The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  "Oh." Annarita winced. That got the message across, all right. "And what about in your home timeline?" she asked.

  "We don't have camps for people who commit political crimes," Eduardo said. "We don't send important people who commit political crimes to psychiatric hospitals, either. We don't really even arrest people for political crimes, not the way you do here. We don't in Europe and America, anyway-not even in Russia any more, not very much. Asia, Africa, sometimes South America… Things are different there. We could be better, heaven knows. But going out to the alternates has shown us we could be worse, too."

  "They don't have political arrests in the Soviet Union?" More than anything else, that told Annarita how different from her world the home timeline was.

  But she'd forgotten something. "No, in Russia, I said," Eduardo answered. "There is no Soviet Union in the home timeline, remember? It broke up in… 1991? Or was it 1992? I don't remember which-it's only a question on a history test for us, not something that really matters any more. Russia and Belarus got together for a while, but then they separated again."

  "Bozhemoi!" Annarita exclaimed. Somehow, only Russian fit the moment. She tried to picture a world without the USSR. Even the effort made her dizzy. It was like trying to imagine Milan without the rivalry between AC Milan and Inter Milan, the two great soccer clubs.

  "I told you-it's not the same place. It's not the same at all," Eduardo said-in Russian much more fluent than hers.

  She gaped at him. "I didn't know you spoke Russian," she said in that language, pronouncing it as carefully as she could.

  "Well, I do," he answered, dropping back into Italian. "Might come in handy here-you never can tell-so I learned it. We have ways of doing that in nothing flat." He snapped his fingers.

  "I wish we did!" Annarita thought of all the time she'd spent sitting in class and doing homework and memorizing vocabulary and declensions and conjugations. She thought of all the time she still needed to put in. Learning a language in nothing flat seemed like a party trick-one she didn't know.

  "I'm sorry," he said, plainly guessing what was on her mind. "Things kind of, well, stagnated here once the competition with capitalism ended."

  Banging noises from outside and then a smoother mechanical hum made them both turn their heads. "At least we've finally got the miserable elevator fixed," Annarita said. That didn't seem much next to picking up Russian with pills or however Eduardo did it, but it was better than nothing.

  His smile said he understood what that finally meant. Anyone who'd grown up in the Italian People's Republic would have, of course. But Eduardo, despite speaking perfect Milanese Italian, was in some ways more foreign than a man from Mongolia. Still, he had the right amount of sympathy in his voice as he asked, "How long has it been out?"

  "T don't remember exactly-it's been that long," Annarita said. "Years. Years and years. Now we won't have to clump up and down all those times every day."

  "Good for you," he said, and then, "Sometimes, in the home timeline, people climb stairs so they can get exercise."

  Annarita thought about that for a little while. "Maybe it's different if you don't have to do it," she said at last, which was the kindest thing she could come up with.

  Her father walked into the apartment. He was grinning. "Ciao" he said. "1 just rode the elevator up here. How about that?"

  "Good for you!" Annarita said. She shot Eduardo a glance. Exercise, indeed! He didn't say a word.

  Gianfranco wanted to play Rails across Europe all through the break between school years. That didn't thrill Annarita. He needed a little longer than he might have to realize it didn't. And he needed longer still to see that even Eduardo might rather have been doing something else.

  "I thought you enjoyed it," Gianfranco said reproachfully when the light dawned at last.

  "Well, 1 do… some," Eduardo answered. "But we brought the games here as a means to an end. We wanted to use them to get people in this alternate to think different. They aren't an end in themselves, not for us."

  "Rails across Europe is for me, and I'm not the only one who thinks so," Gianfranco said.

  Eduardo gave him a crooked smile. "Grazie. It's supposed to be interesting. If it weren't, we wouldn't have had any customers, and we wouldn't have been able to change any minds at all."

  "You changed mine, that's for sure." Gianfranco looked down at the game board, and at his railroad route marked out in erasable crayon. "This is my only chance to be a capitalist. I'm not even an elevator repairman."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Eduardo asked.

