The Gladiator

by Harry Turtledove

  “Beats me,” the fellow answered. “They never opened up today.”

  “It sure looks empty in there.” Gianfranco remembered what had happened to people who played at The Conductor’s Cap down in Rome. Worry in his voice, he said, “They aren’t in trouble, are they? I mean, the Security Police didn’t come for them or anything?”

  “Not that I know of. What would the Security Police want with a game shop, for heaven’s sake?” The man laughed to show how silly he thought that was. Gianfranco wished he thought it was silly, too. The man went on, “Scusi, per piacere, but I have to put these out.” He reached for more wallets.

  Get lost, kid. That was what he meant, even if he made it sound more polite. “Grazie,” Gianfranco said, and mooched out of the shop, his hands in his pockets. He stood there on the sidewalk, staring at The Gladiator. It was as if the place would magically open up if he just stared hard enough.

  No matter how hard he stared, The Gladiator stayed dark and quiet. Plenty of people walked past Gianfranco, but nobody paid too much attention to him. Under the roof of the Galleria del Popolo, you didn’t have to go anywhere fast—or at all. You could amble along, or you could just stand still.

  A couple of minutes later, Carlo came up to him. “What are you doing hanging around out here?” the other gamer asked. “Why aren’t you in there playing?”

  “Because it’s closed,” Gianfranco answered mournfully.

  “What? You’re crazy. The Gladiator’s never closed this time of day.” Carlo walked over to the shop and tried the latch. It didn’t open, of course. He looked very surprised and very foolish.

  “You were saying?” Gianfranco rubbed it in.

  “Why are they closed? Do you know? Is somebody sick? Is somebody short of money? Can we do anything to help?” Carlo could spit questions faster than Gianfranco could possibly hope to answer them.

  But he did have an answer: “I think they’re in trouble.”

  “Of course, they’re in trouble. If they weren’t in trouble, ragazzo, the place would be open,” Carlo said. “But what kind?”

  “You call me kid again and you’ll be in trouble,” Gianfranco growled. “And I know what kind of trouble they’re in and you don’t, so don’t you think maybe you ought to keep your big mouth shut and your ears open?”

  He didn’t impress Carlo. He might have known he wouldn’t. “So what kind of trouble are they in, if you’re so smart?” the university student asked.

  “Political trouble,” Gianfranco said softly.

  He wondered if he would have to spell that out for Carlo, but he didn’t. The other gamer got it right away. “What happened?” he demanded. “Did some jerk decide he wanted to be a capitalist for real and not just on the game board?”

  “Not here. Down in Rome. Guys who play at a place called The Conductor’s Cap,” Gianfranco answered.

  “Ah, sì. I’ve heard of it,” Carlo said.

  Gianfranco hadn’t, not till Annarita told him about it, but he didn’t let on. “There must be a connection between that place and The Gladiator,” he said. “I hear it was empty when the Security Police came, and now The Gladiator’s closed down, too.”

  “That’s not good,” Carlo said. “You think the Security Police are going to come after us?”

  “I don’t know.” Gianfranco shrugged. “I don’t know what we can do about it if they decide to, either. Do you?”

  “Not much you can do,” Carlo said gloomily. “You can’t even disappear. They’ll run you down and catch you. But we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “No, of course not.” Gianfranco would have said the same thing even if he had done something. He didn’t think Carlo was an informer, but you never knew. He did add, “Will they care, though?”

  “Not likely!” Carlo said. That was true, but it also left him vulnerable to Gianfranco. Even if some things were true, you weren’t supposed to say them out loud. Carlo went on, “Where are we going to play now?”

  There was an important question! “Well, I’ve got my own copy of Rails across Europe,” Gianfranco said.

  “Sure. Me, too. But so what?” Carlo said. “How many people do you know who play? I mean, know away from The Gladiator?”

  “A couple,” Gianfranco answered. “Guys who go to my school. Even one teacher.”

