The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  "Can we finish this another time, Comrade?" his father asked the officer. "Gianfranco has to be tired, and so do you. Could you let him have a little rest, now that he can sleep in his own bed again?"

  "Well, all right." The man from the Security Police didn't seem sorry to have an excuse to go home-and Gianfranco's father was a Party wheel, even if he wasn't a great big one. The officer got to his feet. "I'll report to my superiors, and we'll see if they have more questions to ask. Ciao." He left the apartment.

  "Grazie, Father," Gianfranco said around another yawn. "I am tired."

  "No wonder, after everything you've been through," his father answered. Gianfranco had been through more and stranger things than his father imagined. On the other hand, his father's imaginings had to be scarier. "I don't know what I would have done if you didn't come home safe."

  "I'm here. I'm fine-except that I'm sleepy," Gianfranco said.

  Lying down in his own bed did feel good. But one thought kept him from sleeping for quite a while. He understood all the reasons why he couldn't stay in the home timeline. Even so, coming back here after seeing what freedom was like made him feel as if he'd just got a life sentence to a prison camp he couldn't hope to escape from.

  Gianfranco didn't want to talk about things in his apartment or in Annarita's. She knew why, loo. The Security Police were too likely to have bugged one of them, or maybe both. He didn't dare tell her the truth if unfriendly ears might also hear it.

  And so, as soon as they could, they went for a walk in a little park not far from the apartment building. Annarita thought she was more eager to hear than Gianfranco was to talk. "Well?" she asked.

  "Well, he wasn't lying," Gianfranco said.

  "I didn't think he was," Annarita replied. "And when you disappeared without a trace, I was sure there was only one place you could have gone. What was that like?"

  "You mean the chamber?" he asked. Annarita nodded impatiently. "It was like-nothing," he said. "It was like sitting in a compartment in a railroad car, except it was cleaner and quieter. I couldn't even tell we were moving. We weren't moving, not the way the two of us are now when we walk. We were going across instead, but that didn't feel like anything."

  "And when you got there?" she said.

  "They wear funny clothes," Gianfranco said. "They wear brighter colors than we do, and the cuts are strange. Everything is brighter there. More paint, more neon lights. Something's always yelling at you, to buy or to try or to fly. They are capitalists. They care more about money than we do. But they have a lot more things they can buy, too, and they don't have to wait for years to get them."

  "That's nice." Annarita remembered her family's seemingly endless wait for their little Fiat. "But are they as free as Eduardo said they were?"

  "They are. They really are." Gianfranco sounded awed.

  "They let me watch TV. I listened to the news, and there were people talking about government programs that didn't work. They were going on about how much money the government had wasted-just telling people. They sounded disgusted. It was like, Well, here we go again."

  "That's different, all right," Annarita agreed. Plenty of government programs here didn't work. The government wasted lots of money. Everybody knew that. Everybody took it for granted. But you never heard anything about it on television or the radio. As far as those were concerned, the government could do no wrong. That wasn't a big surprise, l was no surprise at all, in fact. The TV and radio and papers were all instruments of the government. Would they, could they, bite the hand that fed them? Not likely!

  No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Gian-franco said, "And you should have seen the papers!" He clapped a hand to his forehead. "They made the TV seem like nothing. The things they called the Prime Minister! Here, people go to camps for even thinking things like that. They put them in print, and nobody gets excited."

  "Why not?" Annarita asked.

  "Because they take it for granted. I asked Eduardo about that. Here, everybody would have a stroke if you said anything bad about the Party or the General Secretary, right?" Gian-franco waited for Annarita to nod, then went on, "If you can say anything you want, the way you can there, you have to yell really loud to get noticed at all."

  "Why wouldn't just telling the truth do the job?" she wondered.

  "Maybe it would-if it was real important or really interesting," Gianfranco answered. "But when it comes to politics, who knows for sure what's true? All the different parties try to sell their ideas, the same way companies try to sell cars or soap."

