Pages 845–846
Dateline 19 November YDAU. You're with the A.F.R. — the narration in the same translated-French idiom as the Marathe chapters — operating out of the back of the Antitois' Inman Square shop, the murder scene of pp. 475–489, which the cell has simply kept. Two pages, all business: every lead on "this veiled performer" has come back negative, Fortier and Marathe escalate, and a van drives north into the blizzard. Marathe, Fortier, and the shop you know; Broullîme, Ossowiecke, and Balbalis are new names within the cell.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Broullîme (p. 845) — A.F.R. member running the Entertainment "field-tests"; first appearance by name.
- technical interview (p. 845) — the spy euphemism you watched performed on Molly Notkin (pp. 787ff); here it comes in a "lethal" grade.
- Mlle. Luria P—— (p. 845) — Luria: a name in the Québec-side intrigue since the early chapters (pp. 30, 92, 94).
- Balbalis (p. 845) — the one A.F.R. with legs, "albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, them"; leads the field detail.
- Convexity (p. 846) — the Canadian name for what Americans call the Great Concavity; which word you use marks your side.
- ex-Montpelier (p. 846) — Vermont's emptied capital; "ex-" towns are casualties of the Reconfiguration, fallout-abandoned.
- F.L.Q. (p. 846) — real-world: Front de Libération du Québec, the actual 1960s–70s separatist terror group.
- leur rai pays (p. 846) — dialect French: "their true country."
After you read: three things
1. The hunt escalates to the family. One sentence sets the machinery moving: the new operation is "to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public." Division of labor: Fortier flies ahead of the weather to Phoenix, where a more important technical interview will be conducted with Mlle. Luria P—— attending — the scene doesn't name the subject, though you know who lives in Phoenix — while Marathe is left running Cambridge, passing his nights at "the jazz nights nearby of Ryle's." That places the bar of pp. 774–782 inside A.F.R. routine.
2. The test-subjects are described only by costume. Broullîme's viewer-willingness experiments have hit a snag: one subject has been pushing under the storage-room door the severed digits of the other subject rather than his own, wrecking the statistics. The two are a street man in a white wig with bags of foreign cookware and small ladies' undergarments, and a weakened cross-dressed purse-carrier — the second unmistakably Poor Tony Krause (pp. 698–700, 716–721); the first's data-corrupting self-preservation sounds a lot like Randy Lenz, missing since the fracas. The horror arrives entirely as a statistics problem.
3. The mirror. E.T.A. can't be assaulted directly — "A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides" — so the plan is to intercept and replace Québec's junior squads en route to the gala. Balbalis's crew bolts a giant mirror across I-91 southbound below the border: the chartered bus "must leave the road to avoid impact; its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick." The van holds six children. "The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.