“I have a plan,” Argenis said at last, dry-coughing from the weed.

“What is it?” Charlie asked again, getting up from the L-shaped white sofa on which, from time to time, he’d still pay for someone to suck him off.

Argenis took the bong and inhaled as he kept up his own old habit of answering questions only in his mind. Charlie went over to the kitchen table, combing through his black curls with his fingers, and took a ball of cocaine the size of a baby’s fist out of a little wooden box. The bleachy smell of the cocaine ran all the way down into Argenis’s guts. He could already taste the line he would soon be snorting when Charlie passed him his American Express card, in an invitation to use it like a razor blade.

Charlie again sat down beside him, barefoot, but with his pearl-gray Hugo Boss suit pants and blood-red tie still in place. A few minutes earlier, he had balled up his jacket as he entered the apartment and tossed it onto the dining room table. Argenis supposed he must have more than enough of them, given all the care he’d taken to crumple it up. Unlike his father – how he had cared for the first suit Loudón had ever made him! Whenever he’d come in off the street he would immediately remove it and hang it up on the balcony to air out, then walk through the house in his underwear asking if dinner was ready, while his mom silently smashed green plantains with an aluminum cup under the yellow kitchen light.

Argenis chopped the coke with the edge of the card, making two lines for himself and two for Charlie on the glass coffee table. Charlie used a rolled up thousand-peso bill to inhale the unadulterated drug he’d got through some Venezuelan friends of his father’s. Tony Catrain was the black sheep of a wealthy family of lawyers. He had studied in Italy and come back to Santo Domingo in 1972 to enjoy the company of the Dominican political and artistic avant-garde, who he entertained every weekend at his house in Las Terrenas. The house was deserted in those days, making it both ideal for social experiments and invisible to Balaguer and his henchmen. At the time of his revolutionary splendor José Alfredo had impressed him, but in the eighties Tony had dumped him, resuming a friendship based on mutual interests when José Alfredo had been installed in the National Palace together with his party.

Charlie had taken a doctorate in international law, but like his father he now defended corrupt politicians of all parties. Charlie was twenty-seven, like Argenis, and he had a son with a Chilean ex; a photo of the boy in Valparaiso, wearing a soccer kit, was stuck on the fridge with a magnet that was also a bottle opener. Charlie’d had no trouble turning into a charming version of his own father. He looked satisfied and tranquil. Argenis, on the other hand, had long been fighting against the irritating resemblance the mirror cast back at him, and he thought that he had done everything up to that point only to sully that reflection, to cover the face of his father with stains, to disfigure it with failures. When he was little, he had been proud of that resemblance – it was the only thing he had on his brother Ernesto, who had their mother’s light hair and skin.