Hidden Worthiness Read online

They stood awkwardly together, their small talk dried up, and then he said, “I thought your performance as the Stepmother in Cinderella this spring was really impressive.”

  She’d loved dancing that part. It wasn’t the lead, but the Stepmother didn’t have to be beautiful, and the solo was choreographed to show her as rough and harsh, so Ari was able to ham it up and really put her body into it.

  That was an actually decent compliment—not necessarily substantive, but it was about her art rather than her body, and that alone made it a real step up from the flutterings of the guests in the ballroom beyond. Pleasure warmed Ari’s cheeks, and she smiled. “Thank you.”

  With a nod, he handed her another glass, and ordered a new drink for himself with a wave.

  “You know my name. What’s yours?”

  “Erik.”

  Catching the eyeroll before it happened, just in case it was his actual name, she asked, “Is that coincidence or subterfuge?”

  Another droll smirk. “Masquerade.”

  Now, she rolled her eyes. “That’s hardly fair, since you know my name.”

  “But you’re a public person. I’m not. And this is a masquerade. So tonight, I’m Erik.”

  “Then should I be Christine?”

  “Is that who you want to be?”

  He’d come even closer, so close she had to look up to meet his eyes, so close she could smell his cologne—expensive, subtly applied. The scent of it mingled with the champagne and effervesced her senses.

  “I prefer to be myself.”

  “I can understand why.” His hand came up to her face, and his thumb brushed over her cheek, along the edge of her mask. “You’re very beautiful and very talented, Miss Luciano.”

  Was he going to kiss her? The room was beginning to swish around on a sea of champagne, and she thought she’d let him. Why not? He was nice, and respectful. Seemed even to have a sense of humor. He knew the ballet. The evidence suggested he was handsome and rich. Checking off all the boxes, and some bonus boxes, too. Also? Champagne. So why not? What harm would a kiss do?

  She raised her hand, meaning to mirror his touch of her cheek, intending it as an invitation.

  He stepped back, so quickly Ari felt the rush of air fill in the spot where he’d been. For a moment, they only stared at each other.

  “Darling?” Julian’s voice broke her bubbly confusion. He took her hand. “I’ve been looking everywhere. Baxter wants us to get people dancing.” He sharpened up into Raoul’s regal posture. “Come waltz with me, my love. Excuse us, sir.”

  As Julian drew her toward the ballroom, Ari looked over her shoulder, but all she saw was a beautifully crafted and perfectly expressionless mask.

  “I didn’t know Baxter wanted us to dance again,” she said, woozily, as Julian spun her onto the dance floor and led her into a waltz. “I’ve been enjoying the free champagne.”

  “Bax doesn’t care if we dance. He’s schmoozing. This is me rescuing you, you beautiful fool.”

  “Rescuing? I was fine.”

  “Do you know who you were talking to?”

  She grinned. “Erik, obviously.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha. That’s Donnie Fucking Goretti. You of all people should know that.”

  The name rang a bell, but that bell jangled in a bubbly sea. “Donnie who?”

  “The Pagano guy? Right hand of the don, or whatever they call it?”

  Now she got it—and also that weird ‘you of all people’ crack. Her Uncle Mel, back on Long Island, was a shylock for one of the New York Families. Julian thought that meant she was In with the Mob.

  Donnie Goretti was the underboss of the Pagano Brothers.

  “That’s Donnie Goretti?”

  “Yes, dummy. You were over there flirting with a killer. So I rescued you.”

  “How do you know it’s him?”

  “Some of the guests were talking about him. He’s a regular, I guess, and a big donor, so they all know him. They were saying how funny it was that he’d come to the masquerade. Because, you know, his face.”

  His nickname was The Face. When newspeople talked or wrote about him, that was always how they referred to him: Donnie ‘The Face’ Goretti. Because he’d been horribly scarred in some kind of accident.

  And he’d come to the gala tonight masquerading as the Phantom.

  People were gossiping, saying that was funny? She thought of the beautiful mask that hid so much of his face, and thought it wasn’t funny at all.

  She looked back toward the bar, but he was gone.

