The Gladiator

Thirteen

The door to the transposition chamber opened. Gianfranco hurried out. He didn't remember anything about being drugged. He wasn't supposed to. But what they'd told him while he was out would kick in when the Security Police started grilling him. So people from the home timeline claimed, anyhow. He hoped like anything they knew what they were talking about.

The lights in the subbasement under The Gladiator came on. Motion sensors, Eduardo had told him. He looked back over his shoulder. One instant, the chamber was there. The next, it was gone-gone for good.

"Stuck here," Gianfranco muttered. "Stuck here forever." He said something that should have set off a smoke detector, if there was one here. He would have been just as happy to stay in the home timeline-probably happier. Only the thought of what was bound to be happening to his family and to Annarita's made him come back-that and the obvious unwillingness of the Crosstime Traffic people to let him do anything else. He hadn't argued much. What was the point, when he could see he would lose? Better to jump if you were going to get pushed anyway.

He went up the stairs to the trap door at the top. He pushed it up and went through into the basement. If there were Security Police officers in the shop, they would hear him. But Eduardo had promised him there wouldn't be, and he seemed right.

No motion sensors up there, or none that worked. It stayed dark. The Crosstime Traffic people had warned him it would. He held the trap door open for a moment so he could get his bearings with the light shining up from below. Then he shut it and walked toward the next stairway with his hands out in front of him as if he were blind.

Even so, he almost tripped over the bottom step. He groped till he found the bannister, then went up the stairs. They put him in The Gladiator's backmost room. He came out into the room where he'd spent so much time playing games. The tables and chairs were still in place. He proved as much by nearly breaking his neck on a couple of them.

After a good deal of groping, he opened the door to the front of the shop. Then he could see again, thanks to the street lights outside. He waited for somebody from the Security Police to yell, "Don't move!" But he had The Gladiator all to himself.

He covered his fingers with a handkerchief when he opened the outer door. No alarm sounded. He scurried away as fast as he could go anyhow. The Security Police might not be here, but he would have bet they had some way to know when that door opened.

Even after midnight, the Galleria del Popolo wasn't deserted. Bars and restaurants-and maybe some shadier places- stayed open late. Gianfranco smelled fresh cigarette smoke in the air. (Many more people smoked here than in the home timeline.) Behind him, someone called, "Hey, you! What are you doing?" The voice didn't sound as if it belonged to anyone from the Security Police. It sounded more like that of an ordinary person worried about burglars.

No matter whose voice it was, Gianfranco ignored it. He turned a corner, then another, then another. He didn't run- that might have drawn unwelcome notice to him. But he did some pretty fancy walking.

Once he was sure nobody was on his heels, he slowed down, breathing hard. The man back near The Gladiator had worried that he was a criminal. Now he worried about running into a real one. That would be irony, wouldn't it? Go off on an adventure no one in this world could ask, and then get knocked over the head for whatever you had in your wallet? He shivered, though the summer night was mild.

Not many people were on the street. The ones who were seemed as nervous of him as he was of them. That reassured him. He knew he was no sneak thief or robber. All they knew was that he was tall and might be dangerous.

He turned around a couple of times to figure out where he was-he'd gone around those corners at random when he was getting away from The Gladiator. Then he nodded to himself. Milan 's skyline looked familiar again. Those skyscrapers that changed it from the home timeline were gone. His apartment building would be… over that way.

Off he went. He shrank into a dark doorway when a police car went by. The carabinieri inside didn't notice him, or else didn't care. The car rolled down the street.

When he got to the apartment building, he took the stairs. He somehow felt the elevator would draw too much notice. That was probably foolish, but he didn't care. He hadn't got used to the elevator yet anyway.

He looked at his watch. It wasn't even one o'clock yet. Eduardo had known what he was talking about. Time-or rather, duration-really did stand still inside a transposition chamber. Gianfranco wondered why. From what Eduardo said, chrono-physicists in the home timeline did, too.

Here was the familiar hallway. Here was the familiar-and familial-door. He reached into his pocket. Where the devil were the familiar keys? He'd had them-and now he didn't. They had to be somewhere in the home timeline, or maybe in the transposition chamber. He felt like pounding his head against the wall. Instead, he started pounding on the door.

