Gianfranco was surprised the sign in the familiar shopfront didn't say The Gladiator. He knew he shouldn't have been, but he was anyway. "What do we do now?" he asked as Eduardo held the door open for him.
"We give you your cover story. We give you the drugs so you'll stick to it no matter what. Then we wait until midnight and send you home," Eduardo answered. "If they catch you inside and ask you how you got there, tell 'em we had a tunnel that runs all the way from Rimini to Milan. That'll shut 'em up."
Gianfranco laughed. "I bet it will."
"What do we do if Gianfranco doesn't come back?" Annarita's mother asked for about the fiftieth time as the family Fiat neared their apartment building. The Crosettis had never had such a miserable end to an August holiday.
"I think we change our names and run off to Australia," Annarita's father said.
"How are we supposed to do that?" Annarita asked, curious in spite of herself.
"Well, if we change our names, everyone will think we're Australians anyway, so there shouldn't be any trouble." Her father made it sound ridiculously easy. But the accent was on ridiculously.
"You're not helping," Annarita's mother said. "The Mazzillis are going to hate us forever. We may have to move, and wish we could go to Australia."
"I think Gianfranco will be back," Annarita said.
"He'd better be," her mother said. "Our life becomes impossible if he isn't, and that's nothing next to what happens to the poor Mazzillis. Their only child gone-" She shook her head. "I wouldn't want to keep on living if anything happened to you, Annarita."
"Don't talk like that, Mother," Annarita said. "Just don't. Not about me, and not about Gianfranco, either."
"What worries me is, he's liable to decide he likes it there," her father said. "And if he does, and if they let him, he's liable to decide to stay. A lot of the time, boys that age only think about themselves. What staying there would do to everybody who has to stay here… He may not worry about that for a long time."
"I hope you're wrong!" Annarita exclaimed.
"I hope I'm wrong, too," Dr. Crosetti said. "Eduardo and his friends are more likely to care about what happens here than Gianfranco does, though."
Gianfranco was her boyfriend. When her father criticized him, she felt she ought to leap to his defense. But she couldn't. She was too afraid her father was right. All the marvels the home timeline had to offer… Yes, they would tempt Gianfranco. They would tempt plenty of people from this alternate. And he was young enough and smart enough to start over there if he wanted to-and if they let him.
"Maybe I should fix something for us to eat," her mother said. "I don't think the Mazzillis will want to have supper with us tonight."
"I'll help," Annarita said.
Chopping vegetables and cooking pasta let her lake her mind off her worries for a while. Gianfranco's mother stuck her nose into the kitchen. When she saw Annarita and her mother busy there, she drew back in a hurry. Any other late afternoon, she would have come in and chatted. No, things wouldn't be the same if Gianfranco didn't come back.
They might not be the same even if he did. Annarita frowned when that occurred to her. The Mazzillis would go right on blaming Eduardo for kidnapping him. As far as they knew, Eduardo was the Crosettis' Cousin Silvio. Why wouldn't they think everybody in Annarita's family was responsible in some way?
The knife in Annarita's hand flashed as she cut zucchini into slices almost thin enough to see through. "This is a mess," she said. "Nothing but a miserable, stinking mess."
Her mother was slicing even thinner. "You're not wrong. I wish you were. If Comrade Mazzilli weren't who he was, Gianfranco might be able to tell him what was what. But the way things are…"
"Si," Annarita said unhappily. Because Comrade Mazzilli was a Communist Party official, Gianfranco had used him to get the Security Police out of the way so Eduardo and his friends could escape. His father wouldn't like that even a little bit. And again, how could you say he was wrong not to like it?
Supper turned out to be a very unhappy meal. The Crosettis ate quickly to get out of the dining room and let the Mazzillis have it. Annarita thought about going on like that day after day, year after year. It could happen. In the Italian People's Republic, moving away from neighbors who didn't like you was often harder than finding some way to put up with them. But it would be anything but pleasant.
"We'll have to take turns going first," Annarita's mother said with a sigh-she must have been thinking along the same lines.
"I wonder how much trouble Comrade Mazzilli can make for us if he really works at it," her father said. There was another interesting question. Because of his Party rank, he might be able to make quite a bit.
If Gianfranco didn't turn up, he'd have every reason to do just that. Annarita had never dreamt helping someone could do such a good job of complicating her life.
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.