The Gladiator

Ten

The chief janitor of the apartment building was a large, impressive man named Marcantonio Moretti. He scratched his bushy, Stalin-style mustache as he nodded to Annarita. "Yes, it is very good to have the elevator running again," he said.

"And it's so smooth! Just like a dream!" Annarita wasn't in the drama society at Hoxha Polytechnic, but she knew how to lay it on with a trowel.

"Grazie" Comrade Moretti said, as if he'd done the work himself. He hadn't, of course. He didn't do much work of any sort. He was the chief janitor because his brother-in-law was a medium-important official in Milan 's Bureau of City Maintenance. Under Communism, capitalism, or any old kind of ism at all, whom you knew mattered at least as much as what you could actually do.

"Who were the repairmen who did the job? They ought to get commendations for the Stakhanovite work they did," Annarita said. If people really worked like Stakhanovites or anything close to it, the elevator would have got fixed as soon as it broke down. Maybe it wouldn't have broken down in the first place. But how long had they had to wait? Much, much, too long- Annarita knew that.

"Well, I don't exactly remember," Moretti said instead of saying he had no idea, though that had to be just as true.

"I'd really like to find out," Annarita said.

Comrade Moretti scratched his mustache again. Had Gianfranco said something like that, the chief janitor would have run him out of his office. Annarita was much prettier than Gianfranco. That shouldn't have had anything to do with anything, which wasn't the same as saying it didn't.

"Hey, Ernesto!" Moretti yelled.

"What's up?" Ernesto Albosta called from the back room. A moment later, the assistant janitor came out. He wasn't impressive. He was short and skinny and slouchy and had crooked teeth. He wore ratty overalls and a cap pulled down low on his forehead. But Moretti was only the front man for the housekeeping staff. If you needed something fixed, Albosta was the one to see. If you needed to find something out, Albosta was the one to ask.

"Who were the guys who did the elevator?" Moretti asked.

"I don't know where the devil they found 'em," Albosta answered. "They're not even a Milanese outfit. The fix was in somewhere-you can bet on that."

"So where are they from, then? Bergamo? Como? Pia-cenza?" Moretli named three cities not far away.

But Ernesto Albosta shook his head each time. "Farther off than that. I think Rimini. Yeah, that's right-they're called By the Arch Repairs, from the Roman one in the middle of town there." He spread his hands. "How's an outfit from over by the Adriatic supposed to get work here? Somebody knows where the bodies are buried, all right."

"Sounds like it," Morelti agreed. "Now I'm going to wonder if we've got to worry about the elevator dying on us in two weeks. If it does, I guarantee you we'll never see those worthless bums again."

"Got that right," Albosta said, and slouched away scratching himself.

Marcantonio Moretti nodded to Annarita. "Now you know," he said, as if he'd known himself.

"Yes. Thank you." Annarita got out of his office as fast as she could while staying polite.

Now she knew-but she wondered what she knew. She couldn't remember whether the repair truck had plates from Italy or San Marino. In detective stories, people always noticed stuff like that. She'd paid no attention, though.

Still, there was a fair chance those had been Eduardo's friends looking for him. They hadn't found him. Were they still in Milan, checking other places where he might be? Or had they given up and gone away? She couldn't begin to guess.

Neither could Eduardo when she told him what she'd learned. "That's… too bad," he said. She got the idea he'd clamped down on something stronger. He sighed. "I have to go to San Marino, then, and hope they're not watching the border."

"My family and the Mazzillis are going to Rimini on vacation in a couple of weeks," Annarita said. " San Marino would be easier as a day trip from there than it would going straight from Milan."

"Is Rimini here full of Germans and Scandinavians trying to get sunburn and skin cancer on the beach?" Eduardo asked.

"Si. Some of them hardly wear any clothes at all." Annarita sniffed. "You can probably have a good time even if you don't get up to San Marino."

"Nothing wrong with looking. When you do more than look, that's when life gets complicated," Eduardo said. "Maybe you and Gianfranco can come up to San Marino with me. What could look more innocent than a guy with his cousin and her boyfriend?"

What could give me better cover? he meant. Annarita understood that. She didn't mind. What her parents would think… was bound to be a different story. Of course, if she didn't tell them ahead of time, they wouldn't have a chance to find reasons to say no.

