Second Fiddle (20 page)

“We’re leaving in the morning,” Vivi said. She smiled, picked up her violin, and headed for the door. “So we’ll have to settle for being changed just a little bit.” We followed her out.

“Thank you,” I said, turning back at the door. “It was very kind of you to wait up and let us in.”

“It was no trouble,” the philosophy man said a little wistfully, which made me wonder if he had daughters of his own somewhere.

We took off our shoes to tiptoe down the hall and up the stairs. I don’t think I’d ever been more relieved to see a bed.

“We made it!” Giselle flung herself into the top bunk without even bothering with pajamas or a toothbrush.

“Hey, look,” Vivian said. “Blank sheet music.” She held up a sheaf of papers. “Oh man!” she said. “You promised Mr. Whitman you’d write something!”

“Oh, right. I remember.” I took the pages from her. “You go ahead and sleep. I’ll just get started.”

Vivian kicked off her shoes, yawned, and was asleep in five minutes, hogging the whole pillow and way more than half the blanket. I didn’t really mind. I was tired but too wound up to sleep.

I turned on the lamp that stood beside the armchair, went to the picture-book section, and pulled out a hardcover book that was big enough to be a lap desk. It was going to be tricky to write a viola part for my composition, especially since I didn’t have the other parts to work from. I paced back and forth in the room singing the violin and cello parts quietly to myself and thinking of what the viola could add. I didn’t have any brilliant ideas.

I tripped over a book on the floor as I was pacing from the chair to the window. It was
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
I flipped through a few pages, and the book fell open to
chapter five. There was a stack of hundred-franc notes plus fifty American dollars. It made my hands tingle to hold that much money. Who on earth could have left so much in a book? A little parade of things I wanted ran through my head. I shut the money in the book and put it on the shelf. Those Gypsies who gave us dinner and shared music with us didn’t have a lot, but I’d way rather be like them than like Arvo.

It was their music I couldn’t get out of my head—the sadness of it and the power. I wanted to write something like that. There had been a bit of a melody in my mind all weekend that I’d thought of while we were riding the train. I pictured the Montoyo boy dancing in the rhythm of a train. I dug a pencil out of my backpack, sat in the armchair, and started to write a new song.

next morning I woke up still in the chair with pages of half-written music on the floor in front of me. It was hard to decide which felt worse, sleeping in a chair or not brushing my teeth. Giselle and Vivi were sound asleep in the bunk bed, still in last night’s clothes. The sun was up, spilling light in through the dusty window.

“Oh my gosh!” I said. “What time is it? Vivian! Giselle! Wake up!”

I looked all around the room for a clock and then remembered that Vivian had a watch. She was still wearing it; quarter to seven, whew, plenty of time to catch our train. I gathered up the pages and set them on the windowsill, where Mr. Whitman would find them later.

Vivian and Giselle were not morning people. They growled and grumbled and pretended not to hear me. Annalies poked her head in the door and said, “Sunday! Free pancakes in the dining room in ten minutes.”

That did the trick. Giselle and Vivi were up and dressed in a flash. Just a few of the bookstore residents were there. I heard snoring from one of the rooms along the hall. Mr. Whitman presided over the stove with a large bowl of extremely thin pancake batter that he ladled into a skillet and tossed in the air to flip. The pancakes were more sour than sourdough, and the syrup was watery. The only thing that tasted normal was the butter. If I hadn’t been worried about hurting Mr. Whitman’s feelings, I might have eaten a plate of butter for breakfast.

As people finished and walked out the door, Mr. Whitman called out various chores to be done around the bookshop. People grumbled as they went out, and sometimes they traded jobs in the hallway, but I heard someone scrubbing the bathroom and saw people walking past with brooms and dustpans, so housekeeping must have been part of the Sunday-morning drill.

When we had eaten as much of the pancakes as we could stand and cleared our places, I said, “Do you have a chore for us? Because we need to do it fast. We’ve got to catch the nine-o’clock train.”

Mr. Whitman smiled and ate a pancake from the pan with his fingers. “You did your chore last night giving William a bath. I’d forgotten what a pleasure it is to have a clean cat.” He put the stopper in the sink and started running hot water. “But I won’t say no to some help with these dishes.”

“No problem,” Giselle said, turning up her sleeves.

“I’ll get the table,” said Vivian. She grabbed the dishrags from the counter and tossed one to me. “I wonder if anyone left a tip.”

“Oh my gosh, that reminds me! I’ll be right back,” I said.

I went to the room where we’d slept and hunted for
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. I had been so groggy the night before, it was hard to remember where I’d put the book. Eventually I found it on a top shelf behind the door. The money was right where I’d left it.

“Mr. Whitman,” I said when I returned, “this book was on the floor last night, and there’s money in it.” I opened to chapter five.

“What?” Giselle said, turning to look as she dried a dish. “Holy cow! That’s hundreds of francs!”

“Twelve hundred francs and fifty dollars American,” I said. “Do you think someone lost it?” I handed Mr. Whitman the bills.

“Twelve hundred francs? Really?” Vivian came and looked over my shoulder.

“It’s not lost,” Mr. Whitman said. “This bookstore is my bank.” He extended his skinny arms and gestured toward the rest of the building. “When I have a little extra, I make a deposit. When I need a little more, I can usually find some.”

