The Gladiator

Two

The dismissal bell. Gianfranco exploded out of the seat in his biology class. If Comrade Pastrano thought he cared about the differences between a frog's circulatory system and a mouse's, the teacher needed to think again.

Gianfranco wished he didn't have to lug so many books home. His old man would come down on him like a landslide if he didn't at least make a show of doing his homework, though.

But before he went home… Before he went home, he went to the Galleria del Popolo-the People's Gallery. Once upon a time, it had been named for a King of Italy, not for the people. Once upon a time, too, it had been the most stylish and expensive shopping center in Milan. A glass roof covered a crossed-shaped district of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings crammed with shops and restaurants of all sorts.

Fashion had long since moved on, as fashion has a way of doing. The expensive shops and the first-rate restaurants went elsewhere. The places that took over were the ones that didn't pretend to be up-to-the-minute or first-rate. That didn't mean you couldn't have a good time at the Galleria del Popolo. It did mean the good time you had wasn't the same as it would have been a hundred years earlier.

Now the Galleria del Popolo was where the people gathered-the strange people, that is. Old men looking for older books prowled the secondhand stalls. People who played music that wasn't in favor with the cultural authorities played it in little clubs there. Gianfranco wouldn't have been surprised if the men and women at those clubs who smoked cigarettes and drank espresso or wine while they listened were political unre-liables. If the Security Police needed to make a roundup, they would start there.

He walked past a shop selling clothes that only people who didn't care about getting ahead would wear. Flared trousers and tight-fitting shirts for men, short skirts and gaudy stockings for women… They seemed more like costumes than real clothes to Gianfranco. He imagined what his father would say if he came home in an outfit like that. Slowly, he smiled. The look on his father's face would almost be worth the price of the clothes and the price of the trouble he'd get in.

And there was The Gladiator. It had a license in the front window, the way any shop had to. Somebody in the Ministry of Commerce had decided the place could do business. As Gianfranco walked up to the door, he made money-counting motions. He couldn't believe The Gladiator ever opened up without bribes of some sort. Communism should have made corruption a thing of the past. He was only sixteen, but he knew better.

A guy coming out of the shop nodded to Gianfranco as he went in. The other guy looked to be two or three years older than Gianfranco was-he really needed a shave. But he looked to be the same kind of person: somebody who couldn't get excited about most of the life he was living. The knowing grin on his face said he got excited about The Gladiator.

So did Gianfranco. So did all the people who came in here, looked around, and decided they liked what they saw. There were others. Gianfranco had seen them. They'd walk in, go to the back room and stare at the people playing games, eye the games and the stuff that went with them, and walk out shaking their heads. They were fools. They proved they were fools by not getting what was going on right in front of their noses.

"Ciao, Gianfranco," called the fellow behind the counter.

"Ciao, Eduardo. Come sta?" Gianfranco said.

"I'm fine," Eduardo answered. "How are you?"

"I'll live. I made it through another day of school," Gianfranco said. Eduardo thought that was funny. Gianfranco wished he did. He went on, "Is Carlo here yet?"

"Si. He just got here a couple of minutes ago," Eduardo told him. "He thinks he's going to clean your clock-he said so."

"In his dreams!" Gianfranco exclaimed. That touched his honor-or he imagined it did, anyhow. A lot of people called honor an outdated, aristocratic idea. Maybe it was, but plenty of Italians still took it seriously anyhow. Gianfranco set ten lire on the counter: two hours' worth of gaming time. "I'll show him!"

"Go on into the back room," Eduardo said. "I may have to give you some of your money back-I don't know if Carlo can stay till six."

"I'll worry about that later," Gianfranco said. He had money-more money than he knew what to do with. Even if his father wasn't a big Party wheel, he was a Party member. That all by itself just about guaranteed you wouldn't come close to being broke. The trouble was finding anything worth buying for your lire. Cars and apartments had waiting lists years long. TV sets kept you waiting for months. So did halfway decent sound systems. You could get cheap junk right away-but you got what you paid for if you spent your money like that.

