The price of the betrayal: her medical care is what Marathe sells his loyalty for

pivotal · standing arrangement, in force by 30 April YDAU

• When: the arrangement is a standing fact by the first desert installment (30 April YDAU); when it was struck is never dated
• What: Gertraude is the stake of the novel's whole triple-agent structure. Marathe has "committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this—betray"; the apparatus lays out the layers: at Fortier's direction Marathe "had pretended to approach B.S.S. seeking to trade knowledge of the A.F.R.'s anti-O.N.A.N. activities for protection and medical care for his hideously ill wife", while in fact Marathe "really is betraying them (the superiors, his country)—probably actually for that medical tech—and is thus only pretending only to pretend." Every layer of the deception is denominated in her: the cover story Fortier authorized is wife-care, and the real betrayal under the cover story is (probably — the apparatus's own hedge, kept) wife-care too. Note the counter-reading held open by the text itself: Fortier does not credit the wife-motive at all — "This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe's love of his wife's health of prompting his betrayal of Leur Rai Pays" — instead nursing "a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress" for his brothers' train-deaths. Whose account of Marathe's motive is true — his own wife-story, the apparatus's "probably," or Fortier's revenge theory — is exactly what the book leaves open, and this page resolves nothing. [Attribution note: narrated (Marathe-focalized) and apparatus; Gertraude referenced throughout as "his wife," unnamed.]