  “Same here,” Carlo said. “I know a couple, maybe three, at the university. We can still play, but it won’t be the same—not even close. All the tournaments, the fools at the next table going nuts when something exciting happens in their game … Won’t be the same, trying to have a game in your kitchen.”

  “Tell me about it!” Gianfranco said. “We share ours with another family.”

  “Who doesn’t? I can’t wait to get my own apartment—but even then, I’ll be sharing the kitchen and the bathroom.” Carlo sighed. “What can you do? That’s how they build ’em. That’s how they’ve built ’em for the last hundred years and then some.”

  Ever since Italy went Communist, probably, Gianfranco thought. Maybe it had to do with keeping people in groups, not letting them be individuals. Or maybe it wasn’t that complicated. Maybe the Italians just started imitating the Russians, who’d been building apartments that way ever since the glorious October Revolution.

  “You’re right. It won’t be the same. Better than nothing, though.” Gianfranco knew he sounded like someone whistling in the dark. He felt that way. He’d just had a big chunk of his life yanked out by the roots.

  “Maybe the people from The Gladiator will turn up somewhere else. We can hope, anyhow.” Carlo sounded like someone whistling in the dark.

  Another gamer strolled up then, and looked horrified to discover The Gladiator was closed and dark. He and Gianfranco and Carlo went through a conversation a lot like the one Gianfranco and Carlo had just had. Then they all went away unhappy.

  Annarita was doing Russian homework at the kitchen table when Gianfranco came in. “Why aren’t you at The Gladiator, if you were going to go there?” she asked in surprise. Then she took a real look at him. “And why do you look like somebody just ran over your cat with a tank?”

  “Remember what you told me about The Conductor’s Cap?” he said. “Well, The Gladiator is closed, too.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t say I’m too surprised,” Annarita said. Gianfranco didn’t look consoled. “What are you going to do now?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know!” he burst out, fiercely enough to startle her. “I’ll probably go out of my mind.”

  “Is it really as bad as that?” Annarita said.

  “No. It’s worse.” Gianfranco couldn’t have sounded any sadder if he tried for a year. If he was acting, he should have gone out for drama, because he would have grabbed leading roles with the greatest of ease. “How would you like it if somebody took away your favorite thing in all the world?”

  “Not very much, I’m sure,” Annarita answered. “But can’t you still play somewhere else?”

  “Sì, but it won’t be the same.” Gianfranco explained why not. He brought everything out so pat, it was as if he’d said it before. “No tournaments or anything like that. I’ll be lucky to get a game in every once in a while.” He stopped—something new seemed to have occurred to him. “You wouldn’t be interested in learning to play, would you? We could have games easier than people who don’t live here could come over. It’s a good game. It really is. You’d like it, I think.”

  He was pathetically eager to have her want to play. No—she changed her mind. He was pathetically eager to have anybody to play against, and she seemed handy. She almost told him no, which was her first impulse. Then she remembered all the things her folks said about the need to get along with the Mazzillis. Gianfranco would be very unhappy if she turned him down … and Rails across Europe had looked interesting.

  “I suppose we could try,” she said slowly. “I’m not going to let it get in the way of my schoolwork, though—and you shouldn’t, either.” He couldn’t affo
rd that as well as she could. His grades were weaker. He had to know it, so she didn’t bother spelling it out for him.

  The way his face lit up when she said yes convinced her she’d done the right thing. It was almost like feeding a stray puppy you found in the street. “Grazie!” he said, and then, “Do you want to start now?”

  “Well …” Again, she almost said no. She didn’t quite. “We won’t be able to play very long, because I have to help get supper ready—and I do need to study this Russian, and some other stuff, too.”

  He hardly heard her—she could tell. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and dashed from the common kitchen into the Mazzillis’ rooms. Maybe he paused to say hello to his mother and father. Then again, maybe he didn’t. He sure reappeared in nothing flat, the box with the game in it clutched firmly in his hands. He sat down across the table from Annarita.

  “What do I have to do?” she asked, thinking, It has to be better than Russian.

