He had handed his crimes to the one person in the family professionally equipped to read them.

There is an irony in it so complete that I have never quite gotten over it.

For years, Leon’s contempt for what I did had been a small running joke in the family — Mirren and her spreadsheets, the basement, the calculator, all of it delivered with that affectionate condescension that is somehow worse than open cruelty because you cannot object to it without seeming to have no sense of humor.

And I let it stand.

I never corrected the joke, never explained the actual scope of my work, never mentioned the cases or the size of the frauds I had unwound or the fact that governments and banks paid a great deal of money for the precise thing my brother thought was beneath comment.

Partly I let it stand out of the old family habit of not competing with Leon.