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.
Male perspective bisexual: When you are a man/woman U.S. spy team in Southeast East and told to give a Laos-China-Myanmar border drug warlord whatever he wants to recruit him to support the national interest of the United States, you give him whatever he wants, even when he wants it from both of you.
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.