“Have you found that it really gets results by isolating the boys this far away from civilization?”

He did, of course, but he had to fight to keep a straight face in responding considering the different take he had on this than the TV commentator obviously did. He decided to deflect from the central point of that.

“I hope you don’t plan to run these clips in Madagascar,” Julio Alvares, head of the Alvares Boys Preparatory Tennis School, based on the Indian Ocean coast of the island of Madagascar, answered, with a laugh. The news correspondent had a microphone pushed into his face. “And, yes, we think we get better results by taking the boys away from all distractions. This is very basic tennis training here and high risk. We only take boys between thirteen and fifteen and ones who are willing to give total commitment to becoming court champions, not necessarily ones fully identified as future champions yet. But, yes, we’ve had successes already in the five years we’ve been here. Shawn Godwin was accepted into the qualifying rounds at Wimbledon last year and Dennis Thanawat made first round at the Australian Open this year.”

The Alvares school, built around Julio Alvares, who had played on the pro circuit into his early thirties, successfully coached for five years, and had established his own school in Madagascar in the last five years, was, indeed, remote from almost anywhere else. The academy was located in the beach town of Vatomandry, bordering the Indian Ocean side of Madagascar. The town did have a road, of sorts, to the interior capital of Antananario, but the school had a helicopter for most travel to there and then, by a series of ever larger airplanes, out to the world.

The tennis academy was the one self-sustaining business in the town. Alvares virtually owned the place as well as the villager’s loyalty and silence.

Alvares, a handsome, muscular and hirsute Brazilian, now just past forty, had done well on the international circuit and was a preparation coach for entry-level players of high repute. He ran the school on a shoestring, with four separately fenced courts, one covered with a high tin roof to enable instruction in the frequent rain; and a clubhouse, with a couple of lecture rooms, a party room, dining hall, large kitchen and good locker room facilities. He’d started with an old beach hotel and a couple of beachside villas. The boys—only about a dozen at a time—were housed in the old hotel. He lived in one villa and his Brazilian sidekick and assistant, Faron Garcia, now in his early fifties, lived in the other one. The rest of the staff were locals, all delighted to have the jobs and thus devoted to protecting Alvares’s reputation come what may.

Hopeful families paid through the nose to place their sons in this school, where the boys got more individual attention by a top-flight coach than they could hope to get anywhere else. The school accepted only boys, though, because few would be willing to send a young daughter, unsupervised to such an isolated place—and, if they did, they’d want to receive reports on how the girls were going. It was hard enough to muster up families who would send their boys. It took parents with stars in their eyes to do so, although many of them were as “whatever it takes” as their sons were. Some were more so. Alvares did not permit visits to the school or trips home for the entire time the boys were enrolled there.

He also wasn’t being completely honest with the TV newsman who had come in with the new crop of four boys to do this special to air during the coming U.S. Open tennis tournament. The TV crew would be leaving again for the airport in Antananario almost before the helicopter’s rotary blade had stopped rotating from the boys’ arrival and as it was ready to warm up again for the return trip. Alvares did want his school to be isolated and for the boys to have no contact with the outside world while they were here, but the main reason he’d located the school here was because the age of consent in Madagascar was fourteen, which accorded exactly with Alvares’s preference in sex partners.

Alvares had a fetish for handsome fourteen-year-old boys. There had been rumors of his proclivities for men—very young men—during his playing years, although he was seen with women enough that the charge of homosexuality couldn’t obtain widespread acceptance. He made no “coming-out” declarations and just shrugged off the hints. He was famously handsome and sexy himself and got a lot of play in the press thereby. But nothing definitive had been pinned down and there was even less voiced on his preference for boys, which he was very careful to limit, indulging mostly when he went to minor tennis tournaments in countries with a fourteen-year-old age of consent. When he made trips, as a tennis pro, to such countries, Faron Garcia was easily able to pimp adoring fourteen-year-old boys for him. That’s how he had discovered Madagascar and developed plans to open his school here.