Italy slowed to a crawl in August. It didn't get as hot in Milan as it did farther south, but it was muggier here. Everybody who was anybody got out of town for a while. Doing business often took time-Gianfranco thought about the elevator in his building. Trying to do business in August was a fool's errand.

"It will be good to get to the beach," his father said as they packed for vacation.

"If we can get to the beach," his mother said darkly. "All those foreigners there in as little as the law allows…"

"Well, we've got the hotel reservations. The place is only a couple of blocks from the sand," his father said. "It's where we stayed last year. You liked it then, Bella."

"I wasn't talking about the hotel," Gianfranco's mother said.

Gianfranco kept his mouth shut. Anything he said in a discussion like this could and would be used against him. If the swim trunks he packed were his skimpiest pair, then they were, that was all. He didn't have to mention it.

"Have a good trip," Ernesto Albosta said as Gianfranco's family and the Crosettis brought their bags down to the lobby. The elevator made that much easier. Albosta sounded mournful, and no wonder. He was stuck in town in August. Marcanto-nio Moretti, by contrast, was on holiday somewhere a little north of Rome.

The Crosettis drove a little Fiat. Their bags barely fit into the trunk. They and Cousin Silvio barely fit into the car. Gian-franco's father had a Mercedes. Gianfranco had always taken that for granted. His father had waited a long time to get the car. Nobody, not even a Communist Party official, could avoid that. But when he got it, he got the best.

On the autostrada, the Mercedes soon left the Fiat behind. The highway ran east and a little south, past towns and farms that had been there since time out of mind. Whizzing past those brick buildings in the countryside, Gianfranco wondered how much history they'd seen. A century and a half earlier, Germans and Americans would have fought over them. A century and a half before that, they might have watched Napoleon's army march past. Before that… Well, how old were they? He had no idea.

When he asked his father, he got a shrug for an answer. "Annarita might know about stuff like that," his father said. "Me, I don't much care. I'm a practical man, I am."

"If you want to be practical, keep your eyes on the road," his mother said.

"Haven't hit anything yet, have I?"

"Sometimes I think you're trying to."

When they started going on like that, Gianfranco stopped listening. He'd heard it too many times before. They rolled along the autostrada, and then stopped rolling and started crawling. Gianfranco's father said several things that made his mother cluck. "It doesn't count if you're in the car," his father said defensively.

"Oh? Since when?" His mother didn't believe a word of it.

"It's an old rule I just made up," his father said. His mother snorted.

At last, they got past the slowdown. Three small cars were scrap metal, and a truck had some good-sized dents. Everybody put the pedal to the metal on the autostrada. When accidents happened, they were often bad ones. "I hope the people are all right," Gianfranco's mother said. He hoped so, too, but he wouldn't have bet on it.

A little past Bologna, his father pulled off the road for a rest stop: snacks, espresso, and a pause to use the bathrooms. The Mazzillis were just getting into their car when the Crosettis pulled into the same parking lot. "Fancy meeting you here!" Gianfranco called, waving.

"That was a nasty wreck," Annarita's father answered. "See you at the hotel."

"You sure will." Gianfranco's father unlocked the car. Anybody who lived in a big city learned to lock it all the time. Otherwise, enterprising people took things according to their abilities and their needs. The Mazzillis got in and got back on the highway.

A Roman triumphal arch sat right in the middle of Rimini 's main square. Somewhere not far away would be that repair shop. Cars went under the arch as if it were built as an overpass. Italy had a long, long past. Every so often, it stuck out an elbow and poked the present. South of Rome, there were still stretches of the Appian Way with the paving Roman legionaries had marched on. It must have been easier on their feet than it was on the springs of modern cars and trucks.

Finding a place to park in a strange town was always an adventure. At last, Gianfranco's father managed. It was only a block and a half from the hotel, so he felt entitled to be proud of himself. Everybody was in a good mood carrying luggage to the lobby.

Gianfranco's father gave their name there. The clerk looked down his nose at them and said, "Do I have a record of your reservation? I don't see you here. I have Crosettis from Milan, but no Mazzillis."

Gianfranco gulped. His mother gasped. His father said, "Do you know who I am? I'm the second Party secretary in the Milanese Bureau of Records. Now let me talk to your manager right this minute. Is he a Party member?"

