The Gladiator

Three

Annarita didn't know what to think about The Gladiator. She didn't say anything at supper-she didn't want to talk where Gianfranco and his family could overhear. She just listened while her father chatted about a couple of patients he'd seen. He never named names, but his stories were interesting anyway. Then Signor Mazzilli went on-and on-about some policy decision that wouldn't mean much either way. Annarita thought he was a bore, but she tried not to show it. The Croset-tis and Mazzillis had to live together, so getting along was better than arguing all the time.

After she helped her mother with the dishes, though, she hunted up her father, who was reading a medical journal. "Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Why not?" He put down the journal. "This new procedure sounds wonderful, but it's so complicated and expensive that no one will use it more than once every five years. What's on your mind?"

She told him about visiting The Gladiator. "I don't know what I should say to the Young Socialists' League," she finished.

"Are they hurting anybody?" her father asked. He looked as if he ought to smoke a pipe, but he didn't. He said he'd seen too many cases of mouth cancer to want one of his own.

"Hurting anybody? No." Annarita shook her head. "But they're ideologically unsound."

"And so? I'm ideologically unsound, too. Most people are, one way or another," her father said. "Most of the time, it doesn't matter. You learn to keep quiet about it when you're not with people you can trust-and you learn not to trust too many people. Or it's about something so silly that you can talk about it and it doesn't count, even if you are sailing against the wind. So what's The Gladiator doing that's so awful?"

"They're selling games that make capitalism look good," Annarita answered.

"Are they?" Whatever her father had expected, that plainly wasn't it. "How do they think they can get away with that?" he asked. Annarita told him how Eduardo had explained it to her. Her father clicked his tongue between his teeth. "This fellow should have been either a Jesuit or a lawyer. Does he think the Security Police will let him get away with a story like that?"

"The government tolerates the Church. Why wouldn't it put up with something like this?" Annarita asked.

"It tolerates the Church because the Church has been around for almost 2,100 years. The Church is big and powerful, even if it doesn't have any divisions. The Russians let religion breathe, and they don't usually put up with anything." Her father looked unhappy. "A shop that's been open two years at the most just doesn't have that kind of clout. If this Eduardo can't see that, he needs to get his eyes examined."

"Do you suppose somebody's going to start a company or sell stock or exploit his workers because of The Gladiator?" Annarita asked. Those were things capitalists did. She knew that much, if not much more.

"With the laws the way they are now, I'm not sure you could start a company. I'm pretty sure you can't sell stock," her father answered. "You'd have to be crazy to try, wouldn't you? Who'd want to stick his neck out that way?"

"What am I supposed to tell the League?" That was Annarita's real worry.

"Well, it depends," her father said. "Do you want to get these people in trouble? If you do, I bet you can."

"But I don't, not really. Most of them are like Gianfranco- a bunch of guys who don't get out much sitting around rolling dice and talking," Annarita said. That made her father laugh. She went on, "What could be more harmless, really?"

She thought he would say nothing could. Instead, he looked thoughtful. "Well, I don't know," he said. "When the Bolsheviks started out, they were just a bunch of guys who didn't get out much sitting around drinking coffee and talking. And look what happened on account of that."

"You think a revolution-I mean, a counterrevolution- could start at The Gladiator?" If Annarita sounded astonished, she had a good reason-she was.

"Stranger things have happened," Dr. Crosetti said.

"Is that so? Name two," she told him.

He laughed again, and wagged a finger at her. He always said that when somebody claimed something stranger had happened. Annarita enjoyed shooting him with one of his own arrows. "What am I going to do with you?" he asked, not without admiration.

"When I was little, you'd say you would sell me to the gypsies," she said. "Is that out?"

"I'm afraid so," her father answered. "If I tried it now, they'd really buy you, and that wouldn't be good."

Gypsies still did odd jobs in the countryside, and sometimes in the city. When they saw a chance, they ran con games or just stole. Not even more than a hundred years of Party rule had turned them into good collectivized citizens. Annarita didn't know how they dodged the Security Police so well, but they did.

"Who's on the committee with you?" her father asked. "Will anybody else go to see The Gladiator in person?"

