The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  "Oh? Since when?" His mother didn't believe a word of it.

  "It's an old rule I just made up," his father said. His mother snorted.

  At last, they got past the slowdown. Three small cars were scrap metal, and a truck had some good-sized dents. Everybody put the pedal to the metal on the autostrada. When accidents happened, they were often bad ones. "I hope the people are all right," Gianfranco's mother said. He hoped so, too, but he wouldn't have bet on it.

  A little past Bologna, his father pulled off the road for a rest stop: snacks, espresso, and a pause to use the bathrooms. The Mazzillis were just getting into their car when the Crosettis pulled into the same parking lot. "Fancy meeting you here!" Gianfranco called, waving.

  "That was a nasty wreck," Annarita's father answered. "See you at the hotel."

  "You sure will." Gianfranco's father unlocked the car. Anybody who lived in a big city learned to lock it all the time. Otherwise, enterprising people took things according to their abilities and their needs. The Mazzillis got in and got back on the highway.

  A Roman triumphal arch sat right in the middle of Rimini 's main square. Somewhere not far away would be that repair shop. Cars went under the arch as if it were built as an overpass. Italy had a long, long past. Every so often, it stuck out an elbow and poked the present. South of Rome, there were still stretches of the Appian Way with the paving Roman legionaries had marched on. It must have been easier on their feet than it was on the springs of modern cars and trucks.

  Finding a place to park in a strange town was always an adventure. At last, Gianfranco's father managed. It was only a block and a half from the hotel, so he felt entitled to be proud of himself. Everybody was in a good mood carrying luggage to the lobby.

  Gianfranco's father gave their name there. The clerk looked down his nose at them and said, "Do I have a record of your reservation? I don't see you here. I have Crosettis from Milan, but no Mazzillis."

  Gianfranco gulped. His mother gasped. His father said, "Do you know who I am? I'm the second Party secretary in the Milanese Bureau of Records. Now let me talk to your manager right this minute. Is he a Party member?"

  That wasn't likely. The clerk, looking worried now instead of enjoying himself, shook his head. "No, uh, Comrade. Hold on. I'll get him."

  As if by magic, the manager found the "missing" reservation. The Mazzillis went to their room. "He wanted to squeeze money out of us," Gianfranco's father said as soon as the door closed behind them. "Well, he picked the wrong people to annoy, he did. Gianfranco, go back to the lobby and wait for the Crosettis. Don't let him play games with them."

  "But he said he already had their reservation," his mother said.

  "He said that to us," his father answered. "He'll probably tell them he has ours but not theirs. Or he will unless Gianfranco's there to give him the lie."

  When Gianfranco got to the lobby, the clerk was saying he had no reservation for a big blond man who spoke Italian with a guttural accent. "But this is an outrage!" the blond man spluttered. "Most inefficient!"

  A few minutes earlier, Gianfranco would have thought so, too. Now he decided the hotel was very efficient-at gouging its customers. The blond man demanded to see the manager, too. He didn't have the clout Gianfranco's father did. He also didn't seem to realize the manager expected to get paid off. At last, the manager proposed a fee for fixing the reservation. Fuming, the blond man paid.

  Gianfranco read soccer scores and game reports in a newspaper. He waited for about twenty minutes before the Crosettis came in. Then he walked over to them and started chatting. They had no trouble with their reservation. The clerk gave him a dirty look. He smiled back as if he couldn't imagine why.

  "This ought to be fun," Eduardo said.

  "Are you talking about the beach or the mountains?" Annarita's father asked.

  "Oh, the beach," Eduardo answered. San Marino lay in the mountains. Gianfranco could see how that wouldn't be fun for the man from another world. It would be work-or it might be disaster, if the authorities had closed down the other shop his people ran here.

  What would he do then? What could he do then? Settle down here and try to stay out of the Security Police's way? Hope his people would come back and look for him? Gianfranco didn't see what other choice he had. He would probably feel like a sailor shipwrecked on some distant shore who knew he would never see home again.

