Scene 163: afr mirror ambush plan

• p. 845: dateline; Marathe, Ossowiecke, and Balbalis all report negative on the veiled performer; Fortier and Marathe throw into effect the family-acquisition operation; Broullîme's field-test fiasco — the wigged subject substituting the cross-dressed subject's severed digits for his own, marring the statistics; Fortier weighs letting Broullîme conduct "a lethal technical interview... for reasons of anger only"; Fortier departs for Phoenix (a city's name he "had amusement from") to attend Mlle. Luria P—— at the more important interview, leaving Marathe in charge.
• pp. 845-846: a direct assault on E.T.A. is impossible — "A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides"; the plan: acquire and replace the Québec junior players en route to the gala; Balbalis (both legs, "albeit paralyzed and stickishly withered, them") leads the field-detail; Marathe stays at the Antitois' Cambridge shop, withdrawing to jazz nights at Ryle's.
• p. 846: the drive north — bypassing the Pongo checkpoint at Methuen; mirror components assembled in back; snowfall worse in the Convexity "because of the fans to the south"; ghost-white unoccupied ex-Montpelier (E.W.D.-grid fallout from Champlain), a stop for assembly and "for those who were incontinent to change their bags"; the mirror installed across I-91 southbound at ex-St. Johnsbury; the misplaced night-vision attachment briefly raising tension; the warm chartered bus at the Autoroute 55 checkpoint, destination sign reading the English word for charter; Marathe has promised "an excellent ruse to explain the wheelchairs and adult beards of the false players"; logistics of survival — if the bus is inoperable, the van holds six children at most; "The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way."

Backward

• The test-subjects close two long threads: Randy Lenz (last seen fleeing the consequences of the Nuck killing he caused, scenes 142 and 148 — scene 148's flight with the torn-off bags is where the cookware-and-undergarments detail comes from) and Poor Tony Krause (last seen fleeing with the purses, scene 144, pp. 719-721) have both been "acquired" — Lenz's digit-substitution is perfectly in character with his coke-logic self-preservation and cruelty (cf. his animal killings, and Gately's dream-merge of Lenz with the fly-maiming M.P., scene 162 p. 843).
• "This veiled performer": the failed search for Joelle/Madame Psychosis follows her near-acquisition vectors in the Notkin interrogation (scene 159, pp. 788-795) and precedes the A.F.R.'s convergence on Ennet House.
• Marathe based at the Antitois' shop: the A.F.R. still occupies the murder scene of scene 097 (pp. 475-489), where the Master-copy cartridges may already sit unrecognized among Lucien's inventory.
• Mirror-as-weapon recalls Pemulis's mirror-revenge on Miles Penn (n.129) and the book's lens/mirror chain (the film-optics material); deluded-by-your-own-headlights is annular self-destruction in one image.

Forward

• Fortier's Phoenix trip with Luria P—— is the Orin operation: Luria the honeypot (cf. n.234's Orin-Steeply material, scenes/scene n234) culminating in Orin under the tumbler with the roaches (scene 184, pp. 971-972) — "members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public" names the strategy.
• The acquire-and-replace plan dovetails exactly with Hal's scene 165 (pp. 851-854): the Québec Jr. Davis/Wightman squads expected at M.I.A.-D'Orval for C.T.'s fundraiser exhibition — and Hal's observation that nothing will land at Logan in that snow is the unwitting U.S.-side view of the same blizzard Balbalis drives into. The beards-and-wheelchairs ruse is what E.T.A. staff later half-expect at the gala (scenes 167ff).

• p. 845: "this finally most drastic of the operations for the locating of the Master Entertainment... to acquire members of the immediate family of the auteur, perhaps in public." — the plot's last-act engine stated in one sentence.
• p. 845: the digit-substitution sentence (one enormous Marathe-dialect period from "for one of the newly acquired test-subjects" to "reasons of anger only") — black-comic horror of the field-tests; Lenz and Poor Tony identifiable only by costume.
• p. 846: "A.F.R.s fear nothing in this hemisphere except tall and steep hillsides." — deadpan key to both the wheelchair assassins' limits and why E.T.A.'s hilltop must be approached by ruse.
• p. 846: "its own headlights would delude it. An old F.L.Q. trick." — the mirror ambush; anchor passage for film-optics/annularity crossover.
• p. 846: "The rest would be allowed to die for leur rai pays. Balbalis, he showed no preference one or the other way." — fanatical arithmetic of children's lives; the cell's affectless tone at its coldest.