  "You should have heard those guys-Rocco and whoever the other one was-go on," Gianfranco said. "They were in it for the money, nothing else but. If racing baby buggies paid better, they'd do that instead. You could tell. I even called them capitalists, and they didn't get mad."

  "Really?" Eduardo said.

  "Si." Gianfranco crossed his heart to show he was telling the truth. There was one of the gestures that hung on to show Italian society was less godless than the government said and wished it was.

  "Who exactly were these people? Rocco and his pal, you say?" Eduardo seemed more interested than Gianfranco had thought he would.

  "What do you mean, who? They were a couple of repairmen, that's all." like a lot of people in the so-called workers' paradise, Gianfranco looked down his nose at men and women who really did work with their hands. He didn't know he did, and he would have denied it had anyone called him on it, but it was true.

  Eduardo had other things on his mind. "Is there any way to find out exactly who they were? It could be important. They might be… friends of mine."

  That took a moment to sink in. When it did, Gianfranco blinked. "You mean, people from your home timeline?"

  198 Harry Turtledove

  "I don't know," Eduardo said. "I sure would like to, though." He made a fist, then brought it down gently on the table by the game board. Gianfranco got the idea that he would rather have banged it down as hard as he could. "Maybe they were looking for me. If they were, if they came to the right building and didn't find me… It makes you want to scream, you know?"

  "Plenty of people here like money, too, you know," Gianfranco said.

  "Oh, sure. Maybe I'm building castles in the air, just because I want to so much." Now Eduardo's smile was sheepish. "But I can hope, can't I? And nobody ever said the authorities closed down our shop in San Marino."

  "Ah, so that's where it is. You never told me before," Gianfranco said.

  San Marino, southeast of Milan near Rimini on the Adriatic coast, covered only a few square kilometers. It was entirely surrounded by Italy. But it was an independent country, and had been for more than 1,500 years. It was also, Gianfranco realized, a good place for a shop like The Gladiator. Things were looser in San Marino than in Italy. The government was Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist, of course, but it wasn't very Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. San Marino depended on vacationers and tourists. It took money, and the importance of money, more seriously than Italy did.

  "That's where it is, all right," Eduardo agreed. "How do I go about finding out who these repairmen were?"

  Gianfranco gaped. "/ don't know." He'd never had to worry about anything like that before.

  "They didn't just fall out of the sky," Eduardo said patiently. "Somebody in this building would have hired them, right? Maybe the manager, maybe the janitor, but somebody. Whoever it is, he'll know their firm, won't he?"

  "I guess so." Gianfranco knew he sounded vague. "Or would somebody in the city government have sent them out when our turn finally came up?"

  Eduardo said a couple of things that should have set fire to the table. Somehow, they didn't. "It could be," he said when he calmed down a little. "Things work like that here, heaven knows. D'you think your father could find out for me if it is? He's got the connections to do it if anybody does."

  "Well, yeah," Gianfranco said. "But why do I tell him that you want to know? Or even that I want to know, if you don't w
ant him knowing you do?"

  Some of the things Eduardo said this time made what had come out before sound like love poetry by comparison. He needed longer to get control of his temper. At last, he said, "Well, you're right. I wish you weren't, but you are. You don't want to become an apprentice elevator repairman all of a sudden, eh?"

  "No," Gianfranco said with such dignity as he could muster. Sure enough, he didn't think much of working with his hands. He was an apparatchik's son, all right.

  "Too bad." Eduardo sounded as if he meant it. But he also had some of his usual sarcastic edge back. Before, he'd been too upset for sarcasm. He went on, "You'd sure make things simpler if you did."

  "Simpler for you, maybe," Gianfranco said.

  "Si, simpler for me." Eduardo spread his hands. "Whenever somebody says something like that, what else is he going to mean?" Yes, he was closer to his normal self.

  "Sorry," Gianfranco said. "But if f start asking too many weird questions, my father isn't the only one who'll wonder

  200 Harry Turtledove

  why. Before too long, some informer or other will get word to the Security Police. Then they'll start asking questions of their own."

