The knock at the door: the narration drops the cover — "the non-Swiss woman," calm, with a machine pistol in her purse

pivotal · 7 Nov YDAU — unnamed attestation

• When: 7 Nov YDAU, the same rented room, later the same encounter; Orin's retrospective noticing comes on the drive home that evening
• What: IDENTIFICATION FLAG as in event 6 — the woman is never named here. The liaison's back half is a set of tells the reader sees and Orin half-sees. Pillow-talk first: she confides "how the photograph's big pink Swiss husband after coitus hove himself off her and lay there stunned" — the cover-family narrative performed to spec, complete with S.O.P. anxiety that no one must know. Then "the brisk action of male knuckles" at the door: a handicapped man in a wheelchair with a survey clipboard, at whose appearance she dives beneath the blankets. And here the narration simply drops her cover in passing: while Orin answers the surveyor's questions, "the non-Swiss woman lay very calmly and patiently on her side, breathing silently into the portable O2-mask w/ canister from the purse beside her, one hand in the purse on the Schmeisser GBF miniature machine pistol." Not Swiss; not frightened; armed. The frightened-adulteress performance and the professional beneath it are printed in the same paragraph. Orin, oblivious at the door — "Swiss cuckolds, furtive near-Eastern medical attachés, zaftig print-journalists: he felt ready for anything" — assembles the anomalies only afterward: driving home he kertwangs that "the legless surveyer had had (stranger) the same Swiss accent as the hand-model" (scene 115), and later still the list sharpens: the man's un-disabled eyes were "what struck Orin later as odd — besides the Swiss accent, the absence of a signature-ruse, the Subject's patience with the wait and the absence of gasping when O. pulled the covers abruptly back, later." The scene never says A.F.R., never says Luria; it shows a coordinated two-hander on Orin — the woman inside, the wheelchair outside — and lets "non-Swiss" and the Schmeisser say the rest. Carried as the text's own reveal of the operation, with all identifications left at the text's level.