  It turned out to be more complicated than Russian. As far as Annarita was concerned, that wasn’t easy, but Rails across Europe managed. Building your railroad and shipping things from here to there were pretty straightforward. After that, though, things got stickier. You could let the other player use your track if he paid you, but how did you know how much to ask for? What happened if you were both shipping the same product into the same town? How did you deal with natural disasters? And so on, and so on.

  Gianfranco did a better job of explaining than Annarita would have expected. He knew the game backward and forward and inside out. Sometimes he tried to tell her more than she needed to know. Mostly, though, he stuck with the basics till they ran into something hard. Then he told her how that worked.

  As far as she could see, he didn’t try to take unfair advantage because she wasn’t sure what she was doing. When she thanked him for that, he looked surprised. “It wouldn’t be any fun if I did,” he said. “Who cares if you win if you’ve got to cheat to do it?”

  “Lots of people would say the point of winning is winning, and who cares how you do it?” Annarita answered.

  “But if you know you didn’t win square, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth,” Gianfranco said. “Or if it doesn’t, it ought to.”

  “Sì. I think the same thing. But plenty of people don’t,” she said.

  After about half an hour, her mother called her to help cook. “What do you think?” Gianfranco asked as he marked places and put their cards and play money into separate envelopes.

  “It’s not bad,” Annarita said. “I can see it’s not the kind of game where you get good as soon as you’ve played once. I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

  “I’m still learning,” Gianfranco said. “That loss-leader trick Carlo tried to pull on me a while ago … I had no idea that was in the rules, but it is.” He held up the rule book.

  “It’s thick enough,” Annarita said. “Probably all kinds of other sneaky things hiding in there, too.”

  “Do you want to study it?” Gianfranco asked.

  “Maybe another time,” she said. “If I start looking at it, I won’t study my Russian, and I’ve got to.” She sighed. “I think Comrade Montefusco’s teaching us to speak it better than the Russians do themselves.” She told him about the classroom visitors they’d had.

  “I don’t care if the Russians were the first Communists,” Gianfranco said. “Nobody’d pay any attention to them if they weren’t the biggest, strongest country in the world.”

  “That’s true, but be careful who hears you say it,” Annarita warned. She was glad to get away to help her mother cut up a chicken and chop vegetables.

  Quietly, so her voice wouldn’t carry over the sound of chopping, her mother asked, “Are you really playing that silly game with Gianfranco?”

  “It’s not silly. It’s kind of interesting, as a matter of fact,” Annarita answered, also in a low voice. Her mother snorted. “It is,” Annarita insisted. “It’s complicated as anything, too.”

  “So is a car’s engine. That doesn’t make it interesting, not unless you’re a mechanic,” her mother said.

  “It’s got to be as complicated as bridge,” Annarita said. Her mother loved to play cards. Her father didn’t, but he went along to keep his wife sweet. In self-defense, he’d become at least as good a player as she was.

  “Don’t be silly,” her mother sniffed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Since Annarita didn’t care anything about bridge, her mother had a point. But the coin had two sides, whether her mother wanted to see it or not. “Well, you don’t know anything about Rails across Europe.”

  “I know most of the boys who play it have thick glasses and funny clothes and never comb their hair,” her mother said. “What else do I need to know?”

  “You could say the same thing about chess players,” Annarita answered.

  “That’s different. Chess is respectable,” her mother said. “Even the Russians take good chess players seriously.”

  Even the Russians, Annarita thought as she sliced a green pepper into long strips. Gianfranco was right—if they weren’t top dogs, nobody would pay any attention to them. Comrade Montefusco had talked about the Russian insult—nye kulturny —that meant uncultured, and that foreigners shouldn’t use against them. The Russians used it against one another, though. If they didn’t have soldiers and rockets from Poland to the Atlantic, everybody in Western Europe would have thrown it in their faces. Sometimes, though, saying what you thought came at too high a price.

