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so.”
    â€œHe was wrong.”
    â€œYou were what—a dupe?”
    â€œUh-huh,” I said. “A dupe.”
    Vullo nodded dubiously as if he wanted me to know that he thought I was lying. I touched the check again for solace and then brought out my tin box and rolled a cigarette. I took my time and looked up at Vullo once. He was watching me with an expression of faint disapproval. I wasn’t sure whether he disapproved of my smoking or of the fact that I rolled my own. After I lit the cigarette he reached into a drawer and produced a small glass ashtray, the kind that you can buy in a drugstore for twenty-nine cents. He shoved it across the desk to me.
    â€œThe CIA’s real interest in Hundermark was that international thing he set up—what was it called?”
    â€œThe PWI,” I said. “Public Workers International.”
    â€œIt was sort of a loose confederation of all the public-employee unions in the world, wasn’t it?”
    â€œThe free world,” I said. “I think they were still calling it the free world back in the sixties.”
    â€œAnd the CIA financed that, too, didn’t they?” Vullo said. “The PWI, I mean.”
    â€œA lot of it. They staffed it, too.” I put my cigarette out in the ashtray. “There were two co-directors. One was a nice guy from Kilgore, Texas. The other was a Harvard type with six kids. They were always jumping off to someplace like Lagos or Singapore or Mauritius.”
    â€œAnd that was why the CIA wanted to make sure that Hundermark was re-elected,” Vullo said. “So that they could keep on using the PWI.”
    â€œThat’s right,” I said.
    â€œThey didn’t think that Mix would go along with it if he got elected and found out?”
    â€œThey were right, too. The second thing that Mix did when he won the presidency was to dissolve the PWI, or at least dissolve the union’s ties with it.”
    â€œWhat was the first thing he did?”
    â€œHe fired me—except that I’d already quit. But Mix fired me anyway, at least in the newspapers. Then he fired Murfin and Quane.”
    â€œMix didn’t care for you, did he?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDid you know him well?”
    â€œProbably better than anybody, except possibly his wife. By that I mean that I had studied him—the way that you might study an insect or something that lives in a tidepool.”
    â€œYou didn’t like him?”
    I shrugged. “I didn’t like him or dislike him. I studied him so that I’d be able to predict his moves and his reactions to whatever moves I made.”
    â€œYou make it sound like a chess game.”
    â€œIt wasn’t any game. It was more like a fight. Or a battle, I suppose.”
    â€œAnd you ran Hundermark’s campaign?”
    â€œWith the help of Murfin and Quane. The rest of the staff were mostly hangers-on that Hundermark had accumulated over the years. They tended to panic.”
    â€œBut Murfin and Quane didn’t?”
    â€œNo. They’re not the type to panic.”
    â€œWasn’t Hundermark of any help?”
    I started to tell him about Hundermark, but then I decided not to. Hundermark was dead and Vullo was paying me to tell him about Mix, not Hundermark. But it came back to me then, at least some of it, especially the night that I had gone up to Hundermark’s office to tell him there was a fifty-fifty chance that he was going to get dumped.
    He had sat there at his desk, a portly, pleasant, soft-looking man with rimless glasses who had never been able to bring himself to be one of the boys. He was something of a joke at AFL-CIO headquarters. Meany had despised him and Reuther had pitied him and I hadn’t been sure which was worse.
    â€œI just talked to Murfin and Quane,” I had said. “We haven’t quite got it. We’re about two or three votes short. Maybe even four.”
    Hundermark had nodded