"Ludovico Pagliarone and Maria Tenace," Annarita answered. "No, f don't think they'll go, not unless one of them knows somebody who plays there."

"Will they listen to you because you were on the spot?"

"Maybe Ludovico will. Maria…" Annarita sighed. "Maria will just say to call the place reactionary without even thinking. She always does things like that. If there's any chance it might be bad, she wants to get rid of it."

"More Communist than Stalin," her father murmured.

"What?" For a second, Annarita didn't get it.

Dr. Crosetti explained: "Back in the old days, they would say, 'More Catholic than the Pope,' or sometimes, 'More royal than the king.' They used to say that in France a lot. Only one king there, not a lot of them the way there were in Italy before unification. But we still need a phrase like that for somebody who goes along with authority because it is authority."

"Where did you find these things?" Annarita said. "I bet you were looking in places where you shouldn't have."

"And so? Who doesn't?" Her father held up a hand before she could answer. "I'll tell you who-people like your Maria, that's who. They go through life with blinkers on, the way carriage horses used to."

"You have to be careful when you come out with things like that," Annarita said slowly.

"Well, of course!" her father said. "That's part of growing up, learning how to be careful. I don't think you're going to inform on me."

"I should hope not!" Annarita said. In school, they taught about children who informed on their parents or older siblings. The lessons made those kids out to be heroes. Annarita didn't know anybody who thought they really were. No matter what the state did for you after you blabbed, it couldn't give you back your family. And chances were none of the people to whom you informed would ever trust you after that, either. They had to know you would betray anybody at all, even them.

"Good," her father said now, as if he hadn't expected anything else-and no doubt he hadn't. "You can talk to Ludovico, then. Maybe between the two of you, you'll outyell this other girl, and nothing will happen. Sometimes what doesn't happen is as important as what does, you know?"

Annarita hadn't thought about that. It kept cropping up in odd moments when she should have been thinking about her homework for the rest of the night.

Gianfranco opened his algebra book with all the enthusiasm of someone answering the midnight knock on the door that had to be the Security Police. As far as he was concerned, their jails and cellars held no terrors worse than the problems at the end of each chapter.

He groaned when he got a look at these. They'd driven him crazy in middle school. Here they were again, harder and more complicated than ever. Train A leaves so much time and so many kilometers behind Train B. It travels so many kilometers an hour faster than Train B, though. At what time will it catch up? Or sometimes, how far will each train go before A catches B?

They weren't always trains. Sometimes they were planes or cars or ships. But they were trains in the first question.

And, because they were trains, Gianfranco's panic dissolved like morning mist under the sun. This was a problem right out of Rails across Europe. There, it involved squares on the board and dice rolls instead of kilometers and hours, but so what? He figured those things out while he was playing. Why couldn't he do it for schoolwork?

Because it's no fun when it's schoolwork, he thought. How could it not be fun, though, if it had to do with trains? He tried the problem and got an answer that seemed reasonable. On to the next.

The next problem had to do with cars. When Gianfranco first looked at it, it made no more sense than Annarita's Russian-less, because everybody picked up a little Russian, like it or not. Then he pretended the cars were trains. All of a sudden, it didn't seem so hard. He got to work. Again, the answer he came up with seemed reasonable.

There was a difference, though, between being reasonable and being right. He took the problems to his father, who was smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. "Can you check these for me?" he asked.

"T don't know. What are you doing?" his father asked. Gianfranco explained. His father sucked in smoke. The coal on the cigarette glowed red. People said you were healthier if you quit smoking, but nobody ever told you how. His father shook his head and spread his hands. "Sorry, ragazzo. I remember going down the drain on these myself. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, maybe you're crazy. I can't tell you one way or the other. I wish I could."

"I'll find out in class tomorrow." Gianfranco didn't look forward to that. But he still thought he had a chance of being right, and that didn't happen every day in algebra. "Let me go back and do some more."

"Sure, go ahead. Pick up as much of that stuff as you can- it won't hurt you," his father said indulgently. "But you can do all right without it, too. Look at me." He stubbed out the cigarette, then thumped his chest with his right fist.

