From up there at the eleventh floor, the elegant, sinuous curve of the Maserati stood out on the flat, gray asphalt of the company’s parking lot: a near-feminine silhouette boxed in by straight yellow lines, a satisfaction for the eyes, a constant temptation to go down, start it up and take a ride with it at exhilarating speed, a deserved gratification, a self-celebration for years of a well-done work.
“Mr. Cordeli, it’s time for the meeting!” Lorella, his personal assistant, announced, her flat voice rendered even colder by the intercom. “The London partners are already on the stream”.
Mt. Cordeli, annoyed, let go of the vertical blinds and turned his chair toward the desk. He didn’t like tearing his eyes from his four-wheeled toy, but the London partners couldn’t be kept waiting. “Fine”, he replied with resignation. “Let’s get this over with”.
The PC screen went black, then Tim appeared — that pimply dandy from the City — flashing his warmthless smile. Brilliant at spotting excellent and lucrative deals, thanks to connections carefully cultivated already by his family. MBA? Big fucking deal. And a list of wall decorations so long you could have used them for a toilet paper commercial.
“Giusepe!” the young finance wizard exclaimed — still unable to utter a fucking double “P”. “Come sta la tua sigh-nora?”* The bastard even had an eye for women! Giuseppe remembered it all too well, the hell of that summer vacation, with that prig always sniffing around Valeria’s skirt. And her too, a bit of a bitch, giving him so much rope under the petty excuse of keeping such an influential partner happy.
“Giuseppe!” Reyansh, CEO of IndieSpace, cut in with a more respectful and measured tone. IndieSpace was the daring company that had shaken up the aerospace sector in no time, launching from its own site in the Andaman Islands — practically the equator — slashing launch costs so dramatically that it had driven far more prestigious and well-established ventures into bankruptcy.
“Reyansh!” Giuseppe returned the greeting with relief. That man, yes, he could understand him. Then he switched to the best English he could muster: “So, what is that is worrying you so much?” He stretched his neck, trying to shake off a wave of anxiety he would have rather not let show.
But Tim could read body language like a childhood picture book and smoothly seized the reins of the meeting. “No, Giusepe, we are not worried at all! Why would you say that? We just wanted to go over a few of the specs we discussed, that’s all, as we felt they had not been defined in enough detail. Don’t you think so?”
Son of a bitch… A micromanagement sicko, that’s what he was! If he loved so much everything to go exactly his way, he could damn well run the whole show by himself! Yeah, but then where would have Giuseppe found another 1.2-million-euro-a-month salary?
“You are right, Tim”. He had learned this much: always agree with those who are trying to stab you in your back. He knew that spoiled rich brat was out to stab him in his back, and maybe fuck his wife too, while he was at it, and the best way to handle guys like that was to let them expose themselves, catch them off-balance. The arrogant, haughty ones, always slip up when they step out into the open. And if Tim’s ideas would have turned out to be crap, well, they would have been as many arrows at his own bow for getting rid of a dangerous rival. Besides, if the guy actually had good advice, why not follow suit and go along with it? Conceptual work is so exhausting as it is… “What are we going to talk about, then?”
“About that nitrates producer, the one you suggested to supply the hydrazine!” Tim knew he had no need to explain further, yet he wanted to push him into a corner. Giuseppe had known they would get to this point and he had no intention of being cornered.
They were talking about the factory owned by a close relative of Valeria’s, a plant that had been producing fertilizers for over fifty years. When Giuseppe had spotted a chance to give it an extremely profitable qualitative upgrade, showing his partners he could spot low-cost suppliers, and his wife that he cared about the well-being of the whole family, he hadn’t hesitated. Who would not have done the same?
“Yes, Tim, I do recall you were doubtful, about it. But I also showed you their industrial development plan, and the loans they secured from the banks to be ready for production by next March. Everything is perfectly documented in full compliance with our Quality Control standards. So, what’s the matter, now?”
He had played his cards right: Tim, obsessed with meticulous documentation, could not argue with that appeal to his beloved paperwork, and fell silent.
Reyansh, who had remained on the sidelines until then, stepped in. The game was getting tougher now, yet more interesting.
