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it was Jean-Jacques Le Gouis and he was my mother’s younger brother. The Le Gouis family had moved to the States from Dijon in 1929 when my mother was eighteen and my uncle was nine. By 1941 my uncle was twenty-one and a senior at Yale, a fact that my father always found impossible to believe. It was my old man who first called Jean-Jacques “Slick” and the nickname had stuck, because that’s what my uncle was. Slick. Some people have remarked that I look very much like him and I’ve never been quite sure how to take it.
    My uncle had a very pleasant war with the OSS in England and France and afterward he stayed on with the CIA. In 1964 he showed up unexpectedly in Berlin where I was working for something called the Morningside Network. We did a nightly radio world news wrapup and sold it to independent stations in the States. I had left the Item to join it in 1959 and I worked sometimes out of Bonn and sometimes Berlin.
    In 1961 I had been in the Congo for a while, about the time that Patrice Lumumba was getting his, and that had been the last time I had seen Uncle Slick, which was, I thought, a bit more than coincidental. I never was sure what Slick did for the CIA. Something nasty probably.
    In Berlin he had taken me out to dinner, an expensive spot just off the Kurfürstendamm, as I recall, made his usual fuss about ordering the wine, and then said that my mother had written him that I was thinking of returning to the States. I told him that I was only thinking about it, mostly because five years abroad seemed about enough. My only problem was a job. I didn’t have one lined up mostly, I liked to think, because I really hadn’t tried.
    Uncle Slick said that he had just happened to have heard of one in Washington that would last at least six months and might well turn out to be permanent. Not only that but it also paid eighteen thousand a year, which was six thousand more than I was making then. I said that I was mildly interested and asked what I would have to do. He said that all I needed to do was write a letter, setting forth my qualifications and experience, and he had some old friends who would put in a word for me. That’s how these things work, he assured me.
    I told him that I was pretty well up on how things work. What I was really interested in was what I would be doing for whom. My uncle made me a very pretty little speech about how I would be helping keep a labor statesman in office. He was speaking English now and using his Louis Jourdan accent, which he always used when he was selling something, although he could, when he wanted to, speak in the mellow tones of Yale. When he wanted to be snotty he spoke English very much like Basil Rathbone.
    The labor statesman, it turned out, was one Stacey Hundermark, who was president of something called the Public Employees Union (AFL-CIO), which Hundermark had helped found back in Minneapolis in 1932 and had since nurtured to a respectable membership of around 250,000. Now, it seemed, some young upstart wanted to take Hundermark’s job away from him. The upstart was one Arch Mix who, my uncle had hastened to assure me, was no relation to Tom.
    â€œHundermark,” Vullo said. “He’s dead now, isn’t he?”
    â€œHe died the year after Mix defeated him.”
    â€œThat was when?”
    â€œMix beat him in 1964.”
    â€œYou went to work for Hundermark when?”
    â€œThat same year. Sixty-four. Early sixty-four.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œMix squeaked in by eight votes at the convention. I could have bought the votes, if I had known they were up for sale, which I should have, but didn’t.”
    â€œYou had plenty of money.”
    â€œMore than plenty.”
    â€œDidn’t you ever wonder where it came from?”
    I shrugged.
    â€œIt came from the CIA.”
    â€œSo it would seem.”
    â€œSome people thought you were with the CIA,” Vullo said. “Mix said