The Gladiator ct-4

by Harry Turtledove

  They both turned to walk back up the steps. A police car came around the corner as they did. A spotlight blinded Gianfranco. "Stay right there!" one of the carabinieri called. "Let's see your papers! What are you doing out on the street in the middle of the night?"

  Gianfranco's teeth started to chatter. He had his identity card and his internal passport with him. He would no more go outside without them than without his pants. Nobody would, not in the Italian People's Republic, not anywhere. He assumed Eduardo had his papers, too. But would they pass muster?

  Both policemen got out of the car. One covered Eduardo and Gianfranco with a submachine gun while the other came up and held out his hand. He looked at Gianfranco's documents first. Nodding, he gave them back. "I know who your father is. But who's this guy?"

  "I'm Dr. Crosetti's cousin," Eduardo said, giving the policeman his papers. "I'm staying in their apartment till I find something for myself here."

  "He is," Gianfranco said.

  "How do you know, kid?" the policeman asked.

  "I ought to. We share a kitchen and bathroom with the Crosettis," Gianfranco answered.

  The policeman only grunted. He shone his flashlight on Eduardo's papers. "Is he all right?" the other policeman asked. "Shall I radio headquarters?"

  No! Gianfranco all but screamed it. That wouldn't do anybody any good. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip. "I don't think so," said the carabiniere with Eduardo's papers. Instead of returning them, he asked, "What are you doing out here at this time of night?"

  "Talking about girls," Eduardo answered, and it wasn't even a lie.

  The policeman thought it over. After a moment, he decided it was funny and laughed. Even better, he handed back the identity card and internal passport. "Well, Pagnozzi, that's a nice way to pass the time, but do it somewhere else from now on, you hear?"

  "We'll do that." Eduardo stuck them in his pockets. "Thanks."

  With another grunt, the carabiniere turned to his partner. "They're clean. And we got that drunk an hour ago, so we're on quota. Let's go."

  They drove off. Gianfranco noticed his knees were knocking. He tried to make them stop, but they didn't want to. If the policemen hadn't picked up the drunk, would they have hauled him and Eduardo to the station instead? It sure sounded that way.

  Eduardo wore a small, tight smile. "Boy, that was fun, wasn't it?" he said.

  "As a matter of fact, no." Gianfranco could play the game of understatement, too. Without another word, he went back into the apartment building.

  "You did real well," Eduardo told him as they trudged up the stairs. Would the elevator ever get fixed? Gianfranco wasn't holding his breath.

  "Maybe I did," he said after a few steps. "I didn't like it."

  "Well, who would?" Eduardo said. "Police shouldn't be able to bother you whenever they want to. In a free country, they can't."

  As far as Gianfranco was concerned, he might as well have started speaking Korean. "What would stop them? What could stop them?" Gianfranco asked, certain Eduardo had no answer.

  But Eduardo did. "The laws would," he said. "If the police do something wrong or bother people they've got no business bothering, they get in trouble."

  "How?" Gianfranco still had trouble seeing it. "The police are… the police. They're part of the government. The government can't get in trouble." He might have been saying, The sun will come up tomorrow.

  "Sure it can. Why shouldn't it, if it does something wrong? In a free country, you can sue the government. You can sue the police if they beat you up for no reason. And if a court decides they're guilty, they have to pay." Eduardo spoke with a certain somber relish. "It happens now and again. And because it can happen, the government is more careful about what it does."

  "People… sue the government?" Gianfranco missed a step. Eduardo grabbed him by the arm and kept him from falling on his face. The idea was so strange, he might have been saying, The sun will come up tomorrow… in the west.

  "Why not?" Eduardo seemed to enjoy provoking him. "You live in the Italian People's Republic, don't you?"

  "Yes, but…" Gianfranco tried to imagine what would happen if someone tried to sue the government. He didn't need much imagination to figure it out. The Security Police would land on the poor crackbrained fool like a ton of bricks, and that would be that. "What about the Security Police?" he demanded.

