The Gladiator Read online

  “I gave it my best shot. I really wanted it,” Gianfranco said. “But you’re good. I knew going in you were. You didn’t make any mistakes I could latch on to. Good luck in the finals. I bet you win.”

  “If you were in the other bracket, I’d probably see you there instead of here,” Alfredo said. “When the next tournament starts, you’ll be somebody to watch out for.”

  Gianfranco shrugged. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all. Some of it’s skill, but some of it’s luck, too. That’s part of what makes it fun, because you can’t be sure ahead of time what’ll happen.”

  “I think so, too.” Alfredo sent him a curious look. “I don’t want to make you mad or anything, but you are just a kid. I thought you’d be more disappointed if you lost.”

  “Part of me is. I wanted to win,” Gianfranco said. “But I played as well as I could, so what’s the point of getting all upset? And I showed myself I could play in your league even if I didn’t win.”

  “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, because you’re right,” Alfredo said. “That was quite a game, and I could see it was no fluke. You’ve got the right attitude to be a good player, too. You don’t get too high when things go well, and you don’t get too mad if they don’t.”

  Gianfranco climbed to his feet. Several joints in his back popped like knuckles. He’d been sitting hunched over in a hard chair for a long time. He hadn’t noticed till he stood up. Stretching and twisting felt good. “Let’s go tell Eduardo,” he said.

  The clerk eyed both of them when they came out of the back room. “Who won?” he asked. “I can’t tell by looking at you.”

  “He got me,” Gianfranco said. “I made him work for it, but he got me.”

  “He gave me a big scare,” Alfredo said. “With a little more luck, he would have beaten me.”

  Eduardo wrote the results on the tournament chart. “Cheer up, Gianfranco,” he said. “You’ve still got the third-place game. You win that, you get a little trophy and a free book.”

  “I’m not down,” Gianfranco said. “It’s like I told Alfredo—I gave it my best shot, and it was pretty good. I know which book I want if I do win the third-place game, too—that one about the way the Prussian Army organized their railroads for war. I bet I can get a lot of ideas out of it.”

  Eduardo glanced over at Alfredo. “He is going to be dangerous.”

  “He sure is,” Alfredo said. “I’ve got a copy of that one myself. He’s right. It gives you all sorts of notions about the best way to put your rail net together.”

  “So you’ve read it?” Gianfranco asked. Alfredo nodded. Gianfranco winked at him. “One more reason for me to want to get my hands on it, then.”

  “You sure don’t act like somebody who just lost a big game,” Eduardo said.

  “I told him the same thing,” Alfredo put in.

  “Oh, I wish I’d won,” Gianfranco said. “But playing against Alfredo helped me take my game up a notch. I’ve never seen anybody who makes as good a capitalist as he does—in the game, of course.” He didn’t want to insult the older man.

  And he didn’t. “I understood you, ragazzo,” Alfredo said. “Where else can we be capitalists except in games? If we tried to do it for real … Well, we’d get in trouble, so we don’t.”

  “Here, look—I have to be a capitalist,” Eduardo said. “I have to take money from both of you for sitting at a table in my shop and playing.”

  “I don’t think you’re being a capitalist for that,” Gianfranco said. “I think you make a perfect Marxist, as a matter of fact.”

  Both the clerk and Alfredo raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure?” Eduardo asked.

  “You have the ability to give us a place to sit, and we have a need to play your games,” Gianfranco said. “What could be better?”

  Eduardo looked thoughtful, but Alfredo laughed and wagged a finger at Gianfranco. “You’ve got it backwards, amico. It’s from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. By that logic, Eduardo ought to be paying us.”

  “Works for me.” Gianfranco held out his hand, palm up.

  Eduardo had a can of Fanta on the counter. He made as if to pour some soda into Gianfranco’s hand. Gianfranco jerked it away. That set all three of them laughing.

  Alfredo said, “I’ve got a question for you, Eduardo, if I can ask it without getting wet.”

  “Well, you can try,” Eduardo said, but he made a point of keeping his hand near the can.