  "Do you know who's likely to be an informer?" Eduardo asked.

  "I can guess some people who may be," Gianfranco answered. "Some, though, nobody'd guess in a million years. That's how things work."

  How many people talked to the Security Police? No civilian knew for sure. Gianfranco would have bet no one official at the Security Police had the number at his fingertips. Handlers dealt with informers. But there were millions of them-he was sure of that. Brothers spied on sisters. Wives spied on husbands. Bosses informed on their workers-and the other way round. How huge were the archives with all those accusations, all those denunciations? Wouldn't they fill up the whole country sooner or later? Probably sooner, he thought.

  Eduardo sighed. "All right. Do what you can without sticking your neck out. If you can find out, wonderful. If you can't…" He sighed again, louder. "If you can't, maybe it's time to go to San Marino."

  "It's a nice place. People say so, anyway-I've been to Rimini, but never there," Gianfranco said.

  "I wouldn't be going to sightsee," Eduardo reminded him.

  Gianfranco nodded. He understood that. And if Eduardo found what he was looking for, he would disappear. Gianfranco understood that, too. And he himself would stay stuck in this dull old world after Eduardo had given him a glimpse-no, half a glimpse-of something so much better. Where was the justice in that?

  Ten

  The chief janitor of the apartment building was a large, impressive man named Marcantonio Moretti. He scratched his bushy, Stalin-style mustache as he nodded to Annarita. "Yes, it is very good to have the elevator running again," he said.

  "And it's so smooth! Just like a dream!" Annarita wasn't in the drama society at Hoxha Polytechnic, but she knew how to lay it on with a trowel.

  "Grazie" Comrade Moretti said, as if he'd done the work himself. He hadn't, of course. He didn't do much work of any sort. He was the chief janitor because his brother-in-law was a medium-important official in Milan 's Bureau of City Maintenance. Under Communism, capitalism, or any old kind of ism at all, whom you knew mattered at least as much as what you could actually do.

  "Who were the repairmen who did the job? They ought to get commendations for the Stakhanovite work they did," Annarita said. If people really worked like Stakhanovites or anything close to it, the elevator would have got fixed as soon as it broke down. Maybe it wouldn't have broken down in the first place. But how long had they had to wait? Much, much, too long- Annarita knew that.

  "Well, I don't exactly remember," Moretti said instead of saying he had no idea, though that had to be just as true.

  "I'd really like to find out," Annarita said.

  Comrade Moretti scratched his mustache again. Had Gian-franco said something like that, the chief janitor would have run him out of his office. Annarita was much prettier than Gianfranco. That shouldn't have had anything to do with anything, which wasn't the same as saying it didn't.

  "Hey, Ernesto!" Moretti yelled.

  "What's up?" Ernesto Albosta called from the back room. A moment later, the assistant janitor came out. He wasn't impressive. He was short and skinny and slouchy and had crooked teeth. He wore ratty overalls and a cap pulled down low on his forehead. But Moretti was only the front man for the housekeeping staff. If you needed something fixed, Albosta was the one to see. If you needed to find something out, Albosta was the one to ask.

  "Who were the guys who did the elevator?" Moretti asked.

  "I don't know where the devil they found 'em," Albosta answered. "They're not even a Milanese outfit. The fix was in somewhere-you can bet on that."

  "So where are they from, then? Bergamo? Como? Pia-cenza?" Moretli named three cities not far away.

  But Ernesto Albosta shook his head each time. "Farther off than that. I think Rimini. Yeah, that's right-they're called By the Arch Repairs, from the Roman one in the middle of town there." He spread his hands. "How's an outfit from over by the Adriatic supposed to get work here? Somebody knows where the bodies are buried, all right."

  "Sounds like it," Morelti agreed. "Now I'm going to wonder if we've got to worry about the elevator dying on us in two weeks. If it does, I guarantee you we'll never see those worthless bums again."

  "Got that right," /Ubosta said, and slouched away scratching himself.

