As Cianfranco 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 cliches. 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 ol?"
"Si," 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 lind out through purchase records and things. Alfredo was pitching a fit about that last night."
It had puzzled Annarila, 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. 1 have too much lun 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," Gianlranco 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 (riend 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 1 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?"
"Si, 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, 1 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?"