Fourteen-year-old Turkish Cypriot Safet’s feet couldn’t reach the floor. His forehead and the palms of his hands were plastered to the glass of the sixth-floor sliding-glass door out onto the balcony of the unknown-stars Venus Beach hotel room on Salamis Bay on the eastern coast of Turkish Cyprus. He had been admiring the view south along the beach to the ancient Greek ruins at the Salamis archeological site at the ancient city, said to have been founded by the Greek soldiers returning from the Trojan Wars. Most of the city had sunk into the sea in a third-century earthquake.

Safet who lived with his mother, Gilkiz, in the nearby village of Agios Sergios, had never seen the ruins at Salamis at this angle. But before he knew it, he was at even more of a precarious angle, his feet off the floor, the muscular Israeli tourist’s arm under his belly, holding him in thrall and his face and the palms of his hands smashed into the window. He was immobilized and entirely under the control and at the mercy of the burly man. The man did not want to wait longer to get what he’d paid for from the boy.

The boy had known why he was in the hotel room. He worked as a runner and pool boy for the hotel, offering more services than that, the hotel being fully aware he did so and taking half of whatever the boy made. His mother, working as a housekeeper at the hotel as well, also provided extra services, as required. Safet himself had been the result on one of those hotel services nearly fifteen years earlier.

He just didn’t know he’d be taken so quickly and brutally, with little preparation, as he now was. Safet was small and handsome, his mixed parentage having given him an exotic look, and perfectly formed for his age. He, surprisingly, had blond highlights in his hair and arresting blue eyes, marking his parentage as more than Turkish—quite probably half German or Scandinavian. He was an active, clever boy, who was all smiles and cooperation—and, for tourists who wished to pay the price, initially tight yielding and the ability to act like each time was the first time and not given up without giving the impression that he might be ruined by the experience. Above all, he was able to give the man laying him a sense of power and command.

The Turks who covered him seemed only focused on getting themselves off, so his dramatics were wasted on them, but the tourists—especially the Germans, Scandinavians, and, like today, the Israelis, were thoroughly aroused and entertained by his servicing.

There had been a bit of preparation—fondling inside the door to the room, disrobing, Safet on his knees, taking the Israeli’s cock in his mouth; and a bit of fingers and tongue in the boy’s hole, but the Israeli had left Safet on the bed, on his back, legs bent and spread, when he went to the bathroom of the room that would do but that had become outdated and a bit shabby in décor and a bathroom with tired, chipped fittings. When the Israeli returned, Safet had risen from the bed, drawn by the upper-story view over the Salamis ruins, and was standing at the sliding glass balcony doors.

It was here where the Israeli surprised him, lifting the boy’s feet off the floor, with an arm under his waist. And it was here, with not enough preparation for the boy to comfortably take the man’s cock yet, that the Israeli mounted, penetrated, and as Safet squirmed and panted and cried out, fucked the boy hard and deep. The boy, small, slim, smooth skinned, tight-holed, panting and groaning, squirming ineffectually, nearly sobbing. The man, large, hulking, hirsute, dark, muscular, cruel, thick, stretching cocked, groaning, holding tight, and thrusting, thrusting, thrusting.

So well did Safet convey that he had been taken painfully and mercilessly, which aroused the Israeli tourist to a great degree, that, when the man had exhausted his fury and calmed down, he felt a bit sheepish over how hard he’d used the small boy’s body and tipped him generously. Delighted with the money he would not have to declare to the hotel’s procurer, Safet tripped home to his mother in the mudbrick hovel at the eastern end of Agios Sergios.

He found Gilkiz bent over her sums, glum that she didn’t have enough to cover both the rent that was due in two days’ time and the food that had to be brought in the day after that. She was somewhat happier when she saw what Safet had brought home for her and she acted like he had saved them for another week or too. But Safet could see in his mother’s demeanor that it just wasn’t enough. And Gilkiz wouldn’t be returning to work for another two days, so there was little way she could get enough. She could sell herself in the village, but there was no one in the village able to pay her enough for their immediate needs.

Even that was cut off because her jealous boyfriend, Errol, who lived in the capital in the center of the island, Lefkosa, with his wife and his own children and who drove a produce truck between the capital and the Salamis coast, arrived at their door. He was hungry and randy and there would be no leaving the hut to acquire more funds by Gilkiz that day before Errol’s needs were met and he had left. Errol wasn’t a help; he was just one more expense.

Covering the immediate expenses was now left up to Safet. He thought and thought about what to do. There was always one place he could go when other opportunities didn’t arise. When his mother and Errol had gone behind the beaded screen where her pallet lay and Safet had heard them settle into the rhythm of the fuck, Safet quietly left the house and headed back toward the coast, south of the Venus Beach Hotel, where, on the southern fringes of the protected Salamis ruins reservation squatted the painter from the Turkish mainland, Mehmet.

Taking the bus to Famagusta, Safet disembarked at the southern end of the city, where it abutted the Salamis excavation reservation, and walked out to the beach. Looking out toward the Mediterranean, he saw Mehmet sitting at his easel, facing out to sea and painting. The multicolored caftan he was wearing, which was billowing in the wind, was more arresting in color than the paints being applied to the canvas. He wore a white turban on his head, the end of which was loose and was beating on his cheek in the air currents. He didn’t seem to notice.

Safet took his shoes and socks off, tucked them under his arm, and then walked down the beach and stood behind the mainland Turkish painter he often turned to when he was perplexed, sad, or in need of a friend. Safet looked out to sea, where a large sailing yacht was bobbing up and down, and then at the canvas where the naked figure of a boy about Safet’s age—fourteen—was appearing. There was no sign of water or a boat on the canvas. The boy was very nicely equipped, though. Mehmet was especially fond of nice equipment on a fourteen-year-old boy, and Safet was always flattered when the painter told him he was one of his nicest boys.

“What is it you want, Safet?” Mehmet asked the boy in a low, bass voice. He hadn’t turned around to see Safet come up from the beach to him, as far as Safet could see. “Mustafa is off in Istanbul, pursuing his acting career. He’s been gone since the last time you visited.”

Ah, so he hadn’t forgiven me yet for having caught me with Mustafa on the beach that night, Safet thought. Mustafa had come to stay with Mehmet on the beach, where Mehmet was squatting on government land and being permitted to because he was such an entertaining character with the tourists to the Salamis site. Safet had come to Mehmet for advice but it had been the Turkish actor, Mustafa, who had taken the fourteen-year-old boy out onto the beach in the night and fucked him.

“I know. I just came to visit. I’m lonely for the company of crazy old men. I see that Hakim is gone too.” Safet recognized the model in Mehmet’s painting. It was the man’s sometimes houseboy, Hakim, who easily got into a snit and went back to his boyfriend in Famagusta, only to return to Mehmet when he got hungry—and into a snit over something his boyfriend had or had not done. What Hakim had not done here was to be in front of the canvas to model the painting Mehmet was doing of him from memory. The likeness was there, though. Mehmet knew every square inch of the boy.

“Hakim has been gone a week this time.”