They let Harper back into the dining room just after midnight.
The police had finished, the specialists had gone as quietly as they had come, and someone — she did not ask who, and Nico did not say — had taken the thing under Table Nine away. The room was safe. She was told that plainly, twice, and she believed it, and still her eyes went first to the empty space beneath the table, the way a tongue goes to a broken tooth.
"Safe," Nico said, watching her. "I would not have brought you in here otherwise."
"I know," she said. "It's a habit, that's all. Looking."
"Keep the habit."
The table had been stripped. No cloth, no glasses, no flowers. Under the chandelier it looked undressed and faintly shocked, like a guest caught without his coat. Ferrante stood beside it with one hand resting on its bare wood, and in his other hand, on an open palm, lay the little brass token.
"Tell her," Nico said.
Ferrante turned the token with his thumb. It was small, round, stamped with a number that had half worn away, and warm-looking even in the cold light.
"Casa Loma cloakroom," he said. "From the old days. Before the tickets on paper, before the plastic things. A gentleman left his coat, we gave him one of these. He came back, he gave us the token, we gave him his coat. Thirty, forty years ago. We kept a drawer of them. I kept them — sentiment, stupidity. An old man does not throw away brass."
"Where is the drawer?" Nico asked.
"Was," Ferrante said heavily. "In the cloakroom, in the little office. Locked. Or I believed locked."
Harper did not touch the token. She had seen it once already, beside a black box with a blinking light and wires, in a place no cloakroom token had any business to be, and the memory was enough.
"May I ask something?" she said.
"Ask," Ferrante said.
"Who uses that office?"
He sighed. "The cloakroom girls. Marco, for events. Me. Anyone who needs the spare menus, the good candles. It is not a bank vault, Harper. It is a cupboard with pretensions."
"And the keys?" Nico asked.
That, it turned out, was the next hour's work, and it was done without drama, which made it worse. The cloakroom was checked, coat by coat, ticket by ticket. Nothing was missing; no stranger's coat hung waiting to be claimed. The staff stores were checked — the linen cupboard, the cleaning store, the little room where spare uniforms hung in plastic covers. Locks were tried. Lists were fetched from the office, Ferrante's neat, old-fashioned lists, and Marco's printed ones. A police officer stood politely in the corridor the whole time, making notes, saying very little.
What they found was mostly what they should have found, and that was the trouble.
The cloakroom drawer stood open, empty except for dust and a single paper ticket from another decade. Whether the tokens had been cleared out in some forgotten tidy-up, or taken tonight, no one could say. The office key hung on its board with the others. The store keys hung beside it, each on its labelled ring.
"So," Sylvia Grant's voice said from the doorway — she had arrived twenty minutes earlier, spoken briefly to Nico, and said nothing to Harper yet beyond a nod — "we are no longer asking how a stranger got in. Are we?"
No one answered her at once.
Ferrante closed his hand slowly over the token. "Whoever did this," he said, "had been in my cloakroom. In my office. He took one of these, and he put it beside that — beside it, like a signature. Or a joke."
"Or a message," Nico said. "That he could."
Harper thought of the busboy she had never seen before, slipping out of the service door. A scar. A tattoo. A limp. A stranger's face on an insider's errand.
"He had access," she said. "Before tonight. And a key, or someone who gave him one. You don't learn where that drawer is by walking in off the street."
"No," Nico said. "You do not."
The police officer closed his notebook. Arrangements were made, in low voices, about statements in the morning, and about the guests in the yard, who had at last been sent home with Ferrante's apologies and a story about an elderly boiler that everyone politely pretended to believe. The Kovac emissaries had left separately, with Nico's own word that he would speak to their principal before noon. What that conversation would hold, Harper could not guess.
When the officer had gone, Nico walked her to the back door. The yard was empty, the awning dripping. Her ordinary life — her bus route, her flat, her mother asleep three streets from the river — felt far away and unprotected.
"You cannot go home tonight," Nico said. It was not an order, quite. It was worse. It was a reasonable man being reasonable.
"Mr. Barone —"
"Nico, please. We have been under a table together, after a fashion."
"Then, Nico, listen, please. I have a mother. She takes tablets at night, she worries if I'm not — she'll be awake already, wondering. I have a flat with a lock that works. I've lived there two years and nobody has ever —"
"And tonight somebody put that thing under my table and left a token from this house beside it," he said. "You are the one who saw the man. You are the one who spoke. If he was watching the yard, Harper, he saw who stayed behind. He saw who the police spoke to longest."
She had no answer that was honest. Her training had a word for what she now was, and the word was witness, and it had never sounded like a target before.
"One night," Nico said. "A room at the house on Benefit Street. A man outside, whom you will not see unless you need him. Your mother — we will telephone her now, together, and tell her the boiler story, and that the owner is keeping the staff who live farthest away. In the morning you may argue with me again, and I promise to lose more gracefully."
"You don't lose gracefully. I've watched you all night."
"Then I promise to try."
Harper looked back at the dark restaurant, where she earned the money that paid half her mother's rent and sat, coin by coin, in a savings tin for her paramedic exams. Everything she had built was ordinary and small and hers, and she did not want to hand any of it, even for one night, to Nicholas Barone.
"I'll ring Mum first," she said at last. "And I decide in the morning. Not you. Not Sylvia. Me."
"Agreed," Nico said, and opened the door for her, and she understood that he would keep the agreement — and that frightened her almost as much as everything else, because it meant he thought there would be a morning in which it mattered.
Chapter 8: What She Actually Saw