Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

They paused, then moved towards a man who lurched along the sidewalk. When they held out their hands for his papers- a request understood from San Marino to San Francisco -he didn't hand them over. Instead, he shouted a mouthful of Slavic consonants at them.

"Ooh-he's a Russian," Gianfranco said softly. Even the police had to be careful with citizens of the strongest country in the world.

"He looks like one," Annarita said. And he did: his broad face was very fair, and he wore clothes that didn't fit very well and weren't very stylish. Russians relied on muscle. Most of them didn't worry about style.

"You wouldn't see many Italians drunk this early in the morning," Eduardo said, which was also true. Lots of people joked about the way Russians drank. Russians joked about it themselves, which didn't stop them from doing it.

The policemen stayed polite, but they didn't go away. One of them said something. The Russian tourist shook his head. 'Wye kulturny!" he shouted. Annarita winced. She wondered if the policemen knew that uncultured was a much worse insult in Russian than it would have been in Italian. But it turned out not to matter-the tourist knocked one of their hats to the ground and stomped on it.

A second later, he was on the ground himself. The Sam-marinese policemen gave him a thorough thumping, then yanked him upright and started to haul him away. The one who'd lost his hat picked it up, carefully pushed out the dent the Russian gave it, and set it back on his head at the right jaunty angle.

"You idiots, you can't do this to me!" the tourist shouted in Russian. None of the local policemen showed any sign of following him. She wondered if she ought to translate, but decided that would only make matters worse. A moment later, as if to prove her right, the tourist yelled the same thing in bad Italian.

"Idiots, are we?" said the policeman whose hat the Russian had knocked off. "See how stupid you think this is." He punched the tourist in the nose. By the drunk man's howl, he thought it smarted.

"Bozhemoi!" he shouted, and snuffled, because blood was running down his face. Then he remembered to use Italian: "When the Soviet consul hears about this, all you bums will need new jobs-if they don't send you to a gulag in Siberia to teach you not to mess around with your betters."

A different policeman punched him this time. "Shut up," he said coldly. "We jug drunk Russians about three times a day. If we wanted to waste our time on you, we could send you to one of our camps for assaulting a police officer. Keep running your mouth and you'll talk us into it."

The tourist said something that had to be mat'. Annarita didn't follow all of it. What she could understand made her ears heat up. Then the Russian went back to Italian: "You donkeys don't know who 1 am. You don't know what I am. I am a colonel in the Committee for State Security. You're fighting out of your weight."

Annarita gulped. The KGB was the outfit that taught the Security Police everything they knew. But the Security Police had the power of the Italian government behind them. The KGB had the power of the Soviet Union behind it. Lots of people said the KGB wax the real power in the Soviet Union. The feared and fearsome outfil could without a doubt make policemen in San Marino very unhappy if it wanted to.

"If you are-if you aren't just a lying Russian lush-you're a disgrace to your service," one of the policemen retorted. "Come down to the station, and we'll find out what you are. And you'll find out you can't mess with police officers no matter what kind of big cheese you think you are."

They dragged him away. "He'll get off," Gianfranco said gloomily. "Russians always do."

"He shouldn't. He was drunk and disorderly," Annarita said. "But you're right-he is a Russian. And if he does belong to the KGB, they'll pull strings for him."

"They shouldn't be able to do things like that." Gianfranco looked at Eduardo. Plainly, he was waiting for Eduardo to tell him things like that never happened in the home timeline.

Eduardo sighed instead. "You'll find people with influence wherever you go," he said. "Whether that has to do with money or politics or power really doesn't matter. It's the influence that counts."

"Blat," Annarita said. The Russian slang meant nothing to Gianfranco. "It means influence," she explained.

Eduardo nodded, then asked, "You guys done?" Gianfranco was. Annarita quickly finished her soda. Eduardo straightened up and took his elbows off the table. "Come on, then. Let's do some more mountain climbing."

He wasn't kidding. Up they went. It wasn't like climbing stairs in an apartment building. It was more like climbing them in a skyscraper. Annarita knew her legs would start feeling it soon. She laughed. Why was she kidding herself? Her legs already felt it.

At last, after what seemed like a very long time, they made it to the top of the mountain. The street there led to the castle and, signs promised, the museum inside. "Well, I'm ready for another Fanta," Gianfranco said. Eduardo gave him a look. "Just kidding," he added hastily.

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. Annarita wasn't sure. Eduardo didn't push it. They ambled along the street, looking at the shops like any other tourists. If you wanted to take home a plaster castle to remember San Marino by, this was the place to get one-or silver jewelry, or clothes, or anything else you happened to crave. They might not call it capitalism here, but that was what it amounted to.

And there was a sign with three dice on it, each showing a six. People were going in and out of that shop, the same as they were with the ones to either side of it. "It's open!" Gianfranco said joyfully.

Annarita thought Eduardo should have looked delighted. He looked worried instead. "Si," he said in a low voice. "It's open. Let's walk by and get a better look."

It looked just like The Gladiator. The same games and books and military models were on display in the front window. Most of the people going in were guys between Gianfranco's age and Eduardo's. Most of them had the same look. Annarita needed a moment to put her finger on it, but she did. None of them would have been in the popular crowd at school. They wore their clothes carelessly. Their hair needed combing. She would have bet most of them got good grades-and the ones who didn't weren't dumb. They just didn't care about school. Gianfranco was like that, or had been till he got interested.

"You ought to go in and say hello to your friends," he said now.

"I suppose." Eduardo sounded worried, too. "Why don't you kids find another shop to go into? If something's wrong and they nab me, with luck they won't grab you, too. You can call your folks down in Rimini, and they'll come get you."

They would have to come in the Mazzillis' car. Gianfranco's father wouldn't be happy about that. Annarita didn't suppose she could blame him. He didn't know Cousin Silvio was a wanted criminal.

She wanted to look at a dress shop while Eduardo went into Three Sixes, but she knew Gianfranco wouldn't be caught dead in there. She chose a record shop instead. Some of the music it sold you could find anywhere. Some, though, only circulated underground most places. Governments had come down hard on what they called degenerate noise for almost a century and a half. People still made it, though, and sold it and listened to it. It was almost as subversive as the stuff The Gladiator sold.

Most places, it got sold under the counter, and played by people who trusted their friends not to inform on them. Here, it was right out in the open where anybody could see it and buy it. Elvis, the Beatles, the Doors, Nirvana-classics, if you liked that kind of thing. There were newer groups, too: the Bombardiers, Counterrevolution, Burn This Record.

"Wow!" Cianfranco stared. "We ought to buy some of this stuff. When's the next time we'll see so much together like this?"