The Gladiator ct-4

by Harry Turtledove

  He was pathetically eager to have her want to play. No- she changed her mind. He was pathetically eager to have anybody to play against, and she seemed handy. She almost told him no, which was her first impulse. Then she remembered all the things her folks said about the need to get along with the Mazzillis. Gianfranco would be very unhappy if she turned him down… and Rails across Europe had looked interesting.

  "I suppose we could try," she said slowly. "I'm not going to let it get in the way of my schoolwork, though-and you shouldn't, either." He couldn't afford that as well as she could. His grades were weaker. He had to know it, so she didn't bother spelling it out for him.

  The way his face lit up when she said yes convinced her she'd done the right thing. It was almost like feeding a stray puppy you found in the street. "Grazie!" he said, and then, "Do you want to start now?"

  "Well…" Again, she almost said no. She didn't quite. "We won't be able to play very long, because I have to help get supper ready-and I do need to study this Russian, and some other stuff, too."

  He hardly heard her-she could tell. "I'll be right back," he said, and dashed from the common kitchen into the Mazzil-lis' rooms. Maybe he paused to say hello to his mother and father. Then again, maybe he didn't. He sure reappeared in nothing flat, the box with the game in it clutched firmly in his hands. He sat down across the table from Annarita.

  "What do I have to do?" she asked, thinking, It has to be better than Russian.

  It turned out to be more complicated than Russian. As far as Annarita was concerned, that wasn't easy, but Rails across Europe managed. Building your railroad and shipping things from here to there were pretty straightforward. After that, though, things got stickier. You could let the other player use your track if he paid you, but how did you know how much to ask for? What happened if you were both shipping the same product into the same town? How did you deal with natural disasters? And so on, and so on.

  Gianfranco did a better job of explaining than Annarita would have expected. He knew the game backward and forward and inside out. Sometimes he tried to tell her more than she needed to know. Mostly, though, he stuck with the basics till they ran into something hard. Then he told her how that worked.

  As far as she could see, he didn't try to take unfair advantage because she wasn't sure what she was doing. When she thanked him for that, he looked surprised. "It wouldn't be any fun if I did," he said. "Who cares if you win if you've got to cheat to do it?"

  "Lots of people would say the point of winning is winning, and who cares how you do it?" Annarita answered.

  "But if you know you didn't win square, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth," Gianfranco said. "Or if it doesn't, it ought to."

  "Si. I think the same thing. But plenty of people don't," she said.

  After about half an hour, her mother called her to help cook. "What do you think?" Gianfranco asked as he marked places and put their cards and play money into separate envelopes.

  "It's not bad," Annarita said. "I can see it's not the kind of game where you get good as soon as you've played once. I've still got a lot to learn."

  "I’m still learning," Gianfranco said. "That loss-leader trick Carlo tried to pull on me a while ago… I had no idea that was in the rules, but it is." He held up the rule book.

  "It's thick enough," Annarita said. "Probably all kinds of other sneaky things hiding in there, too."

  "Do you want to study it?" Gianfranco asked.

  "Maybe another time," she said. "If I start looking at it, I won't study my Russian, and I've got to." She sighed. "I think Comrade Montefusco's teaching us to speak it better than the Russians do themselves." She told him about the classroom visitors they'd had.

  "I don't care if the Russians were the first Communists," Gianfranco said. "Nobody'd pay any attention to them if they weren't the biggest, strongest country in the world."

  "That's true, but be careful who hears you say it," Annarita warned. She was glad to get away to help her mother cut up a chicken and chop vegetables.

  Quietly, so her voice wouldn't carry over the sound of chopping, her mother asked, "Are you really playing that silly game with Gianfranco?"

  "It's not silly. It's kind of interesting, as a matter of fact," Annarita answered, also in a low voice. Her mother snorted. "It is," Annarita insisted. "It's complicated as anything, too."

  "So is a car's engine. That doesn't make it interesting, not unless you're a mechanic," her mother said.

