“Yeah, old BB.” He was forgetting to whisper in his anguish. “Him and Eleanor, they’ve been so mean about Nicola. Since she died and all. When I said I wanted to go to her funeral, they said why, so I could stand around with all the emotional spicks and bawl to my heart’s content, and then finally BB said there wouldn’t be a funeral because no one could find the body and to—to shut the fuck up.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said inadequately. “I guess your dad worries about whether he’s a tough enough man, and so he’s always on guard against any strong feelings. I don’t suppose it’s much comfort to you now, but can you imagine him as someone who is incredibly weak and scared so he acts like a bully to keep other people from guessing how scared he is?”

“You think that could really be true?” There was wistfulness in the young voice, a hope that his father’s meanness wasn’t due to his own failings.

I thought of Baladine, casually helping with the dismemberment of African newborns, getting his hands dirty, and wondered if my diagnosis had any basis in reality. Maybe he was someone who enjoyed torture for its own sake, but I gave Robbie a hearty assurance I didn’t feel.

“Your father is a cruel man. Whatever the reason for his cruelty, will you try to remember that his sadism is about him, about his needs and weaknesses, and not about you?”

I talked to him for a few more minutes, until he’d recovered enough equilibrium for me to turn the conversation. There were two questions I wanted to put to him before we hung up. The first was about Nicola’s smoking. Oh, no, Robbie said, she never smoked, not like Rosario, their nanny now, who was always sneaking off behind the garage for a cigarette, which made Eleanor furious, because she could still smell the smoke on her breath even after Rosario swallowed a zillion peppermints. Nicola said she had to save all her money for her children; she couldn’t waste it on cigarettes or drinking.

My second question was whether his dad owned any shoes with horseshoe emblems—and if he did, were any of the emblems missing. Robbie said he didn’t know, but he’d look.

It made me feel like a creep, asking Robbie to spy on his own father—but I suppose it also made me feel like I was paying BB back for his frothing over his son’s masculinity. If he’d been proud of his sensitive child I might not have done it. But if he could be proud of a sensitive child, he wouldn’t be doing other stuff.