The seventh book in the Evan Tanner series

I have never liked funerals. I can appreciate the advantages of conventionalizing one’s relationship with Death, but this appreciation has never advanced beyond the level of pure theory. I do not like to view the televised funerals of assassinees, nor do I enjoy attending the last rites of friends and relatives. When I am introduced to an undertaker I categorize him at once as a sanctimonious money-grubbing necrophiliac. I realize this is an unfair generalization. I don’t care.

As far as I was concerned, this particular funeral was the worst of a bad lot. And this for purely subjective reasons: I had to get to the funeral parlor early and stay until the bitter end. I was going to miss the party afterward. And on top of everything else, the poor son of a bitch in the rosewood casket was the one person on earth I cared most for. All of this, added to my personal distaste for such ceremonies, made me sincerely wish I was miles from there.

But that was out of the question. They couldn’t have the show without me, because that was me, see, in that box there. We were gathered together in Klaus Hammacher’s funeral home in Griggstown, the capital city of Modonoland, for the last rites and burial of Evan Michael Tanner. And I’m him, or he’s me. Or what you will.

Eccchhh.

“We will bury you,” Armand Karp had said. Armand was a wrinkled Belgian Jew who had transplanted himself in Griggstown soil thirty years ago. Since then he had both flourished and withered, growing ever fatter in the trunk and ever thinner in the arms and legs and neck. “We will bury you,” he had said, eyes twinkling in his wizened face, and the phrase was neither as menacing nor as metaphorical as it had been when Nikita said it.