  "It's got to be as complicated as bridge," Annarita said. Her mother loved to play cards. Her father didn't, but he went along to keep his wife sweet. In self-defense, he'd become at least as good a player as she was.

  "Don't be silly," her mother sniffed. "You don't know what you're talking about."

  Since Annarita didn't care anything about bridge, her mother had a point. But the coin had two sides, whether her mother wanted to see it or not. "Well, you don't know anything about Rails across Europe."

  "I know most of the boys who play it have thick glasses and funny clothes and never comb their hair," her mother said. "What else do I need to know?"

  "You could say the same thing about chess players," Annarita answered.

  "That's different. Chess is respectable," her mother said. "Even the Russians take good chess players seriously."

  Even the Russians, Annarita thought as she sliced a green pepper into long strips. Gianfranco was right-if they weren't top dogs, nobody would pay any attention to them. Comrade Montefusco had talked about the Russian insult-nye kul-turny-that meant uncultured, and that foreigners shouldn't use against them. The Russians used it against one another, though. If they didn't have soldiers and rockets from Poland to the Atlantic, everybody in Western Europe would have thrown it in their faces. Sometimes, though, saying what you thought came at too high a price.

  104 Harry Turtledove

  Following that line of thought, Annarita made her voice as innocent as she could when she asked, "So you want us to act just like the Russians, then?"

  "No!" Her mother's knife came down hard on the joint be-tween thigh and drumstick. It crunched through gristle and bone. "I didn't say that. I didn't mean that. But Gianfranco's silly game isn't chess, either."

  "I didn't say it was. But it's not easy, and it's not silly, either." Annarita passed her mother the cut-up pepper and squashes. Her mother browned the chicken in olive oil, then put it in a pan with the vegetables, with wine and tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes, and with spices and bits of crumbled prosciutto. Into the oven it went.

  As her mother was washing her hands, she said, "I hope you're not playing just to make Gianfranco happy. You can do better than that, sweetheart."

  "Maybe." It wasn't as if Annarita hadn't had the same thought herself. But she said, "He's kind of like the game, you know? There's more to him than meets the eye."

  "And so? His father's still an apparatchik." Her mother used another Russian word that had spread all over Europe and America. It didn't just mean a petty bureaucrat. It meant someone who was born to be a petty bureaucrat. People who really did things, like Annarita's father, naturally looked down their noses at the ones who made a living by shuffling pieces of paper back and forth.

  "Comrade Mazzilli's not so bad," Annarita said. "Plenty worse."

  "Well, heaven knows that's true," her mother agreed. "But still…"

  "You don't need to get all upset," Annarita said. "You and Father always go on about how I should work hard to get along with Gianfranco. So here I am, working hard to get along with him, and you don't like that, either."

  "I didn't expect you to play his silly game." Her mother seemed stuck on the word. "That goes too far."

  "I told you-it's not silly," Annarita came back again- and there they were, starting again from square one.

  The more her mother argued with her about it, the more interested in Rails across Europe Annarita got. She would have angrily denied that any such thing would happen. She didn't like to think of herself as so pr
edictable. But it did work out that way.

  When she got to school the next morning, Maria Tenace was gloating some more. "So much for your majority report," Maria sneered. "The reactionary lackeys at The Gladiator must have known the fat was in the fire. They fled yesterday, one jump ahead of the Security Police. Sooner or later, the vanguard of the people's justice will catch up with them. I don't think it will take long."

  She could seriously say things even a TV announcer would have had trouble bringing out with a straight face. A TV announcer would have known how silly and stupid they were. Maria didn't. She believed every scrap of Party doctrine. A few hundred years earlier, she would have got just as excited about the Inquisition, and would have been just as sure it was necessary.

  She let out one piece of information without even noticing she was doing it. "So the people at The Gladiator did get away?" Annarita asked.

  "Si," Maria said reluctantly. "But not for long. The hand of every decent Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist is raised against them in iron condemnation of their wicked and corrupt manipulation of the social order and class structure."

