“Here we are.” He pointed.
THE GLADIATOR. The sign wasn’t too gaudy. The front window also showed a painting of a man in Roman-style armor holding a sword. Under his feet, smaller letters said, BOOKS AND GAMES AND THINGS TO MAKE YOU THINK. She hadn’t expected that. “Well, take me in,” she told Gianfranco. He nodded and did.
“Hey, Gianfranco!” called the man behind the counter. “Come sta?”
“I’m fine, Eduardo. How are you?” Gianfranco said. “This is my friend, Annarita.” He didn’t say she was there to investigate The Gladiator. That had to be because they were friends. He probably would have been more loyal to the shop than to some other member of the Young Socialists’ League. And why not? Annarita thought. What’s the League ever done for him?
“Ciao, Annarita,” Eduardo said, and then, to Gianfranco, “I didn’t know you had such a pretty friend.”
Gianfranco blushed like a schoolgirl. That made Annarita smile, but she looked away so Gianfranco wouldn’t see her do it. She got to glance at what was in the shop. It sold every different kind of game, all in brightly printed boxes. She’d never heard of any of them. Rails across Europe, World Cup, Swords and Sorcery, Eastern Front, Waterloo, Tycoon, Hannibal … She could figure out what they were about easily enough.
The Gladiator also sold miniatures: soldiers and locomotives and soccer players made of lead or plastic. Some were already painted, others plain—you could buy paints, too, in tiny bottles, and hair-thin brushes with which to apply them.
And there were books about costumes from every period from Babylon to now. There were books about military campaigns. There were soccer encyclopedias. There were books about railroads, and about what stock markets had been like when there were stock markets.
“This is quite a place.” Annarita wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment or not.
“You’d better believe it.” Gianfranco had no doubts. He sounded as proud as if The Gladiator belonged to him. “Is Carlo here yet?” he asked Eduardo.
“No, but I don’t think he’ll be long,” the older man—he had to be close to thirty—said.
“He’s not as bold as he was yesterday, though,” Gianfranco boasted. “‘Loss leader,’ was it? He found out!”
“He wasn’t very happy when he headed for home. I will say that,” Eduardo answered.
Gianfranco set money on the counter. “I’m going to go in there and set up the game,” he said. When Eduardo nodded, he went into the back room.
That left Annarita out front by herself, and feeling it. “Can I help you with something in particular, Signorina?” Eduardo asked. “Maybe you want a present for a brother or somebody else? Maybe even for Gianfranco?” He looked sly.
She shook her head. “No, grazie, I don’t think so. I just wanted to see what it was like. I’ve heard Gianfranco talk about it a lot. Our families share a kitchen—you know how it is.”
“Oh, sure. Who doesn’t?” Eduardo replied. “It shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and what can you do about it?”
He had nerve, finding anything wrong with the way the world worked with somebody he’d just met. For all he knew, Annarita was a government spy. In fact, she wasn’t that far from being one. “So anyway, he’s been going on about it, and finally he asked me if I wanted to see it,” she said. “And I said sì, and here I am.”
“What do you think?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Annarita said truthfully. “Where do all the games come from?”
“We have crazy people locked up in a psychiatric hospital who make them up,” Eduardo told her.
She blinked. He really did like to see how close to the wind he could sail. Everybody knew the Party put troublemakers in psychiatric hospitals. Getting into one of those places was easy. Coming out? Coming out was a different story.
Everybody knew that, but hardly anybody talked about it. If you talked about it to the wrong people, you might wind up inside a psychiatric hospital yourself. But Eduardo didn’t seem worried. He grinned at her.
Annarita wondered if he was a provocateur. Maybe the whole store was a front, a trap to catch dissidents. Would everybody who played games in here end up in a psychiatric hospital or in jail or in a labor camp or dead? She didn’t like to think so, but the authorities could be sneaky. Everybody knew that, too.
She walked over to the shelves. There were titles like Making Your Corporation Profitable and Economics of Club Ownership alongside others like Greece and Rome at War. “You sell … interesting books,” she said.
