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. “Sì, 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, sì, 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 I 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?”
“No, Comrade,” Gianfranco said, almost truthfully.
“If you do, you will report them to us at once.” The officer did his best to make that sound like a law of nature.
“Of course, Comrade.” Gianfranco did his best to make the man believe he thought it was. As long as you were playing by the rules the government and the security forces set, you could get away with skirting them most of the time.
“You’d better. This is serious business. How could these spies run loose in our country without showing up in our records?” Now the man from the Security Police made it sound as if the people who ran The Gladiator were violating a law of nature.
“Spies? What is there to spy on here?” Gianfranco asked.
“That’s not your worry,” the officer snapped. Gianfranco knew what that had to mean, too. The man had no clue, and neither did his bosses. He gave Gianfranco one more scowl, then jerked his thumb in an unmistakable gesture. “All right, kid. Get lost.”
Gianfranco didn’t wait for him to change his mind. Away he went, before the officer could have second thoughts.
He had some thoughts of his own—confused ones. Eduardo and the others at The Gladiator were no more spies than he was. No matter what the Security Police thought, the idea was ridiculous. But how had they kept from landing in the files? That was quite a trick, whatever it was. Gianfranco wished he could have done it himself.
The invisible man. The man who wasn’t there. He imagined strolling through Italian society untroubled by the authorities, because officially he didn’t exist. The people at The Gladiator and The Conductor’s Cap had done it—for a while, anyhow. But once they got noticed, not being in the records must have drawn more attention to them. Bureaucrats and security men were probably climbing the walls trying to figure out how they managed it.
And how had they all vanished at just the right moment? Plainly, the Security Police hadn’t caught them. Just as plainly, the Security Police wished they had.
Gianfranco laughed to himself. Anything that made the Security Police unhappy seemed like good news to him.
He spotted a former opponent heading toward The Gladiator. Waving, he called, “Ciao, Alfredo. It’s no use.”
“They’re not open?” Alfredo’s voice registered despair.
“It’s not just that they’re not open,” Gianfranco said. “The Security Police are crawling all over the place.”
“Don’t they have more important things to do than pitching fits about people who run a little gaming shop?” Alfredo said. “What are we going to do?”
“They think they’re a pack of spies,” Gianfranco said. That made Alfredo laugh like a loon. But then Gianfranco explained how the people at The Gladiator weren’t in any official records, and Alfredo stopped laughing.
“No way!” he exclaimed.
“Well, if you want to tell the Security Police there’s no way, you can go do that,” Gianfranco said. “But do you think they’ll listen to you?”
“They would have to come from Mars, not to get into the files,” Alfred said, and Gianfranco nodded—he’d had the same thought. Alfredo went on, “Or maybe they really are spies. But spies would act like foreigners, and those people are as Milanese as we are.”
Again, Gianfranco had had the same idea. “None of this makes any sense,” he said.
“I’m sure it does—to somebody,” Alfredo said. “But not to us.” He looked unhappy again. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going crazy without the tournaments. Ever been around somebody who just quit smoking? I’m like that.”
He hadn’t quit. He lit a cigarette, and smoked in quick, nervous puffs. Gianfranco stepped to one side to get away from the smoke, which made him cough.
Alfredo either didn’t notice or didn’t care. From what Gianfranco had seen, most smokers worried more about keeping their own habit going than about what nonsmokers thought. Lots of people in Italy smoked. For as long as anyone could remember, the government had said it wasn’t healthy. That only went to show that even the government had its limits.
“What are we going to do?” Alfredo asked as he crushed the butt under his shoe. “You know what? We all ought to get together and rent a hall where we could play. It wouldn’t be that expensive, not if everybody chipped in.”
He was a great Rails across Europe player. How smart was he away from the game board? Not very, not as far as Gianfranco could see. “Maybe,” Gianfranco said, as gently as he could. “But don’t you think the Security Police would visit us as soon as we did anything like that?”
“What? Why would they?” No, Alfredo didn’t get it.
“Why did they visit The Gladiator?” Gianfranco asked.
“Because they’re … foolish.” Alfredo didn’t say everything he might have. He wasn’t too foolish himself. He wouldn’t call the Security Police a pack of idiots—or worse—in front of Gianfranco, whom he didn’t know well. But he got the message across. And then, with a mournful nod, he went on his way.