  Following that line of thought, Annarita made her voice as innocent as she could when she asked, “So you want us to act just like the Russians, then?”

  “No!” Her mother’s knife came down hard on the joint between thigh and drumstick. It crunched through gristle and bone. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean that. But Gianfranco’s silly game isn’t chess, either.”

  “I didn’t say it was. But it’s not easy, and it’s not silly, either.” Annarita passed her mother the cut-up pepper and squashes. Her mother browned the chicken in olive oil, then put it in a pan with the vegetables, with wine and tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes, and with spices and bits of crumbled prosciutto. Into the oven it went.

  As her mother was washing her hands, she said, “I hope you’re not playing just to make Gianfranco happy. You can do better than that, sweetheart.”

  “Maybe.” It wasn’t as if Annarita hadn’t had the same thought herself. But she said, “He’s kind of like the game, you know? There’s more to him than meets the eye.”

  “And so? His father’s still an apparatchik.” Her mother used another Russian word that had spread all over Europe and America. It didn’t just mean a petty bureaucrat. It meant someone who was born to be a petty bureaucrat. People who really did things, like Annarita’s father, naturally looked down their noses at the ones who made a living by shuffling pieces of paper back and forth.

  “Comrade Mazzilli’s not so bad,” Annarita said. “Plenty worse.”

  “Well, heaven knows that’s true,” her mother agreed. “But still …”

  “You don’t need to get all upset,” Annarita said. “You and Father always go on about how I should work hard to get along with Gianfranco. So here I am, working hard to get along with him, and you don’t like that, either.”

  “I didn’t expect you to play his silly game.” Her mother seemed stuck on the word. “That goes too far.”

  “I told you—it’s not silly,” Annarita came back again—and there they were, starting again from square one.

  The more her mother argued with her about it, the more interested in Rails across Europe Annarita got. She would have angrily denied that any such thing would happen. She didn’t like to think of herself as so predictable. But it did work out that way.

  When she got to school the next morning, Maria Tenace was gloating some more. “So much for your majority report,” Maria sneered. “The reactionary lackeys at The Gladiator must have known the fat was
in the fire. They fled yesterday, one jump ahead of the Security Police. Sooner or later, the vanguard of the people’s justice will catch up with them. I don’t think it will take long.”

  She could seriously say things even a TV announcer would have had trouble bringing out with a straight face. A TV announcer would have known how silly and stupid they were. Maria didn’t. She believed every scrap of Party doctrine. A few hundred years earlier, she would have got just as excited about the Inquisition, and would have been just as sure it was necessary.

  She let out one piece of information without even noticing she was doing it. “So the people at The Gladiator did get away?” Annarita asked.

  “Sì,” Maria said reluctantly. “But not for long. The hand of every decent Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist is raised against them in iron condemnation of their wicked and corrupt manipulation of the social order and class structure.”

  “Did the Security Police catch the people from The Conductor’s Cap in Rome?” Annarita made it sound as if she hoped the answer was yes.

  “No,” Maria admitted, even more reluctantly than before. “But they can’t hope to escape revolutionary justice, either.”

  “How do you know they’re really guilty of anything?” Annarita asked. “Rome is a long way from here.”

  “They must be guilty. If they weren’t, the Security Police wouldn’t go after them.” Maria could even say that and sound as if she meant it. Anyone with the sense of a head of cabbage knew the Security Police did whatever they wanted and whatever their Russian bosses told them to do. Whether you were guilty or innocent didn’t matter. Whether they thought you were dangerous to the state did.

  “I guess.” Annarita didn’t say an eighth of what she was thinking, or an eightieth.

  “I”m going to tell Filippo to make sure my report on The Gladiator is the official one,” Maria said importantly. “I don’t want the Young Socialists’ League to be seen as out of step with the advance of revolutionary and progressive elements in the state.”

  “You can’t make a majority out of a minority,” Annarita said. “You can tell the world I was wrong—though I don’t think anybody’s proved that yet—but you can’t do the other.”