People joked about the midnight knock on the door. They joked so they wouldn't have to cringe, because those knocks were much too real and much too common. Even so, Annarita didn't think she'd ever heard one… till now.

The terror that filled her also amazed her. That a simple sound could cause so much fear seemed impossible. No matter how it seemed, she lay shivering in her bed. She might suddenly have been dropped into crushed ice.

The pounding went on and on. Was it her door? Were they coming for her parents-and for her-because of what had happened to Gianfranco?

She almost screamed when the light in her bedroom came on. There stood her father in his pajamas. "It's not for us," he said. "It's next door."

Half a dozen words that sounded like a reprieve from a death sentence. And, no two ways about it, they might have been just that. There was a joke that ended, "No, Comrade. He lives one floor down." Annarita had always thought it was funny. Now she was living inside it and understanding the relief the poor fellow who said that had to feel.

Then the knocking stopped-the door must have opened.

A split second later, Annarita heard screams and shrieks. At first she thought the Security Police were beating the Mazzillis. Then she made out Gianfranco's name. His mother cried, "You're back!"

Annarita jumped out of bed. She ran over and gave her father a hug. "They played fair with us," she said. "They didn't have to, but they did."

"A good thing, too," her father said. "I just didn't know what to tell the Mazzillis any more."

"Shall we go over there?" Annarita asked. "They can't get mad if the noise woke us up."

"They can find plenty of other reasons to get mad if they want to," Dr. Crosetti said. "But yes, let's go over. At least they can't blame us for getting Gianfranco murdered now. That's a good start."

The Crosetti has needed to knock several times before the Mazzillis paid any attention to them. A lot of noise was still coming from inside the apartment. But Gianfranco's father finally opened the door. "Ah," he said. "You must have heard us."

Of course we did. Half of Milan heard you, Annarita thought. Her father only nodded. "We did," he agreed. "We're glad he's back. We're gladder than we know how to tell you."

"Is he all right?" Annarita asked.

"He seems to be," Comrade Mazzilli answered cautiously.

"I'm fine." Gianfranco came to the door. He was grinning from ear to ear. "I couldn't be better."

"How was it?" Annarita talked to him right past his parents.

"Amazing," he answered. "Just amazing."

"How did you get away from the villains?" Gianfranco's mother said. "I was so glad to see you, I didn't even ask yet."

"Oh, they let me go," Gianfranco said. "That was all a bluff to make sure nobody started shooting at them." He made it sound as if Eduardo and his friends hadn't done anything worse than knock on the wrong door.

"How did you-all of you-get away from the Security Police?" Comrade Mazzilli asked. "They swore up and down that there was no way out of the shop."

Gianfranco winked at Annarita. His parents didn't notice- they were out of their minds with joy to have him back safe and sound. But Annarita knew the answer, and they didn't. Gianfranco had had a ride in a transposition chamber. She hadn't imagined she could be so jealous. He couldn't tell his mother and father about the chamber, though. What would he say?

He didn't say anything at first-he let out a wordless, scornful snort. "The Security Police aren't as smart as they think they are, then," he declared. His parents both nodded. Everybody liked to believe the Security Police was nothing but a bunch of fools. That mostly wasn't true, but people wanted to believe it was, because it made the Security Police seem less dangerous than they really were. "They must have missed the trap door set into the basement wall," Gianfranco went on. "It opened into a secret room with a tunnel. They put a blindfold on me so I couldn't see where the tunnel went, but we got away."

Annarita had all she could do to keep a straight face. Her father's expression looked a little strained, too. Gianfranco was stealing big chunks of the plot from a TV thriller that was on a couple of weeks before. He'd seen it, and so had the Crosettis. His mother and father evidently hadn't.

"Well!" his father said. "I'm going to tell those bunglers a thing or two-you'd better believe I am. And the first thing I'm going to do is tell them you're here and you're safe, and no thanks to them." He stormed off toward the telephone.

"I'm glad they didn't keep you." Again, Annarita talked past Gianfranco's mother, who would think she meant the kidnappers. Gianfranco would know her they included everybody in the home timeline.

He spread his hands. "I couldn't do anything about it any which way."

