Rebecca, strolling through the Friday night kick-off gala, was periodically waylaid by a pair of conventioneers, with one typically attempting to impress the other with his ability to work some magic -- to do some operating -- on the candidate. But as a whole, they had no clue what they were talking about. Thus far one man had asked for his daughter's admission to Northwestern, he being under the impression that Rebecca had pull at a private college, or that the college was in fact public. Another, an owner of a chain of funeral homes, wanted the "contract" for the funerals of all state employees. He was a man in his mid-50s, dressed in a gray three-piece suit, grinning through a tan he'd applied, it seemed, in great haste, from a tube.

Rebecca asked him to repeat the request, and he did. He wanted the contract for the funerals of all state employees.

"But we can't..." Rebecca tried not to sputter. "We can't tell people where to have their funerals." She was almost amused, and hoped the man was kidding. He was probably kidding. Surely he was kidding. He had the face of... what did his face look like? Some crustacean.

"C'mon," he said, getting closer to Rebecca. "A little 'kid goes pro.'" Now he was holding Rebecca's elbow. He thought himself a very smooth man. A crayfish! Or better yet, a langoustine. That was it! He looked like a langoustine, with his long neck, his distended eyes, and large forearms tapering to small clawlike fingers.

"What?" Rebecca said. "Kid goes what?"

"You know," he said, getting even closer. "A little 'kid goes pro.'" She now noticed the many broken blood vessels on his bloated, whisky-ravaged nose. He was the color of pumice. "You know what I mean," he said.

She was baffled but was afraid that he was trying to say what she thought he was trying to say. And did he have a tail? He seemed to have a tail. He even smelled like a langoustine! Or could she be smelling her own hair? She'd washed it dozens of times since Qingdao...

"You mean quid pro quo," Rebecca said.

"Huh?"

"It's Latin."

"Sure it is. I'm Greek, you know."

Rebecca glanced down at his name tag: George Papadolopsolous.

"Listen," he said now, "you ever hear of prearrangement? People often arrange their funerals many years in advance. It's a good percentage of our work. And states set up 401Ks for their employees -- so why not funeral arrangements?"

Now, Rebecca feared, he was almost making sense. But he was still nuts, wasn't he?

"Have you talked to the union?" she asked, now hoping to get out on a technicality.

"No, I haven't talked to the union. I'm talking to you. I'm looking at you and talking to you."

Rebecca could almost see him patting himself on the back for that one. Patting his own back with one of his large cartilaginous claws.

"I'm afraid," Rebecca tried, "that I just have no say in this kind of thing."

Now his face pinched.

"But you can bully pulp it!" he barked.

"I can what?"

"You can bully pulp it!"

Could she smell something on him? It wasn't booze, it was something less optimistic. Could she actually smell the stench of death on this man? She was certain she could. What was that smell? She tried to place it: There was silk there. And the distant fragrance of flowers, lilies maybe. And then -- it had to be -- the whiff of decomposing flesh. The men in the room -- and they were almost entirely men -- might try to disguise the smell, with their clean suits and their cologne, but it came through their pores, it spiraled through their breath. And some of the young men! What brought them into this profession? They seemed so decent, not a bit dour -- almost all of them clean-cut, with faces so innocent and without guile--

"Rebecca," came a voice to her left, "I have to introduce you to Kevin Schlepsnik, who does the most fascinating thing with corpses."

She turned to find the wide and wonderful face of Giacomo Skinputty, his hand outstretched. She gave a quick apologetic smile to the crayfish-man and backed away, pulled by Jeff to safety. God love him, he had rescued her again.

Rebecca had met Giacomo her first day back in Chicago. She'd hung up the phone in Qingdao and 18 hours later was on a plane to Los Angeles, where she vomited out of exhaustion and sheer terror -- was she really going to do this? she looked into the faces of passersby for a sign that she was wrong, that she should turn back -- and then to Boston, where she had a three-hour meeting with her partners at American Global Fisheries -- they barely said a word; they would need weeks to process the information -- and then to Chicago, where she met Charlie Panglosserman, her former campaign advisor and still the wisest man she knew.

"This is as things were meant to be," he said, gazing out his window onto the Chicago River, now full of Venetian-style gondoliers and glass-bottomed boats. They agreed definitively -- she'd hoped that maybe even he would attempt to talk her out of it -- that she should and would run. There was too much at stake, he said, her chances were better than good, and this, more than any other time, was her time. The seat was open. A popular Democrat, Warren Waterman, was leaving it vacant, would not endorse before the primary, and thus everyone had a shot. "Things couldn't," he added, "have happened otherwise."

