Steeply & Poutrincourt at the match

The Helen persona is not a fact but a continuous act, maintained prop by prop across a live interview under a trained observer's eyes. The cap-adjustment is really a wig-adjustment; earlier he's "adjusting the long peasant skirt and crossing legs so he was inclined away from deLint" (p. 675); the "raglan sweater had been his wife's" (p. 681) — the disguise sewn partly out of Steeply's actual dissolved marriage, the way 077's divorce ballasts the legend. He keeps "breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed," "pretend[ing] to inscribe," "pretending to notate" — the reporter's kit worked as theater, notes only mimed. Every gesture is double: the surface a female journalist arranging herself in the cold, the substance an intelligence officer keeping a fabricated body from slipping in front of people who've been warned about him.