The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  "I'm not finding any Under the Arch Repairs," she said worriedly.

  "Didn't you tell me the name of the place was By the Arch?" her father asked.

  "I'm an idiot!" Annarita exclaimed, and went to the right place in the book. There it was! Her smile made Eduardo and her parents breathe easier. Yes, this would have been hard enough if he really were their cousin. By now, he'd spent enough time with them that he almost might have been. Almost. Amazing, the power one little word held.

  "It's at 27 Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution," she said.

  Her father and mother both nodded. Like her, they were used to street names like that. Eduardo made a face. "I wonder what they called it before the revolution," he said. "Whatever it was, that's probably still its name in the home timeline."

  "Is the Galleria del Popolo still the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in the home timeline?" Annarita asked.

  To her surprise, Eduardo nodded. "Si-it is."

  "Does Italy still have a king there?" she asked. She'd only read about kings in history books. If Eduardo came from a world where the country had a real one… She didn't like that idea very much.

  But he shook his head. "No-I told you that once before, remember? We've been a republic-a real one, not a people's republic-for a long time. We don't forget we used to have kings, though, and we don't pretend they were always villains."

  "What do you mean, a real republic and not a people's republic?" her father asked.

  "Secret ballots. More than one candidate for each position. Candidates from more than one party running for each position. Parties with different ideas about how to solve problems. Parties that turn over power to the other side if they lose an election," Eduardo answered.

  The more Annarita thought about that, the better she liked it. Here, the government did whatever it wanted. Every so often, voters got the chance to rubber-stamp the people who already ran things. Ballots were supposed to be secret, but everybody knew better. You needed to be brave, or a little bit crazy, to vote no. You needed to be more than a little bit crazy to run against a government candidate. Annarita didn't know what would happen to anyone who tried. Probably end up in a camp, not on the ballot.

  She tried to imagine the Communist Party giving up power after it lost. She couldn't do it. Holding on to power was what the Communist Party was all about. It said it held on for the sake of the workers and peasants. They weren't the ones who benefited, though. The apparatchiks were.

  Eduardo pulled out his pocket computer and called up a map of Rimini. A green dot of light blinked on and off close to the square with the Roman triumphal arch. He pointed. "There's the Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution, and there's number 27." His tone took all the glory away from the name of the street.

  Annarita's father got up and looked at the map. "Only a few blocks from where we are," he said. "That's lucky."

  "Well, I hope so, anyhow," Eduardo said. "I'11 find out in the morning."

  "What will you do if it turns out to be no good?" Dr. Crosetti asked. It wasn't quite How long will you stay with us then?-but it was pretty close.

  Eduardo understood that. With a sigh, he said, "I'll look for a job, and I'll look for an apartment. I don't know what else I can do in that case. I just have to try to fit in till my people come back to this alternate-if they ever do."

  He would be exiled like no one else. To leave your country behind was bad enough. How much worse would it be to lose your whole world?

  "I'm afraid that's a good answer," Annarita's father said. "If you're cast away on a distant island, you have to join the natives."

  "It's not quite like that." Eduardo was doing his best to stay polite, only his best wasn't as good as it might have been. If he'd left the quite out, things would have been better. It said he thought living in this Italy was nearly as bad as living among savages would have been. Maybe he had his reasons for feeling that way. The computer that fit in the palm of his hand argued that he did. It irked Annarita all the same.

  And when had Eduardo every irked her before? She didn't feel anything about him that should have made Gianfranco jealous. She might have, though, had Eduardo shown any sign of interest in her. She knew she was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in just about everything.

  Or she had been, anyway. Now? Long ago, some American had written, Fish and visitors smell in three days. Eduardo had been as close to a perfect guest as anyone could be. But his welcome was, if not wearing out, at least fraying at the edges. If the repairmen were just repairmen, it was time for him to strike out on his own.

  "I hope everything goes the way you want it to," Annarita said.

  "Thanks," Eduardo said. "Me, too. It's about my last chance, isn't it?"

  Maybe he'd hoped one of the Crosettis would tell him no. But none of them said a word.

