The Gladiator ct-4 Read online

  "Ludovico Pagliarone and Maria Tenace," Annarita answered. "No, f don't think they'll go, not unless one of them knows somebody who plays there."

  "Will they listen to you because you were on the spot?"

  "Maybe Ludovico will. Maria…" Annarita sighed. "Maria will just say to call the place reactionary without even thinking. She always does things like that. If there's any chance it might be bad, she wants to get rid of it."

  "More Communist than Stalin," her father murmured.

  "What?" For a second, Annarita didn't get it.

  Dr. Crosetti explained: "Back in the old days, they would say, 'More Catholic than the Pope,' or sometimes, 'More royal than the king.' They used to say that in France a lot. Only one king there, not a lot of them the way there were in Italy before unification. But we still need a phrase like that for somebody who goes along with authority because it is authority."

  "Where did you find these things?" Annarita said. "I bet you were looking in places where you shouldn't have."

  "And so? Who doesn't?" Her father held up a hand before she could answer. "I'll tell you who-people like your Maria, that's who. They go through life with blinkers on, the way carriage horses used to."

  "You have to be careful when you come out with things like that," Annarita said slowly.

  "Well, of course!" her father said. "That's part of growing up, learning how to be careful. I don't think you're going to inform on me."

  "I should hope not!" Annarita said. In school, they taught about children who informed on their parents or older siblings. The lessons made those kids out to be heroes. Annarita didn't know anybody who thought they really were. No matter what the state did for you after you blabbed, it couldn't give you back your family. And chances were none of the people to whom you informed would ever trust you after that, either. They had to know you would betray anybody at all, even them.

  "Good," her father said now, as if he hadn't expected anything else-and no doubt he hadn't. "You can talk to Ludovico, then. Maybe between the two of you, you'll outyell this other girl, and nothing will happen. Sometimes what doesn't happen is as important as what does, you know?"

  Annarita hadn't thought about that. It kept cropping up in odd moments when she should have been thinking about her homework for the rest of the night.

  Gianfranco opened his algebra book with all the enthusiasm of someone answering the midnight knock on the door that had to be the Security Police. As far as he was concerned, their jails and cellars held no terrors worse than the problems at the end of each chapter.

  He groaned when he got a look at these. They'd driven him crazy in middle school. Here they were again, harder and more complicated than ever. Train A leaves so much time and so many kilometers behind Train B. It travels so many kilometers an hour faster than Train B, though. At what time will it catch up? Or sometimes, how far will each train go before A catches B?

  They weren't always trains. Sometimes they were planes or cars or ships. But they were trains in the first question.

  And, because they were trains, Gianfranco's panic dissolved like morning mist under the sun. This was a problem right out of Rails across Europe. There, it involved squares on the board and dice rolls instead of kilometers and hours, but so what? He figured those things out while he was playing. Why couldn't he do it for schoolwork?

  Because it's no fun when it's schoolwork, he thought. How could it not be fun, though, if it had to do with trains? He tried the problem and got an answer that seemed reasonable. On to the next.

  The next problem had to do with cars. When Gianfranco first looked at it, it made no more sense than Annarita's Russian-less, because everybody picked up a little Russian, like it or not. Then he pretended the cars were trains. All of a sudden, it didn't seem so hard. He got to work. Again, the answer he came up with seemed reasonable.

  There was a difference, though, between being reasonable and being right. He took the problems to his father, who was smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. "Can you check these for me?" he asked.

  "T don't know. What are you doing?" his father asked. Gianfranco explained. His father sucked in smoke. The coal on the cigarette glowed red. People said you were healthier if you quit smoking, but nobody ever told you how. His father shook his head and spread his hands. "Sorry, ragazzo. I remember going down the drain on these myself. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, maybe you're crazy. I can't tell you one way or the other. I wish I could."

  "I'll find out in class tomorrow." Gianfranco didn't look forward to that. But he still thought he had a chance of being right, and that didn't happen every day in algebra. "Let me go back and do some more."