“Well, if they weren’t interesting, who’d buy them?” Eduardo spread his hands and answered his own question: “Nobody, that’s who. Then I couldn’t make my living having fun. I’d have to do something honest instead.” He grinned again.
Even though Annarita grinned back, she still found herself wondering about him and about what the shop sold. “Some of these books look almost … capitalist,” she said, wondering how he would answer.
“They are,” he said simply.
“But—how can you sell them, then?” Annarita asked. Anybody would have—she was sure of that.
“Because they’re just for the games,” he replied. “Everybody who buys them knows it. If there were real capitalists, that would bring back the bad old days. But these are like books on chess openings and endgames. They help people play better, that’s all.”
He was as smooth as silk, as slick as olive oil. That only made Annarita wonder about him more. “You can’t use books on openings and endgames in the real world,” she said. “You could use these. It would be wrong, but you could do it.” She had to make sure she said that, in case a camera and a mike were picking up her words. You never could tell. Never. “Somebody who bought one might get the wrong ideas about the way things are supposed to work. How does the state let you sell them?”
“You’re smart. Not many people asked questions like that.” Eduardo sounded admiring. Then people in the back room started yelling. “Excuse me,” he said, and ducked back there. A moment later, Annarita heard him yelling, too. He could call people some very rude things without really cursing. He could make them laugh while he did it, too, which was a rarer talent. He came out a few minutes later shaking his head. “Argument over the rules. Dumb argument over the rules. Where were we, pretty lady?”
Annarita pegged him for the sort who gave out compliments as readily as insults. That meant she didn’t need to take them seriously. She said, “You were telling me how you get away with selling books like these.”
“That’s right.” Eduardo nodded. “Nothing fancy about it. We do it the same way the Church gets away with teaching what it teaches.”
“This isn’t religion. This is economics,” Annarita said severely.
“Of course. But a lot of what the Church says goes against science and against dialectical materialism and against Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Everybody who thinks about it would say that’s so. Why does the state let the Church do it, then?” Because people would riot if the state didn’t, Annarita thought. Eduardo had a different answer: “Because it’s religion, that’s why. What the Church says only counts in religion, nothing else. And what we sell here only counts in our games, nowhere else. See? It’s simple, really.”
He made it sound simple, anyway. How many complications lurked under that smooth surface? Quite a few, unless Annarita missed her guess. But some of what he said was likely true, or the Security Police would have closed this place down. Unless he belongs to the Security Police, she reminded herself. She wondered how she could find out.
Gianfranco counted out his latest payment for delivering Russian oil to Paris. “Twenty-three million there,” he said, as if the bright play-money bills were real. “That puts me at 509 million.” As soon as you went over 500 million, you won. Carlo was still a good sixty million away.
“Sì, you got me,” he said, and stuck out his hand across the board. Gianfranco shook it. Carlo went on, “When we got into that second price war
, that ruined me. You were smart there, Gianfranco. I didn’t think you’d do anything like that.”
“I’m not always as dumb as I look,” Gianfranco said, which made the university student laugh. They got up and went out to the front counter together.
“Who won?” Eduardo asked.
Gianfranco stuck his thumb up. Carlo stuck his down. That was what you did at The Gladiator. The people who ran the shop hadn’t started it. The people who played there did. In the ancient Roman arenas, a raised thumb was a vote for sparing a downed gladiator’s life. A lowered one was a vote to finish him off. Somebody who knew that must have done it for a joke the first time. Now everybody did.
“Let’s see …” Eduardo pulled out a chart. “Gianfranco beats Carlo in Rails across Europe. Gianfranco, that means you play Alfredo next. Carlo, you go down into the losers’ bracket, and you play Vittorio.”
“I’ll beat him.” Carlo didn’t lack confidence. Common sense, sometimes, but never confidence.
