The A.F.R. raid: Bertraund and Lucien murdered

pivotal · ?/9 Nov YDAU

• When: ?/9 Nov YDAU (scene 097 header "?/9 Nov YDAU 1800h"; the death is intercut with Gately's ~1800h Ennet-errand drive)
• What: At dusk a single-file column of Wheelchair Assassins (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.) converges on the shop through the Portuguese district. Bertraund is already dead at the back-room supper table, a rusty railroad spike through his right eye, the raiders having come in through the rear service door — the one Bertraund habitually opened onto the dumpster alley, found standing agape. Lucien has for minutes been mishearing the wheelchairs' squeaks as the front door's own squeaky hinge (n.206 glosses "to hear the squeak" as contemporary Canada's darkest euphemism for violent de-mapping) until the display mirrors show him the shoproom full of wheelchairs; he fires one wild Colt round, then is walloped to his knees. The A.F.R. leader, in a plain yellow smily-face mask, demands the Copy-Capable Master item and the 585-rpm hardware to run it — words that mean nothing to the non-Francophone Lucien, whose panicked head-shaking reads as refusal. Unable to answer, Lucien is killed by having his own sharpened broom-handle driven down his throat and through his body by a cleric-collared "technical interviewer" (on who this was, see Dating notes and event 11). Dying, he sees his native Gaspé and his mother's kind red face and is "catapulted home."