The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  A second later, he was on the ground himself. The Sam-marinese policemen gave him a thorough thumping, then yanked him upright and started to haul him away. The one who'd lost his hat picked it up, carefully pushed out the dent the Russian gave it, and set it back on his head at the right jaunty angle.

  "You idiots, you can't do this to me!" the tourist shouted in Russian. None of the local policemen showed any sign of following him. She wondered if she ought to translate, but decided that would only make matters worse. A moment later, as if to prove her right, the tourist yelled the same thing in bad Italian.

  "Idiots, are we?" said the policeman whose hat the Russian had knocked off. "See how stupid you think this is." He punched the tourist in the nose. By the drunk man's howl, he thought it smarted.

  "Bozhemoi!" he shouted, and snuffled, because blood was running down his face. Then he remembered to use Italian: "When the Soviet consul hears about this, all you bums will need new jobs-if they don't send you to a gulag in Siberia to teach you not to mess around with your betters."

  A different policeman punched him this time. "Shut up," he said coldly. "We jug drunk Russians about three times a day. If we wanted to waste our time on you, we could send you to one of our camps for assaulting a police officer. Keep running your mouth and you'll talk us into it."

  The tourist said something that had to be mat'. Annarita didn't follow all of it. What she could understand made her ears heat up. Then the Russian went back to Italian: "You donkeys don't know who 1 am. You don't know what I am. I am a colonel in the Committee for State Security. You're fighting out of your weight."

  Annarita gulped. The KGB was the outfit that taught the Security Police everything they knew. But the Security Police had the power of the Italian government behind them. The KGB had the power of the Soviet Union behind it. Lots of people said the KGB wax the real power in the Soviet Union. The feared and fearsome outfil could without a doubt make policemen in San Marino very unhappy if it wanted to.

  "If you are-if you aren't just a lying Russian lush-you're a disgrace to your service," one of the policemen retorted. "Come down to the station, and we'll find out what you are. And you'll find out you can't mess with police officers no matter what kind of big cheese you think you are."

  They dragged him away. "He'll get off," Gianfranco said gloomily. "Russians always do."

  "He shouldn't. He was drunk and disorderly," Annarita said. "But you're right-he is a Russian. And if he does belong to the KGB, they'll pull strings for him."

  "They shouldn't be able to do things like that." Gianfranco looked at Eduardo. Plainly, he was waiting for Eduardo to tell him things like that never happened in the home timeline.

  Eduardo sighed instead. "You'll find people with influence wherever you go," he said. "Whether that has to do with money or politics or power really doesn't matter. It's the influence that counts."

  "Blat," Annarita said. The Russian slang meant nothing to Gianfranco. "It means influence," she explained.

  Eduardo nodded, then asked, "You guys done?" Gianfranco was. Annarita quickly finished her soda. Eduardo straightened up and took his elbows off the table. "Come on, then. Let's do some more mountain climbing."

  He wasn't kidding. Up they went. It wasn't like climbing stairs in an apartment building. It was more like climbing them in a skyscraper. Annarita knew her legs would start feeling it soon. She laughed. Why was she kidding herself? Her legs already felt it.

  At last, after what seemed like a very long time, they made it to the top of the mountain. The street there led to the castle and, signs promised, the museum inside. "Well, I'm ready for another Fanta," Gianfranco said. Eduardo gave him a look. "Just kidding," he added hastily.

  Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. Annarita wasn't sure. Eduardo didn't push it. They ambled along the street, looking at the shops like any other tourists. If you wanted to take home a plaster castle to remember San Marino by, this was the place to get one-or silver jewelry, or clothes, or anything else you happened to crave. They might not call it capitalism here, but that was what it amounted to.

  And there was a sign with three dice on it, each showing a six. People were going in and out of that shop, the same as they were with the ones to either side of it. "It's open!" Gianfranco said joyfully.

  Annarita thought Eduardo should have looked delighted. He looked worried instead. "Si," he said in a low voice. "It's open. Let's walk by and get a better look."