  Rimini in August hardly seemed like an Italian city. Most of the people on the streets didn't look like Italians. They didn't dress like Italians. They didn't sound like Italians, either. Taverns advertised beer and aquavit, not wine and grappa. Restaurants had strange signs in their windows.

  "What's gravlax?" Gianfranco asked Eduardo.

  "Smoked salmon," Eduardo answered. "It's pretty good, actually."

  "What language is it in?" Gianfranco wondered.

  "Swedish, I think, but don't hold me to it," Eduardo said. "Ah, good-there's the arch."

  "Si," Gianfranco said. The Roman monument reminded him he was still in his own country. They wouldn't have anything like that in Hamburg or Copenhagen or Stockholm. Sure enough, several blond tourists were taking pictures of the arch. Gianfranco wondered if it commemorated a victory over their ancestors.

  Getting across the square wasn't easy or safe. Cars packed it, all of them going wherever they pleased. They ignored the shouts and whistles of the policemen who tried to tell them what to do. Men and women on bicycles and on foot threaded their way among the cars. You needed nerve to cross the square on foot. Drivers blew horns and stuck their heads out the window to yell at anyone who dared get in their way. Gianfranco had no idea why hundreds of people weren't mashed flat every day. But they didn't seem to be.

  And if you hung back, you'd never get across. Eduardo started for the far side with as much confidence-and attitude-as anyone who'd grown up here. Gianfranco stuck close to him and hoped for the best.

  Some drivers leaned on their horns whether they needed to or not. That made Gianfranco's ears ring. Eduardo knew what to do about it. He got alongside one of them and yelled, "Beeeep!" right into the open window as loud as he could.

  The man in the car almost jumped out of his skin. "You nuts or something?" he shouted at Eduardo.

  "I don't think so," Eduardo said. "Are you?" And he walked away, Gianfranco in his wake. The driver, stuck in traffic, stared after them with eyes bugging out of his head.

  "That was wonderful," Gianfranco said.

  "Some people think they can act like idiots just because they're behind the wheel," Eduardo said. "Or maybe he's a jerk all the time."

  "I wouldn't be surprised," Gianfranco said.

  "Neither would I. Some people are, that's all." Eduardo shrugged. "You do your best to get along with them. You try not to let them do too much damage to you. Not much else you can do. If you scream at them all the time, they win, because they've turned you into a jerk."

  "I never thought of it like that." Gianfranco knew more jerks at school than he wished he did. "Makes pretty good sense."

  "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." That sounded like a joke, but Eduardo didn't seem to be kidding. He stopped short to keep an Opel from running him down. "Like that moron, for instance."

  "He's got a car. We don't. He thinks that makes him the boss," Gianfranco said.

  "Well, if he hits us, he's right," Eduardo said. "Oh, they'd throw him in jail, but how much good does that do me if I'm in the hospital?"

  "Not enough," Gianfranco said.

  "Looks the same way to me."
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br />   They made it to the far side of the square without getting maimed. Gianfranco sighed with relief. The streets on the far side were crowded, but at least he and Eduardo had a sidewalk to use again. Cars hardly ever came up onto it with more than two wheels, which gave the two of them a fighting chance to dodge.

  "Here's the Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution," Gianfranco said.

  "Sure looks glorious, doesn't it?" Eduardo could pack more bite into a handful of words than anyone else Gianfranco knew-except maybe Annarita's father.

  The avenue looked anything but. Most of the buildings along it were a couple of hundred years old, dating from the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. Some of them might not have been painted in all that time. The sidewalk had cracks. The street had potholes. Big lumps of asphalt repaired some of them. Those stuck up like cobblestones, and were almost as hard on cars as the more numerous holes nobody'd bothered to fix.

  "You said it was number 27?" Gianfranco asked.

  "That's right." Eduardo nodded. "Now I have to hope everybody in the place isn't on holiday, even if it is legit. It's August, after all."

  "What do you do if everybody is?" That hadn't occurred to Gianfranco.

  "What can I do? I pound my head against the door," Eduardo answered. "Then I come back here when vacation time is over. But I hope I don't have to. Stuff breaks down in August, too. They ought to keep somebody around… I hope."

