Second Fiddle (13 page)

“You set the tempo,” Giselle whispered.

I tapped my foot for a measure, and we counted silently for another measure and then we began. The room and the judges faded out of my mind. All I could hear was the sound of us playing.

The piece began shy and quiet, because that was how our friendship began when I was ten and even more shy than I am now, and also because when I started writing the song, I wasn’t at all sure I could finish. The beginning was not my favorite part of the piece; there was nothing fancy about it, but I had to start somewhere. At least it was easy to play and followed all the rules of a canon. It gave us thirty-two bars to get over being nervous. Then came the main theme. We played it together with no harmony part because I wanted it to be like the first time we really listened to each other and the sound we made as a group. In the third part we had a musical argument. Vivi played the theme in double time, and then I played it at the regular tempo but with ornamentation, and then Giselle plucked out the theme on her cello and looked at us like we were so lame for arguing. I couldn’t help smiling, because she really got what I was trying to say in the music. The last part was lots of long, strong cello notes: Giselle walking away from us in her long strides after our fight. Vivi and I played runs of scurrying notes, and now Vivi was smiling, because it was like us running to catch up with Giselle. In the very end we each took a turn playing the theme. Giselle’s variation was very forte and strong to fit her take-charge personality, and Vivi’s was dreamier, a thinking girl’s variation. Mine was the bridge, like always. A little bit like Vivi’s, a little bit like Giselle’s.

Our last note died away, and there was a polite wave of clapping from other kids’ parents. The three judges gave us a
nod, and we left the stage. It wasn’t a perfect performance. We were a bit off time on the fast part, but it was our own song, and I’d never felt closer to Giselle and Vivian than I did at that moment. I looked all around the room hoping that Arvo had snuck in to listen.

Mrs. Jorgenson was waiting at the bottom step. “Lovely. Well done. May I see your composition, Miss Field?”

I kind of hated to show her, because it was in pencil and it had a bunch of eraser marks and also ice cream smudges. I held it against my heart, but Mrs. Jorgenson just stood there with her hand out like I had to give it to her, so I did. She turned to the first violin part, and I saw her do all the things conductors do, waving her hand to the tempo and humming the notes quietly.

“Is this your first composition?”

“Not exactly. It’s the first thing I’ve composed for trio and the longest one by far.”

“It’s a very competent piece—very balanced.” She handed me a card with her name and the name of her school on it. “Please consider auditioning for a scholarship to our school. We are always looking for musicians who can compose.”

That was exactly the kind of school I’d need if being a composer was ever going to become more than a dream. Dad would never let me live away from home, but it was nice to be invited.

The French judge took the stage to announce the winner. “
Mesdames et messieurs
, there has been a challenge under
the rules of the competition. We will break for thirty minutes while we make a decision.”

“What?” Vivi said. She turned to Mrs. Jorgenson. “Did you?”

She shook her head. “But I do think it will be a challenge to the use of an unpublished work, Miss Field.” She looked at me in dead earnest. “Is this your original work and not a copy of some little-known piece of published music?”

“We saw her working on it every week on the train,” Vivi said, scooting up shoulder to shoulder with me.

“Are you calling us cheaters?” Giselle gave Mrs. Jorgenson the look.

“You should write this on the bottom of every page,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. She took a pen out of her purse and put a
c
with a circle around it plus my name and 1990 on the bottom of the first page. I took her pen and finished marking the violin parts. She found another pen, and I handed her the loose cello pages.

The British judge came over and said, “May I have a copy of your composition, please?”

“Absolutely,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. She handed over my notebook without even asking me.

“Have you no other copy, miss?”

I shook my head, and he carried my notebook over to the judges’ table with a frown.

I hated to leave my notebook with them, but I was exhausted from our night on the train and starved from our
skipped breakfast. We trooped out of the auditorium and back to our stuff in the classroom.

“Hey, look!” Giselle said. “Lunch!”

Five croissants were set out on my violin case with a foil-wrapped cube of the soft kind of cheese. There was a paper package of sliced ham and a tall bottle of sparkling water beside Vivi’s case, and next to the cello was a bunch of strawberries wrapped in the handkerchief that used to belong to Vivi’s dad, and a big bar of the good kind of chocolate.

“Wow!” Vivi said. “It’s like having room service. That Arvo, he’s all right!”

“I wonder where he is,” I said much more quietly. He wasn’t anywhere in the room and wasn’t in the hall, either. I went to look out the window. There was a steady stream of people walking down the street, but nobody with a blue shirt and tie and a bald head. I looked for the Russian with the black turtleneck, but all-black clothing was apparently the national uniform of France. Every fourth man wore it. I was about to turn away from the window when a man at a phone booth across the street turned around—black turtleneck, no hat, knife-sharp nose. Was it the Russian? I leaned my forehead against the cool glass. The window was old and had bubbles that blurred the view. Was I imagining things? I turned back to the girls and kept my worries to myself.

We ate the croissants first, prying them apart with our fingers and filling the middles with cheese and ham. It was
so good, I could have eaten twelve of them. Fortunately, just one filled me up. We passed around the bottle of water.

“I wonder how much he paid for all of this,” I said, feeling relaxed for the first time since we got on the train. “You don’t think he stole it, do you?”

Giselle shrugged. “He must have borrowed money from us.”

