The woman smiled. It was a toothy grimace reminiscent of the sacred crocodiles who had once staffed the Nile-side temples in ancient Egypt and done their part for the ecology by devouring anyone the priests didn't like. The crocodiles became very devout and their descendants often bemoaned the modern world's comparative lack of religious zeal.

"A threat, Mr. Godz? You can't scare me; I have teenagers. You're not the head of E. Godz, Inc. yet, and if that day should come, I doubt you'll throw us to the wolves. We're far too valuable to you as a working subsidiary. You'd never do anything to dam the cash flow."

"You're a cynic, aren't you, Ms.—?"

"Call me Nenufer. And no, I'm not, but I think you must be. It's all about the money with you, isn't it? The money and the power. You like pretending to be everyone's best buddy, but only when you're hugging the knowledge that one word from you could turn everything upside down. It gives you a sick little thrill, playing the undercover mastermind. I'll bet you've got a tattoo on your butt that says If They Only Knew."

"How would you know what I am?" Dov shot back. "Considering we just met, what, five minutes ago? Wait, let me guess: woman's intuition." He sneered.

"Middle-aged woman's intuition," an unruffled Nenufer replied. "It's like a superpower: modified X-ray vision. I can't see through a brick wall, but I've met plenty of your type before so I can certainly see right through you."

"Lady, you've got issues."

She laughed at him. "Nice use of a dismissive catchphrase; you'll get extra points for style. Sure, I've got issues. Who doesn't? I notice that you still haven't bothered to apologize for what you did to Behold-all-the-moles-in-the-front-lawn—"

"Apologize to whom? To the cat? You think he cares? You think he even remembers? He's got a brain the size of a walnut and most of the storage space is taken up with that ridiculous name you gave him!"

"To me," said Nenufer. "For having treated the things that I believe in as if they were all just part of a silly little game, something to keep an aging Baby Boomer busy. My generation gets into such mischief when we're not kept busy, don't we? Mischief like standing up for human rights, and speaking up for peace, and pretending the homeless aren't invisible, and seeing that women get treated like human beings, and giving the earth a fighting chance to dig out from under all the trash and sludge and poison that some people believe will just go away if we attend all the right cocktail parties and think happy thoughts."

"Look, lay off me," Dov snapped. "I don't like lectures, but this also happens to be one that I don't need. My mother's part of your precious generation, remember? Believe me, I know everything you've done—and not just the stuff you're proud of! If you want to assume I look down on your beliefs, go ahead, but that won't make it true. One of the first things my mother did long before she set me up in the Miami office was teach me to respect every one of our clients. That was one lesson I took to heart, starting with respecting her. If you think I'm just in this for the money and the power, you might as well say that the same goes for my mother, because everything I know about running E. Godz, Inc. I learned from Edwina Godz herself!"

"Why, thank you, Mr. Godz." Like a brief summer cloudburst, Nenufer's dark scowl blew away as if it had never existed. Her face was transformed from Gorgon to Grace by a warm, affectionate smile. "That's all we were waiting to hear."

She turned on her heel, walked up to the statue of Isis, and clapped her hands four times. There was a great creaking of wood, a groaning of gears, and a squeal of moving parts as the statue of the goddess spread her arms wide. Fountains of blue and green sparks leaped from the gilded palms of her hands and the ceiling began to leak roses.

Before Dov's astonished eyes, the lights dimmed and a citrine glow suffused the great room. He smelled patchouli incense and heard many voices chanting sonorously, but he could not for the life of him figure out where they were coming from. When he looked for Nenufer, to ask her what was going on, he found her gone.

Now the gauze curtain at the far end of the room began to wave as if a small windstorm had darted into the house. With a clash of tinny bells, the fragile cloth was whipped aside and down the steps came Ray Rah, leading a procession of his followers— those who weren't watching the Cubs play, anyway.

They walked slowly, solemnly, in perfect order. Ray Rah himself was dressed to resemble the divine Osiris, ruler of the Afterlife. The thick layer of blue paint covering his face looked itchy—his nose and firmly closed mouth both twitched like mad—but despite his obvious agony he repressed any urge to break character and scratch. Behind him came two women dressed as the goddesses Isis and Nephthys. Musicians followed, playing small harps, drums, and the sistrum's jangling framework of bells. Next came those who carried burning bowls of incense, palm fronds to spread the fragrant smoke throughout the hall, and last of all a magnificently tall, regal woman wearing a gilded mask.

Dov drew in his breath sharply when he saw her painted face. It was Edwina.

Stumbling from the shock, he fell into line at the end of the procession and followed Ray Rah's congregation into a smaller room to one side of the hall of the gods' images. The walls were either stone or painted to look like stone. They were certainly painted to look as if they had been carved with low relief figures, in the style of the ancient Egyptian pharaonic tombs. Dov glanced to left and right and felt his heart begin to beat faster with dread.

The painted walls were covered with pictures of his mother.

As the rest of the procession circled the room, making reverential gestures at each of the pictures, Ray Rah dropped back from his place at the head of the line in order to speak with a trembling Dov.

"Please take your proper place, Mr. Godz," he said. "Ever since Horus first avenged his father Osiris' death, the firstborn son has been the most important participant in rites like these."

"But—but she's not dead yet!" Dov protested. "You're giving her a funeral and she's not dead!" Another, more terrible thought struck him: Could it be that while he was in transit, somewhere a computer had hiccupped and he'd missed out on a truly vital piece of news? "Is she?"

Ray Rah raised the ceremonial crook and flail aloft in a warding gesture. "May the gods forbid it! Of course not. We've been in touch with her on a daily basis ever since we heard about her illness."

"Oh." Dov lowered his eyes. They've been in touch with her every day, he thought. And what have I been doing? Nothing. Just looking out for my own interests. I'm one hell of a son. Suddenly he felt more ashamed of himself than when Sam Turkey Feather had called him on his lack of filial devotion.

"This isn't a funerary rite," Ray Rah went on. "Though I must admit that what attracted me to the ancient Egyptian practices was the emphasis on death. The trouble is, when you're at a cocktail party and someone asks you about your beliefs and you say something like, 'I belong to what's basically a death cult,' that kind of kills the conversation."

Dov couldn't disagree with that. "What is this if it's not a funeral?"

"It's our way of making peace with what must come. As much as we love Edwina, as much as we owe her, we knew that the day would come when we'd have to bid her farewell. That's how it is for all of us, isn't it? But in this country, death is an embarrassment. It's a wonder we can hear ourselves talk over the noise of several million people whistling past the graveyard. We worship youth and beauty not for their own sakes but because we tell ourselves that the young and the beautiful never die. We follow a thousand different health fads because we believe that there's some magic number of granola bars that will let you live forever, but only if you wash them down with the right kind of one hundred percent natural spring water while standing on the Sacred Treadmill. My generation's called the Baby Boomers for a reason: We act like babies when it comes to facing the inevitable. If we close our eyes, cover our ears, and hide under the blankets, Death won't be able to find us."