  "Did the Security Police catch the people from The Conductor's Cap in Rome?" Annarita made it sound as if she hoped the answer was yes.

  "No," Maria admitted, even more reluctantly than before. "But they can't hope to escape revolutionary justice, either."

  "How do you know they're really guilty of anything?" Annarita asked. " Rome is a long way from here."

  "They must be guilty. If they weren't, the Security Police wouldn't go after them." Maria could even say that and sound as if she meant it. Anyone with the sense of a head of cabbage knew the Security Police did whatever they wanted and whatever their Russian bosses told them to do. Whether you were guilty or innocent didn't matter. Whether they thought you were dangerous to the state did.

  "I guess." Annarita didn't say an eighth of what she was thinking, or an eightieth.

  "F'm going to tell Filippo to make sure my report on The Gladiator is the official one," Maria said importantly. "I don't want the Young Socialists' League to be seen as out of step with the advance of revolutionary and progressive elements in the state."

  "You can't make a majority out of a minority," Annarita said. "You can tell the world I was wrong-though I don't think anybody's proved that yet-but you can't do the other."

  Maria looked at her as if she were very foolish to say such a thing. "Of course I can. What do you think Bolshevik means?"

  Annarita bit her lip. No matter how obnoxious Maria was, she was right. At a Party meeting before the Revolution, the group that became the Bolsheviks found themselves outvoted on some issue or other. So they simply declared themselves the majority-Bolsheviki in Russian. Their more moderate opponents were known as the Mensheviks-the minority-forever after. Annarita thought the Mensheviks were foolish to let themselves get stuck with the name, but it was almost two hundred years too late to worry about that now.

  "Do you really want to get tagged as an unreliable? You're sure working on it." Maria went off shaking her head before Annarita could even answer.

  At least half in a daze, Annarita sat down in her Russian class. She made a bunch of careless mistakes. "Are you feeling all right?" the teacher asked her, real worry in his voice-he knew something had to be wrong.

  "Yes, Comrade Montefusco. Please excuse me," Annarita said.

  "Well, I'll try," he answered. "I know you're a better student than you're showing. Is everything at home the way it ought to be?"

  "Yes, Comrade," she answered truthfully. If the authorities had left The Gladiator alone… If Maria had let her alone… But none of that had anything to do with what went on in her apartment.

  Comrade Montefusco still didn't look as if he believed her. "Try to keep your mind on the grammar and the vocabulary, then," he said.

  "Yes, Comrade," Annarita repeated. "I'll do my best." And she did. But her best that morning just wasn't very good. Shaking his head, Comrade Montefusco got out the roll book and made a couple of notes in it. Annarita didn't think they were the kind of notes that would help her grade.

  Things were almost as bad in her other classes. They got a little better, because she wasn't in such a state of shock as she had been to start the day. Even so, she had a lot more on her mind than the rest of the students did.

  She went looking for Filippo Antonelli at lunch. He found her first. One look at his face told her he'd already talked-or, more likely, listened-to Maria. "You're not going to change the report, are you?" Annarita asked in dismay.

  "Well, I don't know," Filippo answered. "If we're on the wrong side here, it makes us look bad. We shouldn't do that, not if we can help it."

  "We still don't know the authorities raided The Gladiator. All we know is, it's closed." Annarita was grasping at straws, and she knew it.

  And Filippo broke the straws even as she took them in her hand. "The Security Police did raid the place," he said. "They didn't catch anybody, though."

  "How do you know?" Annarita asked.

  Filippo looked smug. "I know because I've got friends I can ask," he answered. "And I'll tell you something else funny- some of the fingerprints they found there don't match any on file in the records."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Annarita said. "Do they think they're foreigners? The one I talked to didn't just sound like an Italian. He sounded like somebody from Milan."

  "No, not only in the Italian records. That's what my friend says," Filippo told her. "Not in anybody's records, even the Russians'."

