If on the outside the old building kept its traditional, wealthy appearance, on the inside everything was modern. Tradition and modernity. The two faces of Milan. Pisanelli followed Trotti through the revolving wooden doors and waited before a locked glass door. The door was promptly buzzed open by a girl sitting behind a desk. She would have been pretty, but she appeared mildly distraught, harassed by two computers and a blinking light on the telephone console. A telephone receiver was jammed between her raised shoulder and her tilted head. “The Vissuto offices?” Across the top of the counter she pushed a book towards them. “Sign,” she ordered peremptorily and they obeyed while she spoke softly into the telephone. She was talking about a consignment of something that had gotten lost at Codogno. Trotti wrote the name of a distant uncle, now in Argentina. Pisanelli entered his habitual scrawl. Without checking the signatures, the woman handed them identity tabs, telling them to clip them to their coats.
