The Marathe intake: interviewing a disguised assassin, and the "Mars" phone call

pivotal · 14 Nov YDAU

• When: 14 Nov YDAU, a group-intake evening (nested inside Gately's hospital window)
• What: Pat conducts the intake interview of "Henri the Swiss" — in fact the A.F.R.'s Rémy Marathe, veiled and wheelchair-bound, casing the House for the Entertainment. She never suspects (Marathe, who seldom misjudges people, had believed the woman a desperate addict before she was revealed as the authority of the demi-maison). She is warm, professional, disarmingly self-disclosing: she offers her own came-in-in-a-chair story (event 3), notes the House is one of only a handful in the metro area fully equipped to take disabled clients, examines his forged O.I.N.S. papers with a poker face, mentions the U.H.I.D. member in early residency — inadvertently confirming Marathe's target — and offers him the rear-office Convertisofa that very night. Mid-interview she takes a speaker-phone call from her husband and refuses him flatly — No she can't, Mars; promises don't matter; she's promised before — stopping a sobbing with the back of her wrist before stiffening back into the Director. It occurs to Marathe, deciding firmly against the snapping of any necks upon this visit, that this is a happy person; and in the office cabinet behind her sit Clenette's donated E.T.A. cartridges, which he suspects may include the Entertainment itself, perhaps a duplicatable Master.