  “Where do you get your games?” Alfredo asked. “I’ve looked all over Milan, and this is the only place that sells them.”

  “Of course it is,” Eduardo said. “This is the only place in town where the elves make their deliveries.”

  Gianfranco laughed again. He’d got the same kinds of answers when he asked questions like that. But Alfredo frowned and said, “Come on, Eduardo. You can do better than that. What am I going to do, take your answer to the Security Police?”

  “Well, you might,” the clerk said. That turned Alfredo’s frown into a scowl. You couldn’t say much worse about a man than that he was an informer. Gianfranco wondered why that was true, when so many people really were informers. Memories of days gone by, he supposed. But before Alfredo could say anything everybody would regret, Eduardo went on, “You see, the true secret is that we have a sharashka full of zeks down in the basement, and they turn out the games for us.”

  That was only a little less unlikely than the story about the elves. A sharashka was a lab where privileged prisoners went on working for the state. If they came through, they might get their terms cut. If they didn’t, they went back to being ordinary zeks. Somebody who knew his Dante once called sharashkas the first circle of Hell: they were bad, but you knew there were worse places. That was the kind of joke you could repeat only to the people you trusted most. The USSR had got some good work out of sharashkas. The Germans and the Chinese also used them a lot. They weren’t so common in Italy and most other fraternal Communist countries.

  Gianfranco clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Now I know you’re telling us lies, Eduardo,” he said sadly.

  “Oh, you do, do you?” The clerk stood on his dignity. “And how do you know that?”

  “Because The Gladiator hasn’t got a basement.”

  For some reason, that set all three of them off. They laughed so loud, somebody came out of the back room to complain that players there couldn’t concentrate on the games. “And that’s important,” he finished, as if they were too dense to know it.

  “Sorry,” Eduardo said. The irate gamer rolled his eyes and went back to his board and his cards and his dice. Eduardo and Gianfranco and Alfredo laughed harder than ever. That life should get in the way of the games … Well, heaven forbid!

  As Gianfranco had seen during the game, Alfredo was stubborn. When the laughter faded, the older man said, “You still didn’t answer my question.”

  “Why don’t you ask other places why they don’t have them?” Gianfranco said.

  Alfredo looked at him as if he wasn’t so bright after all. “I’ve done that,” he said. “They tell me they can’t get them. They say they don’t know where to get them.”

  “See?” Eduardo said. “They don’t have the telephone number for the zeks in the basement.”

  That made Gianfranco laugh again, but Alfredo didn’t think it was so funny. “Confound it, Eduardo, how can you have games nobody else can get his hands on? What do you do, bring them down from the moon?”

  “Sure,” the clerk said. “If you go out to the alley behind the shop, you’ll see the launch tower for our rocket ship.”

  Alfredo gave him a very odd look. “You know, I almost wouldn’t be surprised. Ciao, Eduardo. One of these days, maybe you’ll tell me the truth. Ciao, Gianfranco. You played a fine game there.” He walked out before either of the other two could answer him.

  Eduardo tried to make light of it, saying, “He doesn’t like mysteries.”

  “Neither do I,”
Gianfranco said, which seemed to startle the clerk. He went on, “I put up with them, though, because I like the games so much. Alfredo’s the same way. Now that he’s one win away from taking the tournament, you think he’ll kick up a fuss?”

  “Well, I hope not,” Eduardo said slowly.

  At supper, Gianfranco was full of all the details of his epic match with Alfredo. Annarita heard much more about the railroad game than she ever wanted to. Trying to shut Gianfranco up, her mother said, “Then you won, did you? Congratulations!”

  “Oh, no, Signora Crosetti,” Gianfranco answered. “He beat me. But it was a good game. That’s what really counts.”

  Annarita’s father eyed Gianfranco over the tops of his glasses. “If you can say that and really mean it—and I think you do—you’ve taken a long step toward growing up. You deserve more congratulations for that than you would for winning.”