“Documents don’t tell the whole story, Giuseppe, and you and I both know that!” he sentenced, with the serene gaze of a Buddha reading the concealed sins of a devotee of his, and smiling at them as something intrinsic to his condition as a fallible living being. Between Giuseppe and Reyansh there had been mutual understanding since day one: one from India, the other from the Lower Po Valley, both united in their shared contempt for the stiff abstruseness of financial procedures, kindred spirits when it came to glimpsing picaresque opportunities and subtleties more suited to pirates, to raiders.
A flicker of doubt shook Giuseppe: “What do you mean?” he asked, though he already anticipated where the conversation was ahead.
“EU regulations, Giuseppe!” snapped Tim, proud of his unrivaled mastery of bureaucracy. So, the bastard could pronounce his name, after all! “Hydrazine production requires components that are not allowed under EU law! How’s your… — brother-in-law’s? — company supposed to manufacture hydrazine without them? Of course we are worried about the project’s success, if your choice of supplier puts the whole operation at stake!”
Giuseppe smirked coldly. So it was Tim again, behind this call, once more trying to paint his actions in a bad light in front of the boss. But this time, Mr. Cordeli hadn’t allowed himself to be caught off-guard.
Having long ago taken the measure of Englishman’s slime factor, he had gone deep into the operation, studying every last detail: neither he nor Valeria’s cousin had ever studied so much in their whole lives. They had gone so far as to even hire real researchers, pay them real salaries, to organize a facility that would comply, to the letter, with the EU’s labyrinthine regulations! With the kind of money they stood to make, stinginess could rot in hell!
“Tim, it is possible that, by mistake, you might have missed the latest report I sent. Here, let me check, no! I sent it to you too! Could it have ended up in your spam folder?” Giuseppe delivered the line with thinly veiled satisfaction, catching the slick City boy off balance.
“The facility is fully up to code, the staff is more than adequately qualified, everything is in full compliance with both current and foreseeable EU regulations for the next ten years!” As he uttered his last words, he shot such a look of contempt into the webcam, that Reyansh had to step in to defuse the tension.
“Giuseppe, forgive me, I think Tim’s point is actually outdated. And… sorry, Tim, but after the latest report — which I have to admit was more than convincing — further considerations came into play”.
Giuseppe and Tim both froze: Reyansh was openly bypassing Tim, putting himself on the line, and yet, he didn’t exactly seem to be siding with the Italian either.
Tim swallowed hard. “Reyansh, I don’t believe that…” So, he did know.
“May I be informed of these further considerations?” Giuseppe asked. “Gentlemen, I find it rather unfair to demand my paperwork always to be flawless, while I see that you clearly make an effort not to inform me of developments which, at this point, I would also deem relevant”. Complaining was all he could do. It was only a moral stand, nothing more, it gave him no leverage, he knew it well, but underlining it gave him a small, defiant surge of confidence.
“You are right, Giuseppe”, Reyansh replied, with feigned embarrassment. “We didn’t tell you that, while you were proceeding with your supplier, we contacted another one in India”.
Set, game, match! Giuseppe felt the ground vanish beneath his feet. No one needed to explain the sea of advantages a hydrazine supplier in India implied: practically next door to the Andaman Islands, meaning lower transport costs and risks, in a country with far more permissive regulations than Europe’s, and with labor costs, even for skilled workers, close to zero… “Ah!” he muttered, trying not to give the Englishman the satisfaction of seeing him defeated. “That does sound extremely advantageous!”
Reyansh liked the Italian man. He liked his way of thinking, of looking for solutions, of adapting to situations… And most of all, he liked that he could hold his own against that unbearable, smug English bureaucrat. “So, should I take it that you are not too offended that we handled this of our own initiative, without keeping you in the loop?” he asked.
Giuseppe played the card of a sincerity that wasn’t quite his own, but believable enough. “Reyansh”, he said, “I believe in the project. Whether it’s here in Italy with my wife’s cousin, or over there in India, wherever you prefer, I think what really matters is that we stay focused on the benefits of the initiative. Sure, I would have liked a different outcome for the guy here, and for the people who were already involved: I did, after all, have a stake in their company too…”
“You don’t need to worry about your stake” Reyansh replied, warmly and understanding. “The increased profits will more than make up for whatever you might lose with the other supplier. Actually, it might even be worth bringing some of those profiles to India: it is always so hard to find truly qualified personnel!”
