Standard Hapsburg procedure would have been to put him out of the way at some agreed-upon point of diminishing usefulness, but nobody was willing to try.
* * * * * * * * * *
If I'm following, Max Käutsch was seen as too dangerous to keep around, based on his deadly assassin abilities, which would normally mean he'd be sentenced to boring bureaucratic jobs far from urban centers of any importance. Perhaps that's the kind of thing you do with a government employee who was used to murder rivals or dissidents, an employee you just can't have in the public eye, or being seen associated now with the heads of government or members of royalty. It would be like if the photographers who chased Diana's car down, causing the crash, had been working for the royal family. They'd immediately want to distance themselves from them, for propriety's sake. Also for the sake of they obviously hired them to hound Princess Diana to death but they didn't want it to seem that way, so best send them to the Isle of Wight to take family portraits of the locals instead.
More probably, I'm misunderstanding this sentence. Pynchon is sometimes difficult, especially for somebody who has trouble with the concepts in Clifford books. Why is that dog so big? How does the family afford feeding it? Do they need a pick-up truck for his doody when they go for walks? How hard is it to ignore Clifford's lipstick when he's giving himself a good lick?
If I've got the gist of this right then that means I understand the usual procedure for dealing with somebody like Max in your ranks. But since Max is such a scary bad-ass, nobody has had the nerve to push him out of close proximity to the Hapsburg family. And that's why he's become the captain of the unit in charge with keeping Archduke Ferdinand safe during their overseas travel. Sure, this job gets him "out of the way" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But he's still in close proximity to Ferdinand, and he still retains major responsibilities.
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