Second Fiddle (14 page)

“Where now?” Giselle said.

My mind was a total blank. I just started walking. I wasn’t even looking for Arvo anymore. What on earth had made us think we could find him? Paris was huge, and he was just one person, one foreigner in a city full of them.

I was sweaty and there were red marks on my heels where Mom’s black pumps rubbed. We turned right, down another narrow street crowded with little delivery trucks and the maddeningly delicious smells of sweet rolls and chocolate. Bike messengers with their cutoff jeans and long hair zipped by our elbows, calling out to us in singsong French as they passed. A few blocks on and there was an open paved square with a fountain in the middle and a very old church with a bell tower on each side and lots of columns in front.

We sat down on the pavement on the shady side of the fountain and rested against the yellow sandstone. A marble lion with a permanent snarl guarded us. Vivi kicked off her shoes. Sweaty red feet vividly set off her purple toenail polish. We sat there not looking at each other, and Paris was postcard perfect all around us.

Vivi said a swear. Then she said a whole long string of swears, and then she switched to German and French when she’d exhausted her supply of English cusswords. Giselle, who never swore because of home training, let out just one like a giant belch, and I said, “Amen.”

“We are going to hell,” Giselle said quietly, and with such conviction you would’ve thought she’d already bought a ticket.

“Honestly, Giselle, you are not going to hell for one little swear.”

“We talked to a stranger—an enemy stranger. An enlisted man. I’m not even allowed to talk to enlisted men in our own army. My dad is never going to forgive me.”

“We saved him,” Vivi said, “and we took care of him, and nothing we did mattered.”

I didn’t care that he was an enemy, and I would have given him money if that was what he needed, but that last thing Vivi said had teeth. I didn’t even matter enough for him to say goodbye.

“How could we have been so wrong about him?” I said.

“I can’t believe he stole from us!” Giselle said. “He’s a snake. He could have just taken the money, but no, he took our passports. Do you know how long it takes to get another? The forms? The lines? Mom hates the passport office!”

“I can’t believe how grounded we are going to be,” I said. “What are we going to tell our dads?” I tried to imagine calling Dad and asking him for money to come home. I wasn’t even sure he had enough for another ticket. It was a big extravagant thing to send me here in the first place. All our other competitions had been close enough to drive.

“Let’s not tell,” Vivi said. She rested her elbows on her knees and fixed her gaze on the steeples across the square. “If we never tell them, it will be like it never happened.”

“Oh please, Vivi,” I said. “I haven’t gotten away with that kind of logic since I was five years old.” I twirled a strand of hair that had fallen out of my bun. “We can’t just stay here forever. We have to tell them.”

“No,” Vivian insisted. “Do you remember the time in the fifth grade when I was pickpocketed on the S-Bahn on our way to lessons? I never told my parents. Mom would have made me go to music with her car and driver, and I would have felt like a total dork. Plus then it would have been just you two on the train together without me, and we wouldn’t have become friends. I’ve never had friends who play music before. No way was I messing it up! It was only twenty marks, so I stopped eating lunch for two weeks and used my lunch
money to replace what was stolen. Come on, girls! We can think our way out of this.”

“Vivi,” Giselle said, “this is not an algebra problem. It’s not even a calculus problem. It’s more of a lying-to-your-parents, helping-an-enemy-soldier-go-AWOL, and becoming-homeless-in-a-foreign-country problem. Where are we going to sleep tonight if we don’t have any money?”

“But it’s just money!” Vivi said. As if money was no big deal at all. “If we had money, none of this would be a problem. We could buy new tickets and hide on the train like Arvo did. He didn’t need a passport to get into France. We can come home on Sunday just like they are expecting us to, and no one will worry.”

Giselle pried up a loose corner of a cobblestone and tossed it across the city square. “So money is the only problem, huh? Great! We’ll just knock over a bank and be done with it. You’ll translate, yes?”

“We’re going to start stealing now?” I squeaked. I could actually imagine Giselle doing this.

“Why stop at stealing?” Giselle said. “Let’s hunt down that skunk Arvo and shoot him dead!”

“No!” I gasped, but Giselle and Vivian were already laughing.

“And then we’ll join a criminal gang,” Giselle went on.

“And then we’ll overthrow a country!” Vivian added enthusiastically. “Just a small one; Liechtenstein would do, or Monaco.”

“Definitely Monaco,” Giselle said. “More fashionable. What do you think, Jody?”

“Umm, I think we need a plan,” I said.

“A better plan than a life of crime?” Giselle said. She gave me a shove that rocked me sideways into Vivian. “Let’s hear it.”

“Well,” I said, “we have a little bit of food.” Because it’s always good to start with something positive. “And it’s not raining.” Which was the only other good thing I could think of. I looked at the sky between the bell towers of Saint Sulpice and the buildings that ringed the square—not a cloud in sight. “And our parents aren’t going to start worrying about us until Sunday night, when we don’t show up at the train station. That’s the main thing. They shouldn’t worry. We’ll get ourselves home and say we lost our passports. Our moms will be mad, but at least they won’t think—”

“That we’re pathological liars who went to a foreign country with a total stranger, enemy soldier, thief, horrible bad guy—”

“Right. That would be bad. Let’s not tell them that.”

“So all we need is twenty bucks each for the youth hostel tonight and forty-five for the train,” Vivi said. “So that’s a hundred and fourteen francs for a bed and two hundred fifty-five francs for the trip home.”