Tim was fuming, Giuseppe could see him seething through the screen. He would have loved to boot that chatty Italian out of the company, and instead, the boss was offering him even higher returns!
“So, gentlemen, do we have an agreement?”
Tim and Giuseppe glared at each other. They hissed their hard “Yes!” between clenched teeth. Reyansh smiled, satisfied.
* * *
Amitabh kissed his sweet Janitra. He rose silently from the bed, picked up the betel-nut flatbread his wife had prepared for him the night before, savoured its delicious fragrancy feeling like the very Krishna himself, loved by his Radha, stepped off the raised platform of wooden pallets that served as the floor of their shack, his gait unsteady from the intoxication of the feeling filling him up and climbed onto his bicycle.
The morning was thick with the moisture of the nearby Ganges, and the bicycle creaked as Amitabh pushed at the pedals, heading to work.
He had been lucky to find that job, at that company that manufactured a substance used to launch rockets into space, those rockets that touched the stars.
With that job’s salary, a full fifteen thousand rupees a month, Amitabh had been able to marry Janitra, the girl of his dreams, and now the two of them were expecting their first child. Enough to be happy for a whole lifetime, and maybe even beyond!
He rode the ten kilometers to the factory alongside some coworkers, who shared part of the journey with him. Some came from farther away, others joined along the route, all of them gathered at the gate before their shift. They dismounted and waited, exchanging greetings, jokes, bits of news, sharing what they had done the night before.
Amithabh was mid-laughter with Prasad, a friend since school, when the factory siren sounded to mark the start of their shift, but no, that wasn’t the usual siren!
There was no time to realize it: the sudden explosion engulfed them all in a fire ball in the blink of an eye, and Janitra could never again embrace his young husband.
* * *
From up there at the eleventh-floor window, Mr. Cordeli looked down at the sinuous silhouette of his Maserati with a sense of unease. That curved line laid on the flat asphalt of the company parking lot now seemed almost vulgar to him, like a languid, naked escort sprawled across silk sheets.
“Poor bastards!” he muttered to himself, thinking about the news from India: poor maintenance, inadequate safety systems, and the whole factory had exploded at the first gas leak. At 38 degrees Celsius, easily reached in an industrial plant, the contact between air and hydrazine is explosive. Any unburned hydrazine is toxic, corrosive and carcinogenic. Good job, Tim! Really good! Where did exactly your cost-cutting get us? he thought bitterly.
An icon appeared on his computer screen: Reyansh was calling.
Giuseppe had had time to think about it, about the CEO’s role in the whole affair. In the end, it had been Reyansh who had played both him and Tim, pulling strings for maximum profit. Of course, after the blow IndieSpace had suffered on the stock market following the disaster, the cocky young London manager had sharply toned down his swagger, staying in a state of shock for at least a couple of days. But… But the documents were all in order! This is no responsibility of mine! he had repeated like a demented for forty-eight hours straight. Then, maybe with the help of some pills or amphetamines, he seemed to snap out of it.
Seemed, Giuseppe was sure it was only a mask. He could see the fear, the horror, the guilt of having pushed so hard for a decision that had led to such devastation, all of it flickering now and then in a twitch of the young man’s lower eyelid: a subtle, almost unnoticeable tremor, like that of one who hadn’t slept in days for fear of what nightmares might come.
“Giuseppe!” The Indian man greeted him coldly, a coldness born of guilt, not superiority: in order to save a small amount of money, the equivalent of a manager’s salary, he had effectively dropped a bomb on his own country. Did he actually feel guilty? Cordeli had learned a lot about Indian culture in dealing with Reyansh, and extreme fatalism was one of those traits that angered him more than most. “We have lost a good deal of investors after the accident. If IndieSpace wants to get back in the game, we need to prove we are following every regulation, no more daring shortcuts!”
Giuseppe looked at him without flinching: his personal wealth depended on that lucrative venture, and now it was time to contain the damage. The damage to the company, of course. “Reyansh, we already have the man to take care of this and do it right!” Giuseppe announced.