Gianfranco started back toward his apartment building. He wished he hadn’t come to the Galleria in the first place. Seeing the Security Police swarming over The Gladiator brought him down—and it was dangerous. He knew that officer could have arrested him.
He went past Hoxha Polytechnic. A chorus was singing the praises of the Communist Party and the illustrious General Secretary. Rehearsal for May Day, Gianfranco thought, and then, What’s so great about the Party, if it goes after places like The Gladiator?
His mind shied away from that like a frightened horse. You couldn’t think such thoughts. It was too dangerous—they might show on your face. If he’d been thinking What’s so great about the Party? while the Security Police officer grilled him, the fellow would have been all over him the way a cat jumped all over a mouse.
He was almost home when somebody called his name: “Gianfranco! Hey, Gianfranco, you’ve got to help me!”
“Eduardo!” Gianfranco knew the voice—and knew he was in trouble no matter what he did—even before he turned. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“They’re after me!” said the clerk from The Gladiator, which Gianfranco already knew. “You’ve got to help me!”
“Well, I’ll try,” Gianfranco said, and that told him what kind of trouble he was in.
Six
Annarita hated regular Russian verbs. Irregular Russian verbs drove her crazy. She consoled herself that things could have been worse. Comrade Montefusco said that Polish, a close cousin to Russian, had separate masculine, feminine, and neuter forms for verbs. Annarita tried to imagine little children learning a language that complicated. They evidently could. She wondered how.
When Gianfranco came into the kitchen, she was ready to put the Russian aside for his game. Her mother would cluck, but she didn’t care. Then she got a good look at his face. “What’s wrong?” she asked, adding, “You look like somebody who just saw a ghost.”
“That’s not funny,” Gianfranco said. “Come out with me for a second, will you?”
“All right.” Annarita closed the book and got up. “What’s going on? You don’t usually act this way.”
He didn’t try to tell her it was nothing. She would have brained him with the Russian book if he had. It was big and square and heavy—she might have fractured his skull. All he said was, “You’ll see.”
Out she went. He led her to the stairwell. On the stairs, looking miserable and worried, stood Eduardo. “Ohh,” Annarita said, as if someone had punched her in the pit of the stomach.
“He’s not a puppy.” Gianfranco might have been joking, but his tone said he wasn’t. “I can’t go ask my mother if I can keep him.”
“No,” Annarita said unhappily. She rounded on Eduardo as if this were his fault. “Why didn’t you disappear with yo
ur friends?”
That only made the clerk from The Gladiator look even more miserable. “I couldn’t,” he said. “The Security Police had already raided the shop.”
And what was that supposed to mean? “Have you got a tunnel in the bottom of it, one that goes through to Australia or the Philippines?” she asked. “Is that how everybody else got away clean?”
Eduardo turned red. Even with the cheap, low-wattage lightbulbs in the stairwell, Annarita could see it plainly. “That’s a better guess than you know,” he said, and then, to Gianfranco, “We’ve got a basement after all.” The crack didn’t make much sense to Annarita, but they both managed rather sickly smiles. Eduardo turned serious again in a hurry. “Shall I disappear from here now, so I don’t get you guys in trouble?”
“I’m already in trouble.” Gianfranco sounded proud of it, too.
“Not if nobody finds out I was here,” Eduardo said.
Part of Annarita wanted to tell him, Yes, go away! That was the part she hated, the part that worried about safety ahead of everything else. “Don’t go anywhere,” she told him. “Just stay here till I get back. It won’t be long, one way or another. Gianfranco, you come with me.”
“What’s going on?” Gianfranco said, but he came. Eduardo sat down on the stairs and put his head in his hands. He couldn’t have seemed more downcast if he were rehearsing in a play. Annarita clicked her tongue between her teeth as the stairwell door closed behind her and Gianfranco. This was a mess, all right, and no two ways about it.
Her father was reading a medical journal in the living room. He looked up in mild surprise when Annarita marched in on him, Gianfranco in her wake. “Ciao, ragazzi,” he said, and then, “What’s up? Something must be—you’ve got blood in your eye, Annarita.”
“You know about The Gladiator, sì?” Annarita said.
“The gaming place in the Galleria? I know it’s there—that’s about all,” Papa answered. “And that silly girl was giving you a hard time about it.”
The Gladiator Page 10
