"Did the Security Police catch the people from The Conductor's Cap in Rome?" Annarita made it sound as if she hoped the answer was yes.

"No," Maria admitted, even more reluctantly than before. "But they can't hope to escape revolutionary justice, either."

"How do you know they're really guilty of anything?" Annarita asked. " Rome is a long way from here."

"They must be guilty. If they weren't, the Security Police wouldn't go after them." Maria could even say that and sound as if she meant it. Anyone with the sense of a head of cabbage knew the Security Police did whatever they wanted and whatever their Russian bosses told them to do. Whether you were guilty or innocent didn't matter. Whether they thought you were dangerous to the state did.

"I guess." Annarita didn't say an eighth of what she was thinking, or an eightieth.

"F'm going to tell Filippo to make sure my report on The Gladiator is the official one," Maria said importantly. "I don't want the Young Socialists' League to be seen as out of step with the advance of revolutionary and progressive elements in the state."

"You can't make a majority out of a minority," Annarita said. "You can tell the world I was wrong-though I don't think anybody's proved that yet-but you can't do the other."

Maria looked at her as if she were very foolish to say such a thing. "Of course I can. What do you think Bolshevik means?"

Annarita bit her lip. No matter how obnoxious Maria was, she was right. At a Party meeting before the Revolution, the group that became the Bolsheviks found themselves outvoted on some issue or other. So they simply declared themselves the majority-Bolsheviki in Russian. Their more moderate opponents were known as the Mensheviks-the minority-forever after. Annarita thought the Mensheviks were foolish to let themselves get stuck with the name, but it was almost two hundred years too late to worry about that now.

"Do you really want to get tagged as an unreliable? You're sure working on it." Maria went off shaking her head before Annarita could even answer.

At least half in a daze, Annarita sat down in her Russian class. She made a bunch of careless mistakes. "Are you feeling all right?" the teacher asked her, real worry in his voice-he knew something had to be wrong.

"Yes, Comrade Montefusco. Please excuse me," Annarita said.

"Well, I'll try," he answered. "I know you're a better student than you're showing. Is everything at home the way it ought to be?"

"Yes, Comrade," she answered truthfully. If the authorities had left The Gladiator alone… If Maria had let her alone… But none of that had anything to do with what went on in her apartment.

Comrade Montefusco still didn't look as if he believed her. "Try to keep your mind on the grammar and the vocabulary, then," he said.

"Yes, Comrade," Annarita repeated. "I'll do my best." And she did. But her best that morning just wasn't very good. Shaking his head, Comrade Montefusco got out the roll book and made a couple of notes in it. Annarita didn't think they were the kind of notes that would help her grade.

Things were almost as bad in her other classes. They got a little better, because she wasn't in such a state of shock as she had been to start the day. Even so, she had a lot more on her mind than the rest of the students did.

She went looking for Filippo Antonelli at lunch. He found her first. One look at his face told her he'd already talked-or, more likely, listened-to Maria. "You're not going to change the report, are you?" Annarita asked in dismay.

"Well, I don't know," Filippo answered. "If we're on the wrong side here, it makes us look bad. We shouldn't do that, not if we can help it."

"We still don't know the authorities raided The Gladiator. All we know is, it's closed." Annarita was grasping at straws, and she knew it.

And Filippo broke the straws even as she took them in her hand. "The Security Police did raid the place," he said. "They didn't catch anybody, though."

"How do you know?" Annarita asked.

Filippo looked smug. "I know because I've got friends I can ask," he answered. "And I'll tell you something else funny- some of the fingerprints they found there don't match any on file in the records."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Annarita said. "Do they think they're foreigners? The one I talked to didn't just sound like an Italian. He sounded like somebody from Milan."

"No, not only in the Italian records. That's what my friend says," Filippo told her. "Not in anybody's records, even the Russians'."

"That's impossible," Annarita blurted. Maybe it wasn't quite, but it sure struck her as unlikely. The Security Police had files on everybody in Italy. The Russians had files on everybody in the world, except maybe people from China and its satellites. Whatever, whoever, Eduardo was, he wasn't Chinese.

"I thought so, too, but that's what I heard," Filippo said. "And they found a big secret room under The Gladiator."

"What was in it?" Annarita asked. "It sounds like something out of a spy story."

"It does, doesn't it?" Filippo said. "There wasn't anything in it. It was just a room with a concrete floor. There were yellow lines painted on the floor, lines that might warn you to stay away from something, but there wasn't anything to stay away from."

"That's… peculiar," Annarita said, and he nodded. She went on, "It all sounds like the little man who wasn't there."

"Well, he must have been there once upon a time, or the Security Police wouldn't have raided the place," Filippo said, which proved he believed what his friends in high places told him.

"I guess so." Annarita didn't want to argue with him. "What would the Security Police do with one of those people if they did catch him?"

"Question him, I suppose." Filippo sounded as if he didn't want to think about that. Even the way he answered said as much. It was true, but it didn't go far enough. The Security Police didn't just question. They drugged. They tortured. They did whatever they had to do to find out what they wanted to know. Everybody understood that. But nice people-and Filippo was a nice person-didn't like to dwell on it.

Annarita didn't like to dwell on it, either. Did that make her a nice person? She could hope so, anyhow. She could also hope everybody at The Gladiator had a hole and pulled it in after himself. Not rooting for the Security Police was slightly subversive, or maybe more than slightly. She knew she wasn't the only one who did it just the same.

Gianfranco went back to the Galleria del Popolo after school hoping for a miracle. Maybe he'd just had a bad dream. Maybe The Gladiator would be open and everything would be fine. Maybe pigs had wings, and they'd built the roof on the Galleria because of that.

The shop was closed. He might have known it would be. He had known it would be. What he hadn't known was that it would be swarming with Security Police officers, the way cut fruit at a picnic would be swarming with ants.

He tried to amble on by as if he'd never had anything to do with Rails across Europe or any of the other games they sold there. One of the men from the Security Police spotted him. "Hey, you!" the officer yelled. "Si, you, kid! C'mere!"

"What do you want?" Gianfranco wasn't so frightened as he might have been. That came from having a father who was a Party official.

"Let's see your identity card and your internal passport," the man said. As in the USSR and most other Communist states, you needed permission to travel inside your own country, not just from one country to another.

"Here you are, Comrade." Gianfranco didn't dream of not handing them over. He had no idea how much trouble you could get in by refusing, and he didn't want to find out.

"So you're Mazzilli's brat, are you?" The officer didn't sound much impressed.