“Alfredo?” Gianfranco didn’t sound so bold. “He’ll be dangerous. He studies the game all the time.” Alfredo was older than Eduardo. He wore a mustache, and it had some white hairs in it. He was out of school, so he didn’t have to worry about homework and projects and things. He had a job, but who took jobs seriously? He spent as much time at work as he could get away with on his hobby, and just about all the time after he got home. He was a fanatic, no two ways about it.
“Hope the dice go your way,” Eduardo said. “If you have enough luck, all the other guy’s skill doesn’t matter. Might as well be life, eh?”
“Sì.” That was Carlo, still looking for a way to console himself after losing.
“It’s a long game,” Gianfranco said. “Most of the time, the dice and the cards even out.”
“Well, in that case you’d better pray, because Alfredo will eat you for lunch like fettuccine,” Carlo said. “I’ve got to go. Ciao.” He walked out without giving Gianfranco a chance to snap back at him.
“He thought he’d beat you,” Eduardo said.
“I know. He figured I was a kid, so I wouldn’t know what I was doing,” Gianfranco said. “I guess I showed him.” Then, cautiously, he asked, “What did Annarita think of the place?” He still didn’t want to tell Eduardo she was investigating The Gladiator.
“She seemed interested,” answered the man behind the counter. “She’s more political than you are, isn’t she?”
Gianfranco knew what that meant—Annarita was asking questions. He just laughed and said, “Well, who isn’t?” A lot of the time, not being interested in politics was the safest road to take. If you didn’t stick your neck out one way or the other, nobody could say you were on the wrong side.
“She seemed nice, though. She’s smart—you can tell,” Eduardo went on.
“Uh-huh,” Gianfranco said. Nobody ever went, He’s smart—you can tell about him. He got by, and that was about it.
“She really did seem interested,” Eduardo said. “Do you suppose she’ll come back and play?”
“I don’t know,” Gianfranco said in surprise. “I didn’t even think of it.” A few girls did come to The Gladiator. Two or three of them were as good at their games as most of the guys. But it was a small and mostly male world. Some guys who had been regulars stopped coming so often—or at all—when they found a steady girlfriend or got married. Gianfranco thought that was the saddest thing in the world.
“It would be nice if she did,” Eduardo said. “People find out pretty girls come in here, we get more customers. That wouldn’t be bad.”
“I guess not.” Gianfranco didn’t sound so sure, mostly because he wasn’t. One of the reasons he liked coming to The Gladiator was that not so many people knew about the place. The ones who did were crazy the same way he was. They enjoyed belonging to something halfway between a club and a secret society. If a bunch of strangers who didn’t know the ropes started coming in, it wouldn’t be the same.
Eduardo laughed at him. “I know what the difference between us is. You don’t have to worry about paying the rent—that’s what.”
“You don’t seem to have much trouble,” Gianfranco said. Along with the games and books and miniatures and models The Gladiator sold, it got all the gamers’ hourly fees. It had to be doing pretty well—the Galleria del Popolo wasn’t a cheap location.
“We manage.” Eduardo knocked on the wood of the countertop. “But that doesn’t mean it’s easy or anything. And we can always use more people. It’s the truth, Gianfranco, whether you like it or not.”
“You just want to indoctrinate them,” Gianfranco said with a sly smile. “You want to turn them all into railroad capitalists or soccer-team capitalists or whatever. By the time you’re done, there won’t be a proper Communist left in Milan.”
Eduardo looked around in what seemed to Gianfranco to be real alarm. After he decided nobody’d overheard Gianfranco, the clerk relaxed—a little. “If you open your big mouth any wider, you’ll fall in and disappear, and that’ll be the end of you,” he said. “And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, either.”
“Oh, give me break,” Gianfranco said. “I was just kidding. You know that—you’d better, all the time and money I spend in this joint.”
“Nobody jokes about capitalists. They’re the class enemy,” Eduardo said.
“Carlo and I were joking about them while we played. We aren’t the only ones, either. You hear guys like that all the time,” Gianfranco said.
