The Gladiator

As for Gianfranco's father, he talked about some bureaucratic silliness even he wouldn't care about day after tomorrow. Nobody else cared now. Even Gianfranco's mother looked bored. The Crosettis didn't, but they weren't family. They worked harder to stay polite.

Supper was good, but Gianfranco paid it less attention than he might have. He wanted to know where Eduardo was and what would happen to him. He couldn't ask, though, not without letting his own folks know what was going on. He was sure he didn't want to do that.

As people were getting up from the table, A

He hadn't asked her for any help. That had to mean… "Sure!" Gianfranco had to work not to sound too eager. A

Beaming, his father said, "That's good. It's right out of The Communist Manifesto-from each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs." Then the smile slipped. "Of course, maybe Gianfranco wouldn't need the help if he worked harder on his own."

"I do work hard," Gianfranco protested. "It just doesn't stick as well as I wish it did."

"What did you get in algebra when you were in school?" his mother asked his father. Instead of answering, his father went back to talking about the Manifesto. That told Gianfranco everything he needed to know.

He got his algebra book, then followed A

"What? You don't want to do algebra?" A

What he said about algebra wasn't quite suited to polite company, even if, at the last moment, he made it milder than he'd first intended. "Where's Eduardo?" he asked.

"Who?" A

Eduardo sat on the sofa there, a glass of wine in front of him. Dr. Crosetti sat in his favorite chair, a glass of wine on the end table next to him. They both looked pleased with themselves. "Ciao, Gianfranco," A

Gianfranco gaped. He started to squawk. Then he realized something was going on. He held out his hand. "Mo/to lieto… Silvio."

Eduardo stood up and gravely shook hands with him. "Pleased to meet you, too, Gianfranco," he said, for all the world as if Gianfranco weren't a regular at The Gladiator.

"I hope your papers are in order… Silvio," Gianfranco said. "They're liable to be doing a lot of checking for a while. Looking for dangerous criminals like murderers and bank robbers and gaming-store clerks, you know."

"Si, si." Eduardo pulled out an identity card and an internal passport. Gianfranco wasn't astonished to see that they had Eduardo's photo, a fingerprint likely to be his, and the name of Silvio Pagnozzi. The internal passport said he was born in Acireale, down on Sicily, but had moved to Milan when he was only two. That made sense-he didn't talk like a Sicilian, so he couldn't have lived in the south for long.

"What happens if the Security Police telephone Acireale to find out if you were really born there?" Gianfranco asked.

Eduardo shrugged. "Acireale's right by Mount Etna. Most of the records there were lost in the earthquake of 2081," he said. "They can't prove anything one way or the other."

"I see." Gianfranco nodded and gave the documents back. "These look good. They look real."

"They're as good as the ones you've got," Eduardo- Silvio?-answered.

"If someone with a different name who looks like you had papers, would his be just as good, too?"

"Well, of course," Eduardo answered, smiling. "You're not a human being at all if you don't have papers that say you are, eh?" He winked.

Gianfranco didn't. "Where do you get papers like that?" he asked. Are you a spy? he meant. He hadn't wanted to believe that, but seeing those perfect documents in a false name made him wonder. Or was Silvio Pagnozzi a false name? Gianfranco realized he couldn't be sure.

Eduardo stopped smiling. "I've told Dr. Crosetti where 1 got them. The fewer people who know, the fewer who can tell."

That wasn't good enough for Gianfranco. "I've earned the right to know. The Security Police can already slice me into carpaccio or chop me up for salami. If I'm putting my neck on the line, I've got a right to know why."

"He's right," A

Her father looked surprised-mutiny in the family? And Gianfranco was surprised, and tried to hide it. So Dr. Crosetti hadn't told A

"What do you think?" A

"Maybe I'd better tell them," answered the man with the interesting papers.

"They're children," Dr. Crosetti said.

Before Gianfranco could get angry, Eduardo said, "If not for them, I'd be wandering the streets right now-or else the Security Police would have grabbed me. They're acting like grown-ups. Don't you think we ought to treat them that way?"

"Mnirm." Dr. Crosetti made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. "I wouldn't trust grown-ups with this, either. Who saw you on the stairwell?"

"Nobody who paid any attention to me. I made a point of looking away from the two or three people who came by-you'd better believe I did," Eduardo said.

A

Eduardo smiled again. "They won't have picked me up. I have the power to cloud cameras' minds-or at least to jam their signals."

"How do you do that?" Gianfranco blurted.

"It has to do with where I come from," Eduardo said.

"And where's that?" A

"I do come from Milan -from Arese, actually," Eduardo said. Gianfranco and A

"Huh?" Gianfranco said, at the same time as A

"In my world"-Eduardo brought the phrase out as calmly as if it were something as ordinary as on my block- "Communism didn't win the Cold War. Capitalism did."

"Marx says that's impossible." Gianfranco brought out the first objection that popped into his head. Others stood in line behind it, waiting their turn.

"Si," Eduardo said. "What about it? A believer might think the sun goes around the earth because the Bible says the sun stood still. Does that make it true? Do you want to believe something because a book says it's so, or do you want to look at the evidence?"

"What is your evidence?" A

"It's also very light," Gianfranco said with a grin. "You can haul boxcars of it with a beat-up old locomotive in Rails across Europe."

"The game is part of my evidence," Eduardo said. "Do you think it would be legal-or safe-to make it anywhere in this world?"

A

"I wouldn't be surprised. They're not all blind. I wish they were. My life would be easier," Eduardo answered.

"How do we know this isn't some sort of fancy scam?" Gianfranco asked.