A couple of hours of fun? Cheap at the price.

Other people-almost all of them guys from a couple of years younger than Gianfranco up to, say, thirty-sat bent over tables in the back room. They studied game boards with the attention they should have given to schoolwork. Carlo looked up and waved when he saw Gianfranco. "Ciao" he said. "Watch what I do to you."

"You can try," Gianfranco said, and sat down across from his gaming partner. Carlo was nineteen, just starting at the university. His father wanted him to be a pharmacist. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life-anything but push pills, probably. Gianfranco felt the same way about being a bureaucrat.

For now, they both forgot about the real world. Here, they were railroad magnates building rival lines across Europe. They had to lay track, buy engines, and move passengers and goods from one city to another. Dice and the quality of locomotives controlled how fast they could go. Cards told them what to take where and added disasters and blizzards and floods. But there was still a lot of strategy. Getting your line through the mountain passes, picking the shortest or the safest route (the two weren't always the same) between two towns, building here so the other player wouldn't…

The Gladiator didn't just sell games and offer a place to play. It also sold books, so players who got interested could learn how things really worked. Gianfranco knew much more about nineteenth-century railroads than about twentieth-century history. He'd learned this stuff because he wanted to, and because the more he knew, the better he did in the game.

"Goal!" somebody three tables over shouted. He was running a soccer club. Gianfranco had tried that game, too, but he didn't like it as well as railroading. Playing soccer was great. Running a team? Paying and trading players, keeping up the stadium, getting publicity so your crowds would be large and you could afford to pay better players-that all seemed too much like work.

Carlo was building his own rail line into Paris, an important center where Gianfranco was already operating. Carlo offered lower shipping rates than Gianfranco was charging. Gianfranco lowered his even more so Carlo couldn't steal his business. He cut rates as low as he could while still making money. Then Carlo cut his so he was losing money on that route but trying to make up for it other places.

"Is that in the rules?" Gianfranco asked.

"It sure is." Carlo brandished the rule book, a thick pamphlet. "It's called a 'loss leader.' And it's going to ruin you."

"We'll see about that," Gianfranco said. He built toward Vienna, where Carlo had been operating by himself. Even before he got there, Carlo cut shipping rates. Gianfranco cut them even more. If Carlo wanted to keep him out, he would have to start taking a loss in Vienna, too. He tried it. It didn't work- losing money on two major routes, he couldn't make enough on the others to stay in the black. His whole operation started hemorrhaging money. He had to give up the Paris line.

Gianfranco didn't gloat-too much. "I think you got a little too cute," he said.

"Maybe," Carlo said unhappily. "I didn't expect you to get back at me so fast." He tapped the rule book with his forefinger. "I saw this loss leader thing in here, and it looked so cool I had to try it out."

"I've done stuff like that," Gianfranco said. "I think that one can be good, but you pushed it too hard. The game will bite you if you go with any one thing too much. You've got to stay balanced. That's how you make money."

"You old capitalist, you," Carlo said. They both laughed.

Annarita didn't say anything about The Gladiator to Cianlranco at supper or at breakfast the next morning. She didn't feel like getting worried questions from his parents-or from her own. Right now, all she knew about the place was that Marco Furillo thought it was politically unreliable. That didn't prove much.

So she waited till the two of them went down the stairs together and started (or Hoxha Polytechnic before asking, "You've been to The Gladiator, haven't you?"

"Sure!" He sounded enthusiastic.

"What do you do there?" she asked.

"Play games, mostly. I get books sometimes, too." He started talking about a complicated coup he'd pulled off against somebody named Carlo. It didn't make much sense to her. Then he started talking about how railroads really operated in the nineteenth century. Some of that made even less sense, but he knew a lot about it.

"How did you find out about all that stuff?" Annarita asked.

"I told you-they've got books there. The more you know, the better you can play," Gianfranco answered. Playing well mattered to him-she could see that. He didn't care much about school, so he didn't work any harder than he had to there.

"Do you ever do anything… political at The Gladiator?" she asked.