In the Panglosserman office, Rebecca was introduced to the newer members of Charlie's staff -- he'd done well for himself since the days when he got her elected out of the back of his Grand Caravan -- and then to Giacomo Skinputty, plain-faced, in his early 40s, whom Charlie recommended to run the day-to-day campaign, get some funds raised and do everything else that needed doing until things heated up closer to the primary. At that point, Charlie might swing into action himself, or at least deputize someone do so.

Giacomo had worked for a few campaigns in Minnesota, one under the recently infamous Sergei Andropov, which made Rebecca slightly nervous. Was he a Democrat or Republican or worse, this Giacomo Skinputty? Did he believe in anything? She certainly didn't want her constituents to be burned alive by chunks of molten blimp. Did he advocate that kind of thing?

Charlie read Rebecca's mind.

"He worked for Sergei ages ago. He was a kid. Relax. He's one of us, Rebecca. And he's good."

She stood next to Charlie at the window. She watched what seemed to be children in the river, in inner tubes. They really were changing things in the Loop.

"I'm stupid to do this," she said.

"You are. We all are. But we'll have fun. This is the best of all worlds, the only way the world could have been."

"We're nuts," Rebecca said.

"We're not," Charlie said. "You actually do stack up pretty well."

Rebecca's résumé was pretty much perfect, impressive without being showy. She'd studied economics at the University of Chicago, got her law degree at DePaul, had been an assistant D.A. for two years, prosecuting chiefly domestic abuse and family crisis cases before realizing she didn't have the stomach for it. She saw the same families again and again, and she never seemed to make a dent. For two years she'd taught history and street law to students at a number of Chicago high schools -- she was roaming faculty -- and when there was a window, on a lark she ran for state Senate in the 59th, her home district. Her opponent, and much of the reason she ran, was a first cousin to Strom Thurmond, though he was even older, and trumped Strom in both liver spots and illegitimate children. He had 11, two of them with a Filipino maid who turned out to be his daughter -- that's a story (an extremely good one) for another day -- though he blithely chalked it all up to "a whole lot of stress and travel." She won handily, served respectably, and was thinking, and was encouraged by Charlie to think, of next steps, of for example running for Congress.

Then came The Speech. Or The Rapture. Or, depending on who was telling the story, The Honor-Lady Freakout.

This was Rebecca's brief chance at the national spotlight. She'd been asked to address the Democratic National Convention and, though no one was expecting much of her, she had, in 11 minutes, knocked the afternoon audience through the back of the building. She was not, according to her estimation, a born speaker. She was shy in front of a microphone and preferred to share the stage with others, groups of legislators watching the governor sign a bill into law, that kind of thing, and to leave the podium soon thereafter. Her speeches, when she was required to make them, were written carefully, and never did she detour from the text, rarely did she raise her eyes from the page.

But every so often something changed inside her, as if the waters within her rose and she could no longer contain them. When she was very young, her parents feared she had mild epilepsy, because she would have quick quiet fits that would bring her eyes to the back of her head, cause her arms to rise and vibrate. But the episodes were never serious, and after she turned 8, never recurred.

But that day at the convention, when she was supposed to speak about the value of medical research -- a paralyzed actor was scheduled to speak in this slot but had been bumped up to prime time -- she found her waters ascending, and instead of the planned speech, she opened her mouth and from it came 11 minutes of words about honor. No one had uttered that word in years, and it ripped everyone open. She seemed, oddly, to be speaking in a different octave, one that cut through the cacophony of the convention floor. Rarely were many paying attention at that hour on the convention's first day, but her voice, in the state she was in, cut through the static like a missile through mist.

But her speech -- or address or homily or whatever it might be called -- was never televised and soon became only a story told by those who'd witnessed it. And the feelings of those witnesses were mixed. Many in the room were moved, transformed, felt sure they were watching their future speak to them from another realm, if that made any sense. She spoke on one subject, honor, a vague and intangible thing, but the speech sounded so specific, and the demands she made on her audience were precise. The exact words of her address will not be recounted here, for they are not known, and Rebecca herself had no memory of them.

However, the lingering effect of her voice, its clarity and frequency -- had she invented a new octave? -- left many limp, caused shudders when witnesses remembered those minutes. But among those who had heard her words, just as many thought she was loony.

Episode 6: Rebecca noticed Giacomo's eyes were trained on his own reflection. More specifically, on his own ass.