Second Fiddle (9 page)

No wonder Vivian got a hundred percent on every quiz at school, because I never would have thought of that.

“Those officers will be waiting for somebody to find the body,” Vivian went on. “If it doesn’t turn up somewhere along the river, they’re going to start searching for it, and I bet they’ll begin right from the spot they heaved him into the water.”

“Oh my gosh,” Giselle said. “We need a plan.”

I started walking toward the S-Bahn station on the west end of the park. “So we need to move the body of an almost,
but not quite, dead guy. How are we going to do that? Carry him? Toy wagon? Wheelchair?”

The glass dome over the hippo habitat started to show above the trees. I swerved onto a path going south to take us around the zoo. I could smell the sharp, sour fish smell from the penguin exhibit.

“I don’t know, Jody,” Giselle said. “A moving target is the easiest thing to find. What if we just hid him where he is? He was hard to see today all wrapped up in green and hiding under that bush, and we knew exactly where to look for him.”

“Maybe,” I said. “They would be looking for a dead body, so probably they’d only look along the bank and not up under the bridge.”

“He might be fine for a while under the bridge, but there’s no way he’s going to get all the way to Estonia with no money and no paperwork,” Vivian said.

We walked on a little farther, past the pond with flamingos. Eventually the fishy smells of animal feed were replaced with the smell of fried pork and mustard from the bratwurst cart that always stood by the zoo entrance.

“What we need is an excuse for a grown-up to travel with three kids who are obviously too old to be his kids,” Giselle said.

I frowned and kicked at the gravel on the path. “What we need is something like a school field trip.”

We came out of the park and headed toward the S-Bahn
station. There was a record store, and we all automatically stopped and looked in the window at a bunch of mannequins with pink and orange Mohawks and black leather jackets. There was an album cover from U2 and one from Madonna and one from the Bangles. The Bangles were my favorite because they were an all-girl band.

An all-girl band. I stood stock-still, hardly daring to taste the idea. I closed my eyes. Could it actually work?

“We need something like our music teacher, Herr Arvo Kross, taking his string trio to the Solo and Ensemble Contest in Paris this Friday.”

Vivi and Giselle turned from the window and just looked at me. I got chills.

We headed toward the train and walked the last block very slowly. We didn’t say anything so as not to spoil the perfectness of the idea. By the time we came to the station, we were grinning like fools.

“Oh my gosh, could we really make this work?” Vivian almost whispered. “Could we save Arvo and still get our trip to Paris?”

I nodded. We turned to Giselle.

“I am not giving up on Paris,” she said. “We’ll never play together again if we don’t go. We worked hard on our piece, and we could win this year, you know we could!”

“We could win,” Vivi said. “And we could be in Paris! Just us. No diplomats to meet. No stupid receptions like we have every time I travel with my mom.”

Just us and music, I thought. One perfect weekend before I leave Germany forever.

“We can do this,” I said. “We have to do this. Arvo needs us. We’re the only ones who can save him, right?”

They both agreed.

“Okay, so we just need to … ummm …”

“Tell a whole bunch of lies?” Vivi said.

“Yeah.” I thought about my mom and dad and about how much they trusted me. Setting a good example for my brothers was like a religion with them.

“They’ll never know,” Vivi said. She steered us to the shady end of the train platform. “They’ll think we are at the competition with Herr Müller, and we will be at the competition—just with Arvo. It’s almost like we’re not lying—right? We go. We play music in the morning. We help Arvo find some other Estonians in Paris in the afternoon, and then we go home on Sunday just like they are expecting. What could possibly go wrong?”

Clearly, we had no idea.

“You know,” Giselle said, “I don’t think my parents even think about me when I’m not there. They’re so busy all the time. As long as I’m with people they know, doing things they approve of, they don’t care. I think they’re kind of glad I’ll be gone over the weekend. Dad never thinks of anything but his command, even when he has a day off, and Mom works fulltime plus overtime just with the stuff an officer’s wife has to do. They want me to go.”

“Mom got me francs from the bank on Monday,” I said. “She got me film for my camera. She’d be sad for me if I couldn’t go.”

“We’ll go!” Vivi said. “It’s only a little bit of lying.”

“It’s lying for a good reason.” Giselle let her backpack slide off her shoulder and hit the platform with a thump. “Arvo will never make it on his own. Walk to Estonia? Right! He can fly to Estonia from Paris.”

“Vivi, you said there were Estonian people in Paris,” I said. “Are you sure? Where are they?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Vivi said. “But Paris is packed with immigrants. I bet we can find someone who knows where people from the Baltics live. Probably those people will give Arvo a place to stay and help him earn enough money to fly home. It won’t be fast, but it will be way safer than walking.”

“I’ll lie to save someone’s life,” I said.

“It’s not like our parents are going to be worried,” Giselle said. “All we have to do is get on a train. How hard can that be?”

next day, just Giselle and I went to see Arvo under the bridge. It was Vivian’s ballet day and not Giselle’s fencing day. I wouldn’t have cared if it was my have-tea-with-the-Queen-of-England-day; I was dying to see Arvo again. I’d had the most awful dream of those officers coming back and beating him up all over again and then taking him somewhere where I couldn’t find him. I brought fresh water bottles, a little bit of cash, and a flashlight in case he was afraid of the dark. Giselle brought the crutches she’d used last year, a dress shirt that belonged to Vivian’s dad, and a belt and a navy blue tie, so he would have something to wear that made him look like a music teacher. We didn’t bring our instruments, and we went to the bridge by a different route to not attract attention. I totally felt like a spy.