He looked at her as if she were crazy. "I play games. I talk with the other guys who play games. What could be political about old-time railroads or soccer teams or hunting dragons?"

"Dragons? You're confusing me," Annarita said.

"Some of the games are in this pretend world," Gianfranco explained. "They're all right, I guess, but the railroad's my favorite."

"How come?" Annarita asked.

"I don't know. I just like it," Gianfranco answered. She made an exasperated noise. He carried his books in his left hand, which kept his right free for gesturing. "Why do you like a song or a movie? You just do, that's all."

"I know why I like a movie," Annarita said. "The actors are good, or the plot is interesting, or it's funny, or something."

"All right, all right. Let me think." Gianfranco did-Annarita could watch him doing it. That impressed her all by itself. He wasn't stupid or anything. They'd been living in each other's pockets since they were little, so she knew that. But he hardly ever wanted to do more than he had to to get by. At last, he said, "When I'm playing, it's like the railroad is really mine. I'm in charge of everything from paying the workers to fixing the track if a flood washes out a stretch to figuring out how much to charge for hauling freight."

He'd talked about that when he was trying to explain what he'd done to Carlo. Carefully, Annarita said, "It sounds like a very, uh, individualistic game." People in the Italian People's Republic weren't supposed to be individualists. They were all supposed to work together for the eventual coming of true Communism, when the state would wither away.

The state hadn't done any withering lately. It still needed to be strong to guard against reactionaries and backsliders and other enemies. So it insisted, in films, on radio and TV, in the newspapers, and on propaganda posters slapped onto anything that wasn't moving.

Gianfranco understood that individualistic was a code word for something worse. You'd have to be dead not to. "It's no such thing!" he said hotly. "It's no more individualistic than chess is. You run a whole army there."

Annarita knew she had to back up. You couldn't say anything bad about chess, not when the Russians liked it so well. She tried a different approach: "Well, maybe, but people have been playing chess for a long time. I've never heard of a game like this before. Where does The Gladiator get it? Where does the shop get all its games? I don't think other places have any like them."

"I don't know." Gianfranco's shrug, a small masterpiece of its kind, showed that he didn't care, either. Then his eyes narrowed. "How come you're so curious about all this?"

She wondered if she should tell him. After a moment, she decided to-if she said something like I just am, that's all, it would only make him more suspicious. She realized she should have had a cover story ready. She wasn't much of a secret agent. "Don't get mad at me," she said, "but somebody at the Young Socialists' League meeting yesterday said they were politically unreliable."

Gianfranco said something that should have scalded the gray tabby trotting down the street. But it just kept going-cats were tough beasts. Then Gianfranco said, "Whoever thinks so is nuts. We sit. We play. We talk. That's it."

"You don't talk about politics?" Annarita asked.

"Of course not. The guys who play the railroad game talk about railroads. Some of them build model railroads, but I don't think that's interesting. The other guys talk about soccer-we all do that sometimes, 'cause soccer's important. And the others go on about dragons and ogres and using zoning laws to get ores out of a pass they need to go through and stuff like that."

"Zoning laws?" Annarita hadn't thought she could get more confused. Now she discovered she was wrong.

Gianfranco only shrugged again. "I don't know, not really. Like I said, I don't play that game much. Stuff like that, though. Politics?" What he said about politics was even hotter than anything he'd come out with before. He went on, "Why don't you come and see for yourself what we're up to? Then you won't have to listen to nonsense." That wasn't exactly what he called it.

"All right, I will," Annarita said. "Do I need to have you along, or can I go by myself?"

"You can go by yourself if you want to. It's a shop. It's looking for customers," Gianfranco answered. "People might talk to you more if you come in with somebody they know. It's like a restaurant or a bar-it has regulars."

She nodded. "Fair enough. Will you take me this afternoon, then?"

"Why not?" he said. "I'm going over there. I've got to finish Carlo off-you just see if I don't. Meet me at the entrance right after classes get out."

