the smile that runs the operation

The cell wears heraldic cover — "synthetic-blend heraldic-flag irises," a "fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem mask" — the disguise doubling as uniform and terror-instrument. But command wears the have-a-nice-day face: the leader, in "an unpretentious sportcoat and tie," hides behind "the worst mask of all, a plain yellow polyresin circle with an obscenely simple smily-face," eating soup through "his mask's mouth's cheery hole," his "hideous blank black smile" brought within centimeters of Lucien's. The mask is the operation's only face, fixed and unreadable — which is precisely why the narration has to ask of it, at the interrogation's pitch, "Can a mask's drawn smile widen?" The smily-face that marks the lethal cartridge marks its couriers too.