  It looked just like The Gladiator. The same games and books and military models were on display in the front window. Most of the people going in were guys between Gianfranco's age and Eduardo's. Most of them had the same look. Annarita needed a moment to put her finger on it, but she did. None of them would have been in the popular crowd at school. They wore their clothes carelessly. Their hair needed combing. She would have bet most of them got good grades-and the ones who didn't weren't dumb. They just didn't care about school. Gianfranco was like that, or had been till he got interested.

  "You ought to go in and say hello to your friends," he said now.

  "I suppose." Eduardo sounded worried, too. "Why don't you kids find another shop to go into? If something's wrong and they nab me, with luck they won't grab you, too. You can call your folks down in Rimini, and they'll come get you."

  They would have to come in the Mazzillis' car. Gianfranco's father wouldn't be happy about that. Annarita didn't suppose she could blame him. He didn't know Cousin Silvio was a wanted criminal.

  She wanted to look at a dress shop while Eduardo went into Three Sixes, but she knew Gianfranco wouldn't be caught dead in there. She chose a record shop instead. Some of the music it sold you could find anywhere. Some, though, only circulated underground most places. Governments had come down hard on what they called degenerate noise for almost a century and a half. People still made it, though, and sold it and listened to it. It was almost as subversive as the stuff The Gladiator sold.

  Most places, it got sold under the counter, and played by people who trusted their friends not to inform on them. Here, it was right out in the open where anybody could see it and buy it. Elvis, the Beatles, the Doors, Nirvana-classics, if you liked that kind of thing. There were newer groups, too: the Bombardiers, Counterrevolution, Burn This Record.

  "Wow!" Cianfranco stared. "We ought to buy some of this stuff. When's the next time we'll see so much together like this?"

  "Probably not a good idea right now," Annarita said.

  "What? Why not?" Gianfranco might have thought she was crazy.

  "If our friend ends up getting in trouble, do you want to be carrying anything that could land you in trouble if they snag you?" She didn't need to explain who they were. In the Italian People's Republic, as in every fraternal Communist state around the world, there was always a they.

  "Oh," Gianfranco said in a small voice. "Well, I'm afraid that makes sense. I wish it didn't, but it does."

  "Next time we're here, maybe," Annarita said. If they hadn't arrested the shopkeeper by then. Or if he wasn't working for the Security Police, trapping unreliables. You never could tell.

  "When will that be?" Gianfranco challenged.

  "Who knows? A year? Two years?" She shrugged. "Probably no longer than that. Rimini 's a nice place to go on holiday, and San Marino 's easy to get to from there." She began to say more, but then stopped. "Look! Here's, uh, Cousin Silvio."

  They both hurried out of the record shop. One look at his face said everything that needed saying. "It's no good?" Gianfranco asked, just to be sure.

  "No. It's a trap. Those have to be the Security Police in there," Eduardo said, walking quickly toward the closest stairway. "The place is a snare now, a lure. I didn't expect to recognize anybody in it, but the guy behind the counter didn't know what 1 was talking about when I said something was as rotten as '86."

  "I don't, either," Annarita told him.

  "In the home timeline, we were playing Vietnam in the World Cup finals in 2086. The ref missed the most obviou
s offside in the world, Vietnam scored, and we lost 2-1." Eduardo sounded furious as he explained. "We got robbed, right there in broad daylight. No Italian from my world doesn't know about that. This fellow didn't have a clue, so he's from here, not there. I hope the people from the home timeline got away, that's all."

  Eleven

  Gianfranco was taller than Eduardo, and had longer legs. But he needed to hustle to keep up with the man from another world as they hurried toward the stairs that led down to the Crosettis' Fiat. "What are you going to do now?" he asked, breathing hard.

  "I don't know. I just don't know," Eduardo answered.

  "Those maybe-capitalist repairmen?" Annarita suggested. Gianfranco had the same thought at the same time, but she got it out first. It would never do him any good now.

  "I suppose so." Eduardo sounded anything but thrilled. "They're probably from the Security Police, too. Heaven help the poor fools who go into Three Sixes. Next thing they know, they'll end up in camps wondering what the devil happened."

