“I’ll help,” Annarita said.
Chopping vegetables and cooking pasta let her take her mind off her worries for a while. Gianfranco’s mother stuck her nose into the kitchen. When she saw Annarita and her mother busy there, she drew back in a hurry. Any other late afternoon, she would have come in and chatted. No, things wouldn’t be the same if Gianfranco didn’t come back.
They might not be the same even if he did. Annarita frowned when that occurred to her. The Mazzillis would go right on blaming Eduardo for kidnapping him. As far as they knew, Eduardo was the Crosettis’ Cousin Silvio. Why wouldn’t they think everybody in Annarita’s family was responsible in some way?
The knife in Annarita’s hand flashed as she cut zucchini into slices almost thin enough to see through. “This is a mess,” she said. “Nothing but a miserable, stinking mess.”
Her mother was slicing even thinner. “You’re not wrong. I wish you were. If Comrade Mazzilli weren’t who he was, Gianfranco might be able to tell him what was what. But the way things are …”
“Sì,” Annarita said unhappily. Because Comrade Mazzilli was a Communist Party official, Gianfranco had used him to get the Security Police out of the way so Eduardo and his friends could escape. His father wouldn’t like that even a little bit. And again, how could you say he was wrong not to like it?
Supper turned out to be a very unhappy meal. The Crosettis ate quickly to get out of the dining room and let the Mazzillis have it. Annarita thought about going on like that day after day, year after year. It could happen. In the Italian People’s Republic, moving away from neighbors who didn’t like you was often harder than finding some way to put up with them. But it would be anything but pleasant.
“We’ll have to take turns going first,” Annarita’s mother said with a sigh—she must have been thinking along the same lines.
“I wonder how much trouble Comrade Mazzilli can make for us if he really works at it,” her father said. There was another interesting question. Because of his Party rank, he might be able to make quite a bit.
If Gianfranco didn’t turn up, he’d have every reason to do just that. Annarita had never dreamt helping someone could do such a good job of complicating her life.
Thirteen
The door to the transposition chamber opened. Gianfranco hurried out. He didn’t remember anything about being drugged. He wasn’t supposed to. But what they’d told him while he was out would kick in when the Security Police started grilling him. So people from the home timeline claimed, anyhow. He hoped like anything they knew what they were talking about.
The lights in the subbasement under The Gladiator came on. Motion sensors, Eduardo had told him. He looked back over his shoulder. One instant, the chamber was there. The next, it was gone—gone for good.
“Stuck here,” Gianfranco muttered. “Stuck here forever.” He said something that should have set off a smoke detector, if there was one here. He would have been just as happy to stay in the home timeline—probably happier. Only the thought of what was bound to be happening to his family and to Annarita’s made him come back—that and the obvious unwillingness of the Crosstime Traffic people to let him do anything else. He hadn’t argued much. What was the point, when he could see he would lose? Better to jump if you were going to get pushed anyway.
He went up the stairs to the trap door at the top. He pushed it up and went through into the basement. If there were Security Police officers in the shop, they would hear him. But Eduardo had promised him there wouldn’t be, and he seemed right.
No motion sensors up there, or none that worked. It stayed dark. The Crosstime Traffic people had warned him it would. He held the trap door open for a moment so he could get his bearings with the light shining up from below. Then he shut it and walked toward the next stairway with his hands out in front of him as if he were blind.
Even so, he almost tripped over the bottom step. He groped till he found the bannister, then went up the stairs. They put him in The Gladiator’s backmost room. He came out into the room where he’d spent so much time playing games. The tables and chairs were still in place. He proved as much by nearly breaking his neck on a couple of them.
After a good deal of groping, he opened the door to the front of the shop. Then he could see again, thanks to the street lights outside. He waited for somebody from the Security Police to yell, “Don’t move!” But he had The Gladiator all to himself.
He covered his fingers with a handkerchief when he opened the outer door. No alarm sounded. He scurried away as fast as he could go anyhow. The Security Police might not be here, but he would have bet they had some way to know when that door opened.
