turns into a pathetic creature and sinks to the floor. He cries and his bird-like shoulders convulse. I slap him again, which turns him to me.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I say. ‘I am not your judge.’
‘I murdered him,’ he says.
‘Were you in love with him?’
‘No, no, no que no!’ he says emphatically. Too emphatically.
I stare into him and see his corruption, so terrible that he cannot admit it to himself. I know Ramon Salgado has killed this boy for no other reason than for what he was making him into. Salgado is vain. He is a great flatterer of women. M. and he adore each other. He has affairs which never last. He is now wealthy, famous in his small world and reputable, but … he likes to sodomize boys and that interferes with his gilded self-image. That’s my reading of it, anyway. He’s killed the boy because he was forcing him to see what he hates.
He says the fateful words:
I couldn’t face a scandal.’
I don’t despise him, even for that. Who am I to despise anyone? I sit at the boy’s feet. I light a cigarette for him.
‘Will you help me?’ he asks.
I tell him a story, which I first heard from a friend of B.H. back in the forties, about a wealthy homosexual who ‘d picked up a bunch of servicemen from a well-known bar for queers in Manhattan and taken them back to a party at his mother’s apartment on 5th Avenue. They were all drunk and one of the soldiers passed out. They removed his pants and for a joke started to shave off his pubic hair. And, accidentally — I emphasize that — they chopped off his prick. So what did they do? Salgado looks at me like Javier does when I’m telling him a bedtime story, all hunched and wide-eyed. They wrapped him in a blanket and dumped him on a bridge somewhere. He was lucky, because a policeman found him and got him to a hospital before he bled to death.
‘What do you make of that, Ramon?’ I ask.
He blinks, desperate not to say the wrong thing and be sent out of class.
‘If you help me, Francisco,’ he says. ‘I will never do anything like this again.’
‘What? Kill somebody?’
‘No, no, I mean … I will never go with boys again. I will lead an exemplary life.’
‘I will help you,’ I say, ‘but I want to know what you think of my story.’
More silence. He’s too panicked to think.
‘They paid the soldier off,’ I add. ‘So that he wouldn’t press charges. How much do you think?’
He shook his head.
‘Two hundred thousand dollars, and that was in 1946,’ I say. ‘You made a lot more money from losing your prick in those days than you did from painting pictures.’
Salgado rushes past me and vomits in the toilet. He comes back wiping his mouth.
‘I don’t know how you can be so cool about this, Francisco.’
‘I’ve killed thousands of people. All of them as guilty or as innocent as you and I.’
‘That was war,’ he says.
‘I’m just pointing out that once you’ve seen slaughter on the scale I have, a dead boy in a hotel room is not so terrible. Now, give me your comment on my story.’
‘It was a terrible thing to have done,’ he says, drawing on his cigarette.
‘Worse than murdering a boy?’
‘He could have died for all they cared.’
‘Right. And what does that reveal about the people you’re so desperate to impress?’ I ask. ‘The perpetrator is still free, by the way, and he’s still a friend of Barbara Hutton.’
Ramon is too muddled to work it out for himself.
‘We are their lapdogs,’ I say. ‘We are their little marvels — yes, even me, Ramon. They stroke us, feed us morsels, tease us and then grow tired of us and throw us out. We are nothing to the very rich. Absolutely nothing. Less than toys. So remember, when you sip their champagne, that it is for these worthless people’s high opinion of you that you have murdered this boy.’
The words shunted into his chest like high-calibre bullets. He thumped back into his chair.
‘For them?’ he said, puzzled.
‘You killed the boy because you did not like the idea of those people knowing this about you. You killed him because it is the one thing you find hateful in yourself, and you think others will, too. And you have been very wrong.’
He sobs. I pat him on the back.
‘Francisco,’ he says, ‘where would I be without you?’