“That’s in the game. It’s not real in the game, and everybody knows it’s not. I was talking with your girlfriend about that.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“The more fool you,” Eduardo said, which flustered Gianfranco. The clerk went on, “As long as you know you’re only being capitalists in a game, everything’s fine. Games are just pretend.”
“Not just,” Gianfranco said. “That’s what makes your games so good—they feel real.”
“Sure they do, but they aren’t,” Eduardo said. “What happens if you go out into Milan and try to act like a capitalist? The Security Police arrest you, that’s what. You want to see what a camp’s like from the inside?”
“No!” Gianfranco said, which was the only possible answer to that question. But he couldn’t help adding, “I’ve done too much studying for the game. Sometimes I think what they had back then worked better than what we’ve got now. The elevator in our building’s been out of whack for years, and how come? ’Cause nobody cares enough to fix it.”
“If I were a spy, you just convicted yourself,” Eduardo said. “For heaven’s sake, be careful how you talk. I don’t want to lose customers, especially when I know they’ll never come back.”
Gianfranco played back his own words in his head. He winced. “Grazie, Eduardo. You’re right. I was dumb.”
“Dumb doesn’t begin to cover it.” Eduardo shook his head. “In here, it’s a game. Out there”—his gesture covered the world beyond The Gladiator’s door—“it’s for real. Don’t forget it.”
He was urgent enough to impress Gianfranco, who said, “I won’t.” But then he couldn’t help putting in, “You know what?”
“What?” Eduardo sounded like somebody holding on to his patience with both hands.
“This stuff with working with prices and raising money works really well in the game,” Gianfranco said. “How come it wouldn’t work for real?”
Even more patiently, Eduardo answered, “Because the game has its rules, and the outside world has different ones. The Party sets the outside rules, sì? And they’re whatever the Party says they are, sì?”
“Well, sure,” Gianfranco said. “But isn’t the Party missing a trick? If it changed the real rules so they were more like the ones in the game, I bet a lot of people would get rich. And what’s so bad about that?”
“I ought to throw you out of here and lock the door in your face,” Eduardo said. “You’re smart when it comes to the game, maybe, but you’re not so smart when it
comes to the real world. The Party does what it wants. If we’re lucky—if we’re real lucky—it doesn’t pay any attention to what a bunch of gamers in a crazy little shop are thinking. You got that?”
“Sì, Eduardo. Capisco.” Gianfranco yielded more to the clerk’s vehemence than to his argument. He thought the argument was weak. But Eduardo seemed ready to punch him in the nose if he tried talking back.
“Bene. You’d better understand, you miserable little—” Sure as blazes, Eduardo was breathing hard. He was ready for any kind of trouble, all right. Gianfranco couldn’t quite see why he was getting so excited, but he was. Eduardo wagged a finger at him in a way his own father couldn’t have. “You going to do anything dumb?”
“No, Eduardo.” Gianfranco didn’t want to rattle the clerk’s cage. If Eduardo and the other people at The Gladiator did lock him out, he would … He shook his head. He didn’t know what he would do then.
“Bene,” Eduardo said. “Maybe you’re not so dumb. Not quite so dumb, anyhow. Why don’t you get out of here for now? Or do you have some other scheme for giving me gray hair before my time?”
“I hope not,” Gianfranco said.
“So do I, kid. You better believe it,” Eduardo told him. “In that case, beat it.” Gianfranco did. Yes, no matter what, he wanted to stay in good with the people here. Next to the games at The Gladiator, the real world was a pretty dull place.
Three
Annarita didn’t know what to think about The Gladiator. She didn’t say anything at supper—she didn’t want to talk where Gianfranco and his family could overhear. She just listened while her father chatted about a couple of patients he’d seen. He never named names, but his stories were interesting anyway. Then Signor Mazzilli went on—and on—about some policy decision that wouldn’t mean much either way. Annarita thought he was a bore, but she tried not to show it. The Crosettis and Mazzillis had to live together, so getting along was better than arguing all the time.
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