The Gladiator

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 A

"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. A

"Two to one," A

"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 ru

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," An-narita 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 A

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, A

"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 A

"Maybe she'll end up General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party," Ludovico said. A

"That's what 1 think, too," A

"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." A

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 gri

"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?"