  "Me, too," Gianfranco said. They went past 164, 161, 158, 153… Most of the businesses were dark. Eduardo muttered under his breath.

  He started muttering again a little farther along. This time, Gianfranco could make out the words: "Getting close." And so they were. They walked by 47, 39, 38, 36…

  "Look!" Gianfranco pointed at the grimy little sign ahead. BY THE ARCH REPAIRS, it said, and then, in smaller letters, ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT OUR SPECIALTY.

  "That's the place, all right." Eduardo walked faster. As Gianfranco had in San Marino, he needed to hurry to keep up. "Now we find out what's going on-or we find out nothing's going on."

  When Gianfranco saw the dirty window at the front of the shop, he thought nothing was. Then, through the dirt, he saw a lightbulb shining. "Somebody's in there," he said.

  "Looks that way." Before going in, Eduardo looked behind him and to both sides. If somebody from the Security Police was watching, he wasn't obvious about it. Eduardo's right hand came down on the latch. It clicked. The door swung open. Gianfranco thought the hinges should have creaked, but they didn't.

  Eduardo went in. Gianfranco followed. Eduardo didn't say anything, though he hadn't wanted Gianfranco and Annarita along when he went into Three Sixes.

  The guy behind the counter wasn't anyone Gianfranco had seen before. He looked half asleep. A ceiling fan spun lazily, stirring the air without cooling it. Gianfranco was surprised the calendar on the wall wasn't from 1996, or maybe 1896.

  "Help you, Comrade?" the repairman asked when Eduardo showed no sign of vanishing in a puff of smoke.

  "Well, I don't know," Eduardo said, and that had to be true on levels Gianfranco could barely imagine.

  "You've got something that's busted. You want somebody to fix it. If it's a buggy or a gas lamp, you're in the wrong place. If it's got an electric motor in it, maybe we can do you some good." The repairman sounded so reasonable-and so sarcastic at the same time-that Gianfranco wanted to punch him in the nose.

  "Well, I don't know," Eduardo repeated. "This isn't something just anybody can take care of." That was bound to be true. Maybe nobody in this whole world could take care of it. Certainly nobody from this whole world could take care of it.

  "And so? Do I look like just anybody?" The fellow in the grimy coveralls drew himself up with touchy pride. The answer there, as far as Gianfranco could see, was yes. The repairman was around forty. He was chunky-not fat, but definitely chunky. He should have shaved this morning, but he hadn't. His face wouldn't set the girls' hearts pounding, not with that honker in the middle of it. "So what's your trouble? Home? Industrial? This is a good time to get industrial work done. Not much happens in August most places."

  "Why are you open, then?" Gianfranco asked.

  "Somebody's gotta be," the repairman said with a resigned shrug. "We take turns with four or five other outfits. It's our year. What can I tell you?" He spread his hands.

  "How long have you been in business here?" Eduardo asked. For a moment, Gianfranco didn't get it. Then he did. Tf this guy's great-grandfather had started the shop, it had nothing to do with the home timeline.

  But the man answered, "Just a few years. We're modern, we are. We don't have a bunch of old stuff to unlearn. When we do something, we do it right the first time."

  "Were you here the last time the Azzuri made it to the World Cup finals?" Eduardo inquired. Gianfranco thought him a fool for asking. The Italian team hadn't got that far since before he was born. Then Gianfranco caught himself. The Blues hadn't got that far here. It was different in the home timeline. That story Eduardo told…

  The repairman suddenly stopped being bored. He thumped his elbows down on the counter and leaned forward. "That lousy ref," he growled. "We were robbed, nothing else but. If Korea hadn't got that goal-"

  "Vietnam. It was Vietnam," Eduardo said, his own excitement rising. Gianfranco wondered who was testing whom. He decided they were testing each other. They both needed to.

  "Si, you're right. It was." The repairman nodded.

  Now Eduardo did some prodding: "It was the plainest hand ball anybody could see-except the blind fool didn't."