  But those repairmen, Rocco and his pal, came from around here, too. Maybe they also came from Eduardo's world. And maybe they didn't. If the other shop was shut, Eduardo would have to find out.

  "Yes, the beach will be nice," Dr. Crosetti said. "Remember, use plenty of sunscreen. Some people think a nice tan is worth anything, but you pay for it down the road. Not just skin cancer, but a hide like a rhino's, too."

  Gianfranco and Annarita and Eduardo all looked at one another. It wasn't that her father was wrong. From everything Gianfranco had ever heard, Dr. Crosetti was right. Still… A doctor could take a lot of fun out of a vacation.

  Annarita didn't think the beach was so nice. The competition was too fierce. The tall, fair girls from the north fascinated Italian men. Blondes had intrigued Mediterranean men since Greek and Roman days, and the tradition lived on. And the girls from Germany and Scandinavia flaunted what they had. Their suits, what there was of them, made Annarita's seem dowdy by comparison.

  They didn't worry about skin cancer, either. Some of them were turning brown. Some were turning golden. Some were just turning red, the red of a roast before it went into the oven. They didn't care. They laughed about it. "So good to see the sun," one of them said in throaty Italian. The sun was sure seeing- and baking-a lot of her.

  Most of them lay on their towels or strolled along the sand. A few went into the Adriatic. It was warm-or warm enough- in August, though it would cool down once summer ended. It wasn't like Hawaii or even North Africa, where you could swim the year around.

  When Annarita remarked on that, her father nodded and looked east, towards Albania. "No, but it stays hot all the time on the far side of the water," he said.

  Albania was not a happy place. As far as Annarita could tell, it had seldom been a happy place. Enver Hoxha, after whom her school was named, had backed China against the USSR after Stalin died. When the Soviet Union won the Cold War, it paid Albania back by pretending the sorry little country wasn't there. No aid went in. Nothing but trouble came out.

  These days, the government in Tirane was pro-Moscow. The hills seethed with pro-Chinese guerrillas, and with bandits who didn't like anybody further removed than their own first cousins. Several fraternal Socialist countries, Italy among them, had soldiers in Albania trying to put down the bandits and the rebels. They weren't having much luck.

  A couple of tall blond men walked by, talking in a language full of consonants and flat vowels. Norwegian? Swedish? An-narita couldn't tell. Big blond men did nothing for her. From what she could see, the northern men didn't find small, dark women especially wonderful, either. Oh, well.

  "Dio raior Eduardo pointed. "A cormorant just flew by."

  "He's fishing," Annarita's father said. "He must have some luck around here, or he would have starved by now."

  "Well, I expect I'll go fishing pretty soon, too," Eduardo said. "Fishing for answers, I mean."

  "I'd rather see the mountains than the beach," Annarita said. She liked the idea of the sea, not least because she lived hundreds of kilometers away from the real thing. The idea of the sea in her mind, though, didn't include a beach packed with scantily clad foreigners.

  Her father sighed. "I wish Cousin Silvio were going up to San Marino by himself," he said. He and her mother knew. They weren't happy, but they weren't-quite-saying no.

  "If we can help him get there without any trouble, we should," Annarita said.

  "I'm not thinking about what happens if he gets there without any trouble," her father said. "I'm thinking about what happens if there is some. You have no idea what being a zek is like. And it's w
orse for a woman, believe me."

  "Whatever happens, it won't land on Annarita and Gian-franco," Eduardo said. "I'll tell the authorities they didn't know anything about it."

  "If something goes wrong, what happens after that will be up to the gentlemen in the jackboots. You won't have anything to say about it," Dr. Crosetti retorted. But he still didn't tell Annarita she couldn't go.

  Maybe he got distracted. A blond girl with a tiny suit and a dancer's arched-back, catlike strut certainly seemed to distract Eduardo. Annarita's father also noticed her. He would have had to be blind, or more likely dead, not to. Most of the time, Annarita would have despised her on sight. But if she helped keep the argument from taking off, maybe she wasn't so bad after all.