  "And they're the people Italy really needs!" Gianfranco exclaimed.

  "Some of them are, maybe," Eduardo said. "But some of the people Italy needs are the ones who'll stay away from a place like that after the Security Police shut down two others. They'll think something's fishy about this one."

  "They'd better," Annarita said. "When the authorities closed down The Gladiator and the shop in Rome, it was all over the news. If you weren't paying attention, you had to be dead."

  "Or stupid. Stupid in a particular way," Eduardo said. "Politically stupid."

  "Ah," Gianfranco said. Lots of the people who'd been regulars at The Gladiator fit that bill. He probably had himself, and his father was in politics up to his eyebrows. Most people like that were harmless. Even the Security Police recognized as much. But those people left themselves open for trouble when crackdowns came-and crackdowns always came. Everybody had a file. If your file said you went into places where counterrevolutionary sympathizers gathered, that could be all the excuse the authorities needed.

  Or maybe they wouldn't need any excuse at all. If they wanted to turn you into a zek, they could turn you into a zek. Who'd stop them?

  Nobody. That was the trouble right there.

  Going down all those flights of stairs was a lot easier than climbing them had been. When Gianfranco and Annarita and Eduardo got back to the car, the man from another world pulled out his pocket computer. He turned it on, checked something, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  "What is it?" Gianfranco asked.

  "They haven't put any tracers in here," Eduardo answered. "That's good, anyhow. You live in a place like this for a while, you start thinking everybody's after you all the time. Instead, it's only some of the people some of the time. Happy day."

  Usually, Gianfranco took the possibility of being spied on for granted. Why not? He couldn't do anything about it. Nobody could. And chances were that someone he knew, someone he liked and trusted, sent the Security Police reports about him.

  You couldn't guess who all the informers were. If you knew, you'd act different around them, and then what would their reports be worth?

  Eduardo kept looking around nervously while he was using the marvelous gadget from the home timeline. "Relax," An-narita told him.

  He looked at her as if he thought she'd gone round the bend. Gianfranco knew he did. "I can't relax," Eduardo said. "What if somebody sees me with this thing?"

  "What if somebody does?" Annarita returned. "He'll think it's something fancy that belongs to the Security Police."

  Eduardo blinked, then started to laugh. "Maybe you've got something there."

  Gianfranco thought Annarita was likely to be right. Ordinary people didn't think about other worlds. They thought about secrets in this one-and they had reason to. Even so, he said, "What if somebody from the Security Police sees him?"

  "He'll think Cousin Silvio's in military intelligence, or a Russian or a German." Annarita had all the answers.

  She was also liable to be right there. The Security Police looked for secrets within secrets, sure. But they weren't equipped to understand a secret that came from outside this whole world. "They don't know the shops are from the home timeline, do they?" Gianfranco asked as Eduardo started the Fiat.

  "Not unless they caught somebody and tortured it out of him," Eduardo said, backing the car out of its space. "I don't think they did. Otherwise, they'd know about me. No, I think everybody else got back to the home timeline just fine."

  "What kind of evidence would your people leave behind?" Annarita asked.

  "Maybe a computer, if they couldn't grab it and take it with them," Eduardo answered. "But without the right password or voiceprint, it wouldn't do the Security Police any good."

  "There wouldn't be any sign of the machine you use to go back and forth?" Gianfraneo tried to imagine what that machine would be like. He pictured something that hummed and spal sparks. It probably wasn't like that for real-he had sense enough to realize as much. It was probably quiet and efficient, even boring. But when he thought of a fancy, supersecret machine, he thought of one that belonged in the movies.

  "No." Eduardo shook his head. "Just an empty room below ground with lines painted on the floor to warn people to stand back so they don't get in the way when the transposition chamber materialized."

  "What would happen if somebody did?" Gianfranco and Annarita asked at the same time.

  "Nobody wants to find out." Eduardo shifted gears even more roughly than usual. "It would be a pretty big boom- we're sure of that much. Two things aren't supposed to be in the same place at the same time."

