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position is considered to be one of the best. Is that the case here?”
    Jeffrey shrugged. “There were about four hundred applicants for each person hired.”
    â€œHow interesting. I suppose you must find the work tremendously stimulating.”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œOh? Why is that?”
    â€œDo you prefer honesty or corporate diplomacy?”
    â€œI have always put the highest value on honesty, young man,” Alexander replied. “Carry on.”
    â€œThe pay for the lower grades is lousy. There’s an endless back-stabbing battle to see who is going into one of the senior slots. Partners go out to the client companies, make the presentations, and leave us behind to do the trench work. Because of the competition, people on my level spend ridiculous hours doing research, poring over figures, writing out stuff that nobody in his right mind is ever going to read. Justifying the fees charged by the partners, basically.”
    Jeffrey leaned back, allowed the waiter to collect his plate. “Working there has been like joining a secret order or fraternity, with the partners coming by our cubicles every once in a while to pat us on the back and tell us to keep at it, because look how wonderful it’s going to be once we hit the jackpot.But only less than one in ten actually make partner. The rest suffer from severe burnout and drop by the wayside.”
    â€œAnd which are you to be?” Alexander Kantor asked gravely.
    â€œBurnout, most likely. I lack some of the basic ingredients, like an overriding desire to go for the jugular. Sometimes I pull back and wonder what in the world I’m doing there. It all seems so silly, chasing after an ulcer, a heart attack, and an early grave. But every time I put on the brakes I see all the others start pulling ahead, so I dive back down in the trench and keep on digging.”
    â€œI take it, then, that your present occupation does not grant you the satisfaction of having found the purpose for which you were placed upon this earth.”
    Jeffrey laughed a rueful no.
    â€œLet’s see. This would put your age at twenty-six, is that right?”
    â€œTwenty-seven. I took a year off to travel before graduating.”
    â€œAh yes. I recall a card or letter to that effect, saying that I should expect to find a bedraggled and no doubt bearded young man on my doorstep, and that I should not set the dogs on him. You were to be fed and allowed to wash your drawers. I believe your dear ones also included a request to have the doctor check you for lice and other horrors before placing you on the plane home—as though there were European strains of bacteria designed to attack visiting American college students.”
    â€œI think it was more a fear of where I had been sleeping.”
    â€œNo doubt with good reason. In any case, I was quite disappointed not to have heard from you.”
    Jeffrey sipped at his water, recalling the impressions he had carried with him to Europe. Somewhere in his backpack had been a series of three or four addresses, enough to seem as if there was at least one place in each country he had visited belonging to this unknown uncle. Only he wasn’t really anuncle, and no one in the family could bring themselves to speak of him without a smirk and a shake of the head.
    Jeffrey had dutifully carried the addresses around with him for a year, along with a mental image that kept shifting between a crotchety old man with too much money and something a little more swish. Upon his return, he had made some vague excuse for not having called the mystery relative, and nobody had seemed very concerned.
    â€œWhy do they talk about you as they do?” he asked.
    â€œWho, my long-lost American kin?” Kantor made a regal gesture dismissing the waiter’s offer of anything further. “That is quite simple. Anything that is not known becomes shrouded with supposition, Jeffrey. It is one of life’s