, a Mediterranean paradise split and war torn by a marathon ethnic struggle between Greek and Turk, each consciously seeking connection with the writings of the British novelist and essayist Lawrence Durrell. They all take up tenancy, some longer than others, in the Bellapais villa where Durrell wrote...
I stopped going to play tennis on Saturday mornings. Instead I went to the compound on Sathorn Road, where the host and one of the men living with him, the black captain, had a private tennis court. The host didn't play; he'd sit there by the court, under an umbrella, sipping his martinis and watching the black captain and me play. They had other men living...
"We don't have time for this, Ergon. We're going down to the harbor for dinner." "There is always time to make fuck," Ergon answered me. "And we have an hour before we should be down in the harbor. Turks don't eat their evening meal before ten at night." He had come up to the flat after dark—after they had stopped work for the day. The main bath in the hou...
My eyes went to the water of the harbor just below and to the right of where I was sitting on a sultry, glorious evening in the Mediterranean. There, between the bows of two bobbing small yachts, I saw them in the water and smiled to myself—two spent condoms, floating there, like gelatinous jelly fish, on the surface of the slightly oil-slicked water. Had I...
Sometimes the simplest of questions require the greatest amount of preparation. "The golden question for this week the same as for last week?" "Yep," my boss answered. We were sitting in the office of the chief of station, the highest-ranking CIA agent in country, in the Nicosia, Cyprus, embassy and, as usual, I was trying to see if I could see anything a...
One of the saddest—and most ironic—casualties of the internecine Greek-Turkish war on Cyprus that divided the island into warring camps three decades ago was the once-famous and elegant Ledra Palace Hotel. The Treaty Room of the Ledra Palace, a hulking stone edifice in the Moorish style, had been the venue where the British secretly committed the crime of sl...
"Do you have any objections?" The way Fazil was looking at me, sitting by me on the narrow bunk, with the man giant Axel standing by the cabin door beyond him, I felt he wanted me to say I did have objections. And it did frighten me, but it also excited me. It represented just what attracted me to the older, Zeus-like Turk. He was danger. I said nothing, b...
Mahmoud's binoculars nearly fell out of his hand as he watched the young blond Adonis on the small yacht down in the Kusadasi harbor strip off his Speedo and stretch out on the roof of the yacht cabin to take in the sun. Mahmoud Noufeh enjoyed his voyeuristic pastime spying on men in the harbor from his tenth-floor balcony perch. He particularly enjoyed it w...
Chapter One: Scarred Wedged in the crowd in Times Square below the CNN big screen, next to the tower on top of which Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen were cavorting and waving to the crowd, Nick felt Steven Saylor pull him in close. Someone near them was starting the countdown on the ball drop ushering in 2018 early by thirty seconds and others were taking up...