That wasn't likely. The clerk, looking worried now instead of enjoying himself, shook his head. "No, uh, Comrade. Hold on. I'll get him."

As if by magic, the manager found the "missing" reservation. The Mazzillis went to their room. "He wanted to squeeze money out of us," Gianfranco's father said as soon as the door closed behind them. "Well, he picked the wrong people to annoy, he did. Gianfranco, go back to the lobby and wait for the Crosettis. Don't let him play games with them."

"But he said he already had their reservation," his mother said.

"He said that to us," his father answered. "He'll probably tell them he has ours but not theirs. Or he will unless Gianfranco's there to give him the lie."

When Gianfranco got to the lobby, the clerk was saying he had no reservation for a big blond man who spoke Italian with a guttural accent. "But this is an outrage!" the blond man spluttered. "Most inefficient!"

A few minutes earlier, Gianfranco would have thought so, too. Now he decided the hotel was very efficient-at gouging its customers. The blond man demanded to see the manager, too. He didn't have the clout Gianfranco's father did. He also didn't seem to realize the manager expected to get paid off. At last, the manager proposed a fee for fixing the reservation. Fuming, the blond man paid.

Gianfranco read soccer scores and game reports in a newspaper. He waited for about twenty minutes before the Crosettis came in. Then he walked over to them and started chatting. They had no trouble with their reservation. The clerk gave him a dirty look. He smiled back as if he couldn't imagine why.

"This ought to be fun," Eduardo said.

"Are you talking about the beach or the mountains?" Annarita's father asked.

"Oh, the beach," Eduardo answered. San Marino lay in the mountains. Gianfranco could see how that wouldn't be fun for the man from another world. It would be work-or it might be disaster, if the authorities had closed down the other shop his people ran here.

What would he do then? What could he do then? Settle down here and try to stay out of the Security Police's way? Hope his people would come back and look for him? Gianfranco didn't see what other choice he had. He would probably feel like a sailor shipwrecked on some distant shore who knew he would never see home again.

But those repairmen, Rocco and his pal, came from around here, too. Maybe they also came from Eduardo's world. And maybe they didn't. If the other shop was shut, Eduardo would have to find out.

"Yes, the beach will be nice," Dr. Crosetti said. "Remember, use plenty of sunscreen. Some people think a nice tan is worth anything, but you pay for it down the road. Not just skin cancer, but a hide like a rhino's, too."

Gianfranco and Annarita and Eduardo all looked at one another. It wasn't that her father was wrong. From everything Gianfranco had ever heard, Dr. Crosetti was right. Still… A doctor could take a lot of fun out of a vacation.

Annarita didn't think the beach was so nice. The competition was too fierce. The tall, fair girls from the north fascinated Italian men. Blondes had intrigued Mediterranean men since Greek and Roman days, and the tradition lived on. And the girls from Germany and Scandinavia flaunted what they had. Their suits, what there was of them, made Annarita's seem dowdy by comparison.

They didn't worry about skin cancer, either. Some of them were turning brown. Some were turning golden. Some were just turning red, the red of a roast before it went into the oven. They didn't care. They laughed about it. "So good to see the sun," one of them said in throaty Italian. The sun was sure seeing- and baking-a lot of her.

Most of them lay on their towels or strolled along the sand. A few went into the Adriatic. It was warm-or warm enough- in August, though it would cool down once summer ended. It wasn't like Hawaii or even North Africa, where you could swim the year around.

When Annarita remarked on that, her father nodded and looked east, towards Albania. "No, but it stays hot all the time on the far side of the water," he said.

Albania was not a happy place. As far as Annarita could tell, it had seldom been a happy place. Enver Hoxha, after whom her school was named, had backed China against the USSR after Stalin died. When the Soviet Union won the Cold War, it paid Albania back by pretending the sorry little country wasn't there. No aid went in. Nothing but trouble came out.

These days, the government in Tirane was pro-Moscow. The hills seethed with pro-Chinese guerrillas, and with bandits who didn't like anybody further removed than their own first cousins. Several fraternal Socialist countries, Italy among them, had soldiers in Albania trying to put down the bandits and the rebels. They weren't having much luck.

