I needed paid work before I could afford another refusal. The man who had arranged my escort assignments finally agreed to put my request before Luciano, but warned me not to arrive carrying the clubs' quarrel. I wore my good suit and walked to save the fare. At the entrance, an attendant searched my face as though trying to remember whether I belonged there. I had passed him often enough with other men behind me. Alone, I waited while he went upstairs. Rain began before he returned to let me in.
Luciano received me in a small room where a window had been raised against the heat. This was not the place to bring a club delegation, and I had brought none. I asked for work: escorting a visitor, meeting a train, anything within the duties I had done before. He asked whether I had finished the business that had taken me away from my last assignment. I said Paolo was home. He waited. I added that the argument over his place remained unsettled. He moved a paper aside and looked directly at me.
'Can you keep an appointment?' he asked. I said I could, if I accepted it. It was a poor answer for a man seeking wages, but I would not promise to abandon Paolo if another messenger came. Luciano neither hired nor dismissed me in that room. He told me to speak with the man who arranged the work. I rose before I could turn the interview into a request for protection. He had given me no authority over Neri, no promise concerning Lanza. I went out carrying exactly what I had brought in.
The arranger offered a possible engagement for the following week and told me to return for confirmation. I wrote the hour on an old envelope. Downstairs Neri was waiting beside a newsstand, turning a coin between his fingers. I did not know who had told him where I was. He proposed a walk, and I agreed rather than let him follow me to the Rinaldis. We crossed toward a lunchroom where he ordered two coffees. I left mine untouched until the waiter had moved away. Neri noticed and pushed it nearer.
He had regular work, he said, work that would keep me indoors and under friendly eyes. I would supervise service entrances again. The clubs needed someone they knew. I asked which clubs. He stirred his coffee long after the sugar had dissolved. Paolo's objections were keeping everybody from earning, he said; one reasonable statement from me could help. I was to say the disputed tally should stand until another ordinary vote. Bruno's part could be called a misunderstanding. My own lapse at the door would then be nobody's business.
I pushed back my chair. Neri caught its arm before I could stand. 'You think hunger makes you honest?' I looked at his hand until he removed it. I told him I needed wages, not a story to repeat for them. He paid for both coffees and left me sitting there. Through the window I watched him stop to greet a man I knew from the banquet kitchen. They spoke briefly. When I passed that kitchen later, the manager said there was nothing open. He did not explain, and I could not claim I knew why.
In June the public news made a different scale of trouble plain. Luciano was convicted and received a sentence of thirty to fifty years for running a prostitution ring. None of my private errands explained that case, and none gave me a claim upon its outcome. I still had an engagement penciled on the envelope, so I went at the appointed hour. The arranger met me in the vestibule instead of taking me upstairs. Someone else would do the escort work. He kept his hand on the inner door while he told me.
I asked whether there would be another assignment. He said he could not say. I stepped outside before he had to ask me to move. Frank Costello became acting boss after Luciano's conviction; that change in authority supplied no personal guarantee to a man waiting on the pavement. I took the old envelope from my pocket and crossed out the hour. There was no patron I could name at the next club meeting, and no wage in sight that would make the meeting easier. I turned toward the club office. They would have to hear Matteo Verri, without anyone else's name ahead of mine.