the Wild Conceits essay: the escutcheon and "to hear the squeak" — "To hear the squeak,” unquote, is…"
“To hear the squeak,” unquote, is now an understood euphemismic locution among officials highly placed in Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures for instant, terrifying, and violent death.
Context
The cell's heraldry and its terror-idiom, the two most quotable A.F.R. facts: the standard is "a double sinuous S shaped line across the traditional fleur-de-lis motif of Quebecois Separatism" — the wheelchair-tracks overwriting the old Québécois emblem, the new insurgency literally drawn across the old one. And their approach is announced only by "the ominous squeak of slow wheels," so that "to hear the squeak" has become the shared euphemism for assassination "among officials highly placed in Quebecois, Canadian, and O.N.A.N.ite power structures." That all three administrations share one dread-phrase is the measure of the A.F.R.'s reach: newly elected Bloc Québécois leader Duceppe "heard the squeak" mid-broadcast despite "a dozen units of the Domestic Detail's elite mounted Cuirassiers."