  ~oOo~

  Left to right: Nick Pagano, his wife, Beverly, Donnie Goretti, and an unnamed woman leave a performance of “La Traviata.”

  Donnie “The Face” Goretti (left), and two unnamed men entering the Biltmore Hotel last Friday, around 10 p.m. Tyrone Bederman’s body was found the next morning, when housekeeping entered his room. Bederman was under federal indictment. No cause of death has been released.

  FREE TO GO: Donnie “The Face” Goretti leaving the federal courthouse this afternoon after all charges against him were dropped.

  Opinion: Donnie “The Face” Goretti: Saint or Sinner?

  ORG CHART FOR THE NEW ENGLAND FIVE FAMILIES: THE PAGANO BROTHERS, RHODE ISLAND

  The roof was repaired after the school received a donation from Donnie Goretti, of Quiet Cove.

  Ari clicked through the images and read their captions. When one caught her interest, she read the post it was attached to. It was dumb—she’d probably never see the guy again, and she didn’t want to, anyway—but she was curious. What had he been hiding?

  She’d been wrong—most of the news didn’t identify him with his nickname, but it made an impression when they did. But most of the stories that called him ‘The Face’ were focused on his criminal activities, and there were surprisingly few legitimate news stories about him as a mobster.

  Most of the stories that called Donnie Goretti out as a criminal came from shady sites and blogs run by crime-obsessed nobodies. For a mobster, Goretti kept a surprisingly low profile. Uncle Mel would say he was ‘old school.’ As an influential citizen of Rhode Island, however, Goretti made the news fairly often—donating sizeable amounts to charities and non-profits, patronizing the arts, enjoying the best the city of Providence had to offer.

  In any photo he knew was coming, he showed only the left side of his face. It was the shots taken without his knowledge that showed what he’d hidden beneath that beautiful mask. He’d been burned. The whole right side of his face, hairline to jawline and back to his ear, or the place where his ear should have been, was a mottled, melted scar. Shiny and smooth in some places, rough and raised in others—a combination of skin grafts and burn scars, she assumed. His nose, his mouth, and his eye were all partly melted.

  The scars were horrible, but not horrifying.

  He wore a short beard. Ari found that fascinating. It was stubble, not a full growth, but still, she would have expected a man who could grow hair on only half his face not to grow hair on his face at all. Instead, he seemed to have decided that he would look the way he wanted to look, wherever he could look that way.

  Where he could be, he was very good looking.

  Whatever had happened to him to leave such ravaging scars behind must have been painful beyond imagining. Ari looked and looked for a story about a fire or something like that, but she found nothing. There was a story about a nightclub bombing in Providence twenty years ago, in which Nick Pagano had featured prominently, and for a second she thought she’d found the answer. But Goretti wasn’t mentioned in that story or any of the follow-ups she found.

  After an hour online in the dark of her bedroom, Ari knew what Donnie Goretti looked like. She also knew he lived in Quiet Cove, was forty-six years old, and had never been married. He was on the board and/or the top donors’ circle of every major arts foundation in Rhode Island and high on the donor lists of several charity organizations as well. He’d been indicted for murder, but the charges hadn’t stuck. But of cours
e he’d killed that man. He was a mobster. A Mafioso. At the top of the ‘org chart.’ Don Pagano’s close right hand.

  A philanthropist Mafioso who enjoyed the ballet. She found that absolutely fascinating.

  Out of nothing more than curiosity, she decided she’d ask in the office where his seats were. They kept track of their most prominent donors, sent gifts to their seats. She could probably finagle that information if Bernard was in the office. He liked her.

  Once the house lights were down, she wouldn’t be able to see the audience, and while she was dancing, she wouldn’t care. But she wanted to know where Donnie Goretti sat.

  No reason. Just curious.

  ~ 5 ~

  Nick’s grandfather, Gavino Pagano, had started Pagano Brothers Shipping as a one-man, one-truck delivery operation and slowly built it up to a modestly successful shipping company. In Gavino’s day, the enterprise had been nothing more than that—strictly aboveboard. After he dropped dead in his own warehouse, the two oldest of his three sons, Beniamino and Lorenzo, took over the company. And they saw an opportunity to make the Pagano name hold sway.