Her father wasn't just talking on the phone. He was shouting: "Comrade Mazzilli here. What? I woke you up? Too bad! I've got news worth waking you up for, you lazy good-for-nothing. Gianfranco's home!… What do you mean, am I sure? You blockhead, he's standing right here in front of me. And a whole fat lot of help getting him back you people were, too!"

He listened for a moment, then slammed the phone down. "That's telling them, Father!" Gianfranco said.

"Those idiots said they'd send somebody over to take your statement," Comrade Mazzilli said. "I think they're ashamed of themselves for not knowing what's what. They've got plenty to be ashamed about, too."

"I think we'd better go back to bed," Annarita's father said. "Gianfranco, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you again." That was bound to be nothing but the truth.

"Me, too," Annarita said, which made Gianfranco's face light up in a way her father's words hadn't. "Good night."

"Good night," Gianfranco said with a wry grin. "At least you get to go back to sleep. Me, I've got to talk to the Security Police."

"You're right! I should have told them to come in the morning," his father said. "I'll go call them back."

"Never mind. I'll deal with it now, and then I'll sleep for a week," Gianfranco said.

"Good night," Annarita said again. She and her parents went back to their own apartment. She wondered if she would be able to fall asleep again after the excitement in the middle of the night. As it turned out, she had no trouble at all.

The man trom the Security Police scowled at Gianfranco. "Where exactly in the wall was this stinking trap door?" he demanded.

"I don't know," Gianfranco said.

"What do you mean, you don't know? What kind of answer is that?"

"It's the truth," Gianfranco lied.

"How can it be the truth? You went through the miserable thing, didn't you?"

"Sure. Of course."

"Well, then?" the Security Police officer said triumphantly.

"Well, then-what? This guy had an arm around my neck. I was backwards to the wall when I went through the door. If I had eyes in my rear end, I could tell you more."

"Plenty of people keep their brains there." The officer yawned. It was half past three in the morning. He looked like a man who wanted to be asleep in bed, not grilling a kidnapping victim who'd appeared out of thin air. With a sigh, he went on, "So where did you go from there?"

"I don't know, not really," Gianfranco answered. "I already told you, they put a blindfold on me after that."

"Why didn't they just knock you over the head?" No, the officer wasn't happy about being here in the middle of the night.

"Beats me," Gianfranco said. "You could ask them yourself if you'd managed to catch them."

"As far as we can see, they might have disappeared by magic, not by your stupid trap door," the man from the Security Police grumbled. He was righter than he knew. One of Crosstime Traffic's biggest advantages was that nobody from this alternate really believed in other worlds. Travel from here to the home timeline might as well have been magic. With another sigh, the officer asked, "When did they let you go?"

"This morning. Yesterday morning, I mean." Gianfranco yawned. His mother had brought espresso for the Security Police officer and for him. Despite the strong coffee, he was still very tired. Too much had happened with not enough sleep.

"You should have let us know you were free as soon as they did," the officer said.

Gianfranco just looked at him. The officer turned red and made a production out of lighting a cigarette. The Security Police called on you. If you were in your right mind, you didn't call them. Everybody knew that-even Security Policemen. The only reason Gianfranco's father, a loyal Party man, had told them Gianfranco was back was to let them know what a bunch of blundering idiots they were.

After blowing out a long plume of smoke, the man from the Security Police asked, "How did you get back to Milan?"

"I stuck out my thumb," Gianfranco answered. "One truck took me as far as Bologna. I got another lift there, and it took me here." Hitchhiking was against the law. That didn't mean people didn't do it, even if it was dangerous. And if he said he'd taken the train, they could ask who'd seen him at the station and find out if there were records of his ticket. Thumbing a ride didn't leave a paper trail.

The officer tried his best: "What were the names of the men who picked you up? What were they carrying?"

"I think one was Mario and one was Luigi." Gianfranco pulled ordinary names out of the air-or out of what the Crosstime Traffic people had told him while he was under their drugs. "One of them said he was carrying mushrooms. The other guy didn't talk much. He just smoked smelly cigars."

"Right." The Security Policeman sucked in smoke himself. He scribbled notes. Would people start checking to see if a trucker named Luigi-or maybe Mario-who smoked cigars was on the road yesterday? Did Crosstime Traffic have men who looked like Mario and Luigi? He wouldn't have been surprised.