  "That's impossible," Annarita blurted. Maybe it wasn't quite, but it sure struck her as unlikely. The Security Police had files on everybody in Italy. The Russians had files on everybody in the world, except maybe people from China and its satellites. Whatever, whoever, Eduardo was, he wasn't Chinese.

  "I thought so, too, but that's what I heard," Filippo said. "And they found a big secret room under The Gladiator."

  "What was in it?" Annarita asked. "It sounds like something out of a spy story."

  "It does, doesn't it?" Filippo said. "There wasn't anything in it. It was just a room with a concrete floor. There were yellow lines painted on the floor, lines that might warn you to stay away from something, but there wasn't anything to stay away from."

  "That's… peculiar," Annarita said, and he nodded. She went on, "It all sounds like the little man who wasn't there."

  "Well, he must have been there once upon a time, or the Security Police wouldn't have raided the place," Filippo said, which proved he believed what his friends in high places told him.

  "I guess so." Annarita didn't want to argue with him. "What would the Security Police do with one of those people if they did catch him?"

  "Question him, I suppose." Filippo sounded as if he didn't want to think about that. Even the way he answered said as much. It was true, but it didn't go far enough. The Security Police didn't just question. They drugged. They tortured. They did whatever they had to do to find out what they wanted to know. Everybody understood that. But nice people-and Filippo was a nice person-didn't like to dwell on it.

  Annarita didn't like to dwell on it, either. Did that make her a nice person? She could hope so, anyhow. She could also hope everybody at The Gladiator had a hole and pulled it in after himself. Not rooting for the Security Police was slightly subversive, or maybe more than slightly. She knew she wasn't the only one who did it just the same.

  Gianfranco went back to the Galleria del Popolo after school hoping for a miracle. Maybe he'd just had a bad dream. Maybe The Gladiator would be open and everything would be fine. Maybe pigs had wings, and they'd built the roof on the Galleria because of that.

  The shop was closed. He might have known it would be. He had known it would be. What he hadn't known was that it would be swarming with Security Police officers, the way cut fruit at a picnic would be swarming with ants.

  He tried to amble on by as if he'd never had anything to do with Rails across Europe or any of the other games they
sold there. One of the men from the Security Police spotted him. "Hey, you!" the officer yelled. "Si, you, kid! C'mere!"

  "What do you want?" Gianfranco wasn't so frightened as he might have been. That came from having a father who was a Party official.

  "Let's see your identity card and your internal passport," the man said. As in the USSR and most other Communist states, you needed permission to travel inside your own country, not just from one country to another.

  "Here you are, Comrade." Gianfranco didn't dream of not handing them over. He had no idea how much trouble you could get in by refusing, and he didn't want to find out.

  "So you're Mazzilli's brat, are you?" The officer didn't sound much impressed.

  "I'm his son, Si, Comrade." Gianfranco made the correction with as much dignity as he could.

  It didn't impress the older man. Nothing seemed to impress him-he worked at it. He jerked a thumb toward The Gladiator. "You ever go in there?"

  "A couple of times." Gianfranco couldn't have been so casual if he hadn't been thinking about the question since the man called him over. He wanted to say no, but the records they would find inside could prove he was lying if he did. This seemed safer.

  When he didn't say anything more, the officer asked, "Well? What did you think?"

  "Some of the games looked interesting," Gianfranco answered. "I bought one, but they were pretty expensive, so [didn't get any more."

  "What did you think of their ideology?" the man asked, his voice a little too casual.

  Whenever anybody asked you about ideology, you were smart to play dumb. When a man from the Security Police asked you, you were really smart to play dumb. "I don't know. I leave all that stuff for my father," Gianfranco said. "Besides, how can nineteenth-century trains have an ideology?"

  "You'd be amazed, kid. You'd be absolutely amazed," the officer told him. And what was that supposed to mean? Probably that when the Security Police went looking for ideology in a game, they'd find it whether it was there or not.

  Gianfranco went right on playing dumb. "Can I go now?" he asked.

  "In a minute," the fellow from the Security Police said. "Have you seen any of the people from this shop since we shut it down?"