  With Ben as don and Lorrie his right hand, the Pagano Brothers organization began there, while the family still mourned the death of the father. During the following decades, from their base in a tiny town in a tiny state, Ben and Lorrie built up their power until they controlled or influenced most of Rhode Island’s government and business and had weight throughout New England. They did it in the old way, preferring to make friends rather than threats.

  When Nick ascended to the head of the family, he followed in Ben and Lorrie’s footsteps, keeping to the old ways even as he brought the organization into a new era. He made no effort to adjust their identity, honoring his father and uncle by insisting that the Family continue to be known as the Pagano Brothers. And he increased his power even more. Under his leadership, the Pagano Brothers now led the New England Council of Families. Nobody did anything significant in New England without Nick’s knowledge and input. Not even the other dons.

  Donnie had joined the organization while Ben was don. He’d been young, barely a teenager, when he’d started working for the Paganos—running messages for Freddie Fingers, the bookie operating out of the shoe repair shop at the end of his street, for ten bucks a run. Once he was eighteen, he got his own sheet, and a reputation as an earner. He was good with numbers, and working the gamblers have him plenty of opportunity to play with the numbers and shape the odds in the Paganos’ favor. He also got a reputation as a hardass. It had been, and still was, his own little secret that he’d been so uncompromising and willing to do violence not because he was naturally brutal but because he was terrified of letting his bosses down. Deep inside, back in those days, he’d still been the shy geek who’d done his first errand for Freddie because he was afraid to say no.

  When Carmine ‘The Knife’ Coltello, the capo back then for the shylocks, heard of his head for numbers, he’d pulled Donnie over and given him a territory of his own. Donnie had been twenty-three years old. The youngest shylock in the organization. Ever. That was still true. As a shylock, he’d maintained his reputation as a hardass earner for the same reason: fear of failure. He earned his bones, and was made.

  His blood family had disowned him on that day, but Ben had stepped in and taken him under his arm. From that day, Donnie had loved Ben like a father. He’d worshipped Nick like an older brother, but, much like an older brother, Nick had hardly noticed him until three years later, after Pagano enemies blew up Nick’s car outside Neon, a Providence nightclub. Donnie hadn’t been anywhere near Providence that night, but after the explosion, they’d beefed up security, putting double teams on all the major players in the organization and their families, and on Beverly Maddox, a woman Nick had picked up in the nightclub and had planned to bring home for a one-night stand. She’d been hurt in the explosion, and press coverage had linked her to Nick, so she got bodyguards, too. There hadn’t been enough security men to cover so much, so they’d brought soldiers in from around the organization. Donnie had been called in to cover her.

  It was while he was guarding Bev, who by then was far more than a one-night stand to Nick, that Donnie had been burned. And Bev had been badly hurt as well.

  It was the greatest failure of his life.

  Nick should have killed him for what he’d failed to protect his woman from. Instead, Nick had been grateful for his sacrifice, as had Bev. They’d brought him into their private circle. They became his closest friends. Eventually, while Donnie was still in his thirties, Nick made him underboss and gave him the keys to the office adjoining his own.

  Pagano Brothers Shipping was the front for their underground business, but it was, in fact, a legitimate business, contributing substantially to their assets. All of the officers and most of the soldiers worked straight jobs in PBS. Donnie was Chief Financial Officer. When Nick had been underboss, he’d been in charge of operations, but Donnie’s talent for numbers made CFO a better fit for him. Angie was COO. For the most part, all three men ran both sides of the business together, so the titles were paperwork more than anything else. But not always.

  On a day like today, Donnie had been trapped at his desk, buried behind virtual stacks of coded spreadsheets, analyzing reports from all corners of the Pagano Brothers empire, dark and light. The similarities between the shipping company and their underworld concerns had always struck Donnie as amusing. The great majority of so-called ‘mob’ work looked a lot like regular work: people to collect from, people to pay, products to deliver, relationships to foster, relationships to sever. It was all work, all done for the same reasons as everyone else’s work: paycheck, advancement, acquisition.

  And everybody was working the system as hard as they could.

  His phone chimed, and his assistant’s voice came into the room. “Mr. Goretti? Miss Evans is calling. Would you like me to put her through?”

