The lives of two fugitive brothers of successive Phoenician kings become entwined in the villa of the Greek philosopher exile Phaedo, where one fugitive is Phaedo's fourteen-year-old catamite, Hiero, and the other, Prince Xander, brother of the current Phoenician king, is a hidden guest. Hiero and Xander's lives as sometimes lovers continue to intersect over the years of trying to gain the throne.
Brad is a respectable forty-year-old banker in the circus wintering town of Peru, Indiana, but he has a hankering for fourteen-year-old boys. He's working, in postwar 1949, on a scheme to "adopt," with fake papers, one of three boys he covers from a German male brothel, when, in Peru, he happens to come onto a knife-thrower's assistant, fourteen-year-old Alfonso, who has tried to drown himself in the Wabash River.
From the perspective of a bitter, cynical husband and father with a penchant for philandering, this is the tale of how his daughter became his slut on her wedding day, just hours after marrying her beau.