The Gladiator ct-4 Page 10

  "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 your 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 yo
u 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, si?" 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."

  "Maria's a lot of things, but silly isn't any of them," Annarita said grimly. "She was giving me a hard time because the Security Police closed the place down. Suspicion of capitalism, I guess you'd say. But all the people who worked there seemed to vanish into thin air."

  "Lucky for them," her father remarked. Not for the first time, he reminded her of someone who would smoke a pipe. He didn't, or anything else. But he had that kind of thoughtful air.

  "Not for all of them." Annarita nudged Gianfranco.

  He jumped. His voice wobbled and broke as he said, "I ran into one of them-a guy named Eduardo. I brought him here. What are we going to do with him, Dottor Crosetti? I don't want to give him to the Security Police, not when he really hasn't done anything."

  "Hasn't done anything you know of," Annarita's father corrected. He frowned. With a lot of people, it would have been an angry frown. Why not, when Gianfranco and Annarita were involving him in something not only illegal but dangerous? Everybody did illegal things to get by now and then. You almost had to. Most of them couldn't land you in too much trouble. Not letting the Security Police get their hands on a fugitive they wanted? That was a different story.

  "They don't want him for anything but working in the shop." Gianfranco sounded more sure of himself now.

  "How do you know that?" Dr. Crosetti asked. He didn't sound angry.

  "Because a Security Police officer was asking me questions outside The Gladiator this afternoon," Gianfranco answered. An-narita hadn't heard that. He went on, "It was all he cared about."

  Annarita's father grunted. "I think I'd better talk to this fellow. If he makes me believe he's harmless-well, we'll see. If he doesn't, I'll send him away from here with a flea in his ear. Is that a deal?"

  "It sounds wonderful," Gianfranco said.

  "It's fine, Father," Annarita agreed.

  "Well, then, go get him, and we'll see what's what," Dr. Crosetti said. "And then you can both disappear. I've already talked with you. I want to talk to him."

  Gianfranco looked miffed. "It's all right," Annarita told him. "That's how Papa works." He didn't seem convinced. She asked, "Have you got any better ideas?" Reluctantly, he shook his head. "Well, then," she said. "Come on. Let's get Eduardo, before he decides he'd better run away."

  Back to the stairwell they went. To Annarita's relief, the clerk from The Gladiator was still there. He looked up at them. "And?" he said.

  "Come talk to my father. If anybody can figure out what to do for you, he can," Annarita said.

  "I've already talked too much. I don't want to do any more," Eduardo said.

  "If you don't want to talk to my father, you can talk to the Security Police instead," she said. Eduardo winced and climbed to his feet. Annarita had thought that would get him moving. He muttered something under his breath. She couldn't make out what it was. Maybe that was just as well.

  Down the hall they went. Gianfranco did the introduction: "Dr. Crosetti, this is Eduardo… You know what, Eduardo? I don't know your last name."

  "Caruso," the clerk said. "Only I can't sing."

  That made Annarita's father smile, but only for a moment. "Oh, you'll sing for me, Comrade Caruso. Or else we're both wasting our time." He gestured to Annarita and Gianfranco. "Out, out, out. Give us some room to talk, some room to breath, per piacere."

  None too willingly, they left the living room. "What's he going to ask him?" Gianfranco whispered. "What's he going to find out that we didn't?"

  "I don't know," Annarita answered. "But we can't do this by ourselves, and you didn't seem to want to go to your folks."

  "I hope not!" Gianfranco exclaimed. "My father would either make speeches at him or hand him to the Security Police. Or both."

  That was about what Annarita thought Comrade Mazzilli would do, too. "There you are, then," she said.

  Gianfranco nodded. "Here I am, all right, and I wish 1 were somewhere else."

  Algebra homework wasn't what Gianfranco wanted to be doing. Across the kitchen table from him, Annarita went through her schoolwork as if she had not a care in the world. What was her father talking about with Eduardo? How long would it take? Forever? It felt that way.