  Annarita thought it over. She wasn't sure she liked it. It didn't seem… dignified. But she supposed getting lots of different kinds of propaganda was better than getting just one. If you had lots, you could pick and choose among them. With only one, you were stuck. She knew all about that. Everybody in this whole world did.

  "Do they all walk around with their little computers all the time?" she asked.

  "Do they!" Gianfranco rolled his eyes. "Those things are telephones, too, and they can send messages back and forth on them, and photos, and I don't know what all else. Half the time, people in the home timeline pay more attention to their gadgets than they do to what's going on around them. They'll walk out in the street without even looking. It's a miracle they don't get killed."

  People here walked out in the street without looking all the time, too. Sometimes they did get killed. "Are the drivers there any more polite than they are here?" Annarita asked.

  Gianfranco shook his head. "Not even a little bit. And with all those cars… Well, sometimes it jams up so nobody can move. Then it's all horns and cussing." Annarita laughed. That sounded familiar, all right. Gianfranco added, "But when they can move-well, it's all horns and cussing then, too. All the time, pretty much."

  She'd been skirting what she really wanted to know: "Did you like it there? Would you have stayed if you could?"

  "In a minute," he answered. "1 could breathe without filling out a form first, you know what I mean?" He took her hand. "I would have missed you. I would have missed you like anything. But I would have stayed. This"-his wave took in not just the park, not just Milan, but the whole Italian People's Republic- "this is jail. We've got to find some way to change it, to get free."

  "How?" Annarita asked.

  Gianfranco seemed to shrink in on himself. "I don't know. I just don't know."

  Gianfranco didn't want to go back to San Marino. He especially didn't want to go back to The Three Sixes. When the Security Police put him in one of their cars and got on the autostrada heading east, what he wanted stopped mattering. They intended to take him there, and they could do as they pleased. His only choice besides going to San Marino was going to a camp. All things considered, going to San Marino was better.

  Of course, he might end up going to San Marino and to a camp. If the Security Police couldn't find the trap door in the wall he'd talked about, what would they do to him? He worried about that more with every kilometer by which he drew closer to San Marino. Since the trap door didn't exist, he figured he had reason to worry.

  The Three Sixes was still operating when the Security Police led him into the shop. All the people who worked there belonged to the Security Police. The games they sold were copies they'd made themselves of the originals from the home timeline. How much had that cost? If it helped trap enemies of the state, the Security Police seemed to think it was worth it.

  They took him down to the basement. "So your trap door is here somewhere?" one of them said. His name was Iacopo, or maybe lacomo. Gianlranco wasn't sure which, and the Security Police didn't bother with formal introductions.

  "That's right," Gianfranco said, knowing it wasn't.

  "But you don't know exactly where," Iacopo or lacomo said.

  "I'm sorry, Comrade, but I don't. I had my back to the wall, and I was scared like you wouldn't believe." Gianlranco aimed to slick to his story as long as he could.

  "Yes, you said so." The officer didn't sound convinced
. "But at least you know which wall it's on, right? Even if you couldn't see that one, you could see all the others."

  No, this wouldn't be easy or fun. The Security Police had thought about what he told them, and drawn reasonable conclusions from it. He wished they hadn't bothered. But he was a Party official's son. And, even worse from their point of view, the people who nabbed him had vanished into thin air. They didn't know that was the literal truth.

  Cautiously, Gianlranco nodded. Even more cautiously, he said, "I guess so."

  "All right, then." Iacopo/Iacomo went on sounding reasonable. Gianfranco supposed that was better than having him sound ferocious. It still wasn't good. When Gianfranco still didn't say anything, the officer gestured impatiently. "Well? Which one was it?"

  "That one." Gianfranco pointed to the wall where Giulio had had his little room, the one from which he'd summoned the transposition chamber. Gianfranco didn't see a door on that wall now, any more than he saw any sign of the trap door that led down to the subbasement. Maybe that meant…

  "You heard him. Get to work," lacopo or lacomo told the other men from the Security Police.

