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Wouldn't they fill up the whole country sooner or later? Probably sooner, he
thought.
Eduardo sighed. "All right. Do what you can without sticking your neck out. If
you can find out, wonderful. If you can't. . ." He sighed again, louder. "If
you can't, maybe it's time to go to San Marino."
"It's a nice place. People say so, anyway I've been to Rimini, but never
there," Gianfranco said.
"I wouldn't be going to sightsee," Eduardo reminded him.
Gianfranco nodded. He understood that. And if Eduardo found what he was
looking for, he would disappear.
Gianfranco understood that, too. And he himself would stay stuck in this dull
old world after Eduardo had given him a glimpse no, half a glimpse of
something so much better. Where was the justice in that?
Ten
The chief janitor of the apartment building was a large, impressive man named
Marcantonio Moretti. He scratched his bushy, Stalin-style mustache as he
nodded to Annarita. "Yes, it is very good to have the elevator running again,"
he said.
"And it's so smooth! Just like a dream!" Annarita wasn't in the drama society
at Hoxha Polytechnic, but she knew how to lay it on with a trowel.
"Grazie" Comrade Moretti said, as if he'd done the work himself. He hadn't, of
course. He didn't do much work of any
sort. He was the chief janitor because his brother-in-law was a
medium-important official in Milan's Bureau of City
Maintenance. Under Communism, capitalism, or any old kind of ism at all, whom
you knew mattered at least as much as what you could actually do.
"Who were the repairmen who did the job? They ought to get commendations for
the Stakhanovite work they did,"
Annarita said. If people really worked like Stakhanovites or anything close to
it, the elevator would have got fixed as soon as it broke down. Maybe it
wouldn't have broken down in the first place. But how long had they had to
wait?
Much, much, too long Annarita knew that.
"Well, I don't exactly remember," Moretti said instead of saying he had no
idea, though that had to be just as true.
"I'd really like to find out," Annarita said.
Comrade Moretti scratched his mustache again. Had Gian-franco said something
like that, the chief janitor would have run him out of his office. Annarita
was much prettier than Gianfranco. That shouldn't have had anything to do with
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anything, which wasn't the same as saying it didn't.
"Hey, Ernesto!" Moretti yelled.
"What's up?" Ernesto Albosta called from the back room. A moment later, the
assistant janitor came out. He wasn't impressive. He was short and skinny and
slouchy and had crooked teeth. He wore ratty overalls and a cap pulled down
low on his forehead. But Moretti was only the front man for the housekeeping
staff. If you needed something fixed, Albosta was the one to see. If you
needed to find something out, Albosta was the one to ask.
"Who were the guys who did the elevator?" Moretti asked.
"I don't know where the devil they found 'em," Albosta answered. "They're not
even a Milanese outfit. The fix was in somewhere you can bet on that."
"So where are they from, then? Bergamo? Como? Pia-cenza?" Moretli named three
cities not far away.
But Ernesto Albosta shook his head each time. "Farther off than that. I think
Rimini. Yeah, that's right they're called
By the Arch Repairs, from the Roman one in the middle of town there." He
spread his hands. "How's an outfit from over by the Adriatic supposed to get
work here? Somebody knows where the bodies are buried, all right."
"Sounds like it," Morelti agreed. "Now I'm going to wonder if we've got to
worry about the elevator dying on us in two weeks. If it does, I guarantee you
we'll never see those worthless bums again."
"Got that right," /Ubosta said, and slouched away scratching himself.
Marcantonio Moretti nodded to Annarita. "Now you know," he said, as if he'd
known himself.
"Yes. Thank you." Annarita got out of his office as fast as she could while
staying polite.
Now she knew but she wondered what she knew. She couldn't remember whether the
repair truck had plates from
Italy or San Marino. In detective stories, people always noticed stuff like
that. She'd paid no attention, though.
Still, there was a fair chance those had been Eduardo's friends looking for
him. They hadn't found him. Were they still in Milan, checking other places
where he might be? Or had they given up and gone away? She couldn't begin to
guess.
Neither could Eduardo when she told him what she'd learned. "That's . . . too
bad," he said. She got the idea he'd clamped down on something stronger. He
sighed. "I have to go to San Marino, then, and hope they're not watching the
border."
"My family and the Mazzillis are going to Rimini on vacation in a couple of
weeks," Annarita said. "San Marino would be easier as a day trip from there
than it would going straight from Milan."
"Is Rimini here full of Germans and Scandinavians trying to get sunburn and
skin cancer on the beach?" Eduardo asked.
"Si. Some of them hardly wear any clothes at all." Annarita sniffed. "You can
probably have a good time even if you don't get up to San Marino."
"Nothing wrong with looking. When you do more than look, that's when life gets
complicated," Eduardo said. "Maybe you and Gianfranco can come up to San
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