ATDTDA (19): Useful beyond price, 540-542

[Paul Nightingale]

Like Ganesh Rao, perhaps, Piet Woevre "appear[s] to be blonde". He has a
somewhat ambiguous appearance and is "indifferent to most of the
presumptions and passwords of everyday sexuality". Another suspension of the
Gentleman's Code? Upon seeing the mathematicians, he is "smitten", so where
his own appearance resists an unambiguous reading, there is no such problem
with the Qs (no apostrophe).With Pleiade he refers to someone unnamed, under
surveillance: "What we'd like tonight, though, is a look through his room."
(541)

The target isn't named, and the "look through his room" is framed as a
routine activity. In passing, some kind of sexual encounter has taken place
between Pleiade and Piet, one that leaves her bruised: "all charming except
for one on her wrist, which to a connoisseur might have suggested absence of
imagination". Whatever pain has been involved, she is able to reflect upon
the experience, it seems, and evaluate calmly. This passage fast-forwards to
self-scrutiny, "[l]ater in her bath", a scene quickly interrupted as the
text returns to Piet's own introspective musings about the restrictive
nature of social rules: "the civilised complexities" he bemoans are not
unlike Kit's own feelings regarding "[oppressive] European manners" (536).

The section begins by identifying Piet as the person Pleiade has left the
restaurant to meet; yet this meeting doesn't take place until the bottom of
the next page lasting a mere eleven lines. His introduction, and the
subsequent scene with de Decker, have both taken place in flashback, serving
to establish the nature of his inquiry, his suspicions regarding the
mathematicians. Earlier, in the casino, Root said his system would pass
under the detectives' radar (538); but he aims for a totalising system, one
that takes into account all and any variables. Similarly, Piet fears a
"Quaternionic Weapon, a means to loose upon the world energies hitherto
unimagined" (542): by definition such a threat cannot be described, it is
always elusive.