If the clubs finished their tally while Paolo was gone, bringing him home might leave him without the place he had been taken for defending. I went back to the hall carrying his damp coat over my arm. Men were setting broken chairs against the wall. The coffee urn lay in a shallow brown pool, and someone had spread sawdust over the worst of it. At the stewards' table a clerk was adding columns. I put my hand over his paper before he reached the bottom.
'Leave it unsettled,' I said. He tried to pull the sheet away. Behind him, three delegates looked up with the exhausted anger of men who had missed supper. I told them where I had heard Paolo and who had refused to release him. One steward asked whether I had actually seen him inside the storeroom. I said no. Another asked why I had deserted the entrance. That question deserved an answer too, but I pointed toward Paolo's empty chair instead. 'You can't count his absence as consent.'
The oldest steward, a cook named Bellini, moved my hand without roughness. He said the vote concerned supplying banquet workers, not appointing me anybody's guardian. These were hiring clubs, with their own rules and grievances, not a union election I could appeal somewhere grander. Their argument was whether to accept profitable work while other men were out on strike. I had once told myself I was only arranging coats and arrivals. The damaged room made that distinction harder to hold. I asked who had voted in Paolo's place.
Before Bellini answered, Bruno crossed the far end of the room carrying his hat low against his stomach. He saw me and changed direction toward the service passage. I left Paolo's coat on a chair and followed. A kitchen boy came through with a bucket, forcing Bruno to pause at the narrow turn. I reached the doorway first. 'I need your card,' I said. Bruno looked over my shoulder toward the dining room. 'You already took it.' His voice was quiet, almost reasonable.
I put one hand against the jamb. He tried to turn sideways past me. When I held my ground, he drove his forearm into my chest, and we struck the wall together. I caught his sleeve to keep from falling. Cloth tore. Something small hit the tiles and rolled beneath the bucket stand. The kitchen boy jumped back, splashing dirty water across our shoes. Bruno stopped fighting just long enough to look down. I let his sleeve go and dropped to one knee.
The brass disk was lodged against a wooden foot. I drew it out with two fingers. On its face were Paolo's club initials and the number he had shown me before the disturbance. I had checked it myself that morning when he worried about entering. Bruno reached for my wrist. I struck his hand away, harder than necessary, and shouted for Bellini. Bruno backed toward the pantry. 'It was handed to me,' he said. 'You want explanations, ask the man who put you on that door.'
I did not chase him. Men had begun gathering at the passage mouth, and a second struggle would let everyone call the first one another drunken quarrel. I walked back with the token flat on my palm. Bellini examined it without touching it. I told him what I had seen near Paolo during the brawl and what had just fallen from Bruno's clothes. Then he asked the question I had been avoiding. 'Did Serra enter on a proper card?' I said he had not.
The clerk laid down his pencil. I explained Neri's assurance, careful not to turn it into an order I had been helpless to refuse. Bellini said the disk established that Bruno had possessed it, nothing more about how the tally should be repaired. They would not reverse a completed division because a doorman with his own failure to conceal had fought a man in a passage. They agreed to mark Paolo's objection as unresolved. I surrendered the token to Bellini and made him count it aloud into his palm.
Neri waited beside the front stairs while I retrieved the coat. He offered me a cigarette, then put it away when I showed my swollen fingers. 'You can still come out of this with your name intact,' he said. I asked whether he had known Bruno would take Paolo's place. He watched a waiter carry two cracked platters outside. 'Stop asking where Paolo went. I'll see that nobody hangs the doorway on you.' I folded the coat over my arm. He had offered protection against something I had finally admitted.