"Anyway, I'm here now and I'm fine," he said.

His father stepped in and added, "No thanks to the Security Police."

"We did what we could, Comrade. We're not done yet," the officer said. "We'll catch those villains-you wait and see."

Gianfranco knew better. His father didn't, but he also didn't seem much impressed. "I'll believe it when I do see it," he said.

"We work for the safely of the stale and of its people," the Security Police officer said.

"Shouldn't those be the other way around?" Gianfranco asked.

The officer sent him a hooded look. Who do you think you are, to doubt that the state comes first? The man didn't ask that out loud, but he might as well have. In the Italian People's Republic, the question was only too reasonable. The state had come first here for many, many years. But Gianfranco was just back from an Italy where that wasn't so, an Italian Republic that left the people out of its name but took them more seriously than this one did. He hadn't been able to stay there long, but the attitude rubbed off. Maybe the drugs should have fixed that too, so he didn't pop off.

"Can we finish this another time, Comrade?" his father asked the officer. "Gianfranco has to be tired, and so do you. Could you let him have a little rest, now that he can sleep in his own bed again?"

"Well, all right." The man from the Security Police didn't seem sorry to have an excuse to go home-and Gianfranco's father was a Party wheel, even if he wasn't a great big one. The officer got to his feet. "I'll report to my superiors, and we'll see if they have more questions to ask. Ciao." He left the apartment.

"Grazie, Father," Gianfranco said around another yawn. "I am tired."

"No wonder, after everything you've been through," his father answered. Gianfranco had been through more and stranger things than his father imagined. On the other hand, his father's imaginings had to be scarier. "I don't know what I would have done if you didn't come home safe."

"I'm here. I'm fine-except that I'm sleepy," Gianfranco said.

Lying down in his own bed did feel good. But one thought kept him from sleeping for quite a while. He understood all the reasons why he couldn't stay in the home timeline. Even so, coming back here after seeing what freedom was like made him feel as if he'd just got a life sentence to a prison camp he couldn't hope to escape from.

Gianfranco didn't want to talk about things in his apartment or in Annarita's. She knew why, loo. The Security Police were too likely to have bugged one of them, or maybe both. He didn't dare tell her the truth if unfriendly ears might also hear it.

And so, as soon as they could, they went for a walk in a little park not far from the apartment building. Annarita thought she was more eager to hear than Gianfranco was to talk. "Well?" she asked.

"Well, he wasn't lying," Gianfranco said.

"I didn't think he was," Annarita replied. "And when you disappeared without a trace, I was sure there was only one place you could have gone. What was that like?"

"You mean the chamber?" he asked. Annarita nodded impatiently. "It was like-nothing," he said. "It was like sitting in a compartment in a railroad car, except it was cleaner and quieter. I couldn't even tell we were moving. We weren't moving, not the way the two of us are now when we walk. We were going across instead, but that didn't feel like anything."

"And when you got there?" she said.

"They wear funny clothes," Gianfranco said. "They wear brighter colors than we do, and the cuts are strange. Everything is brighter there. More paint, more neon lights. Something's always yelling at you, to buy or to try or to fly. They are capitalists. They care more about money than we do. But they have a lot more things they can buy, too, and they don't have to wait for years to get them."

"That's nice." Annarita remembered her family's seemingly endless wait for their little Fiat. "But are they as free as Eduardo said they were?"

"They are. They really are." Gianfranco sounded awed.

"They let me watch TV. I listened to the news, and there were people talking about government programs that didn't work. They were going on about how much money the government had wasted-just telling people. They sounded disgusted. It was like, Well, here we go again."

"That's different, all right," Annarita agreed. Plenty of government programs here didn't work. The government wasted lots of money. Everybody knew that. Everybody took it for granted. But you never heard anything about it on television or the radio. As far as those were concerned, the government could do no wrong. That wasn't a big surprise, \l was no surprise at all, in fact. The TV and radio and papers were all instruments of the government. Would they, could they, bite the hand that fed them? Not likely!

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Gian-franco said, "And you should have seen the papers!" He clapped a hand to his forehead. "They made the TV seem like nothing. The things they called the Prime Minister! Here, people go to camps for even thinking things like that. They put them in print, and nobody gets excited."