"Thanks anyway, Papa." Gianfranco retreated in a hurry. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life going to an office and doing nothing the way his old man did. Yes, his father had a medium-fancy title. He'd got it not because he was especially smart but because he never made enemies. But it still amounted to not very much. He'd said himself that they could train a monkey to do his job.

So what do you want to do, then? Gianfranco asked himself. He knew the answer-he wanted to run a railroad. How did you go about learning to do that? Figuring out when trains would come in probably was part of it.

Gianfranco muttered to himself, pretending airplanes were trains-very fast trains. His trouble was, he didn't just want to run a railroad that had already been operating for 250 years. He wanted to start one and build it up from scratch, the way he did in the board game. How could you do that when it wasn't the nineteenth century any more?

He sighed. You couldn't. He was no big brain like Annarita, but he could see as much. What did that leave him? Two things occurred to him-working at the railroad the way it was now or starting some other kind of business and running it as if it were a nineteenth-century railroad.

He could almost hear Eduardo yelling at him. He could hear the midnight knock on the door, too, and the Security Police screaming that he was a capitalist jackal as they hauled him off to jail. Or maybe they wouldn't bother waiting till midnight. Maybe they would just grab him at his business and take him away. For a crime as bad as capitalism, why would they waste time being sneaky?

But the way things were now, people just went through the motions. Gianfranco's father wasn't the only one. He was normal, pretty much. Everybody knew how things went. People made jokes about it. You heard things like, We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. That was why you had to wait years for a TV set or a car. That was why crews had to come out to repair repairs half the time. That was why the elevator here hadn't worked for so long, and might never again.

The people owned the means of production. They did here, they did in the Soviet Union, they did in Canada and Brazil, they did everywhere. What could be fairer than that? It kept things equal, didn't it? Gianfranco nodded to himself. He'd learned his lessons well, even if he didn't realize it just then.

Maria Tenace had a face like a clenched fist. "I say we condemn the reactionaries." Her voice said she wasn't going to take no for an answer. "They're trying to corrupt people. The authorities need to make an example of them."

"How do you know? Have you been to The Gladiator?" Annarita asked.

"What difference does that make?" Maria sounded honestly confused.

"Well, if you haven't been there, how do you know?" Ludovico Pagliarone said.

"Because that's what was reported at the Young Socialists' League meeting," Maria said. "It must be true."

"If someone said the earth was flat at one of those meetings, would you believe it?" Annarita inquired.

"Don't be silly. Nobody would say such a counterrevolutionary thing," Maria declared.

Annarita didn't understand how saying the earth was flat could be counterrevolutionary. She would have bet Maria didn't, either. Maria just meant saying that was bad. It sounded more impressive when you used an eight-syllable word instead.

"I went over there yesterday afternoon," Annarita said. "Their business license is in order. I looked. They have a bunch of people playing games in a back room, and they sell games and miniatures and books. They seemed pretty harmless to me."

"Miniatures? The kind you can paint?" Ludovico asked.

"Si, that's right," Annarita said.

"Maybe I ought to go over there," he said. "Do they have any from the Roman legions?"

"I think I saw some." Annarita wouldn't have thought Ludovico knew Rome had ever had legions. People could surprise you all kinds of ways. She didn't know how many times she'd heard her father say that. Ludovico didn't seem real smart and didn't have a lot of friends. Maybe he read history books for fun, though. How could you know till he showed you? He sure seemed interested now.

And Maria was getting angrier by the second. "I think the two of you want to cover up antistate activities," she said.

"Like what?" Annarita asked. "Playing games isn't anti-state. Neither is painting lead centurions the size of my thumb." She eyed Ludovico. Yes, he knew what a centurion was. You had to be interested in Roman legions to know that.

"Being right-wing deviationist is." Maria sounded positive. She always sounded positive. She probably always was. She was one of those people who thought being sure and being right were the same thing.

The trouble was, Annarita wasn't a hundred percent sure Maria was wrong. Some of the games at The Gladiator did seem to have rules only a capitalist could love. Some of the books they sold there sounded as if their authors felt the same way. And that Eduardo hadn't exactly denied things. He'd just tried to say it was all pretend, not for real. But how true was that? How true could it be? Wasn't he trying to dance around the truth?