"I will. Grazie, Gianfranco. The sooner we get this settled, the better off and the happier everybody will be."

"See you then," Gianfranco said. By that time, they'd just about got to school. He hurried on ahead of Annarita, something he hardly ever did. She didn't think he was that eager to learn things from his teachers. No, more likely he was excited about showing off The Gladiator to her.

Annarita was curious. Gianfranco sure didn't think the place was subversive-but then, he wouldn't. Well, she'd find out… something, anyway. She could report to the Young Socialists' League. And that, with any luck, would be that.

Because she was curious about The Gladiator, she didn't pay as much attention in class as usual. She messed up a Russian verb conjugation that she knew in her sleep. Comrade Montefusco clucked and wrote what was probably a black mark in the roll book. She almost complained, but what could she complain about? Even if she knew better, she did make the mistake.

She kept doing silly little things like that all day long. She wondered if Gianfranco was doing the same thing. From what she'd heard, he did that kind of stuff all the time, so how was anybody supposed to tell? She didn't, though. Whenever she fouled up, her teachers looked surprised. She kept on being surprised herself, not that it did her any good.

After what seemed like forever, the dismissal bell rang. No after-school meetings today. She could just go. Gianfranco was waiting when she got outside. "You ready?" he asked.

She laughed at him. He really was eager as a puppy. "What would you do if I told you no?" she teased.

He just shrugged one more time. "I'd go by myself, that's what."

So there, Annarita thought. But she'd sassed him first, so she had it coming. "I'm not saying no, though. I want to see what got you all excited about this place." And she wanted to see if it really was reactionary and subversive, but she didn't say that.

She liked the Galleria del Popolo. You could find almost anything there-when you could find anything at all, that is.

The buildings that housed the shops were a couple of hundred years old. They might not have been as efficient as the Stalin-gothic blocks of flats that dominated Milan 's skyline along with the Duomo, but they were prettier.

Or was that a counterrevolutionary thought? They'd been built long before the Communist takeover of Italy. If you liked them more than buildings that went up after the takeover, did that make you a reactionary? Could you get in trouble if someone found out you did? She hadn't said anything to Gianfranco. She didn't intend to, either. He seemed harmless, but you never could know for sure who reported to the Security Police.

"Here we are." He pointed.

THE GLADIATOR. The sign wasn't too gaudy. The front window also showed a painting of a man in Roman-style armor holding a sword. Under his feet, smaller letters said, BOOKS AND GAMES AND THINGS TO MAKE YOU THINK. She hadn't expected that. "Well, take me in," she told Gianfranco. He nodded and did.

"Hey, Gianfranco!" called the man behind the counter. "Come sta?"

"I'm fine, Eduardo. How are you?" Gianfranco said. "This is my friend, Annarita." He didn't say she was there to investigate The Gladiator. That had to be because they were friends. He probably would have been more loyal to the shop than to some other member of the Young Socialists' League. And why not? Annarita thought. What's the league ever done for him?

"Ciao, Annarita," Eduardo said, and then, to Gianfranco, "I didn't know you had such a pretty friend."

Gianfranco blushed like a schoolgirl. That made Annarita smile, but she looked away so Gianfranco wouldn't see her do it. She got to glance at what was in the shop. It sold every different kind of game, all in brightly printed boxes. She'd never heard of any of them. Rails across Europe, World Cup, Swords and Sorcery, Eastern Front, Waterloo, Tycoon, Hannibal… She could figure out what they were about easily enough.

The Gladiator also sold miniatures: soldiers and locomotives and soccer players made of lead or plastic. Some were already painted, others plain-you could buy paints, too, in tiny bottles, and hair-thin brushes with which to apply them.

And there were books about costumes from every period from Babylon to now. There were books about military campaigns. There were soccer encyclopedias. There were books about railroads, and about what stock markets had been like when there were stock markets.

"This is quite a place." Annarita wasn't sure whether that was a compliment or not.

"You'd better believe it." Gianfranco had no doubts. He sounded as proud as if The Gladiator belonged to him. "Is Carlo here yet?" he asked Eduardo.

