News travels, Sylvia said, at the speed of fear and the accuracy of gossip, and by the Thursday after the confirmation the Kovac side knew three versions of the chapel story, in only one of which the box had been empty. In their version of the week, the Barones could not keep their own chapel safe, their own witness unsilenced, or their own house in order — and men do not sign their names to a peace held by a house that is rotting from inside. That was the word that came back through the intermediaries, and Harper, hearing it relayed in Nico's study, felt the insult inside the strategy of it: the decoy had been built empty, but it had been built to carry exactly this. Rot. Doubt. Delay.
The signing, which was to have happened on the last Friday of the month, in a lawyer's neutral offices with the documents already engrossed, was postponed. Not cancelled — everyone was at great, formal pains to say not cancelled — but postponed, sine die, which Sylvia translated for Harper as: until somebody blinks, dies, or is arrested, preferably in that order reversed.
Nico took the news standing, with his hands flat on his desk, and said almost nothing, which the room correctly understood as the worst response available. Then the harder work began, the work that never made any ballad: holding his own people together. Because delay had a constituency. Every day without a signature was another day the old arrangements paid the old people, and Harper, working her shifts and studying in corners and learning the house the way she had learned Casa Loma's floor, could hear the murmur run through the younger men like weather through a street: the peace was Nico's vanity, the peace was already dead, the Kovac insult wanted an answer, and who, exactly, had this family become, that it found things under chapel steps and telephoned the police?
He answered it in person, tirelessly, in rooms Harper did not see: a warehouse office, a long lunch, a christening, a funeral parlour, the back of a social club where the coffee was terrible and the loyalty was the point. He did not threaten, as far as she ever heard. He reminded. He counted aloud what the feud had cost each room, by name and by year, funerals and closed shops and sons doing time in Cranston, and he asked each room the question that had made him head of the family: who in here believes the next ten years of that will make us richer, safer, or less buried? Harper heard about that question three times from three different men, each repeating it as if it were his own, and understood that this, too, was a kind of campaigning, and that Nico was good at it in the way patient water is good at stone.
It was old Ferrante, of all people, who settled the question of where.
He came to the guest house on a wet afternoon with his coat over his arm and refused, with great ceremony, to sit until he had said the essential thing, which took four sentences and sixty years of neutrality to power. The signing, when it came — and it would come, he said, looking at Nico with the insolence of a man too old to be disciplined — could not hide in a lawyer's office like a debt being settled in a corridor. Hiding was what the empty box was designed to buy. Therefore the signing would happen at Casa Loma, at Table Nine if the room allowed, in his house, in the light, in front of everyone the city could send to watch. Or fear had won, and they could save the engraver's fee, because there would be nothing worth engraving.
"Your house was used once for this already," Nico said. "Badly."
"My house," said Ferrante, sitting down at last, like a king resuming a throne in a kitchen, "was used because it is trusted. Both sides eat my food. Both sides' grandfathers ate my father's food. The day Casa Loma is frightened of its own dining room, I will close it myself and sell insurance. The gala is in six weeks. Your mother's charity. Donors, cameras, the bishop's niece, half the city council pretending they came for the orchestra. Sign it there. In all that light, nobody's cousin can leave a shadow under a table. It would be seen." He looked at Harper. "Things in my house get seen. We have established this."
The Barone charity gala at Casa Loma: it had been Rosa's project for a decade, a fundraiser for the children's hospital that raised real money and laundered, as Sylvia dryly noted, nothing but reputations, which in Providence was a currency above rubies. Now, in the space of one wet afternoon, it acquired a second, silent guest list underneath the printed one. Both families, in evening dress, in a public room, with press at the door and a string quartet on the platform — and at its heart, after the speeches, a table, and two pens, and a peace signed where the attempt to murder it had begun.
Planning began that week, unglamorous as plumbing. Harper was present for the part concerning the floor, because she had asked — no, informed, at the cost of a night's sleep — that she would work the gala as staff.
"You will do what?" Rosa said, in the tone of a woman who has misheard something impossible.
"My job," Harper said. "I'm a waitress at Casa Loma. It's my room, my section if Ferrante gives it to me, my eyes. If I spend the most important night of this peace locked in the guest house like a parcel, then the note in the box did its work exactly. Witnesses burn too. Fine. Then this witness carries a tray at the signing, in the light, like Ferrante says. That's the answer. Not hiding. Working."
Nico was quiet a long time. "You understand what you are volunteering to be near," he said.
"I understand it better than anyone in this house except you," Harper said. "That's rather the point of me."
So it was agreed, reluctantly on his part, completely on Sylvia's, who had, Harper suspected, expected it and drafted around it already. The protection plan took shape in Sylvia's immaculate hand on a fresh legal pad: Okafor, consulted properly and through channels, would have plain-clothes officers among the guests and two at the service door; the Barone security would stay visible, decorative and outside the dining room, where cameras could love them; and Sylvia herself would coordinate the staff list for the night, every name vetted, every agency relief waiter confirmed twice, by telephone, by a human voice she recognised. No one worked the gala floor whom Sylvia Grant had not personally cleared.
"There," she said, capping her pen, looking at the list like a general at a bridge she intended to hold. "Bright room, two pens, four hundred witnesses." Her mouth thinned at the word. "Let them try to frighten that."