Annarita remembered a Russian phrase: dancing between the raindrops without getting wet. One of Stalin's commissars- was it Molotov or Mikoyan?-was supposed to have been able to do that. He'd dodged all the trouble that came his way… and if you worked for Stalin, lots of trouble came your way.

Because of Annarita's own doubts about The Gladiator, she might have gone along with Maria in condemning the place. She might have, that is, if Maria weren't so obnoxious. As things were, Annarita figured anything Maria didn't like had to have something going for it.

Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism might be fine for analyzing historical forces. When it came to looking at how two people got along, or didn't get along, that was a different story.

"I think the shop is harmless," Annarita said. "And denouncing people isn't a game. You don't do it for fun."

Maria did. Annarita could see it in her pinched, angry features. Getting even with anybody who dared act unorthodox in any way had to be her main joy in life. Annarita wondered whether she would denounce her husband if he stepped out of line in any way. She didn't wonder long-she was sure Maria would.

Then she wondered who would marry Maria in the first place. But most women did find husbands, as most men found wives. Somebody else every bit as rigid as Maria might like her fine. When you got right down to it, that was a really scary thought.

And, by disagreeing with her about The Gladiator, Annarita was making her an enemy. That was another scary thought. Still, if you let people like Maria ride roughshod over you, how could you keep your self-respect? You couldn't, and what good were you without it? Not much, not as far as Annarita could see.

"I say The Gladiator is anti-Socialist and needs to be suppressed, and that's what we should report to Filippo-to Comrade Antonelli, I mean." Filippo wasn't a Party member yet, but Maria didn't care. She stuck her chin out-she wasn't going to back down. She had the courage of her convictions. She would have been much easier to deal with if she didn't.

As gently as Annarita could, she said, "You're not the only one on the committee, Maria. We go by majority vote. That's what the rules are." Sometimes reminding her of the rules helped keep her in line. Sometimes nothing did.

This was going to be one of those times. Maria gave her a look that could have melted iron. Then she gave Ludovico Pagliarone another one. "You're not going to let this-this Menshevik get away with being soft on deviationists, are you?"

"You can't call me that! My doctrine's as good as yours!" Annarita had to sound angry. If she accepted the name of the Bolsheviks' opponents, she gave Maria a stick to hit her with. She wished she'd never, never volunteered for this committee.

And she anxiously watched Ludovico, trying to pretend all the while that she wasn't doing any such thing. He was nice enough, but he had the backbone of a scallop. If Maria could frighten him, he'd go along with her no matter what he thought. Some people just wanted to get along, to stay out of trouble.

She didn't like the way he gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. He was having to make up his mind, and he didn't want to. He would leave somebody unhappy. Maria was meaner than Annarita, but Annarita was smoother. He had to be thinking how dangerous she could be if she set her mind to it.

"Well, Ludovico?" Maria demanded.

"Well…" His voice broke, so that he sounded eleven years old at the end of the word. He blushed furiously. "Well…" he said again, and stayed on the same note all the way through. That seemed to encourage him. "Well, it doesn't seem to me the place is doing any harm, Maria. Annarita's been there to look it over, and you haven't. I think we can leave it alone for now. We can always condemn it if it gets out of line later on."

"Two to one," Annarita said. "So decided. I'll write up the report we submit to the League."

"I'm going to turn in a minority report, and it will tell the truth about you people and your backsliding. You'll see." Maria didn't even try to hide how furious she was. "This isn't over yet, and don't you think it is. I'll get that den of running dogs shut down if it's the last thing I ever do." She stormed out of the classroom where they were meeting. The door didn't slam. Annarita wondered why not.

Ludovico said, "She'll make trouble for us. Maybe it would have been easier to do what she wanted. It wouldn't have hurt anybody we know."

"Yes, it would. I have friends who go to The Gladiator," Annarita answered. "Besides, if you let people like that start pushing you around, they'll never stop. Don't you think we did the right thing?"

"I guess so." Ludovico didn't sound sure-not even a little bit. He was a weak reed-he would break and stick your hand if you depended on him too much. But he'd backed Annarita this time, anyhow. And he told her why: "I will have to go over there myself. If they have Roman miniatures, I want to get some."

