By morning I had one useful name left and no right to spend it. I went to the building where I was expected that afternoon to escort a visitor through a crowded entrance and upstairs. Luciano sometimes used men like me because we knew when to move a guest and when to disappear. I had mistaken that occasional usefulness for standing. Now I wanted release from the banquet work, enough separation from Neri to keep searching without every doorway closing at the mention of my employer.
The attendant downstairs knew me and pointed toward a bench. Before I could sit, a bell began ringing behind the restaurant partition. A waiter pushed through with his apron wrapped around one hand. Smoke followed him at ceiling height. Somebody shouted that the kitchen was burning. The attendant left his desk, and a woman near the stairs tried to force her way upward for her husband. I caught the stair rail ahead of her. 'Wait here. Let them come down.' She struck my hand with her purse.
I could have used the confusion to climb. Instead, I helped the attendant hold the entrance clear while restaurant customers came out coughing into the cold. One elderly man stopped in the doorway searching every pocket for a claim check. I took his elbow and brought him outside without his hat. Behind us, a tray fell with a noise like a breaking window. Firemen arrived and pulled a hose past our legs. The woman who had hit me found her husband, then returned to ask where they should stand.
We waited beside a delivery wagon until the smoke thinned. My afternoon visitor might arrive to find nobody available, and Paolo might be moving farther away with every minute. Yet leaving before I had asked would mean admitting that Luciano's name was useful chiefly when the man himself was absent. When the attendant permitted us back inside, I went to the bench. Water trickled beneath the restaurant door. I sat with my wet cuffs sticking to my ankles and watched the stairs until someone called me.
The encounter that followed belongs to my private story, not to any public record. Luciano stood near an open window in an upstairs room, his overcoat resting across a chair. I had expected a desk between us. Without it, I felt more exposed. He glanced at the soot on my sleeve. I said there had been trouble downstairs, then explained that a worker I had vouched for was missing after a banquet. I named my own failure before naming anyone else's. He listened without interrupting.
'I need to leave those duties,' I said. 'Until I bring him back.' Luciano looked toward the corridor, where someone was waiting beyond the partly open door. 'Whose duties?' I said Neri paid me for them. He turned back. 'Then speak to Neri.' I asked whether doing that would cost me the escort work as well. He made a small movement with his hand, neither welcoming nor dismissing me. 'I can't settle every arrangement you make.' There was no rescue instruction, no assurance that another man would yield.
I left with less than I had hoped for and exactly what I should have expected: responsibility still attached to me. Downstairs, the attendant said my visitor was due within the hour and that I should change my stained collar. At the street door Aldo Ferretti waited with a porter's cap twisted between his hands. He had worked the club entrance on delivery nights. I asked how he had found me. 'Your partner said you'd come looking for a bigger roof,' he said. He did not smile.
Aldo had been sent earlier to collect empty food containers from a closed catering depot. Men inside had refused him entry, but while he stood at the side door he heard someone asking for water. He thought the voice was Paolo's. I asked whether he was certain. 'Certain enough to come. Not enough to tell his daughters.' That restraint persuaded me more than a confident claim would have. I looked back into the lobby. The attendant was laying out a clean visitor card beside my assigned place.
I told him I would not be there when the visitor came. He said there was nobody ready to replace me. I had spent years arriving before other men needed to ask; leaving now would be remembered. I put my escort badge on his desk rather than promise to return in ten minutes. Outside, Aldo began walking west with the impatient stride of a man regretting his generosity. I caught up beside him. At the next corner he pointed toward a shuttered catering depot, and we crossed together.