  "We don't have any, not like that, not to keep track of people who haven't done anything wrong," Eduardo said, and Gian-franco's jaw dropped. Eduardo went on, "We have carabinieri to go after criminals, but that's different. Some people will try to cheat no matter what kind of society they live in."

  "I suppose." Gianfranco wasn't sure he would have walked past his floor if Eduardo didn't hold the door open, but he wasn't sure he wouldn't have, either. Eduardo had hit him with too many new ideas, too hard, too fast. He needed some time to get used to them.

  "We wanted things to be like that here, too," Eduardo said as they walked down the hall to the Mazzillis' apartment and the Crosettis'. "That's what we were working toward." He shrugged. "Things don't always turn out the way you wish they would. We'll have to come up with something else and try again, that's all."

  He paused at his doorway, Gianfranco at his. They nodded to each other and went inside. Gianfranco undressed and got ready for bed-quietly, so he wouldn't bother his folks. He lay down, but sleep was a long time coming. Some of the things Ed-uardo had said…

  A country without Security Police? A country where the people actually had power instead of just giving the state their name? A country where, if people didn't like what the government was up to, they could do something about it? What would that kind of country be like? What would living in that kind of country be like?

  Gianfranco didn't know. How could he, when it was so different from everything he'd grown up with? But he knew one thing: he wished he could find out.

  After a moment, he realized something else. Without intending to, he'd just turned into a counterrevolutionary. Then he really had a hard time going to sleep.

  Walking to school Monday morning, Annarita thought Gianfranco seemed quieter than usual. Had Eduardo talked to him? If he had, what had he said? Annarita didn't want to come straight out and ask. She tried a different question, a safer question, instead: "You all right, Gianfranco?"

  He blinked. He thought it over. She watched him doing it. "Well, I'm not sure," he said at last, quite seriously.

  She eyed him, exasperated and curious at the same time. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  He looked around to make sure nobody was paying any special attention to him. In the Italian People's Republic, that kind of glance was automatic for anyone older than seven or so. Annarita suspected it worked the same way all over the world. Gianfranco said, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were no Security Police?"

  "Sure it would," Annarita answered. "And it would be nice if everybody were rich and everybody were beautiful, too. Don't sit up nights waiting, that's all."

  He said something rude-rude enough to startle her. Then he turned red and said, "Scusi. But I'm serious. I really am."

  "That's nice," Annarita said. "No matter how serious you are, though, what can you do about it?"

  "By myself? Nothing," Gianfranco said. "But if all the people united…"

  "The Security Police would throw everybody into camps." Annarita finished the sentence when Gianfranco's voice trailed away.

  He shook his head. "They couldn't do it to everybody, not all at once. There aren't enough camps for that. Not enough Security Policemen, either."

  "Well, in that case the Russians would say we're trying to overthrow Socialism, and they'd invade," Annarita said. "Either they'd build more camps or they'd kill enough people so the ones who are left would fit into the camps they've got."

  "But what if the Russian people united, too?" Gianfranco said.

  Annarita stared at him. "You weren't drinking wine at breakfast. I saw what you had: cappuccino, just like me." L
ike most Italian kids their age, they did drink wine with dinner. Nobody here fussed about it, though people from northern Europe and America sometimes squawked.

  "I was thinking about… freedom," Gianfranco said. "That gets you drunk like too much vino, but you don't come down again afterwards."

  "I guess not, to look at you," Annarita said. "Be careful you don't get in trouble once you're in school."

  "I'll try," Gianfranco said.

  A car went two wheels up on the sidewalk in front of them to let somebody off. It still blocked traffic. All the drivers behind the offender leaned on their horns. Some of them yelled at him, too. He ignored them. Annarita wasn't much impressed. She saw things like that almost every day. Keeping Gianfranco out of trouble was more important-and more interesting. Now she could say what she needed to say: "All this talk about freedom. You must have been listening to Cousin Silvio." In public, she wouldn't call him Eduardo.

  "Well, what if I was?" Gianfranco said. "He likes to talk, you know."