Faron Garcia had been with him from the beginning. He too was a handsome, sensual man, if older than Alvares. He too had a proclivity for young boys. Ever since Alvares was traveling the world on the pro tennis circuit, Garcia was traveling with him. He procured boys for Alvares then and he did so now, as well. He was the one who traveled to recruit boys for the school. He would meet with the families and with the boys. He would determine how greedy the families were and how obsessed they were in making their son a tennis star. Then he would meet separately with the boy to see how badly he wanted it as well and, subtly to determine what the boy was prepared to do to get the professional development. If he opened his legs for Garcia, or convincingly said he would, it was assured that he would do so for the younger, sexier, tennis coach himself.

Garcia didn’t try out all of the boys himself before turning them over to Alvares. Alvares had a certain “type” he liked to enjoy as a virgin, and Garcia did what he could to accommodate that.

If the family would pay and would accept the conditions without wanting to hear any downside to the deal and the boy let Garcia or convincingly said he’d let Alvares fuck him, he very likely would receive an invitation to train with Alvares.

Not all of the boy recruits were recruited to be in Alvares’s bed. Garcia recruited some as genuine prospects to make it to the pro level. Not all fourteen-year-old boys were sexually attractive to Alvares. In the current crop of four new boys, Garcia had said it was half and half: two were genuine prospects for the training only; two had some promise for the tennis court but also were prepared to exchange sex with a man for training. If Alvares made a star out of a boy he didn’t fuck, that was just good protective coloring.

Garcia had come in on the helicopter with the boys and the TV commentator and his two cameramen. A party in the clubhouse was arranged to introduce the new students to the existing ones. As soon as the news people could be satisfied and turned around, they could get to the party and Garcia could move on to pimping a boy or two to Alvares, who always was horny when new students arrived.

If the TV crew felt they were being rushed to be gone, they didn’t indicate it—but they were moved along quickly. Most likely they immediately felt the isolation of the place even though the facility was kept in top-notch condition, and they were anxious not only to get out of the beach village of Vatomandry, but also to be lifting up from the capital city of Antananario and off toward Europe as soon as possible.

“Which are the two new, willing boys?” Alvares asked Garcia after he’d done a quick round of the party room, stopping only briefly at any one group of boys for brief acknowledgment of students he knew and just initial name checks with the four boys Garcia had recruited and brought in on the helicopter that day. Alvares’s appetite was whetted with the arrival of fresh tale, but it’s not like he didn’t have enough fourteen-year-old boys on a string in the eight already at the academy to be in painful need.

“The tall, muscular blond boy who we’ll have to trim down a bit is Gunther Heilmann.”

“German?”

“Austrian,” Garcia answered. “And the darker, foxy Indian boy is Jai Bhatt. He’s Gujarati. Very tough despite the delicate look. Gunther will probably be better for the career, but the Indian is clever and sneaky. He’ll run circles around the rest until they’re all well trained. He’ll also stay fresh longer.”

“And the one who is unused?” Alvares asked. “The Austrian or the Indian?”

Garcia laughed. “The Austrian. Jai Bhatt had me in bed almost before I got to that point in the recruitment talk. He has thighs of steel; wouldn’t let me go until I’d pumped him full of cum. So, which one do you want me to have sent to you first? Right after the party?”

“I think right now, and I’ll take care of it,” Alvares answered. He worked his way back through the crowd and motioned Gunther Heilmann to join him out on terrace off the party room that overlooked the beach and the Indian Ocean.

“So, you are the one from Salzburg,” Alvares said when they reached the rail of the terrace. Without notice his was putting his hands on the boy here, there, and everywhere, although he was mitigating the sexy nature of the pawing with relevant comments on the tennis-related aspect of the boy’s musculature. Gunther was blushing a bit but he didn’t resist. “You’re going to need to trim some of this off without losing muscle to move as you should on the court. I bet your big weapon is the serve, not the movement.”