They drove past large Victorian homes with wide porches. Mike Finn lives on this street, Addis thought. It would be nice to make $300,000 a year.

“I was thinking about that story you told me,” Lancette said. “About Donny Lee Mondreau. And this is going to sound pretentious, but it made me think of a passage in Dante’s Inferno. But don’t think I’m an intellectual. When I was in college, me and my friend Beth used to memorize lines from the great books. We wanted to impress smart guys like you.”

“I’m sure it worked.”

“Actually, no. College was a lonely time.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Believe it … . So we opened Shakespeare to random pages and looked until we found passages we liked. We wrote them down on index cards. Flashcards for snobs-to-be. Did the same with existentialists, Walt Whitman, Kierkegaard, whatever. I forgot most of them. But there’s this line from Dante; it goes something like: ‘The more someone is perfect, the more he sees the good and the bad.’”

Good, you’re thinking about me.

“I’m not sure I get the connection,” he said.

A soccer ball bounced in front of the car, and Addis hit the brakes. Two young girls ran into the street. He looked in his rearview mirror. The sedan behind him had enough room to brake. He waited for the girls to retrieve the ball and then resumed driving.

“Glad somebody’s watching the road,” Lancette said. “I’ve had enough car trouble this week … . Anyway, the connection? I’m not sure either. Maybe it’s a way of saying, don’t beat yourself up too much, because at least you’re decent enough to see something may be wrong.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“As you should,” she said.

“And what came out of your honesty-in-reporting exercise? The Serbs you wanted to help—”

“Got screwed over. They were almost real democrats. But there were mucho irregularities with their finances—some corruption involving a German coal concession and the number-two man—and they couldn’t organize a tea party, let alone a political party.”

“And?”

“Eventually, the information about their deficiencies made it into the pipeline—”

“Thanks to you,” Addis interrupted.

“Yes, thanks to me. And the all-knowing mandarins at State and the NSC got spooked and decided not to help them out.”

“Then?”

“Nothing. They fell apart. Internal bickering. Not such a big deal. But if we had helped … . Well, it probably would have gotten screwed up another one of ten thousand different ways. But you never know.”

“That’s just it,” he said. “You never do.”