Even after midnight, the Galleria del Popolo wasn’t deserted. Bars and restaurants—and maybe some shadier places—stayed open late. Gianfranco smelled fresh cigarette smoke in the air. (Many more people smoked here than in the home timeline.) Behind him, someone called, “Hey, you! What are you doing?” The voice didn’t sound as if it belonged to anyone from the Security Police. It sounded more like that of an ordinary person worried about burglars.
No matter whose voice it was, Gianfranco ignored it. He turned a corner, then another, then another. He didn’t run—that might have drawn unwelcome notice to him. But he did some pretty fancy walking.
Once he was sure nobody was on his heels, he slowed down, breathing hard. The man back near The Gladiator had worried that he was a criminal. Now he worried about running into a real one. That would be irony, wouldn’t it? Go off on an adventure no one in this world could ask, and then get knocked over the head for whatever you had in your wallet? He shivered, though the summer night was mild.
Not many people were on the street. The ones who were seemed as nervous of him as he was of them. That reassured him. He knew he was no sneak thief or robber. All they knew was that he was tall and might be dangerous.
He turned around a couple of times to figure out where he was—he’d gone around those corners at random when he was getting away from The Gladiator. Then he nodded to himself. Milan’s skyline looked familiar again. Those skyscrapers that changed it from the home timeline were gone. His apartment building would be … over that way.
Off he went. He shrank into a dark doorway when a police car went by. The carabinieri inside didn’t notice him, or else didn’t care. The car rolled down the street.
When he got to the apartment building, he took the stairs. He somehow felt the elevator would draw too much notice. That was probably foolish, but he didn’t care. He hadn’t got used to the elevator yet anyway.
He looked at his watch. It wasn’t even one o’clock yet. Eduardo had known what he was talking about. Time—or rather, duration—really did stand still inside a transposition chamber. Gianfranco wondered why. From what Eduardo said, chronophysicists in the home timeline did, too.
Here was the familiar hallway. Here was the familiar—and familial—door. He reached into his pocket. Where the devil were the familiar keys? He’d had them—and now he didn’t. They had to be somewhere in the home timeline, or maybe in the transposition chamber. He felt like pounding his head against the wall. Instead, he started pounding on the door.
People joked about the midnight knock on the door. They joked so they wouldn’t have to cringe, because those knocks were much too real and much too common. Even so, Annarita didn’t think she’d ever heard one … till now.
The terror that filled her also amazed her. That a simple sound could cause so much fear seemed impossible. No matter how it seemed, she lay shivering in her bed. She might suddenly have been dropped into crushed ice.
The pounding went on and on. Was it her door? Were they coming for her parents—and for her—because of what had happened to Gianfranco?
She almost screamed when the light in her bedroom came on. There stood her father in his pajamas. “It’s not for us,” he said. “It’s next door.”
Half a dozen words that sounded like a reprieve from a death sentence. And, no two ways about it,
they might have been just that. There was a joke that ended, “No, Comrade. He lives one floor down.” Annarita had always thought it was funny. Now she was living inside it and understanding the relief the poor fellow who said that had to feel.
Then the knocking stopped—the door must have opened. A split second later, Annarita heard screams and shrieks. At first she thought the Security Police were beating the Mazzillis. Then she made out Gianfranco’s name. His mother cried, “You’re back!”
Annarita jumped out of bed. She ran over and gave her father a hug. “They played fair with us,” she said. “They didn’t have to, but they did.”
“A good thing, too,” her father said. “I just didn’t know what to tell the Mazzillis any more.”
“Shall we go over there?” Annarita asked. “They can’t get mad if the noise woke us up.”
“They can find plenty of other reasons to get mad if they want to,” Dr. Crosetti said. “But yes, let’s go over. At least they can’t blame us for getting Gianfranco murdered now. That’s a good start.”
