Inside Sorkin's operation: the Wo connection as Fackelmann's tripwire

texture · ~the crew's last Unsubsidized-Time winter (chronology strain — see Dating notes)

• When: the Fackelmann-scam weeks — the era Gately's memory anchors to "the last New Year's Eve of Unsubsidized Time"; an internal counter-anchor says the recall comes "over four years later" (both as printed, see Dating notes)
• What: C's structural role in the Fackelmann catastrophe is to be the wire Fackelmann trips without knowing it. When Fackelmann sits on Sorkin's misdirected quarter-million and starts converting it to Dr. Wo's wholesale Dilaudid, the reason the scam is doomed — as Gately later reconstructs the reasoning Kite would have staggered through — is that Sorkin's own enforcer is a Wo customer: "Sorkin's newest savagest U.S. muscle, Bobby ('C') C, old-fashioned smack-addict, copped regular old organic Burmese heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis," and so was certain to hear about 300+ grams of Dilaudid bought by a known co-employee. C is also the standing threat under Gately's own arrangement with Sorkin — had Sorkin thought Gately was in on anything, he "would have regretfully had the C kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too." Even mid-binge C is on the crew's mind as the lesser terror: Fackelmann, deep in Mt. Dilaudid, frets about the Saugus phone duty — "I just hope Gwendine or C's got the phone today out there, man. Instead of Whitey." [Attribution note: the tripwire logic is Gately's hypothetical reconstruction of what Kite would have known, inside the hospital-bed flashback; C does not appear on-page in it.]