Lenz stalks the Chinese women (pp. 717–718)
in his gaudy pastiche of disguise he passes easily for one of metro Boston’s homeless and wandering mad, the walking dead and dying, and is given a wide berth by all comers.
Context
The disguise "works," and the joke is why. Lenz's ensemble — fluorescent snowpants, a tux-coat, a bell-hung sombrero, auto-darkening glasses, a mustache glued off a Lechmere's mannequin — is a heap of stolen mismatch that reads, accurately, as a lunatic, and so earns him the avoidance the mad get. He mistakes that flinch for tradecraft: "Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility." Real concealment-craft engineers unremarkability; Lenz achieves only the involuntary camouflage of being someone people won't look at twice on purpose. The disguise conceals him not because it is good but because he is repellent.