The coat was lying across the property hamper, its lining turned out, when Neri told me to carry it upstairs. I had come to collect the cups and serving cloths left from the banquet, not to find another man's neck waiting for my hands. A triangular repair marked the shoulder. I had seen Lanza wearing it at the loading yard. Now Neri wanted it laid before the clubs when they met again. I lifted it by the collar and asked where it had been found.
“Among the things left behind.” He pushed a stack of chipped saucers toward me. “Put it with the rest.” There was nothing remarkable about a coat surviving a ruined banquet. Men had carried away the wrong hats and abandoned good umbrellas. What troubled me was the clean table upstairs, already cleared for this one article. Neri had made room for a conclusion before anyone asked a question. I folded the coat over my arm instead of putting it on his table.
He followed me into the passage. Two hired men were lowering a cabinet down the stairs, and we had to flatten ourselves against the wall. The cabinet scraped plaster onto his sleeve. “People need something they can see,” he said. “Lanza's men held Paolo. You heard him yourself.” I said that was what I could answer for. “And Aldo?” he asked. I felt the cabinet's weight judder through the banister beneath my hand. Neri waited until the men had passed. “You want his household to get nothing?”
I carried the hamper to the hired wagon outside, then went back for the coat. Neri stood across the storeroom doorway. He did not reach for me. That would have been simpler. “Show it,” he said. “Let the room decide.” I told him a room could make a lie together as readily as one man could make it alone. His face tightened. I expected him to take the coat, but he stepped aside. When I reached the street, the driver asked whether we were finished. I told him to deliver the hamper without me.
Lanza's present place was a shuttered dining room behind a bakery. His men stopped me beside the flour sacks, and one pulled the coat from my arm as though I had stolen it. I kept my hands open. Through the partition I heard a chair scrape. Lanza appeared carrying a heel of bread. He recognized the repair before he looked at me. “You brought my clothes back?” he asked. “I brought back something Neri wanted to put before the assembly.” He stopped chewing.
He took me through to the empty dining room. There were no glasses on the tables, only pale circles where glasses had stood. I explained what Neri had proposed without improving his words. Lanza shook out the coat and searched its pockets. “Then you know who killed the porter.” I told him I did not. He looked up sharply, as if ignorance were another trick I had brought. I repeated it. I knew where Paolo had been held. I knew Aldo had helped us leave. Between those facts lay a dead man and everything I could not swear to.
Lanza dropped the coat onto a chair. “What do you want?” I asked him to keep his men away from the next hall, apart from the delegates admitted by the stewards. He laughed once. Neri would fill the street, he said. I offered to make the same condition bind Neri's side, with the meeting canceled if either broke it. He walked to the bakery door and called one of his men inside. In front of us both, he agreed. It was no reconciliation. It was a promise with a witness who could contradict him.
By dusk I had carried that agreement to the stewards and obtained their condition in return: no crew could claim the entrance. Neri was waiting below their office. He caught my elbow, then released it when I faced him. “You gave him back the only thing useful.” I said the coat belonged to Lanza. “And that matters now?” A delivery boy squeezed between us with an empty basket. We stood silent until his footsteps faded. Then Neri leaned close. “You think I put you on that door because you were strong? People trusted your face.” I had no answer that could restore the faces of the men who had walked past me.