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...
Gavin had arrived from Geneva earlier in the day, but he wanted a breather and had a lot of paper work to go through before the Cyprus reunification talks he was moderating for the UN began on April 1st. Therefore, he'd booked for the night into a five-star beach resort, the Four Seasons, west of the airport on the southern coast, at Limassol. He would go up...
I'd barely made it through a rough day in paradise. I had paperwork up to my eyeballs, and the ambassador was being a real bear toward the Country Team. He was being crushed in a vice between Washington, the Greeks, and the Turks over the latest failure of the Cypriot settlement talks to move just when the Greeks and Turks were both teasing us with the possi...
April 1st, 2019 I extracted Hakan's hand, with a regretfully voiced, "I've got to dress and run to catch my ride," and struggled to zip my shorts up in the forced sitting position I was in in the low tent by the Salamis dig. "I'll take a camp car and drive you to Ercan Airport later myself. We have time, Evan—" "No, we don't have time, Hakan," I said. "We...
While living on the island of Cyprus, I developed quite a taste for young Turkish men. If you could get a good-looking, well-constructed Turkish guy before he got too far into his forties, you could almost guarantee you'd have something forceful, vigorous, straightforward, and good natured to play with. You also, quite often, would have a guy with a pretty h...
When I was young, I had a different attitude. I wanted it all, and I had it all, but it was like a right then, a god-given right, and I found it easily. I never quite lost it, and now I have it all again, but no, not like I did back then. Not like the days when I was young and I first found my escape on the island, in the Bellapais villa. Ahh, the days of...
I would have never known sheer ecstasy or just how wanton I naturally was if it hadn't been for the British diplomat and writer Lawrence Durrell. And it wasn't really because of his writing, either; it was because of his mountainside villa in the ancient Byzantine abbey town of Bellapais on the steep slopes of the Kyrenia Mountains in the Turkish zone of Cyp...
Ahh, the days of drifting down to the square after lunch and sitting around ogling the local Turkish Cypriot men and letting them ogle me until I got that certain look from one I fancied and took him up to my Lawrence Durrell-rented villa and let him vigorously, joyously, and noisily fuck my brains out on a lounger under the sun on the terrace overlooking th...
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 found what I was looking for fairly quickly. The Cypriot door leading into the hidden garden had been the clincher. I felt I needed the autumn off—or at least I needed a change of scene and more mystery in my life. I had been in great demand in Savannah, but that was why I needed the autumn off. There had just been too many men. I didn't want to lose the...