“No, less.” I took the train schedule out of my backpack. I hunted through the columns of prices for the right one. “It’s thirty dollars because we only need one way.”

“So we need fifty dollars apiece,” Vivi said.

It might as well have been a thousand. It would take me months to make that much babysitting.

“So we could pawn some jewelry, right?” Giselle said. “Did you bring some?” She looked at Vivi, not me.

“No, they said no jewelry for the competition, so I didn’t even think about bringing any,” Vivian said.

I remembered the camera Aunt Cassandra had sent me, tucked away in the bottom of my backpack, and I didn’t say a word because, besides my violin, it was the only fancy thing I owned.

“We could play,” I said. “It’s almost lunchtime. People will be sitting at those tables over there.” I nodded in the direction of the Café de la Mairie on the south side of the square. “And there are plenty of people walking around.”

“I could sit here,” Giselle said, pointing to the edge that surrounded the fountain. “You two can stand. We know Pachelbel’s Canon well enough to play from memory, and we’ve had the Minuet in G for ages. Let’s see, Gavotte from the Suzuki book is fun and kind of peppy. Do you remember it?”

Vivi and I nodded.

“How about ‘Für Elise’?” Vivian said. “Everybody recognizes that tune.”

“I’m in,” I said. We set my violin case open in front of us to collect money, and as we tuned, I had to lean in close to
hear over the traffic and the splashing of the fountain. At least it would be hard for our audience to hear a mistake.

“So Minuet in G?” I said. I tapped out a measure with my foot, and we launched into it. It was a good song to warm us up. It had a lively tempo, and lots of people knew the tune. It had been our first competition piece two years ago in Hamburg.

Nobody stopped to listen. Some people tossed a few francs or a handful of centimes into my violin case without even breaking their stride across the square. A tour group passed by and listened, but none of them gave us money. We did the Gavotte next because it’s nice and bouncy. People kept walking past. Most of them didn’t even look at us, let alone leave money. We played through our whole repertoire three times. My hands got sweaty, and my feet were itchy and tired. I could feel myself getting a sunburn on my nose and the back of my neck.

We were in the middle of our third playing of Pachelbel’s Canon when we saw a tour group of British girls about our age. They were in matching navy blazers, skirts, and knee socks, and they looked just as hot and uncomfortable as I felt. Giselle broke off from her part and started playing “London Bridge.” The whole pack of schoolgirls stopped and looked at us. Their chaperone laughed, so Vivi and I switched to “London Bridge,” playing it in a round.

One of the girls called out, “Hey, we’re Aussies, mate!”

“Oops, sorry!” I said.

Giselle hardly missed a beat switching over to “Waltzing Matilda.” The girls sent up a cheer like we were a soccer team and then began waltzing each other around the square or twirling separately or singing loudly and way off-key. I’d never played “Waltzing Matilda” before, but it’s a catchy tune and not too hard to fake if you start on the right note. It was great to finally get a reaction to our music, even for something we weren’t playing very well. Every single one of the girls came up and dropped something into my violin case. Sometimes it was a coin, but mostly it was penny candy. I didn’t care. I could have hugged them all.

soon as the Australian girls left the square, Giselle slumped against the fountain and started massaging her left hand. I kicked off my shoes and stuck my feet, nylons and all, in the water. There was already a run in one leg and a hole in the toe. I was past caring. Vivian totaled up the money we’d earned. Not counting candy, it was almost a hundred francs—not even enough for one of us at the youth hostel.

“We’re doomed,” Vivian said. She packed up her violin and grabbed a handful of candy in white wrappers with green and red stripes. She tossed one to me and one to Giselle. “We’ll be stuck here forever.”

“Well,” I said, looking at the extremely stern face of the medieval stone figure at the top of the fountain, “we could go to the USO or the American embassy and ask to call our parents. I think that’s the whole point of having those places, right?” I unwrapped the candy and popped it into my mouth. It was tooth-crushingly sticky.

“Right,” Vivian said. “I’m going to imagine that conversation now. ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me. I ran away to Paris with a stranger I met under a bridge. He’s really old, too, like twenty-five or something, and a soldier, so I helped him desert from his army, and, oh, did I mention he’s a Communist?’ Yeah, that would go over great.”

Giselle nodded earnestly. “Do you have any idea how much my dad would yell at me? He’d ground me until I was old enough to have grandchildren.”

She was probably right about that. Dad said General Johnson never actually yelled, but he had this wrath-of-God voice that scared the heck out of people. Once when they were on a field exercise that went badly, Giselle’s dad called in his intelligence officer and told him very quietly, but with lots of details, how inadequate his intelligence briefing had been. Dad said that the lieutenant’s face turned gray, and he threw up right in the briefing room. I think I’d rather sleep out on the sidewalk than make General Johnson mad, and I bet Giselle would rather sleep in a pit of snakes than hear him yell.

I wasn’t sure about my parents. I’d never done anything especially wrong before. I guess Dad would yell, and he’d probably ground me, too, but I didn’t care about that so much. The thing was, Mom trusted me. She didn’t dog me with rules or curfews or who I was allowed to hang out with. She just wanted me to tell her where I was and come home at a sensible hour. I would hate for her to think I was sneaky or stupid—that I trusted someone I shouldn’t have.

“If we can just get home,” Vivian said firmly, “we don’t ever have to tell them a thing.”

“Okay,” I said. “We played for a little less than an hour, and we got about a hundred francs, and we need a little more than five hundred altogether, right? So we just need to play four or five more times, and then we’ll have enough. We can play for five hours. How hard can that be?”