  They got chased away from the table about eight o'clock, so their mothers could set it for supper. Dr. Crosetti came out to eat. Eduardo didn't. What had Annarita's father done with him-done to him? Stuck him in a bookcase? Preserved him in a specimen bottle? Stuffed him under the rug? Whatever it was, he gave no sign. He talked a little about a strange case he'd seen that afternoon, but said not a word about the strange clerk he'd-probably-left in his living room.

  As for Gianfranco's father, he talked about some bureaucratic silliness even he wouldn't care about day after tomorrow. Nobody else cared now. Even Gianfranco's mother looked bored. The Crosettis didn't, but they weren't family. They worked harder to stay polite.

  Supper was good, but Gianfranco paid it less attention than he might have. He wanted to know where Eduardo was and what would happen to him. He couldn't ask, though, not without letting his own folks know what was going on. He was sure he didn't want to do that.

  As people were getting up from the table, Annarita said, "Why don't you come over to our place, Gianfranco, and I'll see if I can help you with that algebra."

  He hadn't asked her for any help. That had to mean… "Sure!" Gianfranco had to work not to sound too eager. Annarita had seemed perfectly casual. He hadn't known she was such a good actress.

  Beaming, his father said, "That's good. It's right out of The Communist Manifesto-from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs." Then the smile slipped. "Of course, maybe Gianfranco wouldn't need the help if he worked harder on his own."

  "I do work hard," Gianfranco protested. "It just doesn't stick as well as I wish it did."

  "What did you get in algebra when you were in school?" his mother asked his father. Instead of answering, his father went back to talking about the Manifesto. That told Gianfranco everything he needed to know.

  He got his algebra book, then followed Annarita into the Crosettis' apartment. "Well?" he said as soon as his own folks couldn't hear him. "Where's Eduardo? What are you going to do with him?"

  "What? You don't want to do algebra?" Annarita said, as innocently as if she thought he did.

  What he said about algebra wasn't quite suited to polite company, even if, at the last moment, he made it milder than he'd first intended. "Where's Eduardo?" he asked.

  "Who?" Annarita said. Gianfranco didn't clobber her and he didn't scream, which only proved he had more self-cont
rol than he thought. She took him by the arm. "Come on." She led him into the Crosettis' living room.

  Eduardo sat on the sofa there, a glass of wine in front of him. Dr. Crosetti sat in his favorite chair, a glass of wine on the end table next to him. They both looked pleased with themselves. "Ciao, Gianfranco," Annarita's father said. "I'd like you to meet my distant cousin, Silvio Pagnozzi." He waved towards Eduardo.

  Gianfranco gaped. He started to squawk. Then he realized something was going on. He held out his hand. "Mo/to lieto… Silvio."

  Eduardo stood up and gravely shook hands with him. "Pleased to meet you, too, Gianfranco," he said, for all the world as if Gianfranco weren't a regular at The Gladiator.

  "I hope your papers are in order… Silvio," Gianfranco said. "They're liable to be doing a lot of checking for a while. Looking for dangerous criminals like murderers and bank robbers and gaming-store clerks, you know."

  "Si, si." Eduardo pulled out an identity card and an internal passport. Gianfranco wasn't astonished to see that they had Eduardo's photo, a fingerprint likely to be his, and the name of Silvio Pagnozzi. The internal passport said he was born in Acireale, down on Sicily, but had moved to Milan when he was only two. That made sense-he didn't talk like a Sicilian, so he couldn't have lived in the south for long.

  "What happens if the Security Police telephone Acireale to find out if you were really born there?" Gianfranco asked.

  Eduardo shrugged. "Acireale's right by Mount Etna. Most of the records there were lost in the earthquake of 2081," he said. "They can't prove anything one way or the other."

  "I see." Gianfranco nodded and gave the documents back. "These look good. They look real."

  "They're as good as the ones you've got," Eduardo- Silvio?-answered.

  "If someone with a different name who looks like you had papers, would his be just as good, too?"

  "Well, of course," Eduardo answered, smiling. "You're not a human being at all if you don't have papers that say you are, eh?" He winked.