  Sonia Evans—the woman he’d broken up with last week, on the night the Bondaruks had killed Bobbo and the others. Getting that call in the middle of their ending had made the ending fairly abrupt. She’d been crying when he’d handed her off to his guard to get her home.

  Fuck, he hated those tears. She didn’t love him; she couldn’t love him. But she liked the life he offered, the fancy dinners and expensive box seats, the glittering gifts. They were all the same, the women who’d spend time with him—willing to bear looking at him, fucking him, for the payout.

  Sometimes a woman almost seemed not to care what he looked like, or to get used to it quickly. Those women, he kept around for a while—a few months, occasionally longer. But sometimes, they would want to settle into the lifestyle, and they’d try to pretend they loved him. He was willing to tolerate their pretense of affection—and even to enjoy it himself—until they tried to make him believe they could love him. That was a lie too far. When he ended things, often they cried. And fuck, he hated those fake tears.

  Fake. Endlessly artificial. Like Arianna Luciano’s sparkling smile and flirtatious banter. He’d regretted his weakness in attending the gala from the moment she’d turned away. So stupid, so pathetic. Now the image of her in that starry gown and glittering mask had fixed itself to his mind’s eye. He’d been so taken in, he’d gotten so close to her, there’d been a moment when he’d thought he might kiss her, and he hadn’t kissed a woman in twenty years.

  She was obviously with the dancer who’d whisked her away. Their chemistry of their coupleness had blazed out around them. And yet she’d flirted with him. As fake as all the others. Of course, it was a masquerade, and he’d been pretending, too. To be normal. To be desirable. She hadn’t owed him honesty, or attention. She’d simply been charming, when it was her job to be so.

  He really wished he hadn’t gone to the gala. He really wanted to stop thinking of her. That long, sleek neck, the way the tendons showed at the base. Her pert mouth, her pointed chin. A subtle hint of cleavage rising up from her gown. Ballerinas were the most beautiful w
omen in the world; he’d thought so since he’d first seen one, in a middle-school field trip to see a dress rehearsal for The Nutcracker. He’d seen Arianna Luciano’s head shot in multiple ballet programs and knew very well what she looked like without a mask. She was beautiful in a different way. She looked like someone he could know.

  Irritated at his inability to quit picking at the itch she’d made in him, Donnie was not in the mood for Sonia or any woman. “No,” he answered his assistant. “Tell her I don’t have time.”

  “Right. Sorry for the interruption. Do you need anything?”

  “I’m fine, Tara. Thanks.”

  Just as the line closed, there was a knock on his door, and it swung open. Angie leaned in. “Hey, boss. Got a minute?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  Angie came in and sat before Donnie’s desk, stretching out his legs and settling in. “I had Marty in this morning. He’s got a problem.”

  Marty Bianchi was the capo in charge of the runners, the men who ran errands or deliveries between the men on the streets and their clients, and up to PBS. Other Families had runners in each division, but the Pagano Brothers had always kept the runners separate, assigned to the bookies or the shylocks or whoever needed them by a capo in charge of them all. Marty’s team was the lowest-ranking men, many of them unmade and not even soldiers yet. Where Pagano men got their start.

  Since his men were not made and had not yet taken their vow, they were also the greatest source of potential trouble. Marty was an OG Pagano, a crusty old grandfather type who led with a guiding hand and a closed fist. He kept keen eyes on his men, and he dealt with trouble as it came. If he’d come to Angie with a problem, then it was one that would be solved with blood.

  Donnie sighed. Bobbo’s visitation was tonight, his vigil and funeral tomorrow. He really did not want to get his hands bloody in between. “What?”

  “He’s got a runner swinging out.”

  Skimming was virtually impossible in their organization—there was so much sophisticated oversight that a capo would have to be involved, and capos were men whose loyalty had been tested and proven. But occasionally, a runner would get it in his head that he could pick up some side jobs on his runs, do some extra business with or for Pagano clients. Off the books. They called this ‘swinging out,’ and it was a good way to get, at the least, jumped out of the organization. Depending on how far out a runner swung, it could mean the painful end of his life.