The Crosettis needed to knock several times before the Mazzillis paid any attention to them. A lot of noise was still coming from inside the apartment. But Gianfranco’s father finally opened the door. “Ah,” he said. “You must have heard us.”
Of course we did. Half of Milan heard you, Annarita thought. Her father only nodded. “We did,” he agreed. “We’re glad he’s back. We’re gladder than we know how to tell you.”
“Is he all right?” Annarita asked.
“He seems to be,” Comrade Mazzilli answered cautiously.
“I’m fine.” Gianfranco came to the door. He was grinning from ear to ear. “I couldn’t be better.”
“How was it?” Annarita talked to him right past his parents.
“Amazing,” he answered. “Just amazing.”
“How did you get away from the villains?” Gianfranco’s mother said. “I was so glad to see you, I didn’t even ask yet.”
“Oh, they let me go,” Gianfranco said. “That was all a bluff to make sure nobody started shooting at them.” He made it sound as if Eduardo and his friends hadn’t done anything worse than knock on the wrong door.
“How did you—all of you—get away from the Security Police?” Comrade Mazzilli asked. “They swore up and down that there was no way out of the shop.”
Gianfranco winked at Annarita. His parents didn’t notice—they were out of their minds with joy to have him back safe and sound. But Annarita knew the answer, and they didn’t. Gianfranco had had a ride in a transposition chamber. She hadn’t imagined she could be so jealous. He couldn’t tell his mother and father about the chamber, though. What would he say?
He didn’t say anything at first—he let out a wordless, scornful snort. “The Security Police aren’t as smart as they think they are, then,” he declared. His parents both nodded. Everybody liked to believe the Security Police was nothing but a bunch of fools. That mostly wasn’t true, but people wanted to believe it was, because it made the Security Police seem less dangerous than they really were. “They must have missed the trap door set into the basement wall,” Gianfranco went on. “It opened into a secret room with a tunnel. They put a blindfold on me so I couldn’t see where the tunnel went, but we got away.”
Annarita had all she could do to keep a straight face. Her father’s expression looked a little strained, too. Gianfranco was stealing big chunks of the plot from a TV thriller that was on a couple of weeks before. He’d seen it, and so had the Crosettis. His mother and father evidently hadn’t.
“Well!” his father said. “I’m going to tell those bunglers a thing or two—you’d better believe I am. And the first thing I’m going to do is tell them you’re here and you’re safe, and no thanks to them.” He stormed off toward the telephone.
“I’m glad they didn’t keep you.” Again, Annarita talked past Gianfranco’s mother, who would think she meant the kidnappers. Gianfranco would know her they included everybody in the home timeline.
He spread his hands. “I couldn’t do anything about it any which way.”
Her father wasn’t just talking on the phone. He was shouting: “Comrade Mazzilli here. What? I woke you up? Too bad! I’ve got news worth waking you up for, you lazy good-for-nothing. Gianfranco’s home! … What do you mean, am I sure? You blockhead, he’s standing right here in front of me. And a whole fat lot of help getting him back you people were, too!”
He listened for a moment, then slammed the phone down. “That’s telling them, Father!” Gianfranco said.
“Those idiots said they’d send somebody over to take your statement,” Comrade Mazzilli said. “I think they’re ashamed of themselves for not knowing what’s what. They’ve got plenty to be ashamed about, too.”
“I think we’d better go back to bed,” Annarita’s father said. “Gianfranco, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again.” That was bound to be nothing but the truth.
“Me, too,” Annarita said, which made Gianfranco’s face light up in a way her father’s words hadn’t. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Gianfranco said with a wry grin. “At least you get to go back to sleep. Me, I’ve got to talk to the Security Police.”
“You’re right! I should have told them to come in the morning,” his father said. “I’ll go call them back.”
“Never mind. I’ll deal with it now, and then I’ll sleep for a week,” Gianfranco said.
“Good night,” Annarita said again. She and her parents went back to their own apartment. She wondered if she would be able to fall asleep again after the excitement in the middle of the night. As it turned out, she had no trouble at all.
