Second Fiddle (22 page)

The policewoman was flipping back through her notes. She raised her hand to ask a question. “This name, Arvo, it doesn’t sound Russian. Did he not tell you his last name?”

“Kross,” I said. “Arvo Kross, and he’s not Russian; he’s Estonian. He hates the Soviet Union. He wants to go home to Estonia. He wants his country to be free.”

“Sergeant Kross,” General Johnson said very quietly. “I’ll be damned. He’s alive.”

Johnson and my dad exchanged a look. I knew that look. It was the one Dad always got right before the base went on an alert and he worked around the clock for days on end.

They both stood up, and General Johnson said, “I believe we have people to call.” He motioned the police chief and Mrs. Armstrong to the side of the room by the phones. They had a very intense conversation in whispers.

My stomach was starting to growl. The disgusting pancakes we ate seemed like hours ago. Our penny candy was long gone.

The police chief returned to the conference table where the three of us were still sitting and said, “We will need to secure your bags as evidence.”

“Evidence?” I said. Dad had finished his conversation with the others and was headed my way. “Evidence of what?”

Giselle scooted her chair closer to mine. “We get it that it was wrong to lie to our parents, but that’s not a crime, is it?”

“Jody,” Dad said, “do you remember last Tuesday? It was the night you found Sergeant Kross. I came home late that night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We talked about houses and moving to Texas.”

“The base was on alert because the day before, we’d received information about—well, never mind what it was about—dangerous information from a Soviet informant. We had a plan to intercept something and retrieve our informant.”

“I know, Dad. Arvo told us. They were going to make him carry poison gas to sell in Iraq, or maybe it was Iran, one of those places.”

“Iraq,” Dad said quietly but firmly. General Johnson nodded, and they both looked terribly serious—not just serious but heavy, worried.

“Someone betrayed him, Dad. His officers found out that he went to you for help, and they beat him up. It’s why they threw him off the bridge. He said a spy turned him in.”

“More likely someone listened on his phone,” Dad said. “Eavesdropping is big business in East Germany.” He shook his head and ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “We almost had him. If we’d gotten there a few hours sooner, he’d have been safe.”

“But what about his family?” I said. “We tried to get him to come back to the base with us, but he wouldn’t because he was afraid they’d arrest his mom and his sister. He was so worried about them.”

Dad shook his head. “If they think Sergeant Kross died on that bridge, then there is no reason for them to harass his family. Don’t you worry about them.”

“I’m not sure they believe he died. I think Arvo was followed here to Paris.”

“Followed?”

“Well, there was a guy, a Russian guy, who followed us onto the train, and I saw him again when we were at the music competition.” I looked from my dad to the chief of police, who gave me an encouraging nod. “There were some men in suits in front of Notre Dame last night, right before it got dark, and they were looking for someone.”

“So let’s assume we are not the only ones looking for the elusive Sergeant Kross,” the French police chief said. He got to work on the phones.

Eventually someone brought in lunches, our bags were searched, and we were questioned at length by an American and a British man whose jobs were never exactly explained, but I could guess. They kept coming back to the question of whether or not Arvo had given us something to carry or asked us to call someone or to meet him later. My patience for repeating myself was wearing thin. At last the British man stood up and walked over to the other table to get tea. I followed him, even though I’d already drunk three cups.

“So, Jody,” he said in a less businesslike voice than before. “What sort of a man is this Arvo? Do you like him?” He poured the tea.

Dad had stepped out of the room, and everyone else was busy.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I liked him very much. He listened to me. I told him I want to be a composer, and he sang with me. That’s what Estonians do. They sing. And he acted like being a composer was a thing an ordinary person could do—a thing I could do. Plus I thought he was dead when I first pulled him out of the river, but he wasn’t, and I can’t stop thinking about him and wondering if he’s okay. Yesterday, when we were walking on a bridge over the Seine, I couldn’t help looking for him in the water. It’s crazy.” I poured milk and sugar into my tea. “He stole from us.”

The British agent looked over the tray of cookies. “You saved his life. That makes this different from any other friendship you’ve had.”

“It can’t be much of a friendship if he stole our money and our tickets and our passports. If he’d just asked, I’d have given him money.”

“Curious that he stole your money and then bought you lunch. That doesn’t exactly sound like the action of an enemy.”

