Marathe & Steeply, the Odalisque myths

The hall of mirrors at maximum recursion — and the point the whole nested structure exists to bury. The agent-status is a stack of asymmetric knowings ("did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he knew"), with Steeply privately withholding one datum from his own side "to hold some small thing back from one's superiors" — and, the text immediately adds, "[u]nless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know." Under all of it lies the one truly hidden thing: Fortier does not know Marathe has chosen his wife over Québec, and "[i]f Fortier knew… he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye." The deepest secret in the espionage isn't tradecraft; it's the human choice the tradecraft exists to keep buried, and it carries a death sentence.