Arvo loved our idea of going to Paris. And he knew just how to find Estonians there. Apparently they were all Lutherans before Communism made believing in God illegal, so if we could find a Lutheran church in Paris, then we
could eventually find escaped Estonians who would help him get home. Arvo explained all this while he practiced with Giselle’s crutches. He did okay, even on the slope.

“He looks kind of scruffy,” I said to Giselle as we sat under the bridge and watched.

“Scruffy?” Giselle said. “He looks like a cheap drunk with a bad haircut who just shook hands with the wrong end of a bar fight. We have got to do something about that man’s face.”

Arvo’s black eyes had blossomed from reddish blue to greenish yellow, and although both eyes were less puffy, the dark marks were twice as large. He had cleaned the blood away from where his lip was split, but he had three days of very uneven beard growing. It was not a music teacher look.

“Arvo,” Giselle said, “we need to go shopping.”

He hobbled up on the crutches. “Yes, I am looking …” I could see him searching for a nicer word than “revolting.”

“You need to look tidy,” I said, “like a music teacher. We need a razor and I guess—”

“Deodorant,” Giselle barged in.

I was not going to say that out loud. “Umm, would you like a comb?”

Arvo nodded.

“And I hate to say it, but I think you are going to need some makeup.”

“Lots of makeup,” Giselle said. “Come on, girl, we need to go to the KDW.”

I trailed after Giselle up the riverbank. We stopped in the
bushes to make sure the road was empty and then headed toward the Kaufhaus des Westens in the busy shopping part of the Kurfürstendamm.

Shopping with Giselle was a revelation. She walked into the store like she owned it. She never compared prices, and she had an opinion about everything. Leather jackets—hot. Spike heels—not worth the trouble. Levi’s with rips and tears already in them—so last year. Blue mascara—please! We filled up a basket with the things Arvo needed to get cleaned up.

“Makeup!” Giselle announced, striding in the direction of the bright lights and mirrors in the cosmetics section of the department store. “I have no idea what you white people use.” She breezed past a cluster of German grandmas, oblivious to their disapproving clucks, and took up space at the makeup counter.

“Oh. Umm …” I loved Giselle, but sometimes she made me feel like a little kid. “I’m not much of a makeup expert. I really have no idea what we should buy.”

“Seriously?”

“None.”

“Girl, you have got to stop shopping with your mom.”

“Okay.” I liked shopping with my mom.

“Promise me you’ll shop with your girlfriends when you get to your new school.” Giselle sat me down on a tall pink stool at the makeup counter and motioned for one of the ladies in a pink smock to come over and wait on us.

I tried to imagine myself in one of those American malls I’d heard my cousins talk about.

“Your mom wants you to be pretty and she doesn’t,” Giselle went on. “Moms are like that. It’s because they all just turned forty.”

“Guten Tag. Kann ich euch helfen?”
the makeup lady said.

“Jody needs a new look,” Giselle said.

“Yes, I see.” The makeup lady switched to English like flipping radio stations. It would take me forever to get that good at German. She had perfect hair and perfect makeup. Even in her dorky pink smock, I could imagine her modeling for a magazine. I tucked my grubby tennis shoes underneath the stool and felt even more like a second grader. “Some pink for the cheeks,” the makeup lady said. “And for the eyes—”

“She needs foundation,” Giselle said firmly. “The really good kind. For when she gets zits.”

I could have died right there.

“What a shame! Such lovely skin even with the freckles,” the makeup lady said.

I bet she never had a zit in her life.

“Do you suffer in your cycle?”

I was never going to shop for makeup ever again. I closed my eyes and thought about Arvo and all the bruises on his face. “Yes,” I said. “I suffer a lot.”

She gave me some makeup that felt exactly like the school paste I used in kindergarten and smelled like insect repellent.
I think Giselle felt a little bit sorry for me, because she bought me the brightest red nail polish in the store. On the way back to the bridge, we got a timetable for the train and a tourist map of Berlin to help Arvo find us at the Spandau Bahnhof on Friday.

The next day my classes felt like they were five hundred years long. We spent all day listening to people give their dreams and goals speeches. Yawn. But the whole time I was listening, I was thinking how fun it would be to give a real dreams and goals speech.

“Yes, my goal is to run away to Paris with my two best friends and a complete stranger. We plan to enter a music contest, win it, become world-famous musicians, live our whole lives in fancy hotels all over Europe, and eat gelato every day.”

Very tempting, but it would ruin everything, so I gave the speech I had written. “I love music, and I want to be a music teacher when I grow up.” Not my dream exactly, more of a plan if nothing better worked out. Aunt Cassandra was a piano teacher. She raised chickens and cousins and lots of vegetables that she put in jars and sent to us for holidays. She lived in a little town where the big event every week was the high school game. To be fair, she seemed perfectly happy, but I didn’t want a little life. I just chose music teacher for my speech because it’s a goal that makes grown-ups think you are a responsible person.

After school Giselle’s and Vivian’s folks dropped them
off at my apartment at four o’clock exactly, because when you’re an army family, being late is one of the seven deadly sins. They hugged us and took our picture together. Usually I hate having my picture taken, but the only way we were going to get dropped off at the station was if we were running late. Otherwise, Mom would insist on coming in and handing us over to Herr Müller and watching the train leave. Giselle, Vivi, and I agreed the whole trick was going to be getting to the Spandau Bahnhof late, but not so late we missed the train.