Major Sallana

Major Sallana, known as Pigface, is a resident whose brief appearance turns a description and a name-search into a decisive confrontation with James Mowry. He enters a room already ransacked, recognizes what has happened, and is shot when he reaches toward his pocket. Mowry searches his body and takes the ornate card he had wanted since seeing Sallana celebrated on a train.

Identity and Description

An earlier exchange introduces a resident through another person’s imperfect recollection: he is plump, heavy-featured, and lives on the seventh floor. The speaker has forgotten his name, then falters over the title Major. The description supplies physical and residential details while making the failure to name him part of the scene. In the later encounter, the narrative calls Sallana Pigface, linking the character to a distinctive nickname.

A paper caption provides another fragment of identification. It reads DIRAC KAIMINA TEMPITI, with Leshun Radine appearing on the following line. The text supplies those words without explaining their relationship to Sallana, so they remain a recorded detail rather than a securely established expansion of his identity.

The Encounter in the Room

Sallana enters after the lock responds and the door swings open. He takes four paces before accepting what he sees: the desk has been ransacked. His pause gives way to incredulity and mounting fury. The room’s condition makes his entrance a moment of recognition; he has arrived after Mowry’s actions have already altered the scene.

Sallana reaches toward his pocket. The narration notes that his eyes, which had often watched other people’s death-throes calmly, have now betrayed him to his own end. The movement is barely begun when Mowry fires. Sallana’s practiced composure in the face of others’ deaths therefore stands in sharp contrast to his sudden exposure to danger, though the account offers no further explanation of his past or his state of mind.

Death and Its Consequence

Mowry searches Sallana’s body and obtains the object he had coveted since Sallana basked in adulation aboard the train: an ornate card set in thin plastic. The card is the concrete consequence of the killing in the scene. Sallana’s death enables Mowry to take it, while the earlier image of public admiration is recast as the moment when the object first became desirable to him.

The narration frames the shooting as the wasp’s sting after a period of buzzing. That image makes Sallana the target of a sudden, effective strike and gives the encounter a wider tactical resonance. Within the evidence of this episode, however, the immediate outcome is specific: Sallana is killed, and Mowry leaves with the card he sought.