“Si, Eduardo. Capisco." Gianfranco yielded more to the clerk's vehemence than to his argument. He thought the argument was weak. But Eduardo seemed ready to punch him in the nose if he tried talking back.
"Bene. You'd better understand, you miserable little-" Sure as blazes, Eduardo was breathing hard. He was ready for any kind of trouble, all right. Gianfranco couldn't quite see why he was getting so excited, but he was. Eduardo wagged a finger at him in a way his own father couldn't have. "You going to do anything dumb?"
"No, Eduardo." Gianfranco didn't want to rattle the clerk's cage. If Eduardo and the other people at The Gladiator did lock him out, he would… He shook his head. He didn't know what he would do then.
"Bene," Eduardo said. "Maybe you're not so dumb. Not quite so dumb, anyhow. Why don't you get out of here for now? Or do you have some other scheme for giving me gray hair before my time?"
"I hope not," Gianfranco said.
"So do I, kid. You better believe it," Eduardo told him. "In that case, beat it." Gianfranco did. Yes, no matter what, he wanted to stay in good with the people here. Next to the games at The Gladiator, the real world was a pretty dull place.
Three
Annarita didn't know what to think about The Gladiator. She didn't say anything at supper-she didn't want to talk where Gianfranco and his family could overhear. She just listened while her father chatted about a couple of patients he'd seen. He never named names, but his stories were interesting anyway. Then Signor Mazzilli went on-and on-about some policy decision that wouldn't mean much either way. Annarita thought he was a bore, but she tried not to show it. The Croset-tis and Mazzillis had to live together, so getting along was better than arguing all the time.
After she helped her mother with the dishes, though, she hunted up her father, who was reading a medical journal. "Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Why not?" He put down the journal. "This new procedure sounds wonderful, but it's so complicated and expensive that no one will use it more than once every five years. What's on your mind?"
She told him about visiting The Gladiator. "I don't know what I should say to the Young Socialists' League," she finished.
"Are they hurting anybody?" her father asked. He looked as if he ought to smoke a pipe, but he didn't. He said he'd seen too many cases of mouth cancer to want one of his own.
"Hurting anybody? No." Annarita shook her head. "But they're ideologically unsound."
"And so? I'm ideologically unsound, too. Most people are, one way or another," her father said. "Most of the time, it doesn't matter. You learn to keep quiet about it when you're not with people you can trust-and you learn not to trust too many people. Or it's about something so silly that you can talk about it and it doesn't count, even if you are sailing against the wind. So what's The Gladiator doing that's so awful?"
"They're selling games that make capitalism look good," Annarita answered.
"Are they?" Whatever her father had expected, that plainly wasn't it. "How do they think they can get away with that?" he asked. Annarita told him how Eduardo had explained it to her. Her father clicked his tongue between his teeth. "This fellow should have been either a Jesuit or a lawyer. Does he think the Security Police will let him get away with a story like that?"
"The government tolerates the Church. Why wouldn't it put up with something like this?" Annarita asked.
"It tolerates the Church because the Church has been around for almost 2,100 years. The Church is big and powerful, even if it doesn't have any divisions. The Russians let religion breathe, and they don't usually put up with anything." Her father looked unhappy. "A shop that's been open two years at the most just doesn't have that kind of clout. If this Eduardo can't see that, he needs to get his eyes examined."
"Do you suppose somebody's going to start a company or sell stock or exploit his workers because of The Gladiator?" Annarita asked. Those were things capitalists did. She knew that much, if not much more.
"With the laws the way they are now, I'm not sure you could start a company. I'm pretty sure you can't sell stock," her father answered. "You'd have to be crazy to try, wouldn't you? Who'd want to stick his neck out that way?"
"What am 1 supposed to tell the League?" That was An-narita's real worry.
"Well, it depends," her father said. "Do you want to get these people in trouble? If you do, I bet you can."
"But I don't, not really. Most of them are like Gianfranco- a bunch of guys who don't get out much sitting around rolling dice and talking," Annarita said. That made her father laugh. She went on, "What could be more harmless, really?"
