“Can you walk that far?” I whispered. Arvo gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“I think we need bathrooms first,” Vivian said. “To put on our recital clothes. I don’t even know if there will be changing rooms at the university.”
“Meet you at the Métro station,” I whispered, and Arvo headed slowly in the direction of the subway.
Giselle and I trooped after Vivian down a flight of stairs to the bathroom and changed into the black skirts and white blouses we always wore for competitions. We put up our hair. Mom thought the outfits made us look like real professionals. I thought they made us look like penguins. We clip-clopped back up the stairs in our dress shoes and headed for the university.
Two Métro rides later, we were walking through the Latin Quarter. The streets were narrow but not crowded so early on a Saturday morning. Except for some construction workers and one well-dressed groggy couple who seemed to be heading home from a Friday-night party, we were alone. We came to the iron gate and then the carved wooden front doors of the Sorbonne. We followed signs for the music competition to a lobby full of people with name tags. We fell into line behind a quartet of older girls and a mixed trio about our age. The registration table was staffed by a girl who looked like she was in high school and an older woman who was deep in conversation with two other music teachers. We were safe, probably.
“Just sign Herr Müller’s name where they show you,” Vivi whispered to Arvo.
He signed the paper without looking up and inviting conversation. We got our program with the order of competition and followed the general tide of musicians down the hall and up two flights of stairs into an ancient lecture hall. Fancy plasterwork ringed the ceiling like frosting flowers around the edge of a wedding cake. The wooden floor was buffed to a honey-colored glow. The long wooden tables were pushed to the side and were so old, they probably had graffiti on them that said “Napoleon rocks!” Violin cases and sheets of music and backpacks and satchels were strewn about, and chairs were pulled up in groups as duos, trios, and quartets tuned and practiced their pieces.
I searched the room for an empty spot where we could have a little privacy to settle our nerves. A comfortably anonymous hum of voices in French, German, and Italian floated in the room, but then, a little louder than everyone else, I heard an unmistakably American voice. It was a flat, unmusical, middle-of-the-country voice. I turned around, and there was Mrs. Jorgenson and her string trio from Minneapolis, the trio that beat us in Frankfurt last year.
The kids were named Karl, Lazlo, and Megan, or maybe it was Maggie. There was no mistaking them; they were as pale as three puddles of milk. They looked like triplets with stick-straight pale hair and broad shoulders. I’d heard that they were farm kids from dairy towns in Minnesota and their parents had sent them to the music boarding school in Minneapolis. Vivi had carried on last year about how stuck-up they were because they didn’t talk to her, but I could tell they were just shy. The girl smiled when she saw me, and I gave her a little wave.
Mrs. Jorgenson swooped over, all long black clothes and long black hair and dangly jewelry.
“Here you are,” she said, extending her hand palm down to show her magenta fingernails. I couldn’t make up my mind if she wanted me to shake her hand or not. Giselle glanced up from tuning her cello.
“The expatriates,” Mrs. Jorgenson said with a very lip-sticky smile. “We will have to be at our best to prevail today.”
I hated being called an expatriate, like patriotism was bad or hopelessly old-fashioned. Plus I hated when I couldn’t tell if what someone said was a compliment or a dig.
“How kind of you to say so,” Giselle said. She stood up as she said it and shook Mrs. Jorgenson’s hand. Giselle was taller than her, and she stood up good and straight to make a thing of it.
“Good luck,” I said, trying to match Giselle’s posture if I couldn’t manage her height.
The boy from the Minnesota trio who was standing nearest me, the cute one with the square glasses, said, “Thanks, you too.” He pulled a handful of Smarties out of his suit pocket and held them out to me. I smiled and shook my head. He was wearing a hand-me-down shirt and tie, I could tell, and he acted like an international music competition was nothing to get worked up about. It made me think we could be friends if we lived in the same country.
“And where is Herr Müller?” Mrs. Jorgenson said, still smiling.
The three of us froze. I turned to Arvo, trying to think of how I could possibly explain. He was gone. I glanced all around the room, but Arvo had vanished.
“He must have stepped outside for a moment,” I said.
“He hasn’t been feeling well lately,” Vivi added.
“So I heard,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “I’ll find him afterward. Bonne chance.” She turned back to her own trio.
Whew!
“I guess he decided to duck out of the room,” Giselle said.
“We don’t need him now that he signed us in,” I said. “But weird that he just disappeared without saying anything.”
I was disappointed. Now that I knew he loved music, I’d been hoping that he’d hear us play.
“Let’s run through the beginning and then the last eight measures,” Vivi said. We took our places and were just setting the tempo when the first measures of Pachelbel’s Canon came floating across the room from the Minnesota trio’s corner. All three of us stopped dead.
“They stole our song,” Giselle said. We stared at them for an entire sixteen measures.
“We’ll just have to play it better,” Vivian said. We listened to the rest of the opening section. They sounded good—tone, rhythm, everything.
“We play right after them,” I whispered. “Even if we play better, we’ll sound like copycats.”
“What can we do?” Vivian said with a shrug. “Play last year’s piece?”
Last year’s piece was good, but we’d lost to the Minnesota trio with it. We’d worked so hard to get to Paris. I wanted our song to be perfect. I wanted it to be ours.
“Wait.” I took out my music notebook and flipped to my composition. “We can play this.” I tore out the cello part, put it on Giselle’s stand, and set the first violin part on Vivi’s. “It’s not hard. It’s a canon, and it’s about us.”
“You wrote this?” Giselle said.
“Yeah.”
“Jody, this is amazing. Is this what you’ve been doing all year on the train?”
“Yeah. Look, we’re last. That means we’ve got more than an hour to practice. We can do this! The main theme is only twelve measures long, and it repeats a bunch of times. The bowing is not tricky at all. What do you think?”
Vivian was already going through her part, singing the melody line quietly, and Giselle was running her notes on the fingerboard without bowing.
“Oh yeah,” Vivian said. “This is good.” She read through to the end of the page. “This rocks!”
“Let me at it!” Giselle said, picking up her bow.
An hour and a half later we took the stage in the fanciest auditorium I’d ever seen in my life. It said SALLE CARDINAL RICHELIEU on the door, and it was breathtaking. The panel of three judges sat at a table directly in front of the stage, and an audience of a few dozen parents looked on. We were more nervous than we’d ever been. Giselle stood in front of us as Vivi and I took our places.
“Messieurs et mesdames,” she said in her most polite command voice. “The Berlin American trio will have a change of program this morning. We will play the debut performance of ‘Canon for Three Friends.’ ”
The judges looked at each other over the tops of their glasses.
“It’s a composition by Jody Field.” She flapped her hand at me to get me to stand. I looked from one judge to the next, wondering if we were even allowed to change our program in the middle of the competition.
The three of them looked very stern, but then one of them said, “Very well,” in a British accent, and the old one said, “Merci, mademoiselle,”
and gestured for me to sit down, and the one on