Annarita pegged him for the sort who gave out compliments as readily as insults. That meant she didn't need to take them seriously. She said, "You were telling me how you get away with selling books like these."
"That's right." Eduardo nodded. "Nothing fancy about it. We do it the same way the Church gets away with teaching what it teaches."
"This isn't religion. This is economics," Annarita said severely.
"Of course. But a lot of what the Church says goes against science and against dialectical materialism and against Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Everybody who thinks about it would say that's so. Why does the state let the Church do it, then?" Because people would riot if the state didn't, Annarita thought. Eduardo had a different answer: "Because it's religion, that's why. What the Church says only counts in religion, nothing else. And what we sell here only counts in our games, nowhere else. See? It's simple, really."
He made it sound simple, anyway. How many complications lurked under that smooth surface? Quite a few, unless Annarita missed her guess. But some of what he said was likely true, or the Security Police would have closed this place down. Unless he belongs to the Security Police, she reminded herself. She wondered how she could find out.
Gianfranco counted out his latest payment for delivering Russian oil to Paris. "Twenty-three million there," he said, as if the bright play-money bills were real. "That puts me at 509 million." As soon as you went over 500 million, you won. Carlo was still a good sixty million away.
"Si, you got me," he said, and stuck out his hand across the board. Gianfranco shook it. Carlo went on, "When we got into that second price war, that ruined me. You were smart there, Gianfranco. I didn't think you'd do anything like that."
"I'm not always as dumb as I look," Gianfranco said, which made the university student laugh. They got up and went out to the front counter together.
"Who won?" Eduardo asked.
Gianfranco stuck his thumb up. Carlo stuck his down. That was what you did at The Gladiator. The people who ran the shop hadn't started it. The people who played there did. In the ancient Roman arenas, a raised thumb was a vote for sparing a downed gladiator's life. A lowered one was a vote to finish him off. Somebody who knew that must have done it for a joke the first time. Now everybody did.
"Let's see…" Eduardo pulled out a chart. "Gianfranco beats Carlo in Rails across Europe. Gianfranco, that means you play Alfredo next. Carlo, you go down into the losers' bracket, and you play Vittorio."
"I'll beat him." Carlo didn't lack confidence. Common sense, sometimes, but never confidence.
"Alfredo?" Gianfranco didn't sound so bold. "He'll be dangerous. He studies the game all the time." Alfredo was older than Eduardo. He wore a mustache, and it had some white hairs in it. He was out of school, so he didn't have to worry about homework and projects and things. He had a job, but who took jobs seriously? He spent as much time at work as he could get away with on his hobby, and just about all the time after he got home. He was a fanatic, no two ways about it.
"Hope the dice go your way," Eduardo said. "If you have enough luck, all the other guy's skill doesn't matter. Might as well be life, eh?"
"Si." That was Carlo, still looking for a way to console himself after losing.
"It's a long game," Gianfranco said. "Most of the time, the dice and the cards even out."
"Well, in that case you'd better pray, because Alfredo will eat you for lunch like fettuccine," Carlo said. "I've got to go. Ciao." He walked out without giving Gianfranco a chance to snap back at him.
"He thought he'd beat you," Eduardo said.
"I know. He figured I was a kid, so I wouldn't know what I was doing," Gianfranco said. "I guess I showed him." Then, cautiously, he asked, "What did Annarita think of the place?" He still didn't want to tell Eduardo she was investigating The Gladiator.
"She seemed interested," answered the man behind the counter. "She's more political than you are, isn't she?"
Gianfrarrco knew what that meant-Annarita was asking questions. He just laughed and said, "Well, who isn't?" A lot of the time, not being interested in politics was the safest road to take. If you didn't stick your neck out one way or the other, nobody could say you were on the wrong side.
"She seemed nice, though. She's smart-you can tell," Eduardo went on.
"Uh-huh," Gianfranco said. Nobody ever went, He's smart-you can tell about him. He got by, and that was about it.
"She really did seem interested," Eduardo said. "Do you suppose she'll come back and play?"
