"Maria's a lot of things, but silly isn't any of them," Annarita said grimly. "She was giving me a hard time because the Security Police closed the place down. Suspicion of capitalism, I guess you'd say. But all the people who worked there seemed to vanish into thin air."
"Lucky for them," her father remarked. Not for the first time, he reminded her of someone who would smoke a pipe. He didn't, or anything else. But he had that kind of thoughtful air.
"Not for all of them." Annarita nudged Gianfranco.
He jumped. His voice wobbled and broke as he said, "I ran into one of them-a guy named Eduardo. I brought him here. What are we going to do with him, Dottor Crosetti? I don't want to give him to the Security Police, not when he really hasn't done anything."
"Hasn't done anything you know of," Annarita's father corrected. He frowned. With a lot of people, it would have been an angry frown. Why not, when Gianfranco and Annarita were involving him in something not only illegal but dangerous? Everybody did illegal things to get by now and then. You almost had to. Most of them couldn't land you in too much trouble. Not letting the Security Police get their hands on a fugitive they wanted? That was a different story.
"They don't want him for anything but working in the shop." Gianfranco sounded more sure of himself now.
"How do you know that?" Dr. Crosetti asked. He didn't sound angry.
"Because a Security Police officer was asking me questions outside The Gladiator this afternoon," Gianfranco answered. An-narita hadn't heard that. He went on, "It was all he cared about."
Annarita's father grunted. "I think I'd better talk to this fellow. If he makes me believe he's harmless-well, we'll see. If he doesn't, I'll send him away from here with a flea in his ear. Is that a deal?"
"It sounds wonderful," Gianfranco said.
"It's fine, Father," Annarita agreed.
"Well, then, go get him, and we'll see what's what," Dr. Crosetti said. "And then you can both disappear. I've already talked with you. I want to talk to him."
Gianfranco looked miffed. "It's all right," Annarita told him. "That's how Papa works." He didn't seem convinced. She asked, "Have you got any better ideas?" Reluctantly, he shook his head. "Well, then," she said. "Come on. Let's get Eduardo, before he decides he'd better run away."
Back to the stairwell they went. To Annarita's relief, the clerk from The Gladiator was still there. He looked up at them. "And?" he said.
"Come talk to my father. If anybody can figure out what to do for you, he can," Annarita said.
"I've already talked too much. I don't want to do any more," Eduardo said.
"If you don't want to talk to my father, you can talk to the Security Police instead," she said. Eduardo winced and climbed to his feet. Annarita had thought that would get him moving. He muttered something under his breath. She couldn't make out what it was. Maybe that was just as well.
Down the hall they went. Gianfranco did the introduction: "Dr. Crosetti, this is Eduardo… You know what, Eduardo? I don't know your last name."
"Caruso," the clerk said. "Only I can't sing."
That made Annarita's father smile, but only for a moment. "Oh, you'll sing for me, Comrade Caruso. Or else we're both wasting our time." He gestured to Annarita and Gianfranco. "Out, out, out. Give us some room to talk, some room to breath, per piacere."
None too willingly, they left the living room. "What's he going to ask him?" Gianfranco whispered. "What's he going to find out that we didn't?"
"I don't know," Annarita answered. "But we can't do this by ourselves, and you didn't seem to want to go to your folks."
"I hope not!" Gianfranco exclaimed. "My father would either make speeches at him or hand him to the Security Police. Or both."
That was about what Annarita thought Comrade Mazzilli would do, too. "There you are, then," she said.
Gianfranco nodded. "Here I am, all right, and I wish 1 were somewhere else."
Algebra homework wasn't what Gianfranco wanted to be doing. Across the kitchen table from him, Annarita went through her schoolwork as if she had not a care in the world. What was her father talking about with Eduardo? How long would it take? Forever? It felt that way.