A couple of tall blond men walked by, talking in a language full of consonants and flat vowels. Norwegian? Swedish? Annarita couldn't tell. Big blond men did nothing for her. From what she could see, the northern men didn't find small, dark women especially wonderful, either. Oh, well.

"Dio raior Eduardo pointed. "A cormorant just flew by."

"He's fishing," Annarita's father said. "He must have some luck around here, or he would have starved by now."

"Well, I expect I'll go fishing pretty soon, too," Eduardo said. "Fishing for answers, I mean."

"I'd rather see the mountains than the beach," Annarita said. She liked the idea of the sea, not least because she lived hundreds of kilometers away from the real thing. The idea of the sea in her mind, though, didn't include a beach packed with scantily clad foreigners.

Her father sighed. "I wish Cousin Silvio were going up to San Marino by himself," he said. He and her mother knew. They weren't happy, but they weren't-quite-saying no.

"If we can help him get there without any trouble, we should," Annarita said.

"I'm not thinking about what happens if he gets there without any trouble," her father said. "I'm thinking about what happens if there is some. You have no idea what being a zek is like. And it's worse for a woman, believe me."

"Whatever happens, it won't land on Annarita and Gianfranco," Eduardo said. "I'll tell the authorities they didn't know anything about it."

"If something goes wrong, what happens after that will be up to the gentlemen in the jackboots. You won't have anything to say about it," Dr. Crosetti retorted. But he still didn't tell Annarita she couldn't go.

Maybe he got distracted. A blond girl with a tiny suit and a dancer's arched-back, catlike strut certainly seemed to distract Eduardo. Annarita's father also noticed her. He would have had to be blind, or more likely dead, not to. Most of the time, Annarita would have despised her on sight. But if she helped keep the argument from taking off, maybe she wasn't so bad after all.

Gianfranco didn't have much legroom in the back of the Croset-tis' Fiat. He'd probably feel folded up like an accordion by the time they got to San Marino. He also wished Annarita would have sat back here with him, not in front with Eduardo. The other way did look more natural, but he wished she were back here anyhow.

"We ready?" Eduardo asked. When nobody told him no, he put the car in gear and drove off toward the mountain republic.

He shifted gears clumsily. "You're used to an automatic transmission, aren't you?" Gianfranco said.

"Does it show that much?" Eduardo said. Again, nobody told him no. He sighed. "I'm afraid I am. Not many stick shifts in the home timeline. Hardly any, in fact."

The Mazzillis' Mercedes had an automatic. That made it special here. Everything in the home timeline seemed better than the way the Italian People's Republic did the same thing.

"Watch out for the traffic lights," Annarita warned.

Eduardo laughed. "Don't worry about that. I know all about red lights and green lights-we've got plenty of them back home."

He stopped when he was supposed to. Once or twice, he stopped when a local would have charged on through. Maybe he didn't want to take any chances. Or maybe they just didn't have any guts in the home timeline. Gianfranco almost got on him about it, but thought better at the last moment.

"Now we see what's what, or some of what's what," Eduardo said as they neared the border crossing. Italians needed only their internal passports to enter San Marino. It wasn't foreign enough to require the other kind. Approval to travel to real foreign countries was harder to come by.

"Papers." The guard on duty sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he was. He sure seemed to be. He glanced at the three internal passports, stamped them, and handed them back. "Go on. Enjoy your stay."

"Grazie, Comrade," Eduardo said politely. The guard shrugged and waved him forward.

He didn't just go forward. He went up. The city of San Marino sat at the top of a mountain. One side was a sheer drop of most of a kilometer. The other side was only very steep. The fortress at the heart of the town had never fallen. Gianfranco could see why not.

With so many ups and downs, where where you supposed to find a flat place, or even a fairly flat place, to park your car? That, though, the people who ran San Marino had taken care of. There was an enormous parking lot near the bottom of the city. It was crowded when Eduardo drove into it, but not impossibly crowded.

"Whew!" he said when he turned the key and the motor died. "To drive a stick in a country like this, you need one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake, and one foot on the clutch."

Gianfranco thought about a tripod man. "Your seat wouldn't be very comfortable then," he said.

"Mm, no, I suppose not," Eduardo agreed.

"What's San Marino like in the, uh, home timeline?" Annarita asked. "Have you been there? Been here? However you say it?"