  He does not! But the hot retort never came out. If Annarita said something like that, Gianfranco would be sure she was sweet on Eduardo. And she wasn't, not really. So all she did say was, "What else were you talking about?"

  "Oh, stuff," Gianfranco answered vaguely. Annarita wanted to clout him. She kept quiet and waited instead. It wasn't easy, but she did it. When Gianfranco spoke again, a few steps later, he sounded almost like a gruff old man: "He said he wasn't going to run off to Sicily with you."

  "I should hope not!" Annarita exclaimed. "It's too hot down there in the summertime, and I wouldn't want to have to try to understand that funny dialect." She paused, too. "I suppose they think we talk funny, too."

  "Wouldn't be surprised." Gianfranco took a deep breath. He seemed to look every which way but right at her. "Maybe we could go to a movie or something one of these days before too long."

  "Maybe we could," Annarita said. Nothing wrong with a movie. "It might be fun."

  Gianfranco lit up like a neon sign. He hopped in the air. He seemed so happy, Annarita wondered if he would come down. He did, of course. "Wonderful!" he said. "How about Friday night?"

  "All right," Annarita answered, and he lit up all over again. He didn't seem so worried about freedom and overthrowing the Italian People's Republic any more. He didn't seem so worried about Eduardo, either, which was also good.

  Would he have blamed Eduardo if Annarita told him she didn't want to go out with him? She hoped she hadn't said yes to keep him from blaming Eduardo. That was no reason to go to a movie with somebody.

  What would 1 have done if Eduardo asked me? she wondered. After a moment, she shrugged. She didn't know, and she didn't seem likely to find out, either. Eduardo made a point- even stretched a point-of being a gentleman. And he was playing the role of her cousin.

  Was that just as well, or was it a shame?

  Before she could come close to finding an answer, they got to Hoxha Polytechnic. Then she had to worry about Russian prepositions instead. At least with Russian prepositions, you knew when you were right and when you were wrong. This other stuff? It wasn't nearlv so obvious.

  Gianfranco wanted to use the bathroom mirror to comb his hair. He'd already used it twice, but that didn't matter to him. He wanted to look perfect, or as close to perfect as he could. He was unhappily aware of the distance between the one and the other.

  He couldn't use the bathroom right now because Annarita was in it. His mother saw his glance toward the door and smiled at him. "She'll be out soon," she said. "She wants to look nice for you. That's good."

  "Is it? I guess so." To Gianfranco, Annarita already looked nice. Why did she need to do anything more?

  But when she came out, she looked nicer. Gianfranco couldn't have said how, but she did. He ducked in there, ran the comb through his hair again, and wished he wouldn't have picked this exact moment to get a zit on his chin. He couldn't do much about that, though.

  He stuck the comb in his pocket and went out again. "Shall we go?" he said, trying to sound like someone who did this all the time.

  "Sure." Annarita seemed to take it for granted. Maybe that would help him do the same. He could hope so, anyway.

  "Have fun, you two." Eduardo sounded as if he meant it. Gianfranco hoped he did.

  "Grazie, Cousin Silvio," Annarita said.

  She and Gianfranco walked down the stairs together. He wondered if his feet were touching the ground. When they got to the bottom, Annarita said, "It would be nice if the elevator worked. Coming down is easy, but going back up, especially when you're tired…" She shook her head.

  "If somebody could make a nice profit fixing elevators, it would have been fixed a long time ago," Gianfranco said.

  She looked at him as if he'd just told a dirty joke. His ears got hot. Profit was evil-everybody learned that in school. But then she sighed. She looked around to make sure no one could overhear, then said, "Cousin Silvio tells me the same thing. It still feels wrong, though-know what I mean?"

  "Si," he answered. "But what we've got doesn't work the way it's supposed to. If it did, the elevator would run. So shouldn't we think differently?"

  "I don't know if we should think that different," Annarita said.

  "Why not?" he asked.

  She gave a perfectly practical answer: "Because we'll get in trouble with the Security Police if we make too much noise about profit. Look what happened to The Gladiator."