  “Dottor Crosetti is right,” Gianfranco’s father said. “Things don’t always go the way you want them to. You have to learn to roll with the punches.”

  Comrade Mazzilli was always good for a couple of clichés. An ordinary man, he had ordinary thoughts, and they came out in ordinary ways. The next new idea he had would be the first. But Annarita thought he and her own father were right about this. She wouldn’t have expected Gianfranco to lose a game and be as proud as if he’d won. But he was, plainly. The Gladiator had more going for it than she would have guessed.

  When they were walking to school the next morning, he asked Annarita, “Did you manage to get that nonsense about The Gladiator being a capitalist plot taken care of?”

  “Sì,” she said. “Ludovico went along with me on the report, so you don’t need to worry about that any more.”

  “Grazie,” he told her. Then he said, “You know, I almost asked my old man where The Gladiator gets its games. He could probably find out through purchase records and things. Alfredo was pitching a fit about that last night.”

  It had puzzled Annarita, too. The games and a lot of the books there looked to be in a class by themselves. “Why didn’t you?” she asked.

  He looked sheepish. “I didn’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, that’s why. Maybe they aren’t as legit and legal as they ought to be, you know? I just plain don’t care. I have too much fun there to want to take any chances about getting those people in trouble. I kept my big mouth shut.” He mimed zipping it closed with the hand that wasn’t carrying his notebook and books.

  “If they are doing something under the table, chances are it’ll come out sooner or later, you know,” Annarita said.

  “Better later than sooner,” Gianfranco answered. “Another tournament’ll start soon, and I’m going to win this one!”

  “You’ve got it bad, don’t you?” Annarita might almost have been talking with a girl friend who had a crush on a boy.

  Gianfranco grinned at her—he must have recognized the tone. “I have fun. What’s wrong with that?” he said. “I haven’t found anything I enjoy more.” He grinned again, in a slightly different way. “And if I don’t still feel like that once I find a girl … well, I’ll worry about it then. I’ve seen it happen with other guys.”

  “All right,” she said, because that was in her mind, too.

  And then he looked at her again, thoughtfully. “Eduardo said I was a fool because you weren’t my girlfriend.”

  “Did he?” Annarita said. Gianfranco nodded. She wagged a finger at him. “If Eduardo wants to tell you how to run your railroads, that’s one thing. If he wants to tell you how to run your life, that’s different. It’s none of his business, you hear?”

  “Sì, Annarita.” Gianfranco sounded more subdued than usual. “But you know, it might not be so bad.”

  She almost laughed in his face. Only the thought that she’d keep on seeing him at breakfast and supper every day held her back at first. Her family and the Mazzillis needed to be able to get along with each other if they could. Because they’d shared so much for so long, though, they did have some notion of what made each other tick. Yes, Gianfranco was a year younger than she was. But there was more to him than she’d thought, even if it came out in his game and not in something really important. He might not be her very first choice for a boyfriend, but she realized she could do worse. A couple of years earlier, he would have been an impossible object. These days … ? She looked at him with new eyes. No, he wasn’t so bad.

  She tried not to let any of that show. She didn’t want Gianfranco getting a swelled head. That would make him impossible. All she said was, “Well, we’ve both got other things to worry about right now.” He just nodded, which was a point in his favor.

  Annarita found out how right she was when she came out of Russian that morning. She ran into Maria Tenace on the way to her next class. No, that wasn’t how it happened. Maria was lying in wait for her outside Comrade Montefusco’s door, and waved a newspaper in her face as soon as she came out.

  “Did you see this?” Maria shouted. “Did you?”

  “If you don’t get out of my way, Maria, you’ll see stars, I promise,” Annarita said.

  The other girl paused for a moment, then decided Annarita wasn’t kidding and backed up a step. That was smart, because Annarita would have loved an excuse to knock her block off. But Maria kept waving the paper. “Did you see the Red Banner? Did you see what’s in it?” Her loud, shrill voice reminded Annarita of the noise a dentist’s drill made.