“We do, you say? And who might that be?” Reyansh was intrigued by the Italian’s confidence.
“Tim, of course!” Cordeli replied, calm, even gracious, like a Renaissance lord bestowing clemency on a lifelong rival in a family feud.
“Tim?” Reyansh’s voice trembled slightly. “I thought you loathed him with every fiber of your being!”
“I do, indeed. I loathe his smugness, his arrogance, the way he never misses a chance to flaunt academic titles bought from universities whose only real asset is prestige! Prestige, Reyansh! The very same prestige we trade on the stock market every time we announce that we’ll launch one, two, a hundred rockets before the year ends! We are blinded by it, we base our judgement on it, even the beneficiaries of this sick system get blinded by it! Tim is one of them. Our fault? Our mistake? We thought he would have been able to tell the difference between paper and reality: in the end, it was to save a stash of money, to boost dividends, that you asked him to look for an alternative to the solution I proposed, wasn’t it?”
The question, the accusation, hung heavy in the air, as Cordeli’s piercing gaze seemed to slap the wealthy tycoon across the screen, despite the thousands of kilometers between them.
He wasn’t trying to pick a fight, just to set the record straight, underline his irritation, and stake a claim for a more important (and profitable) role. He didn’t want to upset the boss, of course, so he broke the tension himself and added: “Still, Tim knows how to keep the paperwork in order and how to follow the rules, it would be stupid to deny that! And he already knows all our operational issues. Replacing him, now?” He sneered at the very idea, then got immediately stern and resolute. “We need to get back in the saddle right away! Investors’ confidence will soar, when they see we are able to recover immediately from a disaster like the one we suffered!”
That was what Reyansh loved about the Italian: he dared to think in terms of goals and how to reach them with whatever was at hand! Where others saw gaps, he saw resources, where others saw catastrophe, he saw opportunities.
“I don’t want another disaster to happen!” The Indian man’s expression grew hard. No, for sure he wasn’t worried about the poor souls who might live next to a potentially explosive industrial plant, but rather about the possibility that IndieSpace would have completely sunk in that case.
“All we need to do is to take cost control out of Tim’s hands, and give him a little incentive so that he actually sticks to the rules. I noticed that in India he went looking for every loophole that would let him cut down on costs saving paltry sums of money. The paperwork was all in order, sure! But we have said it before and we’ll say it again: paperwork is not reality!”
This is why Giuseppe had always been a step behind the Englishman: because of his dangerous disregard for bureaucracy. This is why he was now about to leap a step ahead: because that disregard was not an end in itself, it served a real grip on the situation.
“All right then, we’ll do as you suggest. Will he need to relocate from London?” Rayensh asked, already convinced by the plan.
“Why? Quite the opposite!” The very thought of having Tim meddling in the Lower Po Valley, maybe even showing up for dinner, circling around Valeria, sent a cold shiver down Giuseppe’s spine. “We don’t want investors seeing the man behind the India disaster associated with anything similar here: it could spark suspicion and fear! That’s exactly why we need to “promote” him! Let him stay in London: in the end, he can push the paperwork from there just fine”.
“I see. You have thought of everything, bravo! Maybe you deserve a rise yourself…” Reyansh offered, trying to be conciliatory.
Giuseppe felt a sting at those words. An inexplicable surge of anger rose inside him, yet he held it down. “That won’t be necessary, Reyansh. We have to inspire confidence in our shareholders, and rising executive salaries at this moment might not be well received. Let’s get back in the saddle, let’s get IndieSpace off the ground, and then we’ll think about dividends. Is that alright?”
“You are a strange man, Giuseppe, but that’s fine”, Raynash said, and ended the call.
Mr. Cordeli shifted his gaze from the screen to the photograph taped to the frame of his large flat monitor. A young Indian woman dressed in a bright sari, possibly in her sixth month of pregnancy, a photo that had been grimly splashed across newspapers around the world in recent days, sobbed inconsolably over the charred remains of her husband.
* "How is your wife doing?"
This tale, translation of the original L'azionista, is also published on Medium.
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