Gately's drive; the A.F.R. raid on Antitoi Entertainent (pp. 485–486)
one particular of the A.F.R., in an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face in thin black lines, who is speculatively dipping a baguette’s heel in Bertraund’s metal soup-cup and popping the bread into his mask’s mouth’s cheery hole with an elegantly cerise-gloved hand.
Context
The smiley is the face of the thing that kills for pleasure, and here it eats. The A.F.R. leader wears "the worst mask of all," a plain yellow smily-face, and beneath it he calmly dips bread in the dead man's soup and feeds himself through "the mask's mouth's cheery hole" while presiding over torture. The forced smile — the era's emblem, embossed on the attaché's cartridge (007), on Tiny Ewell's detox slippers (027), stamped on the blank anti-ad cartridges upstairs in this very shop — has become a literal mask worn by the agent of the pleasure-weapon, cheerfully consuming a murdered man's meal. It is the Entertainment's affect made flesh: the empty grin over remorseless appetite, happiness as a blank circle behind which something feeds.