  Marcantonio Moretti nodded to Annarita. "Now you know," he said, as if he'd known himself.

  "Yes. Thank you." Annarita got out of his office as fast as she could while staying polite.

  Now she knew-but she wondered what she knew. She couldn't remember whether the repair truck had plates from Italy or San Marino. In detective stories, people always noticed stuff like that. She'd paid no attention, though.

  Still, there was a fair chance those had been Eduardo's friends looking for him. They hadn't found him. Were they still in Milan, checking other places where he might be? Or had they given up and gone away? She couldn't begin to guess.

  Neither could Eduardo when she told him what she'd learned. "That's… too bad," he said. She got the idea he'd clamped down on something stronger. He sighed. "I have to go to San Marino, then, and hope they're not watching the border."

  "My family and the Mazzillis are going to Rimini on vacation in a couple of weeks," Annarita said. " San Marino would be easier as a day trip from there than it would going straight from Milan."

  "Is Rimini here full of Germans and Scandinavians trying to get sunburn and skin cancer on the beach?" Eduardo asked.

  "Si. Some of them hardly wear any clothes at all." Annarita sniffed. "You can probably have a good time even if you don't get up to San Marino."

  "Nothing wrong with looking. When you do more than look, that's when life gets complicated," Eduardo said. "Maybe you and Gianfranco can come up to San Marino with me. What could look more innocent than a guy with his cousin and her boyfriend?"

  What could give me better cover? he meant. Annarita understood that. She didn't mind. What her parents would think… was bound to be a different story. Of course, if she didn't tell them ahead of time, they wouldn't have a chance to find reasons to say no.

  Italy slowed to a crawl in August. It didn't get as hot in Milan as it did farther south, but it was muggier here. Everybody who was anybody got out of town for a while. Doing business often took time-Gianfranco thought about the elevator in his building. Trying to do business in August was a fool's errand.

  "It will be good to get to the beach," his father said as they packed for vacation.

  "If we can get to the beach," his mother said darkly. "All those foreigners there in as little as the law allows…"

  "Well, we've got the hotel reservations. The place is only a couple of blocks from the sand," his father said. "It's where we stayed last year. You liked it then, Bella."

  "I wasn't talking about the hotel," Gianfranco's mother
said.

  Gianfranco kept his mouth shut. Anything he said in a discussion like this could and would be used against him. If the swim trunks he packed were his skimpiest pair, then they were, that was all. He didn't have to mention it.

  "Have a good trip," Ernesto Albosta said as Gianfranco's family and the Crosettis brought their bags down to the lobby. The elevator made that much easier. Albosta sounded mournful, and no wonder. He was stuck in town in August. Marcanto-nio Moretti, by contrast, was on holiday somewhere a little north of Rome.

  The Crosettis drove a little Fiat. Their bags barely fit into the trunk. They and Cousin Silvio barely fit into the car. Gian-franco's father had a Mercedes. Gianfranco had always taken that for granted. His father had waited a long time to get the car. Nobody, not even a Communist Party official, could avoid that. But when he got it, he got the best.

  On the autostrada, the Mercedes soon left the Fiat behind. The highway ran east and a little south, past towns and farms that had been there since time out of mind. Whizzing past those brick buildings in the countryside, Gianfranco wondered how much history they'd seen. A century and a half earlier, Germans and Americans would have fought over them. A century and a half before that, they might have watched Napoleon's army march past. Before that… Well, how old were they? He had no idea.

  When he asked his father, he got a shrug for an answer. "Annarita might know about stuff like that," his father said. "Me, I don't much care. I'm a practical man, I am."

  "If you want to be practical, keep your eyes on the road," his mother said.

  "Haven't hit anything yet, have I?"

  "Sometimes I think you're trying to."

  When they started going on like that, Gianfranco stopped listening. He'd heard it too many times before. They rolled along the autostrada, and then stopped rolling and started crawling. Gianfranco's father said several things that made his mother cluck. "It doesn't count if you're in the car," his father said defensively.