  "Sure, go ahead. Pick up as much of that stuff as you can- it won't hurt you," his father said indulgently. "But you can do all right without it, too. Look at me." He stubbed out the cigarette, then thumped his chest with his right fist.

  "Thanks anyway, Papa." Gianfranco retreated in a hurry. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life going to an office and doing nothing the way his old man did. Yes, his father had a medium-fancy title. He'd got it not because he was especially smart but because he never made enemies. But it still amounted to not very much. He'd said himself that they could train a monkey to do his job.

  So what do you want to do, then? Gianfranco asked himself. He knew the answer-he wanted to run a railroad. How did you go about learning to do that? Figuring out when trains would come in probably was part of it.

  Gianfranco muttered to himseli, pretending airplanes were trains-very fast trains. His trouble was, he didn't just want to run a railroad that had already been operating for 250 years. He wanted to start one and build it up from scratch, the way he did in the board game. How could you do that when it wasn't the nineteenth century any more?

  He sighed. You couldn't. He was no big brain like An-narita, but he could see as much. What did that leave him? Two things occurred to him-working at the railroad the way it was

  now or starting some other kind of business and running it as if it were a nineteenth-century railroad.

  He could almost hear Eduardo yelling at him. He could hear the midnight knock on the door, too, and the Security Police screaming that he was a capitalist jackal as they hauled him off to jail. Or maybe they wouldn't bother waiting till midnight. Maybe they would just grab him at his business and take him away. For a crime as bad as capitalism, why would they waste time being sneaky?

  But the way things were now, people just went through the motions. Gianfranco's father wasn't the only one. He was normal, pretty much. Everybody knew how things went. People made jokes about it. You heard things like, We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. That was why you had to wait years for a TV set or a car. That was why crews had to come out to repair repairs half the time. That was why the elevator here hadn't worked for so long, and might never again.

  The people owned the means of production. They did here, they did in the Soviet Union, they did in Canada and Brazil, they did everywhere. What could be fairer than that? It kept things equal, didn't it? Gianfranco nodded to himself. He'd learned his lessons well, even if he didn't realize it just then.

  Maria Tenace had a face like a clenched fist. "I say we condemn the reactionaries." Her voice said she wasn't going to take no for an answer. "They're trying to corrupt people. The authorities need to make an example of them."

  "How do you know? Have you been to The Gladiator?" Annarita asked.

  "What difference does that make?" Maria sounded honestly eonlused.

  "Well, if you haven't been there, how do you know?" Lu-dovico Pagliarone said.

  "Because that's what was reported at the Young Socialists' League meeting," Maria said. "It must be true."

  "If someone said the earth was flat at one of those meetings, would you believe it?" Annarita inquired.

  "Don't be silly. Nobody would say such a counterrevolutionary thing," Maria declared.

  Annarita didn't understand how saying the earth was f
lat could be counterrevolutionary. She would have bet Maria didn't, either. Maria just meant saying that was bad. It sounded more impressive when you used an eight-syllable word instead.

  "I went over there yesterday afternoon," Annarita said. "Their business license is in order. I looked. They have a bunch of people playing games in a back room, and they sell games and miniatures and books. They seemed pretty harmless to me."

  "Miniatures? The kind you can paint?" Ludovico asked.

  "Si, that's right," Annarita said.

  "Maybe 1 ought to go over there," he said. "Do they have any from the Roman legions?"

  "I think I saw some." Annarita wouldn't have thought Ludovico knew Rome had ever had legions. People could surprise you all kinds of ways. She didn't know how many times she'd heard her father say that. Ludovico didn't seem real smart and didn't have a lot of friends. Maybe he read history books for fun, though. How could you know till he showed you? He sure seemed interested now.

  And Maria was getting angrier by the second. "I think the two of you want to cover up antistate activities," she said.

  "Like what?" Annarita asked. "Playing games isn't anti-state. Neither is painting lead centurions the size of my thumb." She eyed Ludovico. Yes, he knew what a centurion was. You had to be interested in Roman legions to know that.