“I hope there’s enough left for us to get youth hostel beds tonight.” I tried to figure the price of the lunch, guessing from what it would cost at the market in Berlin. “Do you guys know the exchange rate for marks to francs?”

“One mark is three point thirty-six francs,” Vivian said. Giselle just rolled her eyes like she did every time Vivi got mathematical on us.

Vivian brushed the crumbs off her fingers and unzipped her backpack. She pulled out a pink leather purse and sifted through the contents. She unzipped all the little outside pockets. “That’s weird.”

“What?”

“He still has my wallet. I wish he’d just taken cash. My passport and train ticket are in my wallet.”

Giselle and I looked at each other and then at Vivian. I got a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I opened my violin case and flipped up the lid of the rosin box. My wallet was there but the money was missing. I had stuffed my return train ticket and passport all the way to the bottom of the sheet music pocket on the outside of the case, but they
were gone, too. Giselle dumped the contents of her bag into her lap and was unzipping the inner pocket. I could see a scream building up in Vivi, and Giselle looked ready to commit murder.

“He stole from us!” Vivi hissed. “I can’t believe it. After all we did for him! We saved him!”

“He took all our money,” I said. My mind raced back through the last twenty hours we’d spent together, looking for some hint that, what? That he hated us? That he was a rotten thief from the start? “And he didn’t even say goodbye.”

“We can’t get home without the tickets and passports,” Giselle said. “He’s not far. Let’s go!”

I set my violin in the case, snapped it shut, and slid the rest of the food into my backpack. Vivi and Giselle did the same. We had just turned to head out the door when Mrs. Jorgenson swooped over.

“Surely you aren’t leaving without hearing the results? And where is Herr Müller? He will have something to say about this matter.”

We stopped dead.

“We don’t know where he is,” Giselle said, putting on her intense and worried look. “Have you seen him?”

Mrs. Jorgenson looked confused. “No, is he feeling ill again?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said, trying to copy Giselle’s take-charge tone of voice. “I told him he should just stay at the youth hostel and rest, but he said he had to sign us in. Maybe he
went back.” Vivi nodded earnestly with a look of innocent concern.

“Oh, I see. That must be it,” Mrs. Jorgenson said.

Maybe it was the concert clothes, because I’ve noticed people in uniforms automatically look like they know what they’re doing.

“We should check on him,” Giselle said.

“What hostel?” Mrs. Jorgenson asked.

“It’s called the Young and Happy Youth Hostel,” Vivi said. “It’s the one that’s three Métro stops away. We really must be going now.” She turned and strode out of the room with Giselle and me right on her heels. We thundered down two flights of stairs and into the street.

took off across the courtyard in front of the Sorbonne and onto the Boulevard Saint Michel. We ran, not caring that people were staring, or even that we were crashing into some of them with our violin cases. Giselle’s cello bumped along on wheels behind her. Medium-sized men in a shirt and tie were as common as litter, but men with crutches were nowhere to be found. In the window of an art supply shop, we saw a man who could be Arvo. We followed him down the street that led to the Panthéon, but he turned out to be a much older man.

It was crazy to think we could find him, but what could we do? He had all our money. We kept heading toward the nearest train station. He couldn’t travel on a child’s ticket, and no way would he want to go back to Berlin, but he could cash our tickets in for a ticket to Poland and be halfway home by midnight. But the farther we ran, the more I second-guessed myself. What if he caught a cab? Could he really walk all this way? And what was I thinking to travel with a
stranger? He was a thief. What if everything he’d ever said to me was a lie? We finally made it to the Gare Montparnasse, but Arvo was nowhere to be found.

We were walking now, barely. We trudged through the Luxembourg Gardens and back onto the street. Across from the Odéon theater a beggar sitting on the pavement called out to us for money. He was young and handsome in a pirate way.

“Francs. Marks. Pounds,” he said.

If I’d had a dime, I’d have given it to him. But I didn’t. I shrugged and said, “Sorry.”

“No!” he insisted. “Dollars! Pounds!” He grabbed Vivian’s violin case and dragged her closer.

Vivian gasped as if he’d slapped her. I couldn’t believe it; he’d touched her violin. People crowded right past as if this sort of thing was allowed.

“Let go! Let go! Let go!” Vivi’s voice went higher with each shout until it was nothing but a mouse-sized squeak.

“Dollars!” the beggar insisted.

Even if her backpack had been full of bricks, Vivi wouldn’t weigh eighty pounds. She slid toward the man. Her ballet flats had no traction on the pavement.

“Stop it!” I yelled.

I threw my arms around Vivi’s waist and tugged her backward. Giselle squared her shoulders, tightened her grip on her cello, and got ready to kick the beggar’s hand.

“Giselle, don’t do it!”

I could picture her breaking his bones. I could picture us getting arrested for assault. I guess the beggar could picture the same thing, because he let go of Vivian’s violin and spat out a long stream of French swears. We tumbled backward into the street. A teeny black car squealed right by our heels, horn blaring. The driver leaned out her window and yelled more curses at us. We stumbled across the street. Safe on the opposite street corner, Giselle and I sandwich-hugged Vivi until she stopped shaking. I didn’t know what to say. It’s not like we never heard swearing on an army base, but no one swore at wives and children—never.