The Antitoi raid: directing Lucien's fatal technical interview (identity by inference)

pivotal · 9 Nov YDAU, ~1800h+

• When: 9 November YDAU, evening — the A.F.R. seizure of the Antitoi brothers' shop, Antitoi Entertainent, Inman Square, Cambridge
• What: Wheelchairs converge on the shop in silent single file, and by the time the mute Lucien Antitoi bursts into the back room, Bertraund is already dead at his supper with a railroad spike through his eye. Among the flag-masked A.F.R. sits one figure apart: "an unpretentious sportcoat and tie and the worst mask of all," a plain yellow smily-face, dipping Bertraund's baguette in the dead man's soup. This leader greets the kneeling Lucien in French Lucien cannot understand, leans forward — "revealing wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot" — gently removes the hot Colt.44 from Lucien's hand, engages the safety without looking, and backhand-pegs the revolver at Bertraund's profiled head; he compliments the brothers on the craftsmanship of the front's blown-glass notions, then demands the Copy-Capable item and the 585-rpm Master-running TP. (How the cell found the shop at all is glossed at n300: the Antitois were "Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Café® Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the A.F.R. knew well M. DuPlessis's passion of breakfast café au lait," n300 p. 1054.) When Lucien's frantic head-shaking yields nothing, the leader sighs — sincerely, the narration allows — that what follows will be inutile, and as the cleric-collared A.F.R. (a separate operative: Marathe, per 153 — see Dating notes) drives Lucien's own sharpened broom down his throat, the strokes keep time with the technical interviewer's wearily repeated "In-U-Tile." The leader is unnamed in this scene; the identification as Fortier is inference (sportcoat/wiry hair/bald spot matching the named Fortier of 147; 145's back-confirmation that Fortier led the Antitoi operation and spared the mirrors — the glass-blower's son of a piece with the blown-glass compliments).