  "Being right-wing deviationist is." Maria sounded positive. She always sounded positive. She probably always was. She was one of those people who thought being sure and being right were the same thing.

  The trouble was, Annarita wasn't a hundred percent sure Maria was wrong. Some of the games at The Gladiator did seem to have rules only a capitalist could love. Some of the books they sold there sounded as if their authors felt the same way. And that Eduardo hadn't exactly denied things. He'd just tried to say it was all pretend, not for real. But how true was that? How true could it be? Wasn't he trying to dance around the truth?

  Annarita remembered a Russian phrase: dancing between the raindrops without getting wet. One of Stalin's commissars- was it Molotov or Mikoyan?-was supposed to have been able to do that. He'd dodged all the trouble that came his way… and if you worked for Stalin, lots of trouble came your way.

  Because of Annarita's own doubts about The Gladiator, she might have gone along with Maria in condemning the place. She might have, that is, if Maria weren't so obnoxious. As things were, Annarita figured anything Maria didn't like had to have something going for it.

  Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism might be fine for analyzing historical forces. When it came to looking at how two people got along, or didn't get along, that was a different story.

  "I think the shop is harmless," Annarita said. "And denouncing people isn't a game. You don't do it for fun."

  Maria did. Annarita could see it in her pinched, angry features. Getting even with anybody who dared act unorthodox in any way had to be her main joy in life. Annarita wondered whether she would denounce her husband if he stepped out of line in any way. She didn't wonder long-she was sure Maria would.

  Then she wondered who would marry Maria in the first place. But most women did find husbands, as most men found wives. Somebody else every bit as rigid as Maria might like her fine. When you got right down to it, that was a really scary thought.

  And, by disagreeing with her about The Gladiator, Annarita was making her an enemy. That was another scary thought. Still, if you let people like Maria ride roughshod over you, how could you keep your self-respect? You couldn't, and what good were you without it? Not much, not as far as Annarita could see.

  "I say The Gladiator is anti-Socialist and needs to be suppressed, and that's what we should report to Filippo-to Comrade Antonelli, 1 mean." Filippo wasn't a Party member yet, but Maria didn't care. She stuck her chin out-she wasn't going to back down. She had the courage of her convictions. She would have been much easier to deal with if she didn't.

  As gently as Annarita could, she said, "You're not the only one on the committee, Maria. We go by majority vote. That's what the rules are." Sometimes reminding her of the rules helped keep her in line. Sometimes nothing did.

  This was going to be one of those times. Maria gave her a look that could have melted iron. Then she gave Ludovico Pagliarone another one. "You're not going to let this-this Menshevik get away with being soft on deviationists, are you?"

  "You can't call me that! My doctrine's as good as yours!" Annarita had to sound angry. If she accepted the name of the Bolsheviks' opponents, she gave Maria a stick to hit her with. She wished she'd never, never volunteered for this committee.

  And she anxiously watched Ludovico, trying to pretend all the while that she wasn't doing any such thing. He was nice enough, but he had the backbone of a scallop. If Maria could frighten him, he'd go along with her no matter what he thought. Some people just wanted to get along, to stay out of trouble.

  She didn't like the way he gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. He was having to make up his mind, and he didn't want to. He would leave somebody unhappy. Maria was meaner than Annarita, but Annarita was smoother. He had to be thinking how dangerous she could be if she set her mind to it.

  "Well, Ludovico?" Maria demanded.

  "Well…" His voice broke, so that he sounded eleven years old at the end of the word. He blushed furiously. "Well…" he said again, and stayed on the same note all the way through. That seemed to encourage him. "Well, it doesn't seem to me the place is doing any harm, Maria. Annarita's been there to look it over, and you haven't. I think we can leave it alone for now. We can always condemn it if it gets out of line later on."

  "Two to one," Annarita said. "So decided. I'll write up the report we submit to the League."

