Klay looked at this overfed, satisfied man smiling back at him through his folds of skin. He took in the ivory crucifixes hanging on the priest’s wall, the ivory child sculptures lying on his bookshelves—the living trophies who were everywhere. All of it a single tentacle leading back to Ras Botha.

Control yourself, he told himself.

“My brother is in the meatball business,” he continued, wondering where the hell that lie had come from and what he was going to do with it now that he’d said it. “He left our family funeral home to work for his wife’s father, making meatballs . . .”

“He left your family.”

“He told my father, ‘People die only once, but they need to eat every day.’ It broke my father’s heart, but my brother was right, you know? Funerals and faith are a dying business . . .”

The priest nodded.

“So, Father, I’m in charge of marketing.”

He reached into his backpack and brought out a brochure for O’Shea Funeral Home. On the brochure’s cover was an old black-and-white photograph of a little boy with his arm around a puppy, the pair sitting together on the front seat of a horse-drawn hearse. Klay Funeral Home was no longer in business but the photo was real. Beneath the photograph of Klay’s grandfather, the brochure read, “O’Shea Funeral Home. Serving the community since 1898.”

He’d designed the brochure on his laptop and printed it in the business office of Cebu’s Radisson hotel, where he was staying. Working up the brochure, seeing his grandfather as a little boy, brought back happy memories. Klay and his brother playing pirates in the chapel, riding casket carts and swinging gladiola sabers. The time he forgot to close the hearse door. His father’s humor.

“My stretch limousine, eh, champ?” his father had joked, sliding into the Cadillac’s front seat that last day, with a shoebox in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Klay started the car. When they arrived at Lewisburg prison, Jack Klay opened his shoebox. It was empty. He took off his Hamilton watch and his diamond pinkie ring and dropped them into the box. He leaned back in his seat, reached into his front pocket, and took out his Tiffany money clip. He took out his wallet and put them both in the shoebox, too. Then he closed the lid, set the box on the seat between them, and looked into his son’s eyes. “So, this is where I’m supposed to give you life advice. Okay, remember this: There’s always a who. If he’s done you a service, you thank him. If he’s done you a disservice, you never forget it. Use your head, hit before you get hit, look after Sean, and visit your mother.” He winked. “You’ll be all right. Sal has an envelope for you.”