"Why not?" Annarita asked.

"Because they take it for granted. I asked Eduardo about that. Here, everybody would have a stroke if you said anything bad about the Party or the General Secretary, right?" Gian-franco waited for Annarita to nod, then went on, "If you can say anything you want, the way you can there, you have to yell really loud to get noticed at all."

"Why wouldn't just telling the truth do the job?" she wondered.

"Maybe it would-if it was real important or really interesting," Gianfranco answered. "But when it comes to politics, who knows for sure what's true? All the different parties try to sell their ideas, the same way companies try to sell cars or soap."

Annarita thought it over. She wasn't sure she liked it. It didn't seem… dignified. But she supposed getting lots of different kinds of propaganda was better than getting just one. If you had lots, you could pick and choose among them. With only one, you were stuck. She knew all about that. Everybody in this whole world did.

"Do they all walk around with their little computers all the time?" she asked.

"Do they!" Gianfranco rolled his eyes. "Those things are telephones, too, and they can send messages back and forth on them, and photos, and I don't know what all else. Half the time, people in the home timeline pay more attention to their gadgets than they do to what's going on around them. They'll walk out in the street without even looking. It's a miracle they don't get killed."

People here walked out in the street without looking all the time, too. Sometimes they did get killed. "Are the drivers there any more polite than they are here?" Annarita asked.

Gianfranco shook his head. "Not even a little bit. And with all those cars… Well, sometimes it jams up so nobody can move. Then it's all horns and cussing." Annarita laughed. That sounded familiar, all right. Gianfranco added, "But when they can move-well, it's all horns and cussing then, too. All the time, pretty much."

She'd been skirting what she really wanted to know: "Did you like it there? Would you have stayed if you could?"

"In a minute," he answered. "I could breathe without filling out a form first, you know what I mean?" He took her hand. "I would have missed you. I would have missed you like anything. But I would have stayed. This"-his wave took in not just the park, not just Milan, but the whole Italian People's Republic- "this is jail. We've got to find some way to change it, to get free."

"How?" Annarita asked.

Gianfranco seemed to shrink in on himself. "I don't know. I just don't know."

Gianfranco didn't want to go back to San Marino. He especially didn't want to go back to The Three Sixes. When the Security Police put him in one of their cars and got on the autostrada heading east, what he wanted stopped mattering. They intended to take him there, and they could do as they pleased. His only choice besides going to San Marino was going to a camp. All things considered, going to San Marino was better.

Of course, he might end up going to San Marino and to a camp. If the Security Police couldn't find the trap door in the wall he'd talked about, what would they do to him? He worried about that more with every kilometer by which he drew closer to San Marino. Since the trap door didn't exist, he figured he had reason to worry.

The Three Sixes was still operating when the Security Police led him into the shop. All the people who worked there belonged to the Security Police. The games they sold were copies they'd made themselves of the originals from the home timeline. How much had that cost? If it helped trap enemies of the state, the Security Police seemed to think it was worth it.

They took him down to the basement. "So your trap door is here somewhere?" one of them said. His name was Iacopo, or maybe lacomo. Gianlranco wasn't sure which, and the Security Police didn't bother with formal introductions.

"That's right," Gianfranco said, knowing it wasn't.

"But you don't know exactly where," Iacopo or lacomo said.

"I'm sorry, Comrade, but I don't. I had my back to the wall, and I was scared like you wouldn't believe." Gianlranco aimed to slick to his story as long as he could.

"Yes, you said so." The officer didn't sound convinced. "But at least you know which wall it's on, right? Even if you couldn't see that one, you could see all the others."

No, this wouldn't be easy or fun. The Security Police had thought about what he told them, and drawn reasonable conclusions from it. He wished they hadn't bothered. But he was a Party official's son. And, even worse from their point of view, the people who nabbed him had vanished into thin air. They didn't know that was the literal truth.

Cautiously, Gianlranco nodded. Even more cautiously, he said, "I guess so."

"All right, then." Iacopo/Iacomo went on sounding reasonable. Gianfranco supposed that was better than having him sound ferocious. It still wasn't good. When Gianfranco still didn't say anything, the officer gestured impatiently. "Well? Which one was it?"

