The Gladiator (14 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: The Gladiator
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She yawned again. “I'm going to bed. I don't care if tomorrow—I mean, today—is Sunday. I'm too sleepy to play anymore. Good night.” She slipped away before Gianfranco could even try to talk her into going on a little longer.
He sighed and shrugged. “We'll just mark everything and pick it up again later on.”
“Right.” Eduardo took care of that and put the game back in the box. Then he said, “It ought to be pretty quiet out on the
street, right? Come on out, why don't you? I've got some stuff I want to talk to you about.”
“What kind of stuff?” Gianfranco asked.
“Stuff, that's what.” Eduardo got up. “You coming or not?”
“I'm coming,” Gianfranco said. “What do you want to say out there that you don't want to say in here?”
Eduardo didn't answer. Whatever it was, he
didn't
want to say it in here. They went down the stairs together. Somebody from the floor above Gianfranco's was coming up. He'd had a good bit to drink. “
Ciao
,” he said thickly. He reeled on the stairs. Gianfranco hoped he wouldn't trip and break his neck.
It was cool and dark and quiet outside. Well, not too quiet—Milan was a big city. In the distance, car horns blared. Dogs were barking. Somebody yelled at somebody else. But none of that was close. Gianfranco and Eduardo could stand on the sidewalk and not worry about it.
Gianfranco looked up into the sky. Even at one in the morning, city lights washed out all but the brighter stars. But he hadn't come out here to find the Big Dipper. “So what's going on?” he asked Eduardo.
“I'm not trying to take your girl away,” the older man said bluntly. “I'm not—all right?”
“Annarita's not my girl,” Gianfranco said with a sour laugh. “Ask her if you don't believe me.”
“She's more your girl than she is mine,” Eduardo said. “That's how it'll stay, too. She's too young for me, for one thing. And I don't belong here. This isn't my world. What I want most is to get back to the home timeline.”
He'd said that before, but never so strongly. “You have somebody back there waiting for you?” Gianfranco asked.
“Not … like that, no,” Eduardo admitted. “But it's my
home. It's where I belong. So I'm not trying to muscle in on you,
capisce
?”
“I never said you were,” Gianfranco answered. True—he hadn't. But that didn't mean it wasn't on his mind.
“All right. But I wanted you to know. You don't have anything to worry about there, anyhow,” Eduardo said.
“Thanks.” Gianfranco said it even if he wasn't sure he meant it.
If Annarita decides she likes Eduardo, what can I do about it?
he wondered. But he knew the answer to that—he couldn't do anything. And she might. Eduardo was an older man, he wasn't bad-looking, and he had a genuine mystery hanging over him. What could be more intriguing? And even if she didn't, Gianfranco knew he had other things to worry about. The Security Police, for instance. He shivered, though it wasn't very cold. “Let's go back inside.”
“Sure,” Eduardo said. “But I wanted you to hear that, and I wanted to make sure nobody else did.”
They both turned to walk back up the steps. A police car came around the corner as they did. A spotlight blinded Gianfranco. “Stay right there!” one of the
carabinieri
called. “Let's see your papers! What are you doing out on the street in the middle of the night?”
Gianfranco's teeth started to chatter. He had his identity card and his internal passport with him. He would no more go outside without them than without his pants. Nobody would, not in the Italian People's Republic, not anywhere. He assumed Eduardo had his papers, too. But would they pass muster?
Both policemen got out of the car. One covered Eduardo and Gianfranco with a submachine gun while the other came up and held out his hand. He looked at Gianfranco's documents
first. Nodding, he gave them back. “I know who your father is. But who's this guy?”
“I'm Dr. Crosetti's cousin,” Eduardo said, giving the policeman his papers. “I'm staying in their apartment till I find something for myself here.”
“He is,” Gianfranco said.
“How do you know, kid?” the policeman asked.
“I ought to. We share a kitchen and bathroom with the Crosettis,” Gianfranco answered.
The policeman only grunted. He shone his flashlight on Eduardo's papers. “Is he all right?” the other policeman asked. “Shall I radio headquarters?”
No!
Gianfranco all but screamed it. That wouldn't do anybody any good. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip. “I don't
think
so,” said the
carabiniere
with Eduardo's papers. Instead of returning them, he asked, “What
are
you doing out here at this time of night?”
“Talking about girls,” Eduardo answered, and it wasn't even a lie.
The policeman thought it over. After a moment, he decided it was funny and laughed. Even better, he handed back the identity card and internal passport. “Well, Pagnozzi, that's a nice way to pass the time, but do it somewhere else from now on, you hear?”
“We'll do that.” Eduardo stuck them in his pockets. “Thanks.”
With another grunt, the
carabiniere
turned to his partner. “They're clean. And we got that drunk an hour ago, so we're on quota. Let's go.”
They drove off. Gianfranco noticed his knees were knocking. He tried to make them stop, but they didn't want to. If the
policemen hadn't picked up the drunk, would they have hauled him and Eduardo to the station instead? It sure sounded that way.
Eduardo wore a small, tight smile. “Boy, that was fun, wasn't it?” he said.
“As a matter of fact, no.” Gianfranco could play the game of understatement, too. Without another word, he went back into the apartment building.
“You did real well,” Eduardo told him as they trudged up the stairs. Would the elevator ever get fixed? Gianfranco wasn't holding his breath.
“Maybe I did,” he said after a few steps. “I didn't like it.”
