Marathe & Steeply, the outcropping — "The feature of complete unswallowability about…"

The persona is a manufactured artifact that fails at the one seam its makers can't fabricate — the operative's own body. Marathe examines the disguise down to its construction and its tells in the same breath: the purse is packed by handlers, "thin men with horn-rim spectacles… carefully packing with clutter the purse of a field-operative to create the female effect," but no lab-man can issue new feet, and Steeply's are "broad and yellow-nailed, hairy and trollesque," the smallest toenails "blackening and preparing… to fall off" in the borrowed heels. The disguise can be assembled from the outside to any degree of detail and still be given up by the body underneath — the trollesque feet do to Steeply what the veal-stained sweater-vest does to Himself in 005.