So principles didn't matter to him. He'd gone along because he didn't want to lose a chance to buy little Roman soldiers. What did that say? That he was human, Annarita supposed. Wasn't it better to let yourself be swayed by something small and silly than to act like Maria, the ideological machine? Annarita thought so. That probably meant she made an imperfect Communist. If it did, she wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

"I'll write up the report for Filippo," she said. "You'll sign it, too?"

"I guess so," Ludovico said again, even more reluctantly than before. "Do I have to?" He didn't want his name on anything that could come back to haunt him later on.

But Annarita said, "Yes, you have to. You're part of the committee. You voted this way. Either you sign my report or you sign Maria's. And what do you think will happen to Maria one of these days?"

"Maybe she'll end up General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party," Ludovico said. Annarita winced, but she couldn't tell him he was wrong, because he wasn't. People with Maria's kind of single-minded zeal could rise high. But he went on, "More likely, though, she'll get purged."

"That's what I think, too," Annarita said. Most Communists were people just like anybody else. Maria had a knack for getting everyone around her angry. Odds were she'd end up paying for it-and never understand why nobody liked her, even though she was (in her own mind) right all the time. "So which will it be? Mine or Maria's?"

"Yours." Ludovico wasn't happy, but he saw he couldn't get away with pretending none of this had anything to do with him.

"fierce." Annarita smiled at him, and he lit up like a flashlight. Just acting friendly was one more thing Maria would never think to do.

Comrade Donofrio passed back the algebra homework. When he gave Gianfranco his paper, he said, "Please see me after class for a moment, Mazzilli."

Gianfranco didn't follow him for a second. The algebra teacher spoke a French-flavored dialect of Italian that sounded peculiar in Milanese ears. When Gianfranco did get it, he gulped. Had he botched things again? "Si, Comrade Donofrio," he said, no matter how much he wanted to say no.

"Crazie." The teacher walked on.

Only then did Gianfranco look down to see how he'd done. There was his score, written in red-100%. He blinked, wondering if he was seeing straight. He hadn't got all the problems right on a math assignment since… He couldn't remember his last perfect score on a math paper. He wondered if he'd ever had one before.

And he wondered why Comrade Donofrio wanted to see him. What could be better than a perfect paper?

He tried to follow along as the teacher went through today's material. It didn't make as much sense as he wished it did. Could he get another perfect homework paper? He had his doubts, but he hadn't expected even one.

When the other students left the room, Gianfranco went up to the teacher and said, "You wanted to see me, Comrade?"

"That's right, Mazzilli." Comrade Donofrio nodded. "You did very well on the last assignment. Did you have any, ah, special help with it?"

A light went on in Gianfranco's head. He thinks I cheated, he realized. But he said, "No, Comrade," and shook his head.

"Well, let's see how you do on another problem, then," Comrade Donofrio said.

"All right." Gianfranco didn't know what else he could say. He just hoped he didn't make a mess of this one. If he did, the algebra teacher would be sure he'd had somebody else do the homework for him. If I got good grades all the time, he wouldn't suspect me. But he didn't get good grades all the time. He usually didn't care enough about them to work hard. Thanks to the game, he'd got interested in these problems.

Comrade Donofrio pulled a book off his desk. Maybe it was the algebra book he'd used when he was in high school. It looked like an old book, and he wasn't a young man. He flipped through it till he found the page he wanted. "Here. Let's see you do problem seventeen."

Gianfranco looked at it. It was a train problem, so he didn't have to pretend. But it was more complicated than the ones he'd done the night before. Just a lot of steps, he told himself. You've done them in other problems. Now you need to do them all at once.

Instead of numbers and times, he tried to picture squares on the board and dice rolls. It helped. He also tried not to do anything dumb, like multiplying seven times six and getting thirty-five, which had messed him up for fifteen minutes on one of the homework problems.

If you just kept at it, this problem wasn't that bad. He looked up and gave Comrade Donofrio the answer: "Four hours twenty minutes, 390 kilometers."

