The A.F.R. raid on Antitoi Entertainent — "except but now how can a…"
—except but now how can a door’s upper hinge loudly squeak when the door is tightly closed and the bolt driven home with the solid snick of a .44 bullet slipping home in a revolver’s chamber?— […] But Lucien now hears whole systems of squeaks, slow and soft but not stealthy squeaks, the squeaks of weighted wheelchairs moving slow, implacable, calm and businesslike and yet menacing, moving with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain
Context
The chair-squeak — the A.F.R.'s audible signature, the sound Québec has made its darkest euphemism ('to hear the squeak,' per n.206) — multiplying from one deniable door-hinge into "whole systems." The closing clause is the theme's great inversion: wheelchairs, the book's ur-objects of dependence, moving "with the indifference of things at the very top of the food-chain."