They got chased away from the table about eight o'clock, so their mothers could set it for supper. Dr. Crosetti came out to eat. Eduardo didn't. What had Annarita's father done with him-done to him? Stuck him in a bookcase? Preserved him in a specimen bottle? Stuffed him under the rug? Whatever it was, he gave no sign. He talked a little about a strange case he'd seen that afternoon, but said not a word about the strange clerk he'd-probably-left in his living room.
As for Gianfranco's father, he talked about some bureaucratic silliness even he wouldn't care about day after tomorrow. Nobody else cared now. Even Gianfranco's mother looked bored. The Crosettis didn't, but they weren't family. They worked harder to stay polite.
Supper was good, but Gianfranco paid it less attention than he might have. He wanted to know where Eduardo was and what would happen to him. He couldn't ask, though, not without letting his own folks know what was going on. He was sure he didn't want to do that.
As people were getting up from the table, Annarita said, "Why don't you come over to our place, Gianfranco, and I'll see if I can help you with that algebra."
He hadn't asked her for any help. That had to mean… "Sure!" Gianfranco had to work not to sound too eager. Annarita had seemed perfectly casual. He hadn't known she was such a good actress.
Beaming, his father said, "That's good. It's right out of The Communist Manifesto-from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs." Then the smile slipped. "Of course, maybe Gianfranco wouldn't need the help if he worked harder on his own."
"I do work hard," Gianfranco protested. "It just doesn't stick as well as I wish it did."
"What did you get in algebra when you were in school?" his mother asked his father. Instead of answering, his father went back to talking about the Manifesto. That told Gianfranco everything he needed to know.
He got his algebra book, then followed Annarita into the Crosettis' apartment. "Well?" he said as soon as his own folks couldn't hear him. "Where's Eduardo? What are you going to do with him?"
"What? You don't want to do algebra?" Annarita said, as innocently as if she thought he did.
What he said about algebra wasn't quite suited to polite company, even if, at the last moment, he made it milder than he'd first intended. "Where's Eduardo?" he asked.
"Who?" Annarita said. Gianfranco didn't clobber her and he didn't scream, which only proved he had more self-control than he thought. She took him by the arm. "Come on." She led him into the Crosettis' living room.
Eduardo sat on the sofa there, a glass of wine in front of him. Dr. Crosetti sat in his favorite chair, a glass of wine on the end table next to him. They both looked pleased with themselves. "Ciao, Gianfranco," Annarita's father said. "I'd like you to meet my distant cousin, Silvio Pagnozzi." He waved towards Eduardo.
Gianfranco gaped. He started to squawk. Then he realized something was going on. He held out his hand. "Mo/to lieto… Silvio."
Eduardo stood up and gravely shook hands with him. "Pleased to meet you, too, Gianfranco," he said, for all the world as if Gianfranco weren't a regular at The Gladiator.
"I hope your papers are in order… Silvio," Gianfranco said. "They're liable to be doing a lot of checking for a while. Looking for dangerous criminals like murderers and bank robbers and gaming-store clerks, you know."
"Si, si." Eduardo pulled out an identity card and an internal passport. Gianfranco wasn't astonished to see that they had Eduardo's photo, a fingerprint likely to be his, and the name of Silvio Pagnozzi. The internal passport said he was born in Acireale, down on Sicily, but had moved to Milan when he was only two. That made sense-he didn't talk like a Sicilian, so he couldn't have lived in the south for long.
"What happens if the Security Police telephone Acireale to find out if you were really born there?" Gianfranco asked.
Eduardo shrugged. "Acireale's right by Mount Etna. Most of the records there were lost in the earthquake of 2081," he said. "They can't prove anything one way or the other."
"I see." Gianfranco nodded and gave the documents back. "These look good. They look real."
"They're as good as the ones you've got," Eduardo- Silvio?-answered.
"If someone with a different name who looks like you had papers, would his be just as good, too?"
"Well, of course," Eduardo answered, smiling. "You're not a human being at all if you don't have papers that say you are, eh?" He winked.