Pages 721–723
Inside Antitoi Entertainment — the shop a certain chase just left you pointed at — but rewound several days: this is a dossier-voiced account of how the A.F.R. traced the Entertainment here and how their methodical search of the shelves has gone since. On stage: M. Fortier, the cell's U.S. leader (first appearance in the flesh; the name arrived with endnote 39 at p. 89), Marathe, and volunteers young enough to be strapped in front of unsampled cartridges. The register is procurement-memo French-inflected English, and its flatness is doing deliberate work. The murdered brothers from pp. 480–489 are still on the premises.
Terms, in order of appearance
- technical interview (pp. 721–722) — p. 719's euphemism, now performed: one "strenuous," one "regrettably fatal." Endnote 300 traces the trail back to the pp. 55–60 burglary's pawned loot.
- coffre d'amas (p. 722) — the cell's Frenchified word for the alley dumpsters receiving sampled cartridges.
- F.L.Q. (p. 722) — Front de Libération du Québec: a real 1960s–70s separatist group; in the book, a rival cell given to street-display stunts.
- 'IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR' (p. 722) — French: "happiness must no longer be pursued"; embossed under a crude smiley on the display cartridge.
- Master cartridge (p. 722) — endnote 301 gives the engineering: consumer cartridges are Read-Only; only a Master can be copied — hence the whole hunt.
- testicular frappe (p. 722) — frappe: French, a strike or blow; the strategy in two words.
After you read: three things
1. The voice is the horror. Torture arrives as personnel prose: a burglar "whose electrical-surge-tolerance proved considerably lower than that of his room's computer's machinery" (pp. 721–722); corpses rolled in construction plastic "for hygienic purposes"; bickering over the Portuguese pornography while the wrapped cadavers swell. And young Tassigny — toasted, kissed on both cheeks, EEG-wired, and strapped in to test a cartridge that might be the lethal one — for a blank. The tenderness of the martyrdom logistics is the scene's most chilling touch.
2. The war aim, stated in one sentence — and the indirect route stirring. No blackmail, no territory: a duplicable Master, disseminated, would make U.S. retaliation so certain that Ottawa would require Québec to secede — a neighbor "struck down by its own inability to say 'Non' to fatal pleasures" (pp. 722–723). It's the geopolitical version of everything Marathe and Steeply have argued on their mountainside since pp. 87ff. Meanwhile Fortier absents himself for "Southwest ops": a relative of the auteur, "an athlete," with an American operative "jutting with prostheses" clinging to him — you can place both from the interviews you've already read. Endnote 302 is worth the flip.
3. Fortier's closing paragraph is a credo. America treats the wheelchaired with "the solicitude that the weak substitute for respect" (p. 723). He owns working prosthetic legs and refuses to wear them in the U.S., preferring the kneeling buses and institutional 'sensitivity' because the condescension "honed the edge of his senses of purpose." Weakness, cultivated as a weapon — read it against Marathe's attachment doctrine from the desert scenes.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.