Marathe & Steeply, the outcropping — "Steeply’s gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in…"

The novel's first real operative is introduced already coming apart. Steeply arrives not by stealth but by a yelping, cactus-punctured slide down the hillside ("Stealth becomes you," Marathe says), and every element of the female cover is degrading in the field before he's on his feet: the wig un-combing in the descent, the prosthetic breasts swinging cock-eyed, the mascara melting "whorish," the makeup starting to run. Seen through Marathe's eye he is "huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair." The choice to stage the U.S. side's debut as a disguise sliding out of true sets the terms: cross-dressing here is not glamour but high-maintenance apparatus, always one hot wind from betraying its wearer, and the operative wears it anyway because the persona, not the passing, is the point.