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viewing him from the start as a straw man, a factotum in the service of some colonel in the intelligence services

a generally soporific or at best listless phone conversation

and enthusiastically yielding to the festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival (or penultimate carnival) exegesis

He had had faith, but he realized, looking down now on the drift of roofs below, broken in genuflection, from the facade pitted by five centuries

At this moment he even had his hands clasped, and for a parlous moment, stood stock still at the door.