Pemulis expelled (pp. 1073–1075)
From someplace under Nwangi’s chair were brought out two pharmaceutical scales, several jeweller’s loupes, the tow truck’s supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and plus every bottle from Troeltsch’s bedside table, which clearly Troeltsch had eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese.
Context
deLint runs the expulsion as an interrogation with full staging. Nwangi and Watson are "window-dressing"; "This was A. deLint's show." The incriminating leaflet is "riffle[d] through the papers so Pemulis'd have to see" it repeatedly; the physical evidence — scales, loupes, decanting bottles — is produced from under a chair with a prosecutor's timing; and the source is named in code, Troeltsch having "eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese," i.e. informed and cut a deal to save himself. Even Pemulis's problem is pure tradecraft: he cannot clear himself (the dosing was an accident) without confessing to possession, "tantamount to Clippertonizing himself" — the interrogated man boxed by the very evidence that would exonerate him. The E.T.A. leverage-economy (cf. 108) closing on its own best operator.