"No, but I don't think he'll be long," the older man-he had to be close to thirty-said.

"He's not as bold as he was yesterday, though," Gianfranco boasted. "'Loss leader,' was it? He found out!"

"He wasn't very happy when he headed for home. I will say that," Eduardo answered.

Gianfranco set money on the counter. "I'm going to go in there and set up the game," he said. When Eduardo nodded, he went into the back room.

That left Annarita out front by herself, and feeling it. "Can I help you with something in particular, Signorina?" Eduardo asked. "Maybe you want a present for a brother or somebody else? Maybe even for Gianfranco?" He looked sly.

She shook her head. "No, grazie, I don't think so. I just wanted to see what it was like. I've heard Gianfranco talk about it a lot. Our families share a kitchen-you know how it is."

"Oh, sure. Who doesn't?" Eduardo replied. "Tt shouldn't be that way, but it is, and what can you do about it?"

He had nerve, finding anything wrong with the way the world worked with somebody he'd just met. For all he knew, Annarita was a government spy. In fact, she wasn't that far from being one. "So anyway, he's been going on about it, and finally he asked me if I wanted to see it," she said. "And I said si, and here I am."

"What do you think?"

"I've never seen anything like it," Annarita said truthfully. "Where do all the games come from?"

"We have crazy people locked up in a psychiatric hospital who make them up," Eduardo told her.

She blinked. He really did like to see how close to the wind he could sail. Everybody knew the Party put troublemakers in psychiatric hospitals. Getting into one of those places was easy. Coming out? Coming out was a different story.

Everybody knew that, but hardly anybody talked about it. If you talked about it to the wrong people, you might wind up inside a psychiatric hospital yourself. But Eduardo didn't seem worried. He grinned at her.

Annarita wondered if he was a provocateur. Maybe the whole store was a front, a trap to catch dissidents. Would everybody who played games in here end up in a psychiatric hospital or in jail or in a labor camp or dead? She didn't like to think so, but the authorities could be sneaky. Everybody knew that, too.

She walked over to the shelves. There were titles like Making Your Corporation Profitable and Economics of Club Ownership alongside others like Greece and Rome at War. "You sell… interesting books," she said.

"Well, if they weren't interesting, who'd buy them?" Ed-uardo spread his hands and answered his own question: "Nobody, that's who. Then I couldn't make my living having fun. I'd have to do something honest instead." He grinned again.

Even though Annarita grinned back, she still found herself wondering about him and about what the shop sold. "Some of these books look almost… capitalist," she said, wondering how he would answer.

"They are," he said simply.

"But-how can you sell them, then?" Annarita asked. Anybody would have-she was sure of thai.

"Because they're just for the games," he replied. "Everybody who buys them knows it. If there were real capitalists, that would bring back the bad old days. But these are like books on chess openings and endgames. They help people play belter, that's all."

He was as smooth as silk, as slick as olive oil. That only made Annarita wonder about him more. "You can't use books on openings and endgames in the real world," she said. "You could use these. It would be wrong, but you could do it." She had to make sure she said thai, in case a camera and a mike were picking up her words. You never could tell. Never. "Somebody who bought one might get the wrong ideas about the way things are supposed to work. How does the stale let you sell them?"

"You're smart. Not many people asked questions like that." Eduardo sounded admiring. Then people in the back room started yelling. "Excuse me," he said, and ducked back there. A moment later, Annarita heard him yelling, too. He could call people some very rude things without really cursing. He could make them laugh while he did it, too, which was a rarer talent.

He came out a few minutes later shaking his head. "Argument over the rules. Dumb argument over the rules. Where were we, pretty lady?"

Annarita pegged him for the sort who gave out compliments as readily as insults. That meant she didn't need to take them seriously. She said, "You were telling me how you get away with selling books like these."

"That's right." Eduardo nodded. "Nothing fancy about it. We do it the same way the Church gets away with teaching what it teaches."

"This isn't religion. This is economics," Annarita said severely.