"I don't know," Gianfranco said in surprise. "I didn't even think of it." A few girls did come to The Gladiator. Two or three of them were as good at their games as most of the guys. But it was a small and mostly male world. Some guys who had been regulars stopped coming so often-or at all-when they found a steady girlfriend or got married. Gianfranco thought that was the saddest thing in the world.
"It would be nice if she did," Eduardo said. "People find out pretty girls come in here, we get more customers. That wouldn't be bad."
"I guess not." Gianfranco didn't sound so sure, mostly because he wasn't. One of the reasons he liked coming to The Gladiator was that not so many people knew about the place. The ones who did were crazy the same way he was. They enjoyed belonging to something halfway between a club and a secret society. If a bunch of strangers who didn't know the ropes started coming in, it wouldn't be the same.
Eduardo laughed at him. "I know what the difference between us is. You don't have to worry about paying the rent- that's what."
"You don't seem to have much trouble," Gianfranco said. Along with the games and books and miniatures and models The Gladiator sold, it got all the gamers' hourly fees. It had to be doing pretty well-the Galleria del Popolo wasn't a cheap location.
"We manage." Eduardo knocked on the wood of the coun-tertop. "But that doesn't mean it's easy or anything. And we can always use more people. It's the truth, Gianfranco, whether you like it or not."
"You just want to indoctrinate them," Gianfranco said with a sly smile. "You want to turn them all into railroad capitalists or soccer-team capitalists or whatever. By the time you're done, there won't be a proper Communist left in Milan."
Eduardo looked around in what seemed to Gianfranco to be real alarm. After he decided nobody'd overheard Gianfranco, the clerk relaxed-a little. "If you open your big mouth any wider, you'll fall in and disappear, and that'll be the end of you," he said. "And it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, either."
"Oh, give me break," Gianfranco said. "I was just kidding. You know that-you'd better, all the time and money I spend in this joint."
"Nobody jokes about capitalists. They're the class enemy," Eduardo said.
"Carlo and I were joking about them while we played. We aren't the only ones, either. You hear guys like that all the time," Gianfranco said.
"That's in the game. It's not real in the game, and everybody knows it's not. I was talking with your girlfriend about that."
"She's not my girlfriend."
"The more fool you," Eduardo said, which flustered Gianfranco. The clerk went on, "As long as you know you're only being capitalists in a game, everything's fine. Games are just pretend."
"Not just," Gianfranco said. "That's what makes your games so good-they feel real."
"Sure they do, but they aren't," Eduardo said. "What happens if you go out into Milan and try to act like a capitalist? The Security Police arrest you, that's what. You want to see what a camp's like from the inside?"
"No!" Gianfranco said, which was the only possible answer to that question. But he couldn't help adding, "I've done too much studying for the game. Sometimes I think what they had back then worked better than what we've got now. The elevator in our building's been out of whack for years, and how come? 'Cause nobody cares enough to fix it."
"If I were a spy, you just convicted yourself," Eduardo said. "For heaven's sake, be careful how you talk. 1 don't want to lose customers, especially when I know they'll never come back."
Gianfranco played back his own words in his head. He winced. "Grazie, Eduardo. You're right. 1 was dumb."
"Dumb doesn't begin to cover it." Eduardo shook his head. "In here, it's a game. Out there"-his gesture covered the world beyond The Gladiator's door-"it's for real. Don't forget it."
He was urgent enough to impress Gianfranco, who said, "I won't." But then he couldn't help putting in, "You know what?"
"What?" Eduardo sounded like somebody holding on to his patience with both hands.
"This stuff with working with prices and raising money works really well in the game," Gianfranco said. "How come it wouldn't work for real?"
Even more patiently, Eduardo answered, "Because the game has its rules, and the outside world has different ones. The Party sets the outside rules, si? And they're whatever the Party says they are, si?"
"Well, sure," Gianfranco said. "But isn't the Party missing a trick? If it changed the real rules so they were more like the ones in the game, I bet a lot of people would get rich. And what's so bad about that?"