  How big was a pretty big boom? Would it blow up the shop? A city block? A whole city? Gianfranco almost asked, but finally decided not to. Any one of those was plenty big enough. He did ask, "You have armies and things in the home timeline, don't you?"

  "Si." Eduardo steered carefully. The road twisted and doubled back on itself as it went down to the border checkpoint. It seemed to Gianfranco that the man from another timeline spoke as carefully as he drove.

  Gianfranco persisted anyhow: "If one of your armies fought one of ours, who would win?"

  "We would." Eduardo sounded completely sure. "If everything was even, we would, I mean. We're quite a ways ahead of you when it comes to technology. But we couldn't fight a war here or anything. We'd have to try to ship everything in through a few transposition chambers, and that just wouldn't work."

  "Logistics." Gianfranco had played war games instead of Rails across Europe often enough to know the word.

  "What?" Annarita didn't.

  That gave him a chance to show off. "It's how you keep an army supplied. Being brave doesn't matter if you run out of bullets."

  "Or food," Eduardo added. "Or fuel. Or anything else you need to fight with. Fools talk about strategy. Amateurs talk about tactics. Pros talk about logistics."

  "So you're a pro, Gianfranco?" Annarita teased.

  "No, of course not," Gianfranco said.

  "But he could sound like one on TV," Eduardo said. Gianfranco and Annarita both laughed. So did Eduardo-at himself, Gianfranco thought. When Annarita made a questioning noise, the man from another world explained why: "In the home timeline, that joke is ancient-almost as old as television. Didn't occur to me it could really be funny here. But you haven't heard it before."

  "We probably have jokes like that, too," Gianfranco said.

  "You do. I heard one at The Gladiator," Eduardo said. "Every day, this guy would take a wheelbarrow full of trash past the factory guard. The guard kept searching the trash, but he never found anything. The guy finally retired. The guard said, 'Look, I know you've been stealing something all these years. Too late for me to do anything about it now. So will you tell me what it was?' And the guy looked at him and said-"

  "'Wheelbarrows!'" Gianfranco and Annarita chorused the punch line. Sure enough, that joke was old as the hills.

  "See what I mean?" Eduardo hit the brakes. "Here comes th
e checkpoint."

  "Your papers." As usual, the guard sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he looked bored as he handed over his internal passport. Eduardo's false documents had passed muster every time. Why wouldn't they now? And they did. The guard returned them with a nod. But then he said, "Let's see what's in your shopping bags."

  Now Eduardo's shoulders stiffened. He couldn't know what Gianfranco and Annarita had bought, or whether they would get in trouble because of it. "Here you are," Annarita said, and gave them to Eduardo to give to the guard.

  He looked inside each one, then nodded again and passed them back. "No subversive literature or music," he said. "Too much of that trash has been coming out of San Marino lately. But you're all right. You can go on." He touched a button in his booth. A bar swung up, clearing the road ahead for the Eiat.

  They hadn't gone more than a hundred meters before Annarita said, "See what would have happened if we'd bought those records?"

  "I said you were right back there in the shop," Gianfranco said.

  "What's this?" Eduardo asked. Annarita told him about the shop with the music by bands the authorities didn't like. He said, "The Security Police are liable to be running that place, too. Wouldn't surprise me a bit."

  "We thought of that," Annarita said. "It's one more reason we didn't buy anything there. We didn't want to take any kind of chances with you along."

  "Grazie, ragazzi," Eduardo said. "You took a big enough chance just coming with me."

  Gianfranco wanted to say it was nothing. It wasn't, though, not in the Italian People's Republic. "But that was important," Annarita said, which seemed to sum things up pretty well- better than Gianfranco could have, anyhow.

  "Grazte," Eduardo said again, and drove on down toward Rimini.

  Annarita went through the telephone book, looking for the address of the elevator repairmen. Watching her, Eduardo fidgeted. So did her mother and father. Seeing their nerves made her start to realize how big a strain sheltering Eduardo was for them. They hadn't said much about it-they still weren't saying anything-but that didn't make it any less real.