The Gladiator Read online

  To Annarita’s surprise and dismay, Marco Furillo raised his hand. “I move we investigate a shop that may be selling students subversive literature.”

  “What’s this?” Filippo said.

  “It’s true,” Marco said. “Have you ever been to the place they call The Gladiator?”

  “That’s the gaming shop, isn’t it?” Filippo said, and Marco nodded. Filippo went on, “I know where it is, but I haven’t been inside. Why?”

  “Because they skate close to the edge, if they don’t go over it,” Marco answered, his face and voice full of sour disapproval.

  That name … Annarita had heard somebody mention it before. Gianfranco, that was who. Did he realize the place might be dangerous to him? Filippo did the proper bureaucratic thing: he appointed a committee to look into what was going on. And Annarita surprised both him and herself by volunteering to join it.

  Two

  The dismissal bell. Gianfranco exploded out of the seat in his biology class. If Comrade Pastrano thought he cared about the differences between a frog’s circulatory system and a mouse’s, the teacher needed to think again.

  Gianfranco wished he didn’t have to lug so many books home. His old man would come down on him like a landslide if he didn’t at least make a show of doing his homework, though.

  But before he went home … Before he went home, he went to the Galleria del Popolo—the People’s Gallery. Once upon a time, it had been named for a King of Italy, not for the people. Once upon a time, too, it had been the most stylish and expensive shopping center in Milan. A glass roof covered a crossed-shaped district of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings crammed with shops and restaurants of all sorts.

  Fashion had long since moved on, as fashion has a way of doing. The expensive shops and the first-rate restaurants went elsewhere. The places that took over were the ones that didn’t pretend to be up-to-the-minute or first-rate. That didn’t mean you couldn’t have a good time at the Galleria del Popolo. It did mean the good time you had wasn’t the same as it would have been a hundred years earlier.

  Now the Galleria del Popolo was where the people gathered—the strange people, that is. Old men looking for older books prowled the secondhand stalls. People who played music that wasn’t in favor with the cultural authorities played it in little clubs there. Gianfranco wouldn’t have been surprised if the men and women at those clubs who smoked cigarettes and drank espresso or wine while they listened were political unreliables. If the Security Police needed to make a roundup, they would start there.

  He walked past a shop selling clothes that only people who didn’t care about getting ahead would wear. Flared trousers and tight-fitting shirts for men, short skirts and gaudy stockings for women … They seemed more like costumes than real clothes to Gianfranco. He imagined what his father would say if he came home in an outfit like that. Slowly, he smiled. The look on his father’s face would almost be worth the price of the clothes and the price of the trouble he’d get in.

  And there was The Gladiator. It had a license in the front window, the way any shop had to. Somebody in the Ministry of Commerce had decided the place could do business. As Gianfranco walked up to the door, he made money-counting motions. He couldn’t believe The Gladiator ever opened up without bribes of some sort. Communism should have made corruption a thing of the past. He was only sixteen, but he knew better.

  A guy coming out of the shop nodded to Gianfranco as he went in. The other guy looked to be two or three years older than Gianfranco was—he really needed a shave. But he looked to be the same kind of person: somebody who couldn’t get excited about most of the life he was living. The knowing grin on his face said he got excited about The Gladiator.

  So did Gianfranco. So did all the people who came in here, looked around, and decided they liked what they saw. There were others. Gianfranco had seen them. They’d walk in, go to the back room and stare at the people playing games, eye the games and the stuff that went with them, and walk out shaking their heads. They were fools. They proved they were fools by not getting what was going on right in front of their noses.

  “Ciao, Gianfranco,” called the fellow behind the counter.

  “Ciao, Eduardo. Come sta?” Gianfranco said.

  “I’m fine,” Eduardo answered. “How are you?”

  “I’ll live. I made it through another day of school,” Gianfranco said. Eduardo thought that was funny. Gianfranco wished he did. He went on, “Is Carlo here yet?”