“Well, who would?” Eduardo said. “Police shouldn't be able to bother you whenever they want to. In a free country, they can't.”
As far as Gianfranco was concerned, he might as well have started speaking Korean. “What would stop them? What
could
stop them?” Gianfranco asked, certain Eduardo had no answer.
But Eduardo did. “The laws would,” he said. “If the police do something wrong or bother people they've got no business bothering, they get in trouble.”
“How?” Gianfranco still had trouble seeing it. “The police are … the police. They're part of the government. The government can't get in trouble.” He might have been saying,
The sun will come up tomorrow
.
“Sure it can. Why shouldn't it, if it does something wrong? In a free country, you can sue the government. You can sue the police if they beat you up for no reason. And if a court decides they're guilty, they have to pay.” Eduardo spoke with a certain somber relish. “It happens now and again. And because it can happen, the government is more careful about what it does.”
“People … sue the government?” Gianfranco missed a step. Eduardo grabbed him by the arm and kept him from falling on his face. The idea was so strange, he might have been saying,
The sun will come up tomorrow … in the west
.
“Why not?” Eduardo seemed to enjoy provoking him. “You live in the Italian People's Republic, don't you?”
“Yes, but …” Gianfranco tried to imagine what would happen if someone tried to sue the government. He didn't need much imagination to figure it out. The Security Police would land on the poor crackbrained fool like a ton of bricks, and that would be that. “What about the Security Police?” he demanded.
“We don't have any, not like that, not to keep track of people who haven't done anything wrong,” Eduardo said, and Gianfranco's jaw dropped. Eduardo went on, “We have
carabinieri
to go after criminals, but that's different. Some people
will
try to cheat no matter what kind of society they live in.”
“I suppose.” Gianfranco wasn't sure he would have walked past his floor if Eduardo didn't hold the door open, but he wasn't sure he wouldn't have, either. Eduardo had hit him with too many new ideas, too hard, too fast. He needed some time to get used to them.
“We wanted things to be like that here, too,” Eduardo said as they walked down the hall to the Mazzillis' apartment and the Crosettis'. “That's what we were working toward.” He shrugged. “Things don't always turn out the way you wish they would. We'll have to come up with something else and try again, that's all.”
He paused at his doorway, Gianfranco at his. They nodded to each other and went inside. Gianfranco undressed and got ready for bed—quietly, so he wouldn't bother his folks. He lay
down, but sleep was a long time coming. Some of the things Eduardo had said …
A country without Security Police? A country where the people actually had power instead of just giving the state their name? A country where, if people didn't like what the government was up to, they could do something about it? What would that kind of country be like? What would living in that kind of country be like?
Gianfranco didn't know. How could he, when it was so different from everything he'd grown up with? But he knew one thing: he wished he could find out.
After a moment, he realized something else. Without intending to, he'd just turned into a counterrevolutionary. Then he
really
had a hard time going to sleep.
 
 
Walking to school Monday morning, Annarita thought Gianfranco seemed quieter than usual. Had Eduardo talked to him? If he had, what had he said? Annarita didn't want to come straight out and ask. She tried a different question, a safer question, instead: “You all right, Gianfranco?”
He blinked. He thought it over. She watched him doing it. “Well, I'm not sure,” he said at last, quite seriously.
She eyed him, exasperated and curious at the same time. “What's that supposed to mean?”
He looked around to make sure nobody was paying any special attention to him. In the Italian People's Republic, that kind of glance was automatic for anyone older than seven or so. Annarita suspected it worked the same way all over the world. Gianfranco said, “Wouldn't it be nice if there were no Security Police?”
“Sure it would,” Annarita answered. “And it would be nice if everybody were rich and everybody were beautiful, too. Don't sit up nights waiting, that's all.”
He said something rude—rude enough to startle her. Then he turned red and said, “
Scusi
. But I'm serious. I really am.”
“That's nice,” Annarita said. “No matter how serious you are, though, what can you do about it?”
“By myself? Nothing,” Gianfranco said. “But if all the people united …”
“The Security Police would throw everybody into camps.” Annarita finished the sentence when Gianfranco's voice trailed away.
He shook his head. “They couldn't do it to everybody, not all at once. There aren't enough camps for that. Not enough Security Policemen, either.”
“Well, in that case the Russians would say we're trying to overthrow Socialism, and they'd invade,” Annarita said. “Either they'd build more camps or they'd kill enough people so the ones who are left would fit into the camps they've got.”
“But what if the
Russian
people united, too?” Gianfranco said.
Annarita stared at him. “You weren't drinking wine at breakfast. I saw what you had: cappuccino, just like me.” Like most Italian kids their age, they did drink wine with dinner. Nobody here fussed about it, though people from northern Europe and America sometimes squawked.
“I was thinking about … freedom,” Gianfranco said. “That gets you drunk like too much
vino
, but you don't come down again afterwards.”
“I guess not, to look at you,” Annarita said. “Be careful you don't get in trouble once you're in school.”
“I'll try,” Gianfranco said.
A car went two wheels up on the sidewalk in front of them to let somebody off. It still blocked traffic. All the drivers behind the offender leaned on their horns. Some of them yelled at him, too. He ignored them. Annarita wasn't much impressed. She saw things like that almost every day. Keeping Gianfranco out of trouble was more important—and more interesting. Now she could say what she needed to say: “All this talk about freedom. You must have been listening to Cousin Silvio.” In public, she wouldn't call him Eduardo.

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