"Here, look-I have to be a capitalist," Eduardo said. "1 have to take money from both of you for sitting at a table in my shop and playing."

"I don't think you're being a capitalist for that," Gianfranco said. "I think you make a perfect Marxist, as a matter of fact."

Both the clerk and Alfredo raised an eyebrow. "How do you figure?" Eduardo asked.

"You have the ability to give us a place to sit, and we have a need to play your games," Gianfranco said. "What could be better?"

Eduardo looked thoughtful, but Alfredo laughed and wagged a finger at Gianfranco. "You've got it backwards, amico. It's from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. By that logic, Eduardo ought to be paying us."

"Works for me." Gianfranco held out his hand, palm up.

Eduardo had a can of Fanta on the counter. He made as if to pour some soda into Gianfranco's hand. Gianfranco jerked it away. That set all three of them laughing.

Alfredo said, "I've got a question for you, Eduardo, if I can ask it without getting wet."

"Well, you can try," Eduardo said, but he made a point of keeping his hand near the can.

"Where do you get your games?" Alfredo asked. "T've looked all over Milan, and this is the only place that sells them."

"Of course it is," Eduardo said. "This is the only place in town where the elves make their deliveries."

Gianfranco laughed again. He'd got the same kinds of answers when he asked questions like that. But Alfredo frowned and said, "Come on, Eduardo. You can do better than that. What am I going to do, take your answer to the Security Police?"

"Well, you might," the clerk said. That turned Alfredo's frown into a scowl. You couldn't say much worse about a man than that he was an informer. Gianfranco wondered why that was true, when so many people really were informers. Memories of days gone by, he supposed. But before Alfredo could say anything everybody would regret, Eduardo went on, "You see, the true secret is that we have a sharashka full of zeks down in the basement, and they turn out the games for us."

That was only a little less unlikely than the story about the elves. A sharashka was a lab where privileged prisoners went on working for the state. Ff they came through, they might get their terms cut. If they didn't, they went back to being ordinary zeks. Somebody who knew his Dante once called sharashkas the first circle of Hell: they were bad, but you knew there were worse places. That was the kind of joke you could repeat only to the people you trusted most. The USSR had got some good work out of sharashkas. The Germans and the Chinese also used them a lot. They weren't so common in Italy and most other fraternal Communist countries.

Gianfranco clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Now I know you're telling us lies, Eduardo," he said sadly.

"Oh, you do, do you?" The clerk stood on his dignity. "And how do you know that?"

"Because The Gladiator hasn't got a basement."

For some reason, that set all three of them off. They laughed so loud, somebody came out of the back room to complain that players there couldn't concentrate on the games. "And that's important" he finished, as if they were too dense to know it.

"Sorry," Eduardo said. The irate gamer rolled his eyes and went back to his board and his cards and his dice. Eduardo and Gianfranco and Alfredo laughed harder than ever. That life should get in the way of the games… Well, heaven forbid!

As Cianfranco had seen during the game, Alfredo was stubborn. When the laughter faded, the older man said, "You still didn't answer my question."

"Why don't you ask other places why they don't have them?" Gianfranco said.

Alfredo looked at him as if he wasn't so bright after all. "I've done that," he said. "They tell me they can't get them. They say they don't know where to get them."

"See?" Eduardo said. "They don't have the telephone number for the zeks in the basement."

That made Gianfranco laugh again, but Alfredo didn't think it was so funny. "Confound it, Eduardo, how can you have games nobody else can get his hands on? What do you do, bring them down from the moon?"

"Sure," the clerk said. "If you go out to the alley behind the shop, you'll see the launch tower for our rocket ship."

Alfredo gave him a very odd look. "You know, I almost wouldn't be surprised. Ciao, Eduardo. One of these days, maybe you'll tell me the truth. Ciao, Gianfranco. You played a fine game there." He walked out before either of the other two could answer him.

Eduardo tried to make light of it, saying, "He doesn't like mysteries."

"Neither do I," Gianfranco said, which seemed to startle the clerk. He went on, "I put up with them, though, because I like the games so much. Alfredo's the same way. Now that he's one win away from taking the tournament, you think he'll kick up a fuss?"

"Well, I hope not," Eduardo said slowly.

At supper, Gianfranco was full of all the details of his epic match with Alfredo. Annarita heard much more about the railroad game than she ever wanted to. Trying to shut Gianfranco up, her mother said, "Then you won, did you? Congratulations!"

"Oh, no, Signora Crosetti," Gianfranco answered. "He beat me. But it was a good game. That's what really counts."

Annarita's father eyed Gianfranco over the tops of his glasses. "If you can say that and really mean it-and I think you do-you've taken a long step toward growing up. You deserve more congratulations for that than you would for winning."

"Dottor Crosetti is right," Gianfranco's father said. "Things don't always go the way you want them to. You have to learn to roll with the punches."

Comrade Mazzilli was always good for a couple of cliches. An ordinary man, he had ordinary thoughts, and they came out in ordinary ways. The next new idea he had would be the first. But Annarita thought he and her own father were right about this. She wouldn't have expected Gianfranco to lose a game and be as proud as if he'd won. But he was, plainly. The Gladiator had more going for it than she would have guessed.

When they were walking to school the next morning, he asked Annarita, "Did you manage to get that nonsense about The Gladiator being a capitalist plot taken care ol?"

"Si," she said. "Ludovico went along with me on the report, so you don't need to worry about that any more."

"Grazie," he told her. Then he said, "You know, I almost asked my old man where The Gladiator gets its games. He could probably lind out through purchase records and things. Alfredo was pitching a fit about that last night."

It had puzzled Annarila, too. The games and a lot of the books there looked to be in a class by themselves. "Why didn't you?" she asked.

He looked sheepish. "I didn't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, that's why. Maybe they aren't as legit and legal as they ought to be, you know? I just plain don't care. 1 have too much lun there to want to take any chances about getting those people in trouble. I kept my big mouth shut." He mimed zipping it closed with the hand that wasn't carrying his notebook and books.

"If they are doing something under the table, chances are it'll come out sooner or later, you know," Annarita said.

"Better later than sooner," Gianlranco answered. "Another tournament'll start soon, and I'm going to win this one!"

"You've got it bad, don't you?" Annarita might almost have been talking with a girl (riend who had a crush on a boy.

Gianfranco grinned at her-he must have recognized the tone. "I have fun. What's wrong with that?" he said. "I haven't found anything I enjoy more." He grinned again, in a slightly different way. "And if 1 don't still feel like that once I find a girl… well, I'll worry about it then. I've seen it happen with other guys."