“Are you crazy?” Vivian said. “Haven’t you heard of interest? If you’d kept this in the bank for just three years, you’d have another hundred francs by now.”

Apparently, for Vivi, it was never too early in the morning to do math.

Giselle shook her head, her eyes still on the money. “Anybody could walk in and steal it from you,” she said.

Mr. Whitman folded his arms across his chest. “I find most people do not. And tell me this, Vivian. If I were to go to the bank and say, ‘Please tell me the character of the young women who are staying in my shop,’ will they tell me?”

“Well, no,” Vivi said, a little flustered.

“You set that book out last night where I would find it!” I wasn’t sure whether to be glad I’d passed his test or worried that he’d tried to trap me. What if we hadn’t earned enough money to get home last night? What if we hadn’t eaten? That money would have been really tempting.

“So, do you have enough money to get home?”

“Yeah,” Vivian said. She turned to me with a smile. “Thanks to our genius booking agent.”

“She’s going to arrange all our tours of Europe from now on,” Giselle said, laughing.

“Are you sure?” he said. He pulled out a hundred-franc note. “Do you need money for the Métro?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re just going to give us money?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Whitman. “From each according to his ability, to each according to her need.”

“I’ve heard of that,” I said, remembering our talk under
the bridge with Arvo. It seemed like months ago and not four days.

“You are a student of Karl Marx?” Mr. Whitman looked impressed.

“Oh great!” Giselle said, smiling and shaking her head. “Another Communist! We’ve had trouble with you people before.”

“You’re a Communist?” Vivian said. “You own a business and everything.”

Mr. Whitman smiled. “I’m sure in many records of the French FBI it says I’m a Communist. It might be more correct to say I’m a socialist.”

“You do this all the time, not just for us?” I asked.

Mr. Whitman nodded.

“So that’s why you fed fifteen people on three dollars’ worth of ingredients, and there’s a hole in your shoe?”

Mr. Whitman busied himself stacking up the clean plates. “Am I richer knowing you three are sleeping in the street? When our philosopher came up last night to tell me you had safely lighted upon his windowsill, cheerful, healthy, and unharmed, I felt like the richest man in Paris.”

“So that’s all there is to socialism? It’s just being nice to people?” I said.

“Not entirely.” Mr. Whitman smiled. “Would you like to borrow a book?”

“We are
so
going to be grounded if we come home socialists,” Giselle said, and Vivian nodded earnestly.

Mr. Whitman laughed. “Off you go then,” he said. “Don’t miss that train.”

“We won’t,” I said. “Promise.” We went to the children’s room, packed up our stuff, and made the beds. On the way down the stairs, I noticed a sign over a doorway that I hadn’t seen before. It read
BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE
.

We headed for the Métro. It was a beautiful morning; the sights and sounds of Paris already felt like familiar friends. We walked down the Rue Dante with its little shops and brightly colored awnings and then turned onto the busier Boulevard Saint Germain. We walked past round kiosks with movie posters on them and newsstands with papers in dozens of languages. Across the street from the Cluny Museum, we went down the green staircase to the Métro station. The clock said quarter after eight, plenty of time to catch our train.

It was not very crowded on a Sunday morning. There were a few people who looked like college students and an older couple who were definitely American tourists, but there was also a family with kids, and they were staring straight at us and whispering. A businessman was staring, too, and then he went back up to the street. Just when I could feel the rush of air that comes in front of the train, there was the sound of men running and a command voice.

“You there! Stay where you are!”

We turned around to see two gendarmes thundering
down the stairs to the subway platform. A third was a few steps behind talking on his radio in rapid-fire French.

“Don’t move!” the policeman shouted.

We bunched up together. It was the first time I’d ever seen Giselle look afraid.

“Vivian Armstrong? Jody Field? Giselle Johnson?” the officer said. “Are you alone?”

Three more policemen came down the stairs and stood in a semicircle behind us. Every one of them was huge and dead serious.

“Are you alone?” the first gendarme said again.

I was starting to feel very alone. I scooted even closer to Giselle and Vivi.

“No,” I said. “We’re together.”

“You will come with us, please.”

“No,” I said. “We’re going to the train station—the Gare du Nord. Our parents are expecting us in Berlin tonight, and they’ll be worried if we aren’t on that train.” I looked from one disapproving face to another.

“You will come with us,” the policeman said. “Is there no other person traveling with you?”

“It’s just us,” I said.

Vivi stretched herself as tall as she could, which was not very impressive at all, but she put on her most earnest voice and said, “My mother is acquainted with the American ambassador. You will please take us to the embassy immediately.”

“Yes,” the gendarme replied. “The embassy. Come this way, please.” He gestured with his arm that we should walk in front of him up the stairs. We started moving, and the policemen formed a ring walking on all sides of us.

“Thanks, Vivi,” I whispered, and I put my arm around her shoulder. We took the stairs together. Two police cars were blocking traffic on the street. Two more gendarmes were holding back foot traffic. Already there was a knot of pedestrians staring at us like we were criminals. We were hustled into a black sedan that was parked beside the Métro entrance. The driver didn’t even look at us. Police cars drove in front and behind. They didn’t run their sirens, but they drove very fast.

We were a tight fit in the backseat with our backpacks on the floor, our violins propped upright, and the cello across our laps. The policeman driving looked straight ahead, and the one in the passenger seat, who had done all the talking so far, said not one word to us in English or French.