  They did. They started banging on the wall, not just with their fists but with hammers and wrenches, too. After a little while, one of them stopped. "Well, I'll be-!" one of them said. If he would be what he said he would be, he would spend a very long time in a very warm place. "Fry me for a chicken if something's not hollow back there."

  Gianfranco had hoped the Security Police would find the hidden office. He also hoped the people from the home timeline hadn't left behind anything that would hurt them. They'd had to get out in a hurry, as he knew too well.

  Iaeopo/lacomo seemed to be a fellow with simple, direct ideas. "Knock down the wall," he said. "We'll find out what's in back of it."

  The men from the Security Police rolled up their sleeves and got to work with sledgehammers. The racket made Gianfranco stick his fingers in his ears. It also made somebody from upstairs come running down. "What are you guys doing?" he yelled. "People think it's an earthquake."

  "Tell them it's plumbers. Tell them anything you want," la-copo/Iacomo said. "We found a secret passage. I didn't think we would, but we did. The kid here wasn't blowing smoke after all." Gianfranco should have been insulted. He was insulted, but not enough to say anything about it. The Security Police officer from upstairs went away. The others kept banging at the wall.

  Try as they would, the Security Police had a devil of a time knocking it down. They swore and complained. Then one of them smashed enough concrete to bang his sledgehammer off a steel bar. He swore again, this time in disgust. "It's reinforced concrete!" he yelled. "What's hiding back there?"

  They needed cutting torches to get in. They were all fit to be tied by the lime one of them squeezed through the opening and shone a flashlight into the room. "Well?" another one called.

  "Well, what?" the man inside said. "Some of the ugliest furniture I've ever seen, that's all."

  "Go on in, kid," Iacopo/lacomo told Gianfranco. "Is this where you were?"

  "I guess so," Gianfranco said once he scrambled through the hole in the wall. The furniture-most of it gaudy plastic- must have come from the home timeline. Scorched metal filing cabinets stood against the far wall. The air stank of stale smoke. Another man from the Security Police opened a drawer. He looked inside, then muttered and closed it again.

  "What's the matter?" somebody asked him.

  "Papers are nothing but ashes. Whatever was in there, they got rid of it," he answered.

  "Where did they take you next, Mazzilli?" Iacopo or Ia-como asked.

  "I don't know," he said. "This is where they put the blindfold on me."

  The Security Police officer coughed, then nodded. "Oh, yeah. You did say that." Now he seemed more ready to believe the things Gianfranco had said, even when they weren't true. That was pretty crazy, but Gianfranco didn't complain. Oh, no. The officer lit a cigarette. With the air already smoky, Gianfranco wondered why he bothered.

  "So there's a different passage somewhere on one of these other walls?" another officer asked.

  "I guess so. How else could they have got me out of here?" Gianfranco said. He knew the answer to that, but the Security Police didn't. And he didn't think they would ever figure it out.

  A new school year. New classes, new teachers. Annarita knew she'd feel crazy for the first couple of weeks while she got used to things. Not needing to worry about the Young Socialists' League was kind of a relief. Normally, she would have thought hard about running for president her senior year. But, after she'd proved wrong about The Gladiator, she was sure Maria Tenace would clobber her if she tried. And so, with a small mental sigh, she decided to sit on the sidelines and let Maria have it.

  She decided that, anyway, till people started coming over to her and asking her if she'd run. They all seemed horrified when she said no. "You're going to let Maria just take it?" one girl said. "But she'll make everybody hate her and she'll run the League into the ground."

  "I don't want to have a big fight with her," Annarita said. "Life is too short."

  "Who says you'd need a fight?" the girl answered. "Nobody can stand her, and 1 mean nobody." She wasn't any special friend-Annarita hardly knew her. That made Annarita wonder if she ought to change her mind. When three more people told her the same thing, she did change it. She put in her petition of candidacy about an hour before the deadline.

  Maria Tenace stormed up to her the next day, literally shaking with fury. "So you think you can get away with it, do you?" Maria shouted, as if the two of them were alone instead of in a crowded hallway. "Well, you'll find out!"

