Annarita hated regular Russian verbs. Irregular Russian verbs drove her crazy. She consoled herself that things could have been worse. Comrade Montefusco said that Polish, a close cousin to Russian, had separate masculine, feminine, and neuter forms for verbs. Annarita tried to imagine little children learning a language that complicated. They evidently could. She wondered how.

When Gianfranco came into the kitchen, she was ready to put the Russian aside for his game. Her mother would cluck, but she didn't care. Then she got a good look at his face. "What's wrong?" she asked, adding, "You look like somebody who just saw a ghost."

"That's not funny," Gianfranco said. "Come out with me for a second, will you?"

"All right." Annarita closed the book and got up. "What's going on? You don't usually act this way."

He didn't try to tell her it was nothing. She would have brained him with the Russian book if he had. It was big and square and heavy-she might have fractured his skull. All he said was, "You'll see."

Out she went. He led her to the stairwell. On the stairs, looking miserable and worried, stood Eduardo. "Ohh," Annarita said, as if someone had punched her in the pit of the stomach.

"He's not a puppy." Gianfranco might have been joking, but his tone said he wasn't. "I can't go ask my mother if I can keep him."

"No," Annarita said unhappily. She rounded on Eduardo as if this were his fault. "Why didn't you disappear with your friends?"

That only made the clerk from The Gladiator look even more miserable. "I couldn't," he said. "The Security Police had already raided the shop."

And what was that supposed to mean? "Have you got a tunnel in the bottom of it, one that goes through to Australia or the Philippines?" she asked. "Is that how everybody else got away clean?"

Eduardo turned red. Even with the cheap, low-wattage lightbulbs in the stairwell, Annarita could see it plainly. "That's a better guess than you know," he said, and then, to Gianfranco, "We've got a basement after all." The crack didn't make much sense to Annarita, but they both managed rather sickly smiles. Eduardo turned serious again in a hurry. "Shall I disappear from here now, so I don't get you guys in trouble?"

"I'm already in trouble." Gianfranco sounded proud of it, too.

"Not if nobody finds out I was here," Eduardo said.

Part of Annarita wanted to tell him, Yes, go away! That was the part she hated, the part that worried about safety ahead of everything else. "Don't go anywhere," she told him. "Just stay here till I get back. It won't be long, one way or another. Gianfranco, you come with me."

"What's going on?" Gianfranco said, but he came. Eduardo sat down on the stairs and put his head in his hands. He couldn't have seemed more downcast if he were rehearsing in a play. Annarita clicked her tongue between her teeth as the stairwell door closed behind her and Gianfranco. This was a mess, all right, and no two ways about it.

Her father was reading a medical journal in the living room. He looked up in mild surprise when Annarita marched in on him, Gianfranco in her wake. "Ciao, ragazzi" he said, and then, "What's up? Something must be-you've got blood in your eye, Annarita."

"You know about The Gladiator, si?" Annarita said.

"The gaming place in the Galleria? I know it's there- that's about all," Papa answered. "And that silly girl was giving you a hard time about it."

"Maria's a lot of things, but silly isn't any of them," Annarita said grimly. "She was giving me a hard time because the Security Police closed the place down. Suspicion of capitalism, I guess you'd say. But all the people who worked there seemed to vanish into thin air."

"Lucky for them," her father remarked. Not for the first time, he reminded her of someone who would smoke a pipe. He didn't, or anything else. But he had that kind of thoughtful air.

"Not for all of them." Annarita nudged Gianfranco.

He jumped. His voice wobbled and broke as he said, "I ran into one of them-a guy named Eduardo. I brought him here. What are we going to do with him, Dottor Crosetti? I don't want to give him to the Security Police, not when he really hasn't done anything."

"Hasn't done anything you know of," Annarita's father corrected. He frowned. With a lot of people, it would have been an angry frown. Why not, when Gianfranco and Annarita were involving him in something not only illegal but dangerous? Everybody did illegal things to get by now and then. You almost had to. Most of them couldn't land you in too much trouble. Not letting the Security Police get their hands on a fugitive they wanted? That was a different story.

"They don't want him for anything but working in the shop." Gianfranco sounded more sure of himself now.

"How do you know that?" Dr. Crosetti asked. He didn't sound angry.

"Because a Security Police officer was asking me questions outside The Gladiator this afternoon," Gianfranco answered. An-narita hadn't heard that. He went on, "It was all he cared about."

Annarita's father grunted. "I think I'd better talk to this fellow. If he makes me believe he's harmless-well, we'll see. If he doesn't, I'll send him away from here with a flea in his ear. Is that a deal?"

"It sounds wonderful," Gianfranco said.

"It's fine, Father," Annarita agreed.

"Well, then, go get him, and we'll see what's what," Dr. Crosetti said. "And then you can both disappear. I've already talked with you. I want to talk to him."

Gianfranco looked miffed. "It's all right," Annarita told him. "That's how Papa works." He didn't seem convinced. She asked, "Have you got any better ideas?" Reluctantly, he shook his head. "Well, then," she said. "Come on. Let's get Eduardo, before he decides he'd better run away."

Back to the stairwell they went. To Annarita's relief, the clerk from The Gladiator was still there. He looked up at them. "And?" he said.

"Come talk to my father. If anybody can figure out what to do for you, he can," Annarita said.

"I've already talked too much. I don't want to do any more," Eduardo said.

"If you don't want to talk to my father, you can talk to the Security Police instead," she said. Eduardo winced and climbed to his feet. Annarita had thought that would get him moving. He muttered something under his breath. She couldn't make out what it was. Maybe that was just as well.

Down the hall they went. Gianfranco did the introduction: "Dr. Crosetti, this is Eduardo… You know what, Eduardo? I don't know your last name."

"Caruso," the clerk said. "Only I can't sing."

That made Annarita's father smile, but only for a moment. "Oh, you'll sing for me, Comrade Caruso. Or else we're both wasting our time." He gestured to Annarita and Gianfranco. "Out, out, out. Give us some room to talk, some room to breath, per piacere."

None too willingly, they left the living room. "What's he going to ask him?" Gianfranco whispered. "What's he going to find out that we didn't?"

"I don't know," Annarita answered. "But we can't do this by ourselves, and you didn't seem to want to go to your folks."

"I hope not!" Gianfranco exclaimed. "My father would either make speeches at him or hand him to the Security Police. Or both."

That was about what Annarita thought Comrade Mazzilli would do, too. "There you are, then," she said.

Gianfranco nodded. "Here I am, all right, and I wish 1 were somewhere else."

Algebra homework wasn't what Gianfranco wanted to be doing. Across the kitchen table from him, Annarita went through her schoolwork as if she had not a care in the world. What was her father talking about with Eduardo? How long would it take? Forever? It felt that way.

They got chased away from the table about eight o'clock, so their mothers could set it for supper. Dr. Crosetti came out to eat. Eduardo didn't. What had Annarita's father done with him-done to him? Stuck him in a bookcase? Preserved him in a specimen bottle? Stuffed him under the rug? Whatever it was, he gave no sign. He talked a little about a strange case he'd seen that afternoon, but said not a word about the strange clerk he'd-probably-left in his living room.