"That one." Gianfranco pointed to the wall where Giulio had had his little room, the one from which he'd summoned the transposition chamber. Gianfranco didn't see a door on that wall now, any more than he saw any sign of the trap door that led down to the subbasement. Maybe that meant…

"You heard him. Get to work," lacopo or lacomo told the other men from the Security Police.

They did. They started banging on the wall, not just with their fists but with hammers and wrenches, too. After a little while, one of them stopped. "Well, I'll be-!" one of them said. If he would be what he said he would be, he would spend a very long time in a very warm place. "Fry me for a chicken if something's not hollow back there."

Gianfranco had hoped the Security Police would find the hidden office. He also hoped the people from the home timeline hadn't left behind anything that would hurt them. They'd had to get out in a hurry, as he knew too well.

Iaeopo/lacomo seemed to be a fellow with simple, direct ideas. "Knock down the wall," he said. "We'll find out what's in back of it."

The men from the Security Police rolled up their sleeves and got to work with sledgehammers. The racket made Gianfranco stick his fingers in his ears. It also made somebody from upstairs come running down. "What are you guys doing?" he yelled. "People think it's an earthquake."

"Tell them it's plumbers. Tell them anything you want," lacopo/Iacomo said. "We found a secret passage. I didn't think we would, but we did. The kid here wasn't blowing smoke after all." Gianfranco should have been insulted. He was insulted, but not enough to say anything about it. The Security Police officer from upstairs went away. The others kept banging at the wall.

Try as they would, the Security Police had a devil of a time knocking it down. They swore and complained. Then one of them smashed enough concrete to bang his sledgehammer off a steel bar. He swore again, this time in disgust. "It's reinforced concrete!" he yelled. "What's hiding back there?"

They needed cutting torches to get in. They were all fit to be tied by the lime one of them squeezed through the opening and shone a flashlight into the room. "Well?" another one called.

"Well, what?" the man inside said. "Some of the ugliest furniture I've ever seen, that's all."

"Go on in, kid," Iacopo/lacomo told Gianfranco. "Is this where you were?"

"I guess so," Gianfranco said once he scrambled through the hole in the wall. The furniture-most of it gaudy plastic- must have come from the home timeline. Scorched metal filing cabinets stood against the far wall. The air stank of stale smoke. Another man from the Security Police opened a drawer. He looked inside, then muttered and closed it again.

"What's the matter?" somebody asked him.

"Papers are nothing but ashes. Whatever was in there, they got rid of it," he answered.

"Where did they take you next, Mazzilli?" Iacopo or Iacomo asked.

"I don't know," he said. "This is where they put the blindfold on me."

The Security Police officer coughed, then nodded. "Oh, yeah. You did say that." Now he seemed more ready to believe the things Gianfranco had said, even when they weren't true. That was pretty crazy, but Gianfranco didn't complain. Oh, no. The officer lit a cigarette. With the air already smoky, Gianfranco wondered why he bothered.

"So there's a different passage somewhere on one of these other walls?" another officer asked.

"I guess so. How else could they have got me out of here?" Gianfranco said. He knew the answer to that, but the Security Police didn't. And he didn't think they would ever figure it out.

A new school year. New classes, new teachers. Annarita knew she'd feel crazy for the first couple of weeks while she got used to things. Not needing to worry about the Young Socialists' League was kind of a relief. Normally, she would have thought hard about running for president her senior year. But, after she'd proved wrong about The Gladiator, she was sure Maria Tenace would clobber her if she tried. And so, with a small mental sigh, she decided to sit on the sidelines and let Maria have it.

She decided that, anyway, till people started coming over to her and asking her if she'd run. They all seemed horrified when she said no. "You're going to let Maria just take it?" one girl said. "But she'll make everybody hate her and she'll run the League into the ground."

"I don't want to have a big fight with her," Annarita said. "Life is too short."

"Who says you'd need a fight?" the girl answered. "Nobody can stand her, and I mean nobody." She wasn't any special friend-Annarita hardly knew her. That made Annarita wonder if she ought to change her mind. When three more people told her the same thing, she did change it. She put in her petition of candidacy about an hour before the deadline.

