“Well, it was one first-class day.”

     We went down together, the three of us, to a bar that hunched in the shadows of glass-and-steel towers. Inside it was dim and almost empty. Gilsa bought a round, then I did, and the place began to fill up around us. When we got into our third schooners, Gilsa and Collins started talking about Death Kits, and Gilsa said the best he'd seen was for a Botswanan who was supposed to have died in an explosion at a fireworks factory. The beneficiary, his American fiancée, submitted evidence that included a death certificate, coroner's report and police report, eyewitness affidavits, newspaper clippings, an obituary, billings from the mortuary and the cemetery, and photos of the remains, which supposedly had been recovered from the embers.

     “They may have been,” Gilsa said, “but they didn't belong to the insured.”

     “You found him,” I said.

     “We didn't have to. See, it was a real explosion, and those were real newspaper clips, and one of 'em mentioned that it was an illegal factory, unlicensed. That was all we needed to disallow the claim.”

     “Just that?”

     “ ‘… if death occurs while navigating an aerial craft, or while engaged in any illegal or illicit activity, or as a result of war or an act of war,’ ” Collins said. “It's in the standard accident policy, you can look it up.”

     “But he got away,” I said.

     “Not for long,” Gilsa said. “A few months later, the fiancée runs into him at a gas-and-go in Compton. He hasn't bothered to tell her he's back. He also hasn't bothered to tell her he's gotten married. She calls us. ‘I have reason to believe that Kwangi is not actually deceased, and I wish to inquire as to whether you gentlemen desire any assistance in putting his ass in jail.’ ”

     We laughed hard, we swapped a few more war stories, and we left together, feeling high and strong and smart. I