Avril arranges the Québec junior team's visit (the team the A.F.R. plots to seize) and tracks the Moment journalist

texture · Nov YDAU — separatist-ties crux

• When: Nov YDAU (the fundraiser exhibition; the venue-change to M.I.T.)
• What: The End-of-Fiscal-Year fundraising exhibition brings "Québec's notoriously hapless Jr. Davis and Jr. Wightman Cup squads... invited down under very quiet lowprofile political conditions via the good expatriate offices of Avril Incandenza"; when the gala is moved, "Mrs. Inc had had alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp call in mammoth favors" for the M.I.T. venue. This is the very Québec provincial team the A.F.R. (Marathe's cell) plans to intercept and impersonate en route to E.T.A. (cf. event 21 of Marathe's chronology) — placing Avril's "expatriate offices" at an unexplained hinge of the plot. Separately (scene 137) Avril, "seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once," dials the journalist's Tucson number herself; and on 11 Nov "Avril Incandenza's whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown" (scene 126). The suggestiveness is left as suggestiveness. The endnote apparatus adds her Eschaton-night management: it was Avril's argument that got Tavis to admit "Helen" Steeply at all (the profile "and inevitable hype involve only an E.T.A. alumnus" — though "Avril neglected to tell Tavis she was pretty sure it was Orin"); she will "almost certainly wait and tell Tavis" of the Eschaton debacle only "in the morning, if the poor man's to have a chance at any real sleep at all," the delay "also giving Avril time to figure out how upperclass heads can roll, as of course they must [...] without those heads including that of Hal, who — unlike, thank God, John — was identified at the scene with that Pemulis person" (n147 pp. 1028-1029; cf. hal event 70's shielding).