‘Malheureusement, ton collégue est décédé. II faisait une excellente soupe aux pois.’ He looks amused. ‘Non? Ou c’était toi, faisait-elle?’ The leader leans forward in the graceful way people who always sit can lean, revealing wiry hair and a small and strangely banal bald-spot, and gently removes the hot revolver from Lucien’s hand. He engages the safety without having to look at the revolver. Spanish-language music is thinly audible from somewhere up above the alley. The A.F.R. looks warmly into Lucien’s eyes for a moment, then with a professionally vicious backhanded motion pegs the gun at Bertraund’s profiled head, striking Bertraund in the side of the head; and Bertraund rocks away and then toward and forward and slides forward-left off the rickety camping-chair and with a ghastly and moist thump comes to rest chairless but upright, his left hip on the floor, the eye’s sturdy railroad spike’s thick tip caught on the edge of the card table and tilted up as the table tilts downward and cookery slides nautically off and onto the tile as the weight of Bertraund’s large upper body is somehow held by the spike and tilted table. His brother’s face is now turned away from Lucien, and his overall posture is of some person crumpled with hilarity or regret, maybe beer — a man overcome. Lucien, who never has apprehended what the safety-switch is or where, thinks it a small miracle that the Colt.44 with its tail of thread does not discharge again as it wangs off Bertraund’s temple and hits the slick tile and slides from sight under a cot. Somewhere in the tall house next door a toilet flushes, and the back room’s pipes sing. The black thread has remained snagged on the Colt’s sight-blade and in the middle caught somewhere on Bertraund’s ear; the other remains also attached to Lucien by a persistent hangnail on his well-gnawed right thumb, so that a black filament still connects the knelt Lucien to his hidden revolver, with a surreal angled turn at the ear of his overcome frère.
The happy-masked A.F.R. leader, politely ignoring the fact that Lucien’s sphincter has failed them all in the small room, after complimenting them both on the craftsmanship of some of the front’s blown-glass notions, pulls his velvet gloves tighter and tells Lucien that it has fallen to him, Lucien, to direct their attention without delay to an entertainment item they have come here to acquire. And require, this Copy-Capable item. They are here on business, ne pas plaisanter, this is not the social call. They will acquire this thing and then iront paître. They have no wish to disturb anyone’s repast, but the A.F.R. fears that it is fearfully urgent and key, this Master item they now require without delay or dissembly from Lucien — entend-il?