Part Two: Don Alberto Moretti
She had seen his photograph. Everyone in the city had seen his photograph — he appeared in the business press and occasionally in the society pages and once, memorably, on the cover of a magazine whose profile had been careful in the specific way of journalists who understand the cost of incaution with certain subjects. The photograph showed a man in his early fifties, dark-haired with the distinguished silver at the temples that certain men acquire as an asset, wearing a suit that fit with the precision of something made for him specifically, which it had been.
In person, he was larger than photographs suggested. Not in height particularly — he was tall but not remarkable in height — but in presence, in the specific weight of a person whose expectation of deference has been met with sufficient consistency that the expectation has become the default state. He occupied the head of the table in the way that people with genuine power occupy spaces: without effort, without announcement, simply as the natural fact of where he was.
Around him, ten men. Some she recognized from previous visits — the Moretti family dined at the Bellagio Crown several times a year, and the staff had collective memory. Some were new faces, or faces that turned away from her assessment before she could complete it, which was its own kind of information. All of them in the dark suits, the gold watches, the particular quality of men who project a specific image because the image is functional rather than vanity.
She approached the table.
The conversations stopped — not dramatically, not with the sudden quality of interrupted noise, but with the gradual quieting of people who have noticed something and are redirecting their attention. She had encountered this before with certain tables: the pause when a woman arrived to take an order, the recalibration of the room’s social atmosphere, the assessment.
She was accustomed to the assessment. She had developed, over fourteen months at this restaurant and the years before it, the specific professional composure that is not indifference to being assessed but the decision not to let the assessment define the interaction. She had a notebook and a job and a table waiting for her order and the rest was noise.
“Are you ready to order?” she asked.
Don Alberto Moretti looked at her for a moment longer than the question warranted.
She had seen this before too.
“Take off the apron,” he said, with the lazy confidence of someone who has issued this kind of invitation many times and has not been refused, “and sit with us. Make my evening more enjoyable. And if you behave well—” the smile, practiced, certain of itself “—maybe I’ll make you my woman.”
The laughter around the table was the specific laughter of men whose positions require demonstrating appreciation of their employer’s humor. She had classified this kind of laughter at some point in her professional development and had found the classification useful.
She looked at him.
“No,” she said. “I’m working.”
The table quieted in a different way than it had quieted when she approached. This was the quiet of a room recalibrating around an unexpected data point.
Something moved in Don Alberto’s expression — briefly, quickly, controlled before it fully arrived. She filed it with the rest: the man was accustomed to a particular reception and had received a different one and was managing the experience. The smile that replaced the expression was good — genuinely good, the product of a man who had spent decades performing ease in situations that required it. But she had been reading tables for years and she read him accurately enough.
He leaned back in his chair.
He began to speak.