  "No, no, no. It was an offside. Don't you remember anything?"

  Eduardo took a deep breath. "I remember as much as any Italian from the home timeline would."

  "So do I." The repairman came out and threw his arms around him and gave him a bear hug. They started dancing, right there in the middle of the shop. To Gianfranco's eyes, they couldn't have looked much sillier if they tried.

  "I've been stuck here for months!" Eduardo exclaimed. "Now all I have to do is hop in a transposition chamber and I'm home."

  "A transposition chamber? Here?" The repairman's face fell.

  "Yes, here," Eduardo said impatiently. "The next closest one's in San Marino, and the Security Police are running that shop."

  "Tell me about it!" the repairman said. "That's where we came through, and it's where we were going to go back from. Except now we can't."

  Eduardo made as if to pound his head on the counter. "This isn't fair. It just isn't fair," he said. Gianfranco would have been screaming. In a way, Eduardo was, too, but in a quiet tone of voice. He went on, "I finally manage to connect with other people from the home timeline, and what good does it do me? Not even a little bit, because you're as stuck as I am."

  " 'As I am'? Not 'as we are'?" The man in the coveralls jerked his thumb at Gianfranco. "Who's the kid? And how come you're running your mouth in front of him? If this is some kind of setup-"

  "It isn't. He's all right. Odds are the Security Police would have nabbed me after they closed down The Gladiator if he didn't find me a place to stay," Eduardo said.

  "Yeah?" The repairman gave Gianfranco a dubious look. "What have you got to say for yourself, kid?"

  "Well, to begin with, stop calling me kid" Gianfranco said. "My name's Gianfranco. And it sounds like you need to get back into the shop in San Marino if you're going to go back to the home timeline."

  "Brilliant deduction, Sherlock," the repairman said. "The only trouble is, we need to do it without making the Security Police land on us with both feet. I suppose you've got a way to manage that?" His sarcasm had a nastier edge than Eduardo's, which usually invited you to share the joke. When this guy gibed, the joke was likely to be on you.

  But Gianfranco nodded. "I do. Or maybe I do, anyway."

  Annarita and Gianfranco walked along the beach, their feet sometimes in the water, sometimes not, as little waves went in and out. A blond man with a dreadful sunburn jogged past. Annarita thought
he was intent on putting in as many kilometers as he could before he burned to a crisp. By the look of him, he was almost there. A kid kicked a soccer ball around. He couldn't have been more than eight, but he was already pretty good.

  "Do you really think this will work?" Annarita said. If she and Gianfranco couldn't talk safely here, they couldn't anywhere. Of course, that was also possible. And if they couldn't, they'd find out the hard way.

  He shrugged. "1 don't know. We have a chance. If you've got any better ideas, I'd love to hear them."

  Farther up on the sand, two teams were whacking a volleyball back and forth over a net. Most of the men and women were almost as badly burnt as the jogger. They were all laughing and grinning. Annarita couldn't understand why toasting your brains out was supposed to be so much fun. Maybe the Germans and Scandinavians never saw the sun at home, so they had to overdo it when they went on holiday. All the same…

  She tried to pull her mind back to the business at hand. "Your father won't know what he's getting into, will he?"

  "Well, no," Gianfranco admitted. "He wouldn't do it if he did." He looked a challenge at her. "Go on. Tell me I'm wrong."

  She couldn't, and she knew it. "How much trouble will he get into if this all works out the way you want it to?"

  "Shouldn't be too much," Gianfranco said confidently. "He's a Party official. He'd be doing the best job he knew how to do. Nobody could hold it against him."

  "No? Are you sure?" Annarita didn't usually play devil's advocate, but it seemed natural here. "When something goes wrong, people almost always hold it against somebody. That way, they don't have to blame themselves."

  "If it goes the way it's supposed to, nobody will even know anything's happened-nobody but us, I mean," Gianfranco said.

  "If things always went the way they were supposed to, we'd all be happier. Richer, too, chances are," Annarita said.

  "Well, what's our other choice?" Gianfranco asked. "Leaving the people from the home timeline stuck here for good. Do you want to do that?"