  She did have some friends. They started spreading stories about Annarita. Of course they'd heard about Gianf ranco's kidnapping over the holiday. They tried to blame it on her. She wondered what she could say. Simplest seemed best: "We took in a cousin who was down on his luck. He did something he shouldn't have. I wish he didn't, but is it my fault he did?"

  Would that do any good? She didn't know. All she could do was hope. She wasn't very worried either way. If she won, she won. If she didn't, she would have fewer things to worry about the rest of her senior year.

  The election meeting was the most crowded one she'd ever seen. She and Maria flipped a coin to see who'd speak in which order. Annarita won, and chose to go last. Maria launched straight into an attack: "Comrade students, your choice today is simple. It is a battle between the forces of reaction and those of progress. If you want to shamelessly excuse backsliding anti-Socialist thought, you will vote for my opponent. She showed her true colors last year, when she refused to condemn The Gladiator, that hotbed of capitalist propaganda. If you would rather have a true Socialist in charge of the Young Socialists' League, you will choose me instead. I hope you do. Grazie."

  Annarita got up. "I don't think I'm a reactionary," she said. "I just don't like getting people in trouble before I'm sure they need to be there. Maybe I was wrong about The Gladiator." But I'll never believe I was. "At least I know 1 can be wrong, though. I don't think Maria's ever been wrong in her life-and if you don't believe me, just ask her."

  Maria Tenace started to nod. She almost gave herself a whiplash stopping when she realized, a split second too late, that Annarita wasn't complimenting her. Everybody saw. If looks could kill, hers would have knocked Annarita over on the spot.

  No secret ballot-the vote was by a show of hands. Annarita thought that would doom her. Who wanted to risk being labeled a reactionary? To her amazement, she won by something close to two to one.

  After the election, a boy whose name she didn't even know told her, "I don't want somebody turning me in to the Security Police if I say something she doesn't like. I don't think you'd do that."

  "I hope not!" Annarita exclaimed. Somebody slammed the door to the hall where the League was meeting. Several people said it was Maria storming away. Annarita went on, "I wouldn't have walked out if I lost, either."

  "No, I don't think you
would," the boy said. "Congratulations for winning, though. I'm glad you did."

  "Thanks." Annarita was glad she had, too. A year with Maria running things wouldn't have been much fun.

  Gianfranco was waiting outside when the meeting broke up. He also congratulated Annarita, adding, "I knew you had it in the bag when the Dragon Lady came out breathing fire." That made Annarita laugh. He finished, "Want to celebrate with a soda in the Galleria?"

  "Sure. Why not?" Annarita said.

  Two or three more people said they were glad she'd won as she was walking out of Hoxha Polytechnic. Just what she'd done started to sink in then. Any university that saw President of the Young Socialists' League on an application would be much more likely to say yes. That wasn't why she'd run, but it wasn't bad.

  When they got to the Galleria del Popolo, she didn't just have a soda. She had a soda, with a big scoop of ice cream plopped in. It was wonderful. Gianfranco had one, too. They sat at a sidewalk table watching people go by. Two of the people were Russians, in baggy, square-cut suits very different from what Italian men wore. They were arguing at the top of their lungs. Except for a couple of swear words, she hardly understood anything they said. The summer holiday had left her Russian rusty. She supposed it would get better again.

  She eyed Gianfranco. His people-watching wasn't all pretty girl-watching. She appreciated that.

  He pointed across the street. "Look! That shopfront that's been empty forever is finally going to get somebody new in it."

  "You're right." She squinted, trying to make out what was below the big letters that spelled out OPENING SOON! She didn't have much luck. "Can you read it?"

  Gianfranco squinted, too. Then he shook his head. "No. Too small. Shall we go over and look?"

  "In a bit," Annarita said. "Not yet."

  After they finished their sundaes and talked for a while, they did cross the pedestrian-filled street. The sign read, RARE AND UNUSUAL BOOKS TO INTEREST EVERY TASTE. A SHOP EOR THE PERSON WHO THINKS.