rest of the city leaders, the members in good standing of the local Fascist party who were known as The Band.
âWho wants Mazzola?â
There was a cheer for the ruination of Mazzola. There was nothing political any longer about The Band. They had long ago ceased contributing to the national party or to Rome. They kept Santa Vittoria for themselves and stole from it, not too much at a time, but all of the time.
The loudest cheer of all was reserved for Francucci. When Copa had taken over the city twenty years before, he had made his one speech.
âBread is the staff of life,â he told the people. âBread is holy. Bread is too sacred to be left in the hands of greedy individuals. No penny of profit shall ever be made by any individual from the exploitation of the peopleâs bread so long as I am mayor, so help me God.â
He closed all of the bakeries in Santa Vittoria and opened the Citizenâs Nonprofit Good Bread Association and put his brother-in-law, the mule drover Francucci, in charge. Francucciâs first act was to reduce the amount of wheat that went into a loaf and his second was to raise the price. Within a year after that the families of Copa, Mazzola and Francucci moved out of the wet dark caves they had lived in for one thousand years in Old Town up into the sunlight of High Town, where the gentry, what there is of gentry here, live.
âI offer you the ass of Francucci,â Babbaluche said. There was a terrible roar from the crowd.
They would turn the irrigation water for the terraces back on. The Band had turned it off years before, when the people refused to pay for their own water. They would fix the Funny Scale on which all of the grape growers had to weigh their grapes before selling them to Citizenâs Wine Cooperative.
The people began to get angry. There is a saying here that if you canât do anything about something, pretend it doesnât exist. But now that the people could do something about them, the old hurts that had healed began to hurt again. It is impossible to guess what the crowd might have gone on to do had not Francucci chosen that moment to come down from High Town into the piazza.
âWhy were the bells ringing?â he asked. It is asking a great deal to expect anyone to believe that the baker would have come down then; one would have to know Cosimo Francucci to understand how it could happen.
âWhy are you looking at me like that?â he cried. âTake your hands off me.â
They used the baker like a soccer ball. He went from one end of the piazza to the other, and every player along the way had a penalty shot at him. When he could move no more they called his family to come down and take him away, and when they couldnât carry him Fabio had to help them carry him back up the steep lane to High Town, more dead than alive. That is the way Fabio is. When he got back down to the piazza the people were starting back to their houses. The bloodletting had had a soothing effect. As the bakerâs blood had flowed, the blood pressure of the people had dropped.
âThey shouldnât do that,â Fabio said.
âThe people are entitled to their blood,â Babbaluche said. âThe people have a need for blood. They have a taste for it. Now give them big blood, important blood,â the cobbler said. âTell them how the Duce died.â
âThey donât want to hear that,â Fabio said. âThey want to go home.â
âThe people always want to hear when the mighty stag is brought to the ground by a pack of common dogs,â Babbaluche said.
The cobbler was right. Fabio told them how the Fascist Grand Council had gathered in a palace in Rome the night before and how one man, the Count Dino Grandi, rose to his feet and in the face of Mussolini, before the eyes of the Duce, began to read a resolution.
Resolved: The members of the Grand Council and the people of the glorious nation of Italy,