"Yes, I've been here," Eduardo answered. "It doesn't look a whole lot different. Most of the buildings are old enough to go back before the breakpoint, so they're pretty much the same. This lot isn't there, though."

"In that case, where do people park?" Gianfranco asked as they got out of the Fiat.

Eduardo locked the car. "Everywhere."

Annarita found a different question: "Why isn't this parking lot there?"

Eduardo looked around. Nobody stood close by. There probably wouldn't be any microphones hidden in a place like this. You'd have to wait forever before you heard anything good. He nodded to himself and said, "In the home timeline, they didn't have who knows how many zeks to use up carving a big flat lot out of the mountainside."

"You think that's how they did it here?" Gianfranco asked.

"I know that's how they did it here." Eduardo pointed back toward the entrance to the lot. "There's a little sign over there that says, This lot built with the help of the Italian Department of Corrective Labor."

"Oh." Gianfranco nodded. "I didn't see that." Corrective Labor meant zeks, all right. Instead of using bulldozers and dynamite, you gave the political prisoners picks and shovels and turned them loose. If you felt especially mean, you also gave them impossible work norms. Then you punished them for not meeting those norms. The Russians and the Chinese went through zeks by the million. Italy was more economical, but even so…

"Come on." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a stairway. "Let's go."

Gianfranco's shoes crunched on the gravel of the parking lot. He felt as if he were walking on dead men's bones. And maybe he was.

Annarita quickly found there were two ways to get around in San Marino. Both had drawbacks. The streets didn't go straight up the mountainside. They climbed gently, going sideways, then doubled back and went sideways in the other direction. If you followed them, you could get where you were going, but you'd take a while.

If you wanted a more direct route, you could climb stairways between levels. There were lots of them. They were tall and steep and tiring. "This is the first time I wish the repairmen hadn't fixed the elevator," she said as she trudged up and up and up. "I've got out of practice."

"If you're going anywhere here, it helps if you're part mountain goat," Gianfranco said.

"When mountain goats stop, though, other goats don't try to sell them stuff," Eduardo said. "Or I don't think they do, anyway."

You couldn't say that about the people of San Marino. Yes, it was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state. Annarita didn't think there was a country in the world that wasn't-except the Vatican, which was even smaller than San Marino. But it winked at capitalism's sins.

Shops and hotels filled the gray stone buildings that lined the streets. Some of the shops sold cheap glass trinkets-oetopi with staring eyes, yellow lions, dragons. Some sold postage stamps, new and old. San Marino had been printing fancy stamps for collectors since the early days of the twentieth century. Some sold reproductions of antiquities, others the real thing. You could buy recordings of musicians from all over Europe, a lot of them bootlegs the local authorities pretended not to notice. You could buy… anything you had the money for. If you got hungry or thirsty while shopping, you could take care of that, too.

Annarita could see why Eduardo's people had put a shop here. It stood out much less than The Gladiator did even in a busy arcade like the Galleria del Popolo. "What's the name of your place here?" Annarita asked.

"The Triple Six," he answered. That was the best throw you could make in most of the games the shops sold.

"Where is it?" Gianfranco asked, panting a little. Yes, the stairs here put the ones in the apartment building to shame.

"I've never been here before, but I know it's up near the top." Eduardo pointed up toward the castle that crowned the mountain. Gianfranco didn't quite groan, but his face looked mutinous. An-narita's legs felt mutinous.

"Maybe we could stop for a little while before we get there," Gianfranco said.

"Well, maybe we could." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a little shop that sold cold drinks and snacks. "How about a Fanta? You'll move faster with some sugar in you."

"Now you're talking!" Gianfranco said. Annarita nodded.

You didn't sit down inside. Instead, you stood at tall tables. No doubt that helped move people in and out and made more money for the fellow in the white apron who served up the sodas. It wasn't the kind of place that had, or wanted, regulars.

In keeping with San Marino 's eagerness to draw tourists, it dressed its policemen in comic-opera uniforms. Three of them marched past the snack shop. Several people photographed the procession. "They look like a bunch of clowns," Gianfranco said.

Eduardo shook his head. "They dress like a bunch of clowns. It's not the same thing. Look at their guns. Look at their faces."

