Lawrence Blick had been in the CIA in the 1980s, and it had ruined him, really. It’s not that he had killed people or been forced into morally compromising positions. Blick’s job had been to read newspapers in various Slavic languages. Five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he had noted in one of his weekly reports that Serbs and Albanians would try to annihilate each other given half a chance. Many years later, when the Balkans exploded, he became insufferable simply as a result of having said it in 1984. Every headline gave him cause to shake his head and bemoan the obtuseness of the “so-called intelligence community.” But Blick had not fought for his insight at the time, and it didn’t appear to have weighed on him since. He’d left the CIA in 1991, mostly as a result of being fed up with the office politics of his section. From the era when the Iron Curtain crumpled, his most vivid stories were of being unappreciated by nonentities; of slights at the water cooler and in the parking lot; of football pools that had been conducted unfairly. He was the kind of man who would probably have been ruined by any position that allowed him to feel a degree of insider superiority, and the particular spin that the CIA experience gave to his insufferability would have been of no interest to me whatsoever had Lawrence Blick not married my youngest sister.