"Of course. But a lot of what the Church says goes against science and against dialectical materialism and against Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Everybody who thinks about it would say that's so. Why does the state let the Church do it, then?" Because people would riot if the state didn't, Annarita thought. Eduardo had a different answer: "Because it's religion, that's why. What the Church says only counts in religion, nothing else. And what we sell here only counts in our games, nowhere else. See? It's simple, really."

He made it sound simple, anyway. How many complications lurked under that smooth surface? Quite a few, unless Annarita missed her guess. But some of what he said was likely true, or the Security Police would have closed this place down. Unless he belongs to the Security Police, she reminded herself. She wondered how she could find out.

Gianfranco counted out his latest payment for delivering Russian oil to Paris. "Twenty-three million there," he said, as if the bright play-money bills were real. "That puts me at 509 million." As soon as you went over 500 million, you won. Carlo was still a good sixty million away.

"Si, you got me," he said, and stuck out his hand across the board. Gianfranco shook it. Carlo went on, "When we got into that second price war, that ruined me. You were smart there, Gianfranco. I didn't think you'd do anything like that."

"I'm not always as dumb as I look," Gianfranco said, which made the university student laugh. They got up and went out to the front counter together.

"Who won?" Eduardo asked.

Gianfranco stuck his thumb up. Carlo stuck his down. That was what you did at The Gladiator. The people who ran the shop hadn't started it. The people who played there did. In the ancient Roman arenas, a raised thumb was a vote for sparing a downed gladiator's life. A lowered one was a vote to finish him off. Somebody who knew that must have done it for a joke the first time. Now everybody did.

"Let's see…" Eduardo pulled out a chart. "Gianfranco beats Carlo in Rails across Europe. Gianfranco, that means you play Alfredo next. Carlo, you go down into the losers' bracket, and you play Vittorio."

"I'll beat him." Carlo didn't lack confidence. Common sense, sometimes, but never confidence.

"Alfredo?" Gianfranco didn't sound so bold. "He'll be dangerous. He studies the game all the time." Alfredo was older than Eduardo. He wore a mustache, and it had some white hairs in it. He was out of school, so he didn't have to worry about homework and projects and things. He had a job, but who took jobs seriously? He spent as much time at work as he could get away with on his hobby, and just about all the time after he got home. He was a fanatic, no two ways about it.

"Hope the dice go your way," Eduardo said. "If you have enough luck, all the other guy's skill doesn't matter. Might as well be life, eh?"

"Si." That was Carlo, still looking for a way to console himself after losing.

"It's a long game," Gianfranco said. "Most of the time, the dice and the cards even out."

"Well, in that case you'd better pray, because Alfredo will eat you for lunch like fettuccine," Carlo said. "I've got to go. Ciao." He walked out without giving Gianfranco a chance to snap back at him.

"He thought he'd beat you," Eduardo said.

"I know. He figured I was a kid, so I wouldn't know what I was doing," Gianfranco said. "I guess I showed him." Then, cautiously, he asked, "What did Annarita think of the place?" He still didn't want to tell Eduardo she was investigating The Gladiator.

"She seemed interested," answered the man behind the counter. "She's more political than you are, isn't she?"

Gianfrarrco knew what that meant-Annarita was asking questions. He just laughed and said, "Well, who isn't?" A lot of the time, not being interested in politics was the safest road to take. If you didn't stick your neck out one way or the other, nobody could say you were on the wrong side.

"She seemed nice, though. She's smart-you can tell," Eduardo went on.

"Uh-huh," Gianfranco said. Nobody ever went, He's smart-you can tell about him. He got by, and that was about it.

"She really did seem interested," Eduardo said. "Do you suppose she'll come back and play?"

"I don't know," Gianfranco said in surprise. "I didn't even think of it." A few girls did come to The Gladiator. Two or three of them were as good at their games as most of the guys. But it was a small and mostly male world. Some guys who had been regulars stopped coming so often-or at all-when they found a steady girlfriend or got married. Gianfranco thought that was the saddest thing in the world.