  “Sì. He just got here a couple of minutes ago,” Eduardo told him. “He thinks he’s going to clean your clock—he said so.”

  “In his dreams!” Gianfranco exclaimed. That touched his honor—or he imagined it did, anyhow. A lot of people called honor an outdated, aristocratic idea. Maybe it was, but plenty of Italians still took it seriously anyhow. Gianfranco set ten lire on the counter: two hours’ worth of gaming time. “I’ll show him!”

  “Go on into the back room,” Eduardo said. “I may have to give you some of your money back—I don’t know if Carlo can stay till six.”

  “I’ll worry about that later,” Gianfranco said. He had money—more money than he knew what to do with. Even if his father wasn’t a big Party wheel, he was a Party member. That all by itself just about guaranteed you wouldn’t come close to being broke. The trouble was finding anything worth buying for your lire. Cars and apartments had waiting lists years long. TV sets kept you waiting for months. So did halfway decent sound systems. You could get cheap junk right away—but you got what you paid for if you spent your money like that.

  A couple of hours of fun? Cheap at the price.

  Other people—almost all of them guys from a couple of years younger than Gianfranco up to, say, thirty—sat bent over tables in the back room. They studied game boards with the attention they should have given to schoolwork. Carlo looked up and waved when he saw Gianfranco. “Ciao,” he said. “Watch what I do to you.”

  “You can try,” Gianfranco said, and sat down across from his gaming partner. Carlo was nineteen, just starting at the university. His father wanted him to be a pharmacist. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life—anything but push pills, probably. Gianfranco felt the same way about being a bureaucrat.

  For now, they both forgot about the real world. Here, they were railroad magnates building rival lines across Europe. They had to lay track, buy engines, and move passengers and goods from one city to another. Dice and the quality of locomotives controlled how fast they could go. Cards told them what to take where and added disasters and blizzards and floods. But there was still a lot of strategy. Getting your line through the mountain passes, picking the shortest or the safest route (the two weren’t always the same) between two towns, building here so the other player wouldn’t …

  The Gladiator didn’t just sell games and offer a place to play. It also sold books, so players who got interested could learn how things really worked. Gianfranco knew much more about nineteenth-century railroads than about twentieth-century history. He’d learned this stuff because he wanted to, and because the more he knew, the better he did in the game.

  “Goal!” somebody three tables over shouted. He was running a soccer club. Gianfranco had tried that game, too, but he didn’t like it as well as railroading. Playing soccer was great. Running a team? Paying and trading players, keeping up the stadium, getting publicity so your crowds would be large and you could afford to pay better players—that all seemed too much like work.

  Carlo was building his own rail line into Paris, an important center where Gianfranco was already operating. Carlo offered lower shipping rates than Gianfranco was charging. Gianfranco lowered his even more so Carlo couldn’t steal his business. He cut rates as low as he could while still making money. Then Carlo cut his so he was losing money on that route but trying to make up for it other places.

  “Is that in the rules?” Gianfranco asked.

  “It sure is.” Carlo brandished the rule book, a thick pamph
let. “It’s called a ‘loss leader.’ And it’s going to ruin you.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Gianfranco said. He built toward Vienna, where Carlo had been operating by himself. Even before he got there, Carlo cut shipping rates. Gianfranco cut them even more. If Carlo wanted to keep him out, he would have to start taking a loss in Vienna, too. He tried it. It didn’t work—losing money on two major routes, he couldn’t make enough on the others to stay in the black. His whole operation started hemorrhaging money. He had to give up the Paris line.

  Gianfranco didn’t gloat—too much. “I think you got a little too cute,” he said.

  “Maybe,” Carlo said unhappily. “I didn’t expect you to get back at me so fast.” He tapped the rule book with his forefinger. “I saw this loss leader thing in here, and it looked so cool I had to try it out.”