The teacher grunted. Then he worked the problem himself on a piece of scratch paper. He was much quicker and more confident about attacking it than Gianfranco was. When he got done, his bushy eyebrows jumped. "You're right!" He sounded surprised. No-he sounded amazed.

Gianfranco grinned like a fool. He wanted to turn cartwheels, right there in the classroom. "I really can do them!" He was telling himself at least as much as he was telling Comrade Donofrio.

"Well, so you can." Yes, the algebra teacher looked and sounded as if he didn't want to believe it. "I gave you a hard one. Let me see your work."

"Here you are, Comrade." Gianfranco gave him the paper where he'd scribbled.

Comrade Donofrio studied it. Still reluctantly, he nodded. "Your method is correct, no doubt about it. If you did so well on the rest of your papers, you would have a much higher mark in this course. Why have you mastered these problems and not the others?"

"I think it's because of Rails across Europe " Gianfranco said.

He waited for the teacher to ask him what the devil that was. Instead, Comrade Donofrio looked astonished all over again. "You play that game, too?"

"Si, Comrade," Gianfranco said after he picked his chin up off his chest. "But… I've never seen you at The Gladiator."

"No, and you won't," Comrade Donofrio said. "But a friend and I play every Saturday afternoon. We play, and we drink some chianti, and we talk about how to make the world a better place."

"And how do you make it a better place?" Gianfranco asked.

Comrade Donofrio actually smiled. Gianfranco hadn't been sure he could. "Well, the chianti helps," he said.

"If-" But Gianfranco stopped. He'd been about to say something like, If the world ran more the way the game does, that might help. Eduardo would call him a fool if he spoke up like that, and Eduardo would be right. Why should he trust Comrade Donofrio? Because he got one algebra problem right? Because they both enjoyed the same game? Those weren't good enough reasons-not even close.

"You'd belter go," the teacher said. "You'll be late to your next class if you don't hustle." As Gianfranco headed for the door, Comrade Donofrio murmured, "Rails across Europe? Who would have imagined that?"

Since Gianfranco was at least as surprised about his algebra teacher as Comrade Donofrio was about him, he didn't say anything. But I got the problem right! he thought as he hurried down the hall.

Annarita had a class with Filippo Antonelli. She gave him her report on The Gladiator, saying, "This is what the committee decided." Actually, it was what she'd decided, and she'd got Ludovico to go along. She was beginning to suspect a lot of things in the world looked that way.

"Grazie," Filippo said, putting the report into his binder. "Maria Tenace already gave me her minority report. She's not very happy with you or Ludovico."

"She's never very happy with anybody," Annarita answered. That was certainly true. "She got outvoted, and she should have."

"I looked at her report," said the head of the school's Young Socialists' League. "She's… very vehement."

"She's throwing a tantrum," Annarita said. "If she weren't doing it in committee work, somebody would send her to bed without supper. Just what she deserves, too, if you want to know what I think."

"Well, yes." But Filippo laughed nervously. "Even so, she's dangerous to cross, because she knows other people who think the same way she does."

What was that supposed to mean? Annarita feared she knew-he was saying Maria had connections with the Security Police, or somebody like that. "What should we have done, then? Said this place was corrupt when it isn't?" she asked, thinking, / hope it isn't, anyway. If it is, I've given Maria enough rope to hang me. She went on, "That wouldn't be right. Think about what could happen to the people who work there-and to the people who just play there. Do you think they're all right-wing obstructionists who get together to plot how to bring back capitalism and exploit the workers?"

"No, of course not," Filippo said, which proved he was still in touch with reality. "I know some kids from this school go there. In fact, I know a couple of people who do. Don't you?"

"Si," she said. If he asked her who, she intended to duck the question. What he knew, he might have to report one of these days. Yes, he led the Young Socialists' League. Yes, he would probably end up with a job in the government, and one of the things the government did was make sure the Italian people didn't get out of line. Even so, he understood how the system worked. As long as he didn't officially know something, he wasn't responsible for doing anything about it. And so he stayed away from the question that would have led to knowing.

When Annarita didn't name any names, Filippo just nodded and said, "Well, there you are."

"Do you think this report will be the end of it?" Annarita asked.