The American agent strolled over, grabbed the last handful of cookies, and started fiddling with the coffeepot. “I’ve been thinking about that lunch, too,” he said, popping a cookie into his mouth. He had an accent I remembered from my kindergarten teacher, so it must have been a Texas accent. “You’d think he’d be in a bigger hurry to run.”

“Did you say he could find a friend in Paris?” the British agent asked. “Did he have someone specific in mind?”

“No, we decided to find some escaped Estonians living in Paris. We were going to start by finding a Lutheran church.”

“Well, Miss Jody,” the Texan said, “that was a good plan. Any Lutheran pastor you could have found would have been the logical and law-abiding type. He’d have called your parents and straightened this whole thing out.”

“So Arvo’s not in trouble?” I said. “I mean, when you find him, you aren’t going to make him go back to his unit in Berlin, are you?”

The British agent smiled. “No. Mind you, we’ll speak to him about stealing from children, but he did mean to help us. He has information we need about the flow of weapons out of the Soviet Union. He’s far too valuable for us to just let him go.”

“We did try to rescue him,” the agent from Texas added. “We just didn’t get there in time. You, on the other hand, were able to accomplish what your father and one of the most highly respected generals in all of Europe were not, not with twenty years of experience in military operations and all the resources that come along with two stars on your hat.”

My mouth fell right open. “Seriously?”

“Oh yes. They spent the last hour on the phone explaining to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe how three schoolgirls saved the life of their Soviet contact. Not a happy conversation for them, I imagine.”

“We’ll never see that man again.” The British agent drank down the last of his tea. “Soviets are a paranoid lot. He’ll never stop running.”

“Well, he can’t exactly run,” I said. “He can barely walk.”

“What?” both the agents said together.

“He broke his leg, remember?” But then I couldn’t remember myself, after all those questions, if I had mentioned the broken ankle, and then I realized I had glossed over that part because I didn’t want to say, in front of Dad, that I’d stolen the painkillers from our house.

“He broke his ankle,” I said. “It was all puffy and pointed in a wrong direction when I first got him out of the water. So when I brought food, I also brought some Tylenol with codeine.”

I looked from one to the other, but neither of them seemed especially shocked. I guess everyone knew soldiers took that stuff for training injuries all the time.

“Arvo managed to splint his broken ankle himself, but he was in terrible shape. The pain medicine helped. Except it ran out by Friday, and he almost fainted when we had to run to catch the train. He went all gray and sweaty. But he didn’t give up. Not even after the spy guy followed us onto the train.”

I shivered, remembering what Arvo had said about the KGB having no mercy, not even for children. I thought about him sitting on the baggage-room floor all night not knowing if the agent would catch him there. I bet he didn’t sleep for one minute. And after all that, he still went out and got us
food. Could they have seen each other in the market? Did he know the KGB was just outside the university?

“I think I can guess where Arvo is,” I said slowly. “What if he never left the Sorbonne after he got us lunch? What if he stayed put? General Johnson was just saying that right under our noses is a good place to hide. Plus the army manual says if you are shot down and injured, you should hide and heal before you try to run—at least the American one does.”

“How extraordinary,” the British agent said. “The Sorbonne is full of empty spaces, and Sergeant Kross is the right age to be mistaken for a student. A certain amount of scruffiness that would call attention elsewhere would hardly generate notice among college students.”

“It would take us ages to search the place,” the American agent added. “I suppose eventually he’ll need food.”

“Eventually he’ll need pain medicine,” I said. “He took one when we got on the train, and then I gave him three more because that was all that was left at home. So that’s …” I counted doses twelve hours apart. “He’ll be wanting more pain medicine by six o’clock tonight. Maybe if you looked for him at emergency rooms or wherever it is French people go for medicine, you’ll find him.”

“Brilliant!” the British agent said, and he reached into his pocket and handed me his business card. “If you find music not to your liking, I hope you’ll consider intelligence work. You’ve already got as much courage and savvy as half the people I work with.”

the British agent said, turning to the other men in the room, “we have a solid lead, and if we can turn out enough men on the street, I think we can find Sergeant Kross in the next few hours.” He explained where he thought Arvo was and how to find him.

Giselle, Vivian, and I were left at the table, suddenly unimportant. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to see Arvo again or not. I couldn’t even decide if I was mad at him for stealing our money. Maybe learning that I could take care of myself in a foreign city was worth it. Vivian took a deck of cards out of her pocket and started up a game of spoons, but I wasn’t really into it.