  "Somebody ought to do something about the Security Police," Gianfranco said. "They just hold us back."

  Annarita stopped, right there outside the apartment building. "If you keep talking like that, I'm going back upstairs. It's not safe to be around you. It's not safe to be anywhere near you. Cut it out, all right?"

  He wished he could tell her she was worrying too much. He wished he could, but he knew he couldn't. "All right," he said meekly. "Let's go watch the movie."

  "That's more like it," Annarita said. "This other stuff… Do you want to end up a zek in a camp?"

  There shouldn't be zeks. There shouldn't be camps. If Gianfranco said that, he'd just get in more trouble with Annarita, no matter how true it was. But people who couldn't learn to keep their mouths shut were the kind who did end up in camps. So all he said was, "No," which was also true. Annarita nodded. Not only was it true, it was the right answer-not always the same thing.

  The theater was about three blocks from their apartment building. It was showing a remake of the great early Soviet film, Battleship Potemkin. Gianfranco had seen the black-and-white original-with Italian subtitles-in his history class. So had almost everybody. He knew Annarita had. Even though it was more than 150 years old, with acting ridiculously over the top, it still had the power of a punch in the face.

  He bought tickets, then sodas and roasted chestnuts when he went inside. When he and Annarita sat down, other people nearby were already crunching away. "Do you think it will be as good as the first one?" he asked her-that was a safe question.

  "Remakes hardly ever are," she said. "People who do something the first time really mean it. The ones who do remakes are just copycats."

  Gianfranco thought about that for a little while, then nodded. "You say interesting things, you know?" he said.

  She shrugged. The house lights dimmed. The newsreel came on. Halfway through a story about a dam going up in South America (and how many of the laborers building it were zeks?), something went wrong with the projector. The house lights came up again. "One moment, please!" someone called from the projectionist's booth.

  That moment stretched and stretched. People got restless. "Fix it, you bums!" a man with a deep voice yelled.

  "Don't you know how to fix it?" somebody else said. No one from up in the booth answered. Gianfranco feared that meant nobody up there did know.

  After a few minutes where nothing happened, a wit sang out: "You must he the jerks who worked on my car!" He won a laugh.

  The house lights went down again. Sarcastic cheers rose. The newsreel star
ted once more-upside down. Billions of liters of water seemed ready to spill out from behind the dam. The audience booed and jeered. The newsreel stopped. The lights brightened. "Sorry about that!" a man called from the booth. People went on booing.

  At last, after half an hour or so, they got it right and finished the newsreel. It probably got more applause at that theater than anywhere else in Italy. The remake of Battleship Potemkin started. It was a Russian film dubbed into Italian. All the effects were bigger and fancier than the ones in the original. It was in color. The actors didn't ham it up. It should have been better than Eisenstein's version, but Gianfranco found himself yawning, not getting excited.

  "You're right," he whispered to Annarita. "It's no big deal."

  "Well, so what?" she whispered back. "We got to watch an upside-down newsreel instead. That's more interesting than the movie would have been even if it were good."

  She was right again. Gianfranco wouldn't have thought of it like that, but he knew the truth when he heard it. He stopped being so disappointed in Battleship Potemkin and settled down to watch it-and to listen to it. All the boring speeches about the glorious Soviet Revolution, all the propaganda about the wicked Russian landowners and capitalists… Everything seemed different to him now that he knew Eduardo.

  He wasn't the only one yawning. People had a lot of practice tuning out propaganda. But being bored didn't seem enough. What would happen if he yelled, We'd be better off if the Revolution failed!?

  That was a dumb question. He knew what would happen. They'd grab him and haul him off to a camp. His father would get in trouble, too, for raising a subversive son. However much he wanted to come out and tell the truth, the price would be too high to pay.

  Can we ever change things, then? he wondered. If they were ever going to, somebody would have to stand up and tell the government it was wrong. Somebody, yes, but who? Who would be that brave? Gianfranco wished he knew.

  Eight

  "'Did you have a good time at the movie?" Eduardo asked after Annarita came back to her apartment.