She thought he would say nothing could. Instead, he looked thoughtful. "Well, 1 don't know," he said. "When the Bolsheviks started out, they were just a bunch of guys who didn't get out much sitting around drinking coffee and talking. And look what happened on account of that."
"You think a revolution-I mean, a counterrevolution- could start at The Gladiator?" If Annarita sounded astonished, she had a good reason-she was.
"Stranger things have happened," Dr. Crosetti said.
"Is that so? Name two," she told him.
He laughed again, and wagged a finger at her. He always said that when somebody claimed something stranger had happened. Annarita enjoyed shooting him with one of his own arrows. "What am I going to do with you?" he asked, not without admiration.
"When I was little, you'd say you would sell me to the gypsies," she said. "Is that out?"
"I'm afraid so," her father answered. "If I tried it now, they'd really buy you, and that wouldn't be good."
Gypsies still did odd jobs in the countryside, and sometimes in the city. When they saw a chance, they ran con games or just stole. Not even more than a hundred years of Party rule had turned them into good collectivized citizens. Annarita didn't know how they dodged the Security Police so well, but they did.
"Who's on the committee with you?" her father asked. "Will anybody else go to see The Gladiator in person?"
"Ludovico Pagliarone and Maria Tenace," Annarita answered. "No, f don't think they'll go, not unless one of them knows somebody who plays there."
"Will they listen to you because you were on the spot?"
"Maybe Ludovico will. Maria…" Annarita sighed. "Maria will just say to call the place reactionary without even thinking. She always does things like that. If there's any chance it might be bad, she wants to get rid of it."
"More Communist than Stalin," her father murmured.
"What?" For a second, Annarita didn't get it.
Dr. Crosetti explained: "Back in the old days, they would say, 'More Catholic than the Pope,' or sometimes, 'More royal than the king.' They used to say that in France a lot. Only one king there, not a lot of them the way there were in Italy before unification. But we still need a phrase like that for somebody who goes along with authority because it is authority."
"Where did you find these things?" Annarita said. "I bet you were looking in places where you shouldn't have."
"And so? Who doesn't?" Her father held up a hand before she could answer. "I'll tell you who-people like your Maria, that's who. They go through life with blinkers on, the way carriage horses used to."
"You have to be careful when you come out with things like that," Annarita said slowly.
"Well, of course!" her father said. "That's part of growing up, learning how to be careful. I don't think you're going to inform on me."
"I should hope not!" Annarita said. In school, they taught about children who informed on their parents or older siblings. The lessons made those kids out to be heroes. Annarita didn't know anybody who thought they really were. No matter what the state did for you after you blabbed, it couldn't give you back your family. And chances were none of the people to whom you informed would ever trust you after that, either. They had to know you would betray anybody at all, even them.
"Good," her father said now, as if he hadn't expected anything else-and no doubt he hadn't. "You can talk to Ludovico, then. Maybe between the two of you, you'll outyell this other girl, and nothing will happen. Sometimes what doesn't happen is as important as what does, you know?"
Annarita hadn't thought about that. It kept cropping up in odd moments when she should have been thinking about her homework for the rest of the night.
Gianfranco opened his algebra book with all the enthusiasm of someone answering the midnight knock on the door that had to be the Security Police. As far as he was concerned, their jails and cellars held no terrors worse than the problems at the end of each chapter.
He groaned when he got a look at these. They'd driven him crazy in middle school. Here they were again, harder and more complicated than ever. Train A leaves so much time and so many kilometers behind Train B. It travels so many kilometers an hour faster than Train B, though. At what time will it catch up? Or sometimes, how far will each train go before A catches B?
They weren't always trains. Sometimes they were planes or cars or ships. But they were trains in the first question.
And, because they were trains, Gianfranco's panic dissolved like morning mist under the sun. This was a problem right out of Rails across Europe. There, it involved squares on the board and dice rolls instead of kilometers and hours, but so what? He figured those things out while he was playing. Why couldn't he do it for schoolwork?