Marlon Bain's letters

Bain never once gets the name right, and the failures escalate systematically down the letter: the addressee "Helen Steepley" becomes "Ms. Steeples," then "Ms. Steeley," then "Mrs. Starkly," "Mrs. Starksaddle," and finally "Ms. Bainbridge." He does not know "Helen Steeply" is an intelligence officer in a wig; his careless serial mangling is just his temperament — returning exactly as much good faith as the exchange is worth to him. But the dramatic irony runs the reader's way: watching a fabricated cover-name dissolve, letter by letter, into a stream of equally arbitrary false ones is watching the disguise announce its own emptiness, a name worth so little it can't even hold its shape across six pages, while its wearer keeps a straight face and keeps collecting. Bad faith met with bad faith, and neither party knowing how right the disrespect is.