hoarding displaying two posters. The one on the right featured a garish picture of a woman in a bathing costume being pursued by a number of eager fish with teeth like daggers. ‘For the first time in Italy,’ the caption exclaimed, ‘women and sharks in the same pool!!!’ The name of a circus appeared beneath, with the dates of its next visit to Perugia. The other poster showed a famous footballer leering suggestively at a glass of milk, but what attracted Zen’s attention was the top left-hand corner, where the mass of posters accumulated over several months was starting to curl back under its own weight, revealing a section of older strata far beneath. In the corner, in large red letters, he read ‘LETTI’. The protruding curl was almost a centimetre thick, layered like plywood, and when Zen tugged at it the whole block peeled off and fell to the ground at his feet. Now he could see almost all the earlier poster, which was headed ‘SIMP AND THE MlLETTI FAMILY.’ There were five short paragraphs of closely set writing:
The arrogance and intransigence of the Miletti family, amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions in the past, are once again in evidence. Not content with shutting down the Ponte San Giovanni subsidiary, or laying off more than 800 workers in Perugia – to say nothing of their continuing exploitation of female piece-work labour and well-known anti-union policies – they are now reported to be planning to sell off a controlling interest in the Società Industriale Miletti di Perugia to a Japanese electronics conglomerate.
Having crippled a once-prosperous enterprise by a combination of managerial incompetence and ill-advised speculation in the activities of such gentlemen as Calvi, Sindona and their like, the Milettis now intend to recoup their losses by auctioning off SIMP to the highest bidder.
The company named in the take-over bid already owns factories which are running well below their maximum potential production level due to the world economic recession and consequent shortage of demand. Their intention is to use SIMP as a means of eluding the EEC quotas by importing Japanese-produced goods to which nothing will be added in Umbria but a grille bearing one of the brand-names which generations of local workers have helped to make famous.
The Umbrian Communists totally condemn this example of cynical stock-market manipulation. SIMP is not to be sold off like a set of saucepans. The future of our jobs and those of our children must be decided here in Perugia after a process of consultation between representatives of the workforce, the owners, and the provincial and regional authorities.
Italian Communist Party
Umbrian Section
Zen turned away from the billboard and started to climb the ancient street paved with flagstones as smooth as the bed of a stream. An old woman lurched towards him, a bulging plastic bag in each hand, bellowing something incomprehensible at a man who stood looking up at the scaffolding hung with sacking that covered a house being renovated. A gang of boys on scooters swooped down the street, slabs of pizza in one hand, klaxons groaning like angry frogs, yelling insults at each other. They missed the old woman by inches, and a load of rubble gushing down a plastic chute into a hopper made a noise that sounded like a round of applause for their skill or her nonchalance.
‘Anything else?’
The waiter perched like a sparrow beside their table, looking distractedly about him. Bartocci shook his head and glanced at Zen.
‘Shall we go?’
At the cash desk the manager greeted Bartocci warmly. No bill was presented. like the rest of the almost exclusively male clientele of the noisy little restaurant, the magistrate was clearly a regular who paid by the week or month.
‘How about a little stroll before having coffee?’ Bartocci suggested once they were outside. ‘I must warn you, though, that it’s uphill, like everything in Perugia!’
It was a measure of Zen’s
The arrogance and intransigence of the Miletti family, amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions in the past, are once again in evidence. Not content with shutting down the Ponte San Giovanni subsidiary, or laying off more than 800 workers in Perugia – to say nothing of their continuing exploitation of female piece-work labour and well-known anti-union policies – they are now reported to be planning to sell off a controlling interest in the Società Industriale Miletti di Perugia to a Japanese electronics conglomerate.
Having crippled a once-prosperous enterprise by a combination of managerial incompetence and ill-advised speculation in the activities of such gentlemen as Calvi, Sindona and their like, the Milettis now intend to recoup their losses by auctioning off SIMP to the highest bidder.
The company named in the take-over bid already owns factories which are running well below their maximum potential production level due to the world economic recession and consequent shortage of demand. Their intention is to use SIMP as a means of eluding the EEC quotas by importing Japanese-produced goods to which nothing will be added in Umbria but a grille bearing one of the brand-names which generations of local workers have helped to make famous.
The Umbrian Communists totally condemn this example of cynical stock-market manipulation. SIMP is not to be sold off like a set of saucepans. The future of our jobs and those of our children must be decided here in Perugia after a process of consultation between representatives of the workforce, the owners, and the provincial and regional authorities.
Italian Communist Party
Umbrian Section
Zen turned away from the billboard and started to climb the ancient street paved with flagstones as smooth as the bed of a stream. An old woman lurched towards him, a bulging plastic bag in each hand, bellowing something incomprehensible at a man who stood looking up at the scaffolding hung with sacking that covered a house being renovated. A gang of boys on scooters swooped down the street, slabs of pizza in one hand, klaxons groaning like angry frogs, yelling insults at each other. They missed the old woman by inches, and a load of rubble gushing down a plastic chute into a hopper made a noise that sounded like a round of applause for their skill or her nonchalance.
‘Anything else?’
The waiter perched like a sparrow beside their table, looking distractedly about him. Bartocci shook his head and glanced at Zen.
‘Shall we go?’
At the cash desk the manager greeted Bartocci warmly. No bill was presented. like the rest of the almost exclusively male clientele of the noisy little restaurant, the magistrate was clearly a regular who paid by the week or month.
‘How about a little stroll before having coffee?’ Bartocci suggested once they were outside. ‘I must warn you, though, that it’s uphill, like everything in Perugia!’
It was a measure of Zen’s
Similar Books