Maria Tenace stormed up to her the next day, literally shaking with fury. "So you think you can get away with it, do you?" Maria shouted, as if the two of them were alone instead of in a crowded hallway. "Well, you'll find out!"

She did have some friends. They started spreading stories about Annarita. Of course they'd heard about Gianfranco's kidnapping over the holiday. They tried to blame it on her. She wondered what she could say. Simplest seemed best: "We took in a cousin who was down on his luck. He did something he shouldn't have. I wish he didn't, but is it my fault he did?"

Would that do any good? She didn't know. All she could do was hope. She wasn't very worried either way. If she won, she won. If she didn't, she would have fewer things to worry about the rest of her senior year.

The election meeting was the most crowded one she'd ever seen. She and Maria flipped a coin to see who'd speak in which order. Annarita won, and chose to go last. Maria launched straight into an attack: "Comrade students, your choice today is simple. It is a battle between the forces of reaction and those of progress. If you want to shamelessly excuse backsliding anti-Socialist thought, you will vote for my opponent. She showed her true colors last year, when she refused to condemn The Gladiator, that hotbed of capitalist propaganda. If you would rather have a true Socialist in charge of the Young Socialists' League, you will choose me instead. I hope you do. Grazie."

Annarita got up. "I don't think I'm a reactionary," she said. "I just don't like getting people in trouble before I'm sure they need to be there. Maybe I was wrong about The Gladiator." But I'll never believe I was. "At least I know I can be wrong, though. I don't think Maria's ever been wrong in her life-and if you don't believe me, just ask her."

Maria Tenace started to nod. She almost gave herself a whiplash stopping when she realized, a split second too late, that Annarita wasn't complimenting her. Everybody saw. If looks could kill, hers would have knocked Annarita over on the spot.

No secret ballot-the vote was by a show of hands. Annarita thought that would doom her. Who wanted to risk being labeled a reactionary? To her amazement, she won by something close to two to one.

After the election, a boy whose name she didn't even know told her, "I don't want somebody turning me in to the Security Police if I say something she doesn't like. I don't think you'd do that."

"I hope not!" Annarita exclaimed. Somebody slammed the door to the hall where the League was meeting. Several people said it was Maria storming away. Annarita went on, "I wouldn't have walked out if I lost, either."

"No, I don't think you would," the boy said. "Congratulations for winning, though. I'm glad you did."

"Thanks." Annarita was glad she had, too. A year with Maria running things wouldn't have been much fun.

Gianfranco was waiting outside when the meeting broke up. He also congratulated Annarita, adding, "I knew you had it in the bag when the Dragon Lady came out breathing fire." That made Annarita laugh. He finished, "Want to celebrate with a soda in the Galleria?"

"Sure. Why not?" Annarita said.

Two or three more people said they were glad she'd won as she was walking out of Hoxha Polytechnic. Just what she'd done started to sink in then. Any university that saw President of the Young Socialists' League on an application would be much more likely to say yes. That wasn't why she'd run, but it wasn't bad.

When they got to the Galleria del Popolo, she didn't just have a soda. She had a soda, with a big scoop of ice cream plopped in. It was wonderful. Gianfranco had one, too. They sat at a sidewalk table watching people go by. Two of the people were Russians, in baggy, square-cut suits very different from what Italian men wore. They were arguing at the top of their lungs. Except for a couple of swear words, she hardly understood anything they said. The summer holiday had left her Russian rusty. She supposed it would get better again.

She eyed Gianfranco. His people-watching wasn't all pretty girl-watching. She appreciated that.

He pointed across the street. "Look! That shopfront that's been empty forever is finally going to get somebody new in it."

"You're right." She squinted, trying to make out what was below the big letters that spelled out OPENING SOON! She didn't have much luck. "Can you read it?"

Gianfranco squinted, too. Then he shook his head. "No. Too small. Shall we go over and look?"

"In a bit," Annarita said. "Not yet."

After they finished their sundaes and talked for a while, they did cross the pedestrian-filled street. The sign read, RARE AND UNUSUAL BOOKS TO INTEREST EVERY TASTE. A SHOP EOR THE PERSON WHO THINKS.

Annarita stared at Gianfranco. He was staring at her, too. "You don't suppose-?" he said.

"I don't know," she said. "We'll just have to find out, won't we?"