Klay found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. Eady used to invite new hires to sit on his sofa and describe their futures for him. If they were nervous, which covered just about everyone, he would hand them his ivory walking stick with some line about how everyone needs a little assistance. They’d hold Eady’s walking stick across their laps and tell him what they had planned for their illustrious careers, how they intended to tell stories in ways that refreshed the old and tired Sovereign. “Not your work, of course, Mr. Eady . . .”

Those he liked, Eady let in on his little secret. The rest he sent back to their desks, where they learned from their colleagues that they had nervously rubbed a walrus penis bone for half an hour while talking to God.

She was still talking.

“. . . that’s what I told the board about Prescott & Brower, which was one of my main accounts when I was a partner at Aegis. David Prescott founded P&B in 1892, selling pith helmets and elephant guns. Did you know that?” She paused. “Tom?”

“No.”

“But you see the connection. It, too, was headed for extinction. Enter public relations. Packaging. Brand realignment. We identified P&B’s core deliverable. It wasn’t pith helmets. Or canoes. It was freedom. The African word for freedom is ‘uhuru.’ Did you know that? Of course you did. Our research told us people wanted the name, but not the musty stuff inside. Who needs a compass when we’ve got Google Earth, right? Well, nobody likes freedom more than teenagers. Our path was clear.”

“Really?” Klay said, thinking it was tan of some kind, Eady’s carpet.

“Really. We put P&B’s logo on premium T-shirts, delivered low-cut jeans, gave out flip-flops with bottle openers in the soles to colleges across the country. Yesterday’s pith helmets are the hoodies of today, I like to say. What do you think happened?”

Klay was looking out the window.

“What happened was our market cap jumped to six billion! Are you familiar with the P&B brand, Tom?”

His grandfather had had one of those pith helmets in the attic. Klay wondered if he’d ever used it. Chances were the shotguns in the attic had come from P&B, too. He didn’t know. He had ventured into Prescott & Brower’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue a few years ago. He walked in expecting to find fly rods and hand-strung snowshoes. Instead he’d encountered a world not that different from the sex trafficking markets he’d investigated overseas—teenage boys in tank tops and underweight girls in low-cut jeans spraying perfume on tourists.

“Prescott & Brower,” Klay said. “With the pith helmets.”