“Oh,” I said.

“And with the political situation the way it is, and the executions scheduled-”

I nodded. I understood.

“So,” Karp said, “if you are voluntary-”

“What the hell,” I said. “I don’t mind. It’s my funeral.”

And now I lay in my coffin, and a beautiful thing it was, all oiled rosewood with ornamental carving and brass hardware. And what a beautiful thing I was, for that matter, with cotton pads under my lips and rouge on my cheeks and my nails manicured and my hands powdered and a single African lily clasped in them. Klaus Hammacher had done everything but embalm me (and would have done that if he could), and his careful application of the very techniques which allegedly brought life to the features of the dead made me look like the entrée at a ghouls’ banquet. My cheeks looked waxen, my hair looked like a wig, and my future looked dim.

“He looks so natural,” someone said. “So lifelike.”

“Hammacher does beautiful work.”

“Oh, he’s an artist. When my mother died, God rest her soul, he took years off her. She hadn’t looked so good-”

They drifted off and I tuned them out. The open-casket bit was something I’ve always considered tasteless to begin with, and now it was an abomination. But everyone had insisted on it, from the doctor who had doctored a death certificate to Hammacher himself. The argument was that agents of the white supremacist junta would surely attend the funeral, and they would require more than the sight of a closed casket to assure themselves that the notorious American agent was truly and properly dead.

Actually I was as close to dead as I could manage. There’s this yogic relaxation technique that I do when I want to rest, involving a regimen of tensing and relaxing all one’s muscles and making one’s mind as blank as possible and slowing various bodily functions, and I was doing this. I kept my breathing as shallow as I could, and a rig Hammacher had contrived kept my suit jacket and shirt front in place and concealed any rise and fall of my chest.