Marathe's quadruple-agent calculus — "Or calculating also whether to telephone…"
Or calculating also whether to telephone […] the 24-hour costless prefix of M./Mlle. Steeply and convey the very same information instead, finally, first, […] placing bets on O.N.A.N. and against Fortier, casting his lots finally with one side only, conveying his restenotic wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi d’Amherst’s Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down here among U.S.A.’s confusion of choices, demanding hidden protection from Steeply and high-income medical care for the heart- and head-difficulties of beloved Gertraude.
Context
Marathe's whole betrayal, priced in one clause: medical care for Gertraude's damaged heart and head. She is the theme's Concavity-birth made spouse — "restenotic," raised in "Convexity-ravaged wastes" — and the novel's most consequential espionage runs entirely on love for her deformed body. The sentence where the disability-deformity theme and the nationalism plot turn out to be the same machine.