Neri tried to put the whole business into my hands before Bruno had finished answering. I was the doorman, he said; I had admitted the man, abandoned my post, and gone searching where I already knew to search. His voice remained level. That frightened me more than shouting would have. A room relieved to find one guilty man might not care whether he was guilty of everything. I stood with my hands against the table edge and waited until the steward let me answer.
“I knew the yard,” I said. “I saw the truck go there. That isn't the same as arranging what happened.” Neri asked who could establish the difference. I could not offer a witness to my ignorance. I could only refuse his account. I repeated what I had done and stopped where my knowledge stopped. The effort felt miserably small beside his easy version. Then Paolo pushed back his chair. The scraping legs made several men turn before he spoke. “He brought me out. I can answer for that.”
Bruno stood near the stove, turning his hat in both hands. Under the stewards' questions, he admitted that Neri had sent him to take the offered place. He would not say he had known Paolo would be held. When asked about the token, he looked at me and said he had picked it up during the disturbance. I described where it had fallen from his clothes afterward. The steward wrote neither account down as a judgment. He told Bruno to sit away from the delegation until the clubs decided who belonged there.
Paolo walked to the table without my arm. He placed both palms on it, letting the wood carry some of his weight. He named the club that had chosen him and the men who had made that choice. Two answered from the second row. He asked to speak in the place he had been denied. No one reached for a voting token. The senior steward pulled out a chair beside the other delegates. Paolo sat, paused until his breathing settled, and told them he opposed supplying workers to the banquet contract.
That brought the room back to money. A man with cracked fingertips said his members needed wages, not satisfaction. Another said the promised work would be used against other workers. They argued until the stove went dull and the windows whitened with breath. I carried in a scuttle of coal because I needed to do something with my hands. When I returned, the stewards were asking each club separately whether the old tally should stand. One after another, they refused it. The banquet contract lost its claimed majority and then its remaining support.
Neri got up before the final chair scraped back. There was nowhere for him to go except through the men whose promised earnings had just vanished. One caught his sleeve. Another called him Aldo's murderer. I moved between them before the name could become permission. “You don't know that,” I said. The man holding Neri looked at my split lip and asked whether I had learned nothing on the stairs. I told him to let go. He tightened his fist instead.
I took his wrist, not hard enough to hurt him, and pushed the bunched cloth down until his fingers opened. Neri jerked free behind me. A chair toppled. For an instant I expected the room to break around us. I kept my back against Neri and faced the others. “We brought men through that door without a beating,” I said. “They leave the same way.” The senior steward came beside me. Together we moved the fallen chair and made a passage. Neri went down without thanking either of us.
At the bottom I watched him cross the street alone. Upstairs, one of Aldo's friends would no longer meet my eyes. Another said I had chosen my side at last. I could have named everything Neri had cost me. Instead I picked up the chairs and helped stack them against the wall. Paolo was putting on his coat. He said he could get home with a man from his club. I did not insist on accompanying him.
The stewards called me back before I left. There were losses beyond the rejected contract: Paolo's missed work, expenses already borne, Aldo's household left without his wages. They were not asking me to confess to a killing. They were asking what my admitted part would cost me. I pulled out a chair and sat down. For once nobody needed to trust my face. They wanted an amount I could actually pay.