"I sure hope so," he answered. "And I hope you're right. If you turn out to be wrong, if people at The Gladiator really are messing with the wrong kind of politics, Maria won't let you forget it. She won't let you get away with it, either."

A nasty chill of fear ran up Annarita's spine. Filippo was bound to be right about that. She didn't let him see that she was worried. If she had, it would have been the same as admitting she wasn't so confident about the report. "What could they be doing there?" she said.

"I don't know of anything. I guess you don't know of anything, either," Filippo answered. "Just hope you're right, that's all. I hope you're right, too, because I'm accepting your report, not Maria's. Don't make the League look bad."

Don't make me look bad, he meant. Once he did accept the report, his reputation would be on the line with it, too. The person at the top was responsible for what the people in the organization did.

"I won't, Filippo," Annarita told him, responding to everything under the words as well as what lay on the surface.

"I didn't think you would," he said. "You've got good sense. After I graduate, are you going to head up the league yourself?"

"I've thought about it." Annarita knew it would look good on her record. "Maybe I've got too much good sense to want all the trouble, though, you know?"

"Si. Capisco." He nodded. "I ought to get it. Most of this year's been pretty easy, but when it gets ugly, it gets ugly." He smiled a crooked smile. "I'll bet you'd say yes if Maria were graduating with me."

"Maybe I would." Annarita smiled, too. Filippo was acting nicer than he usually did. "But there's bound to be at least one person like that every year, isn't there?"

"Well, I haven't seen a year when we didn't have one," Filippo admitted. "Pierniccolo, two years ahead of me…" He rolled his eyes. "His father really is a captain in the Security Police, so he had a head start."

"He'll probably end up with a fancy car and a vacation home on the beach by Rimini," Annarita said. Going to the Adriatic for the summer, or even for a bit of it, was every Milanese's dream. Not all of them got to enjoy it. Her family and the Mazzillis went, but they stayed in a hotel, not a place of their own. A red-hot Communist from a Security Police family was bound to have the inside track for things like that.

"I can't help but think…" Filippo Antonelli didn't finish.

That he didn't spoke volumes all by itself. He'd started to say something unsafe and thought better of it. He shook his head. "Let it go."

"I understand," Annarita said. Both their smiles were rueful. People got so they automatically watched their tongues. Most of the time, you hardly even noticed you were doing it. Every once in a while, though… Annarita wondered what it would be like to say whatever she had on her mind without worrying that it would get back to the Security Police.

Somewhere in a police file drawer sat a folder with her name on it. Whatever word informers brought on her went in there. Maria might well go to the trouble of writing out a denunciation. All the same, Annarita didn't think the folder would be very thick. She didn't go out of her way to cause trouble. Nothing the authorities had, wherever they got it from (and the informers you didn't know about, the ones who seemed like friends, could be more dangerous than out-and-out foes like Maria), would make large men in ill-fitting suits knock on her door in the middle of the night.

She hoped.

"I wish-" she began, and then she stopped.

"What?" Filippo asked.

"Nothing," Annarita said, and then, "I'd better head for home."

As she walked out of Hoxha Polytechnic, she knew she'd been right on the edge of saying something really dumb. She shook her head. That wasn't right. She'd been on the edge of saying something risky. Saying risky things was dumb, but what she almost said wasn't dumb at all. She sure didn't think so, anyhow.

I wish it weren't like this. I wish we could speak freely. I wish the Security Police would leave us alone. I wish there were no Security Police.

Tf she did say something like that, what would happen? She'd get labeled a counterrevolutionary. She'd get taken somewhere for what they called reeducation. If she was lucky, they'd let her out after a while. Even if they did, though, her chances for making it to the top would be gone forever.

If she wasn't so lucky, or if they thought she was stubborn, she'd go to a camp after reeducation. She'd probably only get five years, ten at the most-she was still young, so they'd give her the benefit of the doubt. But she'd stay under suspicion, under surveillance, the rest of her life.

Just for saying people ought to be free of the Security Police. For saying people ought to be free, period.

That's not right, she thought. It really isn't. She looked around in alarm, as if she'd shouted it as loud as she could. She hadn't, of course, but she worried all the way home anyway. Maybe she really was a counterrevolutionary after all.