  “What’s in the Red Banner, Maria?” Annarita asked resignedly. She paid as little attention to the Party newspaper as she could. Any newspaper was full of propaganda, but the Red Banner stuffed it in the way a sausagemaker shoved ground meat and spices into a salami casing.

  “Here. See for yourself.”

  Maria pointed to the story she had in mind. CAPITALIST PLOTTERS ARRESTED IN ROME! the headline screamed. The article said the Security Police had seized seven men and a woman on suspicion of trying to undermine Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. They were accused of planning to set up a corporation to enrich themselves and grind down their workers. And they were supposed to have got their ideas from playing games at a shop called The Conductor’s Cap, a place that sounded an awful lot like The Gladiator.

  When the Security Police came to this wicked den of iniquity, they found the proprietor and his henchmen fled, the story said. Their capture is expected momentarily, for they cannot hope to escape the aroused forces of Socialist justice.

  “You should have listened to me.” Vindictive pleasure glowed on Maria’s face. It bubbled in her voice, like noxious gas bubbling up in swamp water.

  Even if she knew what she was talking about, her attitude disgusted Annarita. “Why should anyone listen to you, Maria?” she asked.

  “Because I was right!” Maria exclaimed.

  “A stopped clock is right twice a day. Nobody pays any attention to it anyway,” Annarita said.

  She got what she wanted—she made Maria angry, too. It wasn’t pretty. It was scary, because Annarita could see Maria putting her in a mental card file. Subversive, the card said. Reactionary. Capitalist sympathizer. Those were the cards that spawned denunciations, all right.

  “Go ahead. Have your joke,” Maria said now. “But they’ll come after The Gladiator, too. And do you know what they’ll do then? They’ll come after you. And do you know what else? I’ll be glad!”

  She stalked off, as well as anyone so dumpy could stalk. People stared from her to Annarita and back again. Annarita tried to laugh it off. But laughter didn’t come easy, not this time.

  Five

  Gianfranco heard about The Conductor’s Cap from Annarita the next morning. “It might be a good time to stay away from The Gladiator for a while,” she said. “If the Security Police do crack down, you don’t want to be there when it happens.”

  “Why? Do you think they won’t get my name?” Gianfranco said. “Not likely, not with the time and money I’ve spent there. Besides, I hope I know who my friends are.”

 
The look Annarita gave him said she might be seeing him for the first time. “That’s … brave, Gianfranco,” she said after a long pause. “It’s brave, but how smart is it? What can you do for your friends if the Security Police are feeding you truth drugs or beating you with rubber hoses or doing any of the other wonderful things they do?”

  He shivered. He couldn’t help it. Stories about what the Security Police did to people were limited only by the storyteller’s imagination. The worse they sounded, the more likely they were to be true. So everybody said, anyway. Gianfranco didn’t know whether what everybody said was true, but he didn’t have any reason to doubt it here.

  Maybe my father could keep me safe, he thought. Plenty of Party officials’ children stayed out of trouble when other kids without connections ended up in deep. But if he got arrested on charges having to do with capitalism, would the Security Police care whose son he was? He didn’t think so.

  And he didn’t think he ought to rely on his father here anyway. “All I’ve done is play games and read books,” he said. “How bad can that be?”

  “As bad as the Security Police want to make it,” Annarita said, which was bound to be true. “Don’t do anything silly, that’s all.”

  By the way she talked, he half expected to see Security Police vans in front of Hoxha Polytechnic to carry off all the students who ever went into The Gladiator. No vans there. Everything seemed normal. Everything was normal. He had an ordinary day. He didn’t butcher his algebra quiz, but he didn’t think he aced it, either.

  As soon as the closing bell let him escape, he headed for the Galleria del Popolo. It had started to drizzle by then, but the glassed-over roof held the rain at bay. He bought a couple of biscotti and a Fanta to keep his own engine steaming while he played at The Gladiator.

  Only one thing wrong—the shop was closed. When he tried the door, it was locked. Looking inside, he didn’t see anybody. He went to the leather-goods shop next door. “Where is everybody?” he asked a man setting out wallets.