The fire marshal's count and the number of people who left the building differ by one, and the building has one door. Ettore Lattuada stood beside it with a second clicker, because two religions of numbers are safer than one. The missing person left a hat.
Written with sarcastic and philosophical humor in the self-accusing manner of a man whose thumb is not a priest, Capacity 412 is a locked-room mystery about a comp list that told the truth, a coat on the wrong mouth, and a cellar that does the arithmetic darkness prefers. Pietro Maurizi's novel treats legal capacity as a fiction that fines you when it fails.
