Steeply & Poutrincourt at the match (pp. 673–682)

The interview is a double-blind, and Poutrincourt says so out loud: the staff have been briefed to be cold to "the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines," which is to say E.T.A. already half-suspects the cover. So the two of them talk tennis while each runs the other. Steeply, the "putative newshound," pumps the Québecer prorector (a woman whose shrugs and looking-away are "not unlike Rémy Marathe's" — a countryman of the enemy) for read-outs on Hal and the family, and makes a "private ideogram" when he wonders whether deLint "had some French on the sly" and is quietly following the French asides meant to exclude him. Poutrincourt, for her part, ends the scene "looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed" — the practiced over-casualness of someone watching hard. Each pretends not to see the other seeing; the tennis is the cover story they perform at each other.