He had a point, Annarita decided. No matter what they wore, the policemen carried assault rifles like the ones the Italian Army used: great-grandchildren of the classic AK-47. And, under their silly hats, the men looked tough and capable. Unless you were a fool or you had a death wish, you wouldn't want them angry at you.

They paused, then moved towards a man who lurched along the sidewalk. When they held out their hands for his papers- a request understood from San Marino to San Francisco -he didn't hand them over. Instead, he shouted a mouthful of Slavic consonants at them.

"Ooh-he's a Russian," Gianfranco said softly. Even the police had to be careful with citizens of the strongest country in the world.

"He looks like one," Annarita said. And he did: his broad face was very fair, and he wore clothes that didn't fit very well and weren't very stylish. Russians relied on muscle. Most of them didn't worry about style.

"You wouldn't see many Italians drunk this early in the morning," Eduardo said, which was also true. Lots of people joked about the way Russians drank. Russians joked about it themselves, which didn't stop them from doing it.

The policemen stayed polite, but they didn't go away. One of them said something. The Russian tourist shook his head. 'Wye kulturny!" he shouted. Annarita winced. She wondered if the policemen knew that uncultured was a much worse insult in Russian than it would have been in Italian. But it turned out not to matter-the tourist knocked one of their hats to the ground and stomped on it.

A second later, he was on the ground himself. The Sam-marinese policemen gave him a thorough thumping, then yanked him upright and started to haul him away. The one who'd lost his hat picked it up, carefully pushed out the dent the Russian gave it, and set it back on his head at the right jaunty angle.

"You idiots, you can't do this to me!" the tourist shouted in Russian. None of the local policemen showed any sign of following him. She wondered if she ought to translate, but decided that would only make matters worse. A moment later, as if to prove her right, the tourist yelled the same thing in bad Italian.

"Idiots, are we?" said the policeman whose hat the Russian had knocked off. "See how stupid you think this is." He punched the tourist in the nose. By the drunk man's howl, he thought it smarted.

"Bozhemoi!" he shouted, and snuffled, because blood was running down his face. Then he remembered to use Italian: "When the Soviet consul hears about this, all you bums will need new jobs-if they don't send you to a gulag in Siberia to teach you not to mess around with your betters."

A different policeman punched him this time. "Shut up," he said coldly. "We jug drunk Russians about three times a day. If we wanted to waste our time on you, we could send you to one of our camps for assaulting a police officer. Keep running your mouth and you'll talk us into it."

The tourist said something that had to be mat'. Annarita didn't follow all of it. What she could understand made her ears heat up. Then the Russian went back to Italian: "You donkeys don't know who I am. You don't know what I am. I am a colonel in the Committee for State Security. You're fighting out of your weight."

Annarita gulped. The KGB was the outfit that taught the Security Police everything they knew. But the Security Police had the power of the Italian government behind them. The KGB had the power of the Soviet Union behind it. Lots of people said the KGB wax the real power in the Soviet Union. The feared and fearsome outfit could without a doubt make policemen in San Marino very unhappy if it wanted to.

"If you are-if you aren't just a lying Russian lush-you're a disgrace to your service," one of the policemen retorted. "Come down to the station, and we'll find out what you are. And you'll find out you can't mess with police officers no matter what kind of big cheese you think you are."

They dragged him away. "He'll get off," Gianfranco said gloomily. "Russians always do."

"He shouldn't. He was drunk and disorderly," Annarita said. "But you're right-he is a Russian. And if he does belong to the KGB, they'll pull strings for him."

"They shouldn't be able to do things like that." Gianfranco looked at Eduardo. Plainly, he was waiting for Eduardo to tell him things like that never happened in the home timeline.

Eduardo sighed instead. "You'll find people with influence wherever you go," he said. "Whether that has to do with money or politics or power really doesn't matter. It's the influence that counts."

"Blat," Annarita said. The Russian slang meant nothing to Gianfranco. "It means influence," she explained.

Eduardo nodded, then asked, "You guys done?" Gianfranco was. Annarita quickly finished her soda. Eduardo straightened up and took his elbows off the table. "Come on, then. Let's do some more mountain climbing."

He wasn't kidding. Up they went. It wasn't like climbing stairs in an apartment building. It was more like climbing them in a skyscraper. Annarita knew her legs would start feeling it soon. She laughed. Why was she kidding herself? Her legs already felt it.