"It would be nice if she did," Eduardo said. "People find out pretty girls come in here, we get more customers. That wouldn't be bad."

"I guess not." Gianfranco didn't sound so sure, mostly because he wasn't. One of the reasons he liked coming to The Gladiator was that not so many people knew about the place. The ones who did were crazy the same way he was. They enjoyed belonging to something halfway between a club and a secret society. If a bunch of strangers who didn't know the ropes started coming in, it wouldn't be the same.

Eduardo laughed at him. "I know what the difference between us is. You don't have to worry about paying the rent- that's what."

"You don't seem to have much trouble," Gianfranco said. Along with the games and books and miniatures and models The Gladiator sold, it got all the gamers' hourly fees. It had to be doing pretty well-the Galleria del Popolo wasn't a cheap location.

"We manage." Eduardo knocked on the wood of the coun-tertop. "But that doesn't mean it's easy or anything. And we can always use more people. It's the truth, Gianfranco, whether you like it or not."

"You just want to indoctrinate them," Gianfranco said with a sly smile. "You want to turn them all into railroad capitalists or soccer-team capitalists or whatever. By the time you're done, there won't be a proper Communist left in Milan."

Eduardo looked around in what seemed to Gianfranco to be real alarm. After he decided nobody'd overheard Gianfranco, the clerk relaxed-a little. "If you open your big mouth any wider, you'll fall in and disappear, and that'll be the end of you," he said. "And it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, either."

"Oh, give me break," Gianfranco said. "I was just kidding. You know that-you'd better, all the time and money I spend in this joint."

"Nobody jokes about capitalists. They're the class enemy," Eduardo said.

"Carlo and I were joking about them while we played. We aren't the only ones, either. You hear guys like that all the time," Gianfranco said.

"That's in the game. It's not real in the game, and everybody knows it's not. I was talking with your girlfriend about that."

"She's not my girlfriend."

"The more fool you," Eduardo said, which flustered Gianfranco. The clerk went on, "As long as you know you're only being capitalists in a game, everything's fine. Games are just pretend."

"Not just," Gianfranco said. "That's what makes your games so good-they feel real."

"Sure they do, but they aren't," Eduardo said. "What happens if you go out into Milan and try to act like a capitalist? The Security Police arrest you, that's what. You want to see what a camp's like from the inside?"

"No!" Gianfranco said, which was the only possible answer to that question. But he couldn't help adding, "I've done too much studying for the game. Sometimes I think what they had back then worked better than what we've got now. The elevator in our building's been out of whack for years, and how come? 'Cause nobody cares enough to fix it."

"If I were a spy, you just convicted yourself," Eduardo said. "For heaven's sake, be careful how you talk. I don't want to lose customers, especially when I know they'll never come back."

Gianfranco played back his own words in his head. He winced. "Grazie, Eduardo. You're right. I was dumb."

"Dumb doesn't begin to cover it." Eduardo shook his head. "In here, it's a game. Out there"-his gesture covered the world beyond The Gladiator's door-"it's for real. Don't forget it."

He was urgent enough to impress Gianfranco, who said, "I won't." But then he couldn't help putting in, "You know what?"

"What?" Eduardo sounded like somebody holding on to his patience with both hands.

"This stuff with working with prices and raising money works really well in the game," Gianfranco said. "How come it wouldn't work for real?"

Even more patiently, Eduardo answered, "Because the game has its rules, and the outside world has different ones. The Party sets the outside rules, si? And they're whatever the Party says they are, si?"

"Well, sure," Gianfranco said. "But isn't the Party missing a trick? If it changed the real rules so they were more like the ones in the game, I bet a lot of people would get rich. And what's so bad about that?"

"I ought to throw you out of here and lock the door in your face," Eduardo said. "You're smart when it comes to the game, maybe, but you're not so smart when it comes to the real world. The Party does what it wants. If we're lucky-if we're real lucky-it doesn't pay any attention to what a bunch of gamers in a crazy little shop are thinking. You got that?"

“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.