Marlon Bain's letters (p. 1047)

The correspondence is laced end to end with masking imagery, all of it addressed — unknowingly — to a mask. Bain's own footer signs the letter off as the product of a gag concern whose line includes "Wacky Disguises"; he lectures the operative on football as "a grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism," singling out "the masked eradication of facial personality"; and he even queries the cover's diction, quoting back Steeply's phrase "The 'vailed warning' (typo?)" — a veiled/vailed pun surfacing in the spies' own letters. A man in prosthetic breasts and a false name is being written to about masks, disguises, and eradicated faces by a correspondent who has no idea his every disguise-metaphor lands on a literal disguise across the table.