  Gianfranco didn't have much legroom in the back of the Croset-tis' Fiat. He'd probably feel folded up like an accordion by the time they got to San Marino. He also wished Annarita would have sat back here with him, not in front with Eduardo. The other way did look more natural, but he wished she were back here anyhow.

  "We ready?" Eduardo asked. When nobody told him no, he put the car in gear and drove off toward the mountain republic.

  He shifted gears clumsily. "You're used to an automatic transmission, aren't you?" Gianfranco said.

  "Does it show that much?" Eduardo said. Again, nobody told him no. He sighed. "I'm afraid 1 am. Not many stick shifts in the home timeline. Hardly any, in fact."

  The Mazzillis' Mercedes had an automatic. That made it special here. Everything in the home timeline seemed better than the way the Italian People's Republic did the same thing.

  "Watch out for the traffic lights," Annarita warned.

  Eduardo laughed. "Don't worry about that. I know all about red lights and green lights-we've got plenty of them back home."

  He stopped when he was supposed to. Once or twice, he stopped when a local would have charged on through. Maybe he didn't want to take any chances. Or maybe they just didn't have any guts in the home timeline. Gianfranco almost got on him about it, but thought better at the last moment.

  "Now we see what's what, or some of what's what," Eduardo said as they neared the border crossing. Italians needed only their internal passports to enter San Marino. It wasn't foreign enough to require the other kind. Approval to travel to real foreign countries was harder to come by.

  "Papers." The guard on duty sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he was. He sure seemed to be. He glanced at the three internal passports, stamped them, and handed them back. "Go on. Enjoy your stay."

  "Grazie, Comrade," Eduardo said politely. The guard shrugged and waved him forward.

  He didn't just go forward. He went up. The city of San Marino sat at the top of a mountain. One side was a sheer drop of most of a kilometer. The other side was only very steep. The fortress at the heart of the town had never fallen. Gianfranco could see why not.

  With so many ups and downs, where where you supposed to find a flat place, or even a fairly flat place, to park your car? That, though, the people who ran San Marino had taken care of. There was an enormous parking lot near the bottom of the city. It was crowded when Eduardo drove into it, but not impossibly crowded.

  "Whew!" he said when he turned the key and the motor died. "To drive a stick in a country like this, you need one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake, and one foot on the clutch."

  Gianfranco thought about a tripod man. "Your seat wouldn't be very comfortable then," he said.

  "Mm, no, I suppose not," Eduardo agreed.

  "What's San Marino like in the, uh, home timeline?" Annarita asked. "Have you been there? Been here? However you say it?"

  "Yes, I've been here," Eduardo answered. "It doesn't look a whole lot different. Most of the buildings are old enough to go back before the breakpoint, so they're pretty much the same. This lot isn't there, though."

  "In that case, where do people park?" Gianfranco asked as they got out of the Fiat.

  Eduardo locked the car. "Everywhere."

  Annarita found a different question: "Why isn't this parking lot there?"

  Eduardo looked around. Nobody stood close by. There probably wouldn't be any microphones hidden in a place like this. You'd have to wait forever before you heard anything good. He nodded to himself and said, "In the home timeline, they didn't have who knows how many zeks to use up carving a big flat lot out of the mountainside."

  "You think that's how they did it here?" Gianfranco asked.

  "I know that's how they did it here." Eduardo pointed back toward the entrance to the lot. "There's a little sign over there that says, This lot built with the help of the Italian Department of Corrective Labor."

  "Oh." Gianfranco nodded. "I didn't see that." Corrective Labor meant zeks, all right. Instead of using bulldozers and dynamite, you gave the political prisoners picks and shovels and turned them loose. If you felt especially mean, you also gave them impossible work norms. Then you punished them for not meeting those norms. The Russians and the Chinese went through zeks by the million. Italy was more economical, but even so…

  "Come on." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a stairway. "Let's go."

  Gianfranco's shoes crunched on the gravel of the parking lot. He felt as if he were walking on dead men's bones. And maybe he was.