  "I'm going to turn in a minority report, and it will tell the truth about you people and your backsliding. You'll see." Maria didn't even try to hide how furious she was. "This isn't over yet, and don't you think it is. I'll get that den of running dogs shut down if it's the last thing I ever do." She stormed out of the classroom where they were meeting. The door didn't slam. An-narita wondered why not.

  Ludovico said, "She'll make trouble for us. Maybe it would have been easier to do what she wanted. It wouldn't have hurt anybody we know."

  "Yes, it would. I have friends who go to The Gladiator," An-narita answered. "Besides, if you let people like that start pushing you around, they'll never stop. Don't you think we did the right thing?"

  "I guess so." Ludovico didn't sound sure-not even a little bit. He was a weak reed-he would break and stick your hand if you depended on him too much. But he'd backed Annarita this time, anyhow. And he told her why: "I will have to go over there myself. If they have Roman miniatures, I want to get some."

  So principles didn't matter to him. He'd gone along because he didn't want to lose a chance to buy little Roman soldiers. What did that say? That he was human, Annarita supposed. Wasn't it better to let yourself be swayed by something small and silly than to act like Maria, the ideological machine? Annarita thought so. That probably meant she made an imperfect Communist. If it did, she wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

  "I'll write up the report for Filippo," she said. "You'll sign it, too?"

  "I guess so," Ludovico said again, even more reluctantly than before. "Do I have to?" He didn't want his name on anything that could come back to haunt him later on.

  But Annarita said, "Yes, you have to. You're part of the committee. You voted this way. Either you sign my report or you sign Maria's. And what do you think will happen to Maria one of these days?"

  "Maybe she'll end up General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party," Ludovico said. Annarita winced, but she couldn't tell him he was wrong, because he wasn't. People with Maria's kind of single-minded zeal could rise high. But he went on, "More likely, though, she'll get purged."

  "That's what 1 think, too," Annarita said. Most Communists were people just like anybody else. Maria had a knack for getting everyone around her angry. Odds were she'd end up paying for it-and never understand why nobody liked her, even
though she was (in her own mind) right all the time. "So which will it be? Mine or Maria's?"

  "Yours." Ludovico wasn't happy, but he saw he couldn't get away with pretending none of this had anything to do with him.

  "fierce." Annarita smiled at him, and he lit up like a flashlight. Just acting friendly was one more thing Maria would never think to do.

  Comrade Donofrio passed back the algebra homework. When he gave Gianfranco his paper, he said, "Please see me after class for a moment, Mazzilli."

  Gianfranco didn't follow him for a second. The algebra teacher spoke a French-flavored dialect of Italian that sounded peculiar in Milanese ears. When Gianfranco did get it, he gulped. Had he botched things again? "Si, Comrade Donofrio," he said, no matter how much he wanted to say no.

  "Crazie." The teacher walked on.

  Only then did Gianfranco look down to see how he'd done. There was his score, written in red-100%. He blinked, wondering if he was seeing straight. He hadn't got all the problems right on a math assignment since… He couldn't remember his last perfect score on a math paper. He wondered if he'd ever had one before.

  And he wondered why Comrade Donofrio wanted to see him. What could be better than a perfect paper?

  He tried to follow along as the teacher went through today's material. It didn't make as much sense as he wished it did. Could he get another perfect homework paper? He had his doubts, but he hadn't expected even one.

  When the other students left the room, Gianfranco went up to the teacher and said, "You wanted to see me, Comrade?"

  "That's right, Mazzilli." Comrade Donofrio nodded. "You did very well on the last assignment. Did you have any, ah, special help with it?"

  A light went on in Gianfranco's head. He thinks I cheated, he realized. But he said, "No, Comrade," and shook his head.

  "Well, let's see how you do on another problem, then," Comrade Donofrio said.

  "All right." Gianfranco didn't know what else he could say. He just hoped he didn't make a mess of this one. If he did, the algebra teacher would be sure he'd had somebody else do the homework for him. If I got good grades all the time, he wouldn't suspect me. But he didn't get good grades all the time. He usually didn't care enough about them to work hard. Thanks to the game, he'd got interested in these problems.