The man from the Security Police scowled at Gianfranco. “Where exactly in the wall was this stinking trap door?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Gianfranco said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What kind of answer is that?”
“It’s the truth,” Gianfranco lied.
“How can it be the truth? You went through the miserable thing, didn’t you?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“Well, then?” the Security Police officer said triumphantly.
“Well, then—what? This guy had an arm around my neck. I was backwards to the wall when I went through the door. If I had eyes in my rear end, I could tell you more.”
“Plenty of people keep their brains there.” The officer yawned. It was half past three in the morning. He looked like a man who wanted to be asleep in bed, not grilling a kidnapping victim who’d appeared out of thin air. With a sigh, he went on, “So where did you go from there?”
“I don’t know, not really,” Gianfranco answered. “I already told you, they put a blindfold on me after that.”
“Why didn’t they just knock you over the head?” No, the officer wasn’t happy about being here in the middle of the night.
“Beats me,” Gianfranco said. “You could ask them yourself if you’d managed to catch them.”
“As far as we can see, they might have disappeared by magic, not by your stupid trap door,” the man from the Security Police grumbled. He was righter than he knew. One of Crosstime Traffic’s biggest advantages was that nobody from this alternate really believed in other worlds. Travel from here to the home timeline might as well have been magic. With another sigh, the officer asked, “When did they let you go?”
“This morning. Yesterday morning, I mean.” Gianfranco yawned. His mother had brought espresso for the Security Police officer and for him. Despite the strong coffee, he was still very tired. Too much had happened with not enough sleep.
“You should have let us know you were free as soon as they did,” the officer said.
Gianfranco just looked at him. The officer turned red and made a production out of lighting a cigarette. The Security Police called on you. If you were in your right mind, you didn’t call them. Everybody knew that—even Security Policemen. The only reason Gianfranco’s father, a loyal Party
man, had told them Gianfranco was back was to let them know what a bunch of blundering idiots they were.
After blowing out a long plume of smoke, the man from the Security Police asked, “How did you get back to Milan?”
“I stuck out my thumb,” Gianfranco answered. “One truck took me as far as Bologna. I got another lift there, and it took me here.” Hitchhiking was against the law. That didn’t mean people didn’t do it, even if it was dangerous. And if he said he’d taken the train, they could ask who’d seen him at the station and find out if there were records of his ticket. Thumbing a ride didn’t leave a paper trail.
The officer tried his best: “What were the names of the men who picked you up? What were they carrying?”
“I think one was Mario and one was Luigi.” Gianfranco pulled ordinary names out of the air—or out of what the Crosstime Traffic people had told him while he was under their drugs. “One of them said he was carrying mushrooms. The other guy didn’t talk much. He just smoked smelly cigars.”
“Right.” The Security Policeman sucked in smoke himself. He scribbled notes. Would people start checking to see if a trucker named Luigi—or maybe Mario—who smoked cigars was on the road yesterday? Did Crosstime Traffic have men who looked like Mario and Luigi? He wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Anyway, I’m here now and I’m fine,” he said.
His father stepped in and added, “No thanks to the Security Police.”
“We did what we could, Comrade. We’re not done yet,” the officer said. “We’ll catch those villains—you wait and see.”
Gianfranco knew better. His father didn’t, but he also didn’t seem much impressed. “I’ll believe it when I do see it,” he said.
“We work for the safety of the state and of its people,” the Security Police officer said.
“Shouldn’t those be the other way around?” Gianfranco asked.
The officer sent him a hooded look. Who do you think you are, to doubt that the state comes first? The man didn’t ask that out loud, but he might as well have. In the Italian People’s Republic, the question was only too reasonable. The state had come first here for many, many years. But Gianfranco was just back from an Italy where that wasn’t so, an Italian Republic that left the people out of its name but took them more seriously than this one did. He hadn’t been able to stay there long, but the attitude rubbed off. Maybe the drugs should have fixed that too, so he didn’t pop off.
The Gladiator Page 24