  Annarita quickly found there were two ways to get around in San Marino. Both had drawbacks. The streets didn't go straight up the mountainside. They climbed gently, going sideways, then doubled back and went sideways in the other direction. If you followed them, you could get where you were going, but you'd take a while.

  If you wanted a more direct route, you could climb stairways between levels. There were lots of them. They were tall and steep and tiring. "This is the first time I wish the repairmen hadn't fixed the elevator," she said as she trudged up and up and up. "I've got out of practice."

  "If you're going anywhere here, it helps if you're part mountain goat," Gianfranco said.

  "When mountain goats stop, though, other goats don't try to sell them stuff," Eduardo said. "Or I don't think they do, anyway."

  You couldn't say that about the people of San Marino. Yes, it was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state. Annarita didn't think there was a country in the world that wasn't-except the Vatican, which was even smaller than San Marino. But it winked at capitalism's sins.

  Shops and hotels filled the gray stone buildings that lined the streets. Some of the shops sold cheap glass trinkets-oetopi with staring eyes, yellow lions, dragons. Some sold postage stamps, new and old. San Marino had been printing fancy stamps for collectors since the early days of the twentieth century. Some sold reproductions of antiquities, others the real thing. You could buy recordings of musicians from all over Europe, a lot of them bootlegs the local authorities pretended not to notice. You could buy… anything you had the money for. If you got hungry or thirsty while shopping, you could take care of that, too.

  Annarita could see why Eduardo's people had put a shop here. It stood out much less than The Gladiator did even in a busy arcade like the Galleria del Popolo. "What's the name of your place here?" Annarita asked.

  "The Triple Six," he answered. That was the best throw you could make in most of the games the shops sold.

  "Where is it?" Gianfranco asked, panting a little. Yes, the stairs here put the ones in the apartment building to shame.

  "I've never been here before, but I know it's up near the top." Eduardo pointed up toward the castle that crowned the mountain. Gianfranco didn't quite groan, but his face looked mutinous. An-narita's legs felt mutinous.

  "Maybe we could stop for a little while before we get there," Gianfranco said.

  "Well, maybe we could." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a little shop that sold cold drinks and snacks. "How about a Fanta? You'll move faster with some sugar in you."

  "Now you're talking!" Gianfranco said. Annarita nodded.

  You didn't sit down inside. Instead, you stood at tall tables. No doubt that helped move people in and out and made more mon
ey for the fellow in the white apron who served up the sodas. It wasn't the kind of place that had, or wanted, regulars.

  In keeping with San Marino 's eagerness to draw tourists, it dressed its policemen in comic-opera uniforms. Three of them marched past the snack shop. Several people photographed the procession. "They look like a bunch of clowns," Gianfranco said.

  Eduardo shook his head. "They dress like a bunch of clowns. It's not the same thing. Look at their guns. Look at their faces."

  He had a point, Annarita decided. No matter what they wore, the policemen carried assault rifles like the ones the Italian Army used: great-grandchildren of the classic AK-47. And, under their silly hats, the men looked tough and capable. Unless you were a fool or you had a death wish, you wouldn't want them angry at you.

  They paused, then moved towards a man who lurched along the sidewalk. When they held out their hands for his papers- a request understood from San Marino to San Francisco -he didn't hand them over. Instead, he shouted a mouthful of Slavic consonants at them.

  "Ooh-he's a Russian," Gianfranco said softly. Even the police had to be careful with citizens of the strongest country in the world.

  "He looks like one," Annarita said. And he did: his broad face was very fair, and he wore clothes that didn't fit very well and weren't very stylish. Russians relied on muscle. Most of them didn't worry about style.

  "You wouldn't see many Italians drunk this early in the morning," Eduardo said, which was also true. Lots of people joked about the way Russians drank. Russians joked about it themselves, which didn't stop them from doing it.

  The policemen stayed polite, but they didn't go away. One of them said something. The Russian tourist shook his head. 'Wye kulturny!" he shouted. Annarita winced. She wondered if the policemen knew that uncultured was a much worse insult in Russian than it would have been in Italian. But it turned out not to matter-the tourist knocked one of their hats to the ground and stomped on it.