At last, after what seemed like a very long time, they made it to the top of the mountain. The street there led to the castle and, signs promised, the museum inside. "Well, I'm ready for another Fanta," Gianfranco said. Eduardo gave him a look. "Just kidding," he added hastily.

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. Annarita wasn't sure. Eduardo didn't push it. They ambled along the street, looking at the shops like any other tourists. If you wanted to take home a plaster castle to remember San Marino by, this was the place to get one-or silver jewelry, or clothes, or anything else you happened to crave. They might not call it capitalism here, but that was what it amounted to.

And there was a sign with three dice on it, each showing a six. People were going in and out of that shop, the same as they were with the ones to either side of it. "It's open!" Gianfranco said joyfully.

Annarita thought Eduardo should have looked delighted. He looked worried instead. "Si," he said in a low voice. "It's open. Let's walk by and get a better look."

It looked just like The Gladiator. The same games and books and military models were on display in the front window. Most of the people going in were guys between Gianfranco's age and Eduardo's. Most of them had the same look. Annarita needed a moment to put her finger on it, but she did. None of them would have been in the popular crowd at school. They wore their clothes carelessly. Their hair needed combing. She would have bet most of them got good grades-and the ones who didn't weren't dumb. They just didn't care about school. Gianfranco was like that, or had been till he got interested.

"You ought to go in and say hello to your friends," he said now.

"I suppose." Eduardo sounded worried, too. "Why don't you kids find another shop to go into? If something's wrong and they nab me, with luck they won't grab you, too. You can call your folks down in Rimini, and they'll come get you."

They would have to come in the Mazzillis' car. Gianfranco's father wouldn't be happy about that. Annarita didn't suppose she could blame him. He didn't know Cousin Silvio was a wanted criminal.

She wanted to look at a dress shop while Eduardo went into Three Sixes, but she knew Gianfranco wouldn't be caught dead in there. She chose a record shop instead. Some of the music it sold you could find anywhere. Some, though, only circulated underground most places. Governments had come down hard on what they called degenerate noise for almost a century and a half. People still made it, though, and sold it and listened to it. It was almost as subversive as the stuff The Gladiator sold.

Most places, it got sold under the counter, and played by people who trusted their friends not to inform on them. Here, it was right out in the open where anybody could see it and buy it. Elvis, the Beatles, the Doors, Nirvana-classics, if you liked that kind of thing. There were newer groups, too: the Bombardiers, Counterrevolution, Burn This Record.

"Wow!" Cianfranco stared. "We ought to buy some of this stuff. When's the next time we'll see so much together like this?"

"Probably not a good idea right now," Annarita said.

"What? Why not?" Gianfranco might have thought she was crazy.

"If our friend ends up getting in trouble, do you want to be carrying anything that could land you in trouble if they snag you?" She didn't need to explain who they were. In the Italian People's Republic, as in every fraternal Communist state around the world, there was always a they.

"Oh," Gianfranco said in a small voice. "Well, I'm afraid that makes sense. I wish it didn't, but it does."

"Next time we're here, maybe," Annarita said. If they hadn't arrested the shopkeeper by then. Or if he wasn't working for the Security Police, trapping unreliables. You never could tell.

"When will that be?" Gianfranco challenged.

"Who knows? A year? Two years?" She shrugged. "Probably no longer than that. Rimini 's a nice place to go on holiday, and San Marino's easy to get to from there." She began to say more, but then stopped. "Look! Here's, uh, Cousin Silvio."

They both hurried out of the record shop. One look at his face said everything that needed saying. "It's no good?" Gianfranco asked, just to be sure.

"No. It's a trap. Those have to be the Security Police in there," Eduardo said, walking quickly toward the closest stairway. "The place is a snare now, a lure. I didn't expect to recognize anybody in it, but the guy behind the counter didn't know what I was talking about when I said something was as rotten as '86."

"I don't, either," Annarita told him.

"In the home timeline, we were playing Vietnam in the World Cup finals in 2086. The ref missed the most obvious offside in the world, Vietnam scored, and we lost 2-1." Eduardo sounded furious as he explained. "We got robbed, right there in broad daylight. No Italian from my world doesn't know about that. This fellow didn't have a clue, so he's from here, not there. I hope the people from the home timeline got away, that's all."