  “I’ve done stuff like that,” Gianfranco said. “I think that one can be good, but you pushed it too hard. The game will bite you if you go with any one thing too much. You’ve got to stay balanced. That’s how you make money.”

  “You old capitalist, you,” Carlo said. They both laughed.

  Annarita didn’t say anything about The Gladiator to Gianfranco at supper or at breakfast the next morning. She didn’t feel like getting worried questions from his parents—or from her own. Right now, all she knew about the place was that Marco Furillo thought it was politically unreliable. That didn’t prove much.

  So she waited till the two of them went down the stairs together and started for Hoxha Polytechnic before asking, “You’ve been to The Gladiator, haven’t you?”

  “Sure!” He sounded enthusiastic.

  “What do you do there?” she asked.

  “Play games, mostly. I get books sometimes, too.” He started talking about a complicated coup he’d pulled off against somebody named Carlo. It didn’t make much sense to her. Then he started talking about how railroads really operated in the nineteenth century. Some of that made even less sense, but he knew a lot about it.

  “How did you find out about all that stuff?” Annarita asked.

  “I told you—they’ve got books there. The more you know, the better you can play,” Gianfranco answered. Playing well mattered to him—she could see that. He didn’t care much about school, so he didn’t work any harder than he had to there.

  “Do you ever do anything … political at The Gladiator?” she asked.

  He looked at her as if she were crazy. “I play games. I talk with the other guys who play games. What could be political about old-time railroads or soccer teams or hunting dragons?”

  “Dragons? You’re confusing me,” Annarita said.

  “Some of the games are in this pretend world,” Gianfranco explained. “They’re all right, I guess, but the railroad’s my favorite.”

  “How come?” Annarita asked.

  “I don’t know. I just like it,” Gianfranco answered. She made an exasperated noise. He carried his books in his left hand, which kept his right free for gesturing. “Why do you like a song or a movie? You just do, that’s all.”

  “I know why I like a movie,” Annarita said. “The actors are good, or the plot is interesting, or it’s funny, or something.”

  “All right, all right. Let me think.” Gianfranco did—Annarita could watch him doing it. That impressed her all by itself. He wasn’t stupid or anything. They’d been living in each other’s pockets since they were little, so she knew that. But he hardly ever wanted to do more than he had to to get by. At last, he said, “When I’m playing, it’s like the railroad is really mine. I’m in charge of everything from paying the workers to fixing the track if a flood washes out a stretch to figuring out how much to charge for hauling freight.”

  He’d talked about that when he was trying to explain what he’d done to Carlo. Carefully, Annarita said, “It sounds like a very, uh, individualistic game.” People in the Italian People’s Republic weren’t supposed to be individualists. They were all supposed to work together for the eventual coming of true Communism, when the state would wither away.

  The state hadn’t done any withering lately. It still needed to be strong to guard against reactionaries and backsliders and other enemies. So it insisted, in films, on radio and TV, in the newspapers, and on propaganda posters slapped onto anything that wasn’t moving.

  Gianfranco understood that individualistic was a code word for something worse. You’d have to be dead not to. “It’s no such thing!” he said hotly. “It’s no more individualistic than chess is. You run a whole army there.”

  Annarita knew she had to back up. You couldn’t say anything bad about chess, not when the Russians liked it so well. She tried a different approach: “Well, maybe, but people have been playing chess for a long time. I’ve never heard of a game like this before. Where does The Gladiator get it? Where does the shop get all its games? I don’t think other places have any like them.”

  “I don’t know.” Gianfranco’s shrug, a small masterpiece of its kind, showed that he didn’t care, either. Then his eyes narrowed. “How come you’re so curious about all this?”

  She wondered if she should tell him. After a moment, she decided to—if she said something like I just am, that’s all, it would only make him more suspicious. She realized she should have had a cover story ready. She wasn’t much of a secret agent. “Don’t get mad at me,” she said, “but somebody at the Young Socialists’ League meeting yesterday said they were politically unreliable.”

  Gianfranco said something that should have scalded the gray tabby trotting down the street. But it just kept going—cats were tough beasts. Then Gianfranco said, “Whoever thinks so is nuts. We sit. We play. We talk. That’s it.”

  “You don’t talk about politics?” Annarita asked.

  “Of course not. The guys who play the railroad game talk about railroads. Some of them build model railroads, but I don’t think that’s interesting. The other guys talk about soccer—we all do that sometimes, ’cause soccer’s important. And the others go on about dragons and ogres and using zoning laws to get orcs out of a pass they need to go through and stuff like that.”

  “Zoning laws?” Annarita hadn’t thought she could get more confused. Now she discovered she was wrong.

  Gianfranco only shrugged again. “I don’t know, not really. Like I said, I don’t play that game much. Stuff like that, though. Politics?” What he said about politics was even hotter than anything he’d come out with before. He went on, “Why don’t you come and see for yourself what we’re up to? Then you won’t have to listen to nonsense.” That wasn’t exactly what he called it.

  “All right, I will,” Annarita said. “Do I need to have you along, or can I go by myself?”

  “You can go by yourself if you want to. It’s a shop. It’s looking for customers,” Gianfranco answered. “People might talk to you more if you come in with somebody they know. It’s like a restaurant or a bar—it has regulars.”

  She nodded. “Fair enough. Will you take me this afternoon, then?”

  “Why not?” he said. “I’m going over there. I’ve got to finish Carlo off—you just see if I don’t. Meet me at the entrance right after classes get out.”

  “I will. Grazie, Gianfranco. The sooner we get this settled, the better off and the happier everybody will be.”

  “See you then,” Gianfranco said. By that time, they’d just about got to school. He hurried on ahead of Annarita, something he hardly ever did. She didn’t think he was that eager to learn things from his teachers. No, more likely he was excited about showing off The Gladiator to her.

  Annarita was curious. Gianfranco sure didn’t think the place was subversive—but then, he wouldn’t. Well, she’d find out … something, anyway. She could report to the Young Socialists’ League. And that, with any luck, would be that.

  Because she was curious about The Gladiator, she didn’t pay as much attention in class as usual. She messed up a Russian verb conjugation that she knew in her sleep. Comrade Montefusco
clucked and wrote what was probably a black mark in the roll book. She almost complained, but what could she complain about? Even if she knew better, she did make the mistake.

  She kept doing silly little things like that all day long. She wondered if Gianfranco was doing the same thing. From what she’d heard, he did that kind of stuff all the time, so how was anybody supposed to tell? She didn’t, though. Whenever she fouled up, her teachers looked surprised. She kept on being surprised herself, not that it did her any good.

  After what seemed like forever, the dismissal bell rang. No after-school meetings today. She could just go. Gianfranco was waiting when she got outside. “You ready?” he asked.

  She laughed at him. He really was eager as a puppy. “What would you do if I told you no?” she teased.

  He just shrugged one more time. “I’d go by myself, that’s what.”

  So there, Annarita thought. But she’d sassed him first, so she had it coming. “I’m not saying no, though. I want to see what got you all excited about this place.” And she wanted to see if it really was reactionary and subversive, but she didn’t say that.

  She liked the Galleria del Popolo. You could find almost anything there—when you could find anything at all, that is. The buildings that housed the shops were a couple of hundred years old. They might not have been as efficient as the Stalin-gothic blocks of flats that dominated Milan’s skyline along with the Duomo, but they were prettier.

  Or was that a counterrevolutionary thought? They’d been built long before the Communist takeover of Italy. If you liked them more than buildings that went up after the takeover, did that make you a reactionary? Could you get in trouble if someone found out you did? She hadn’t said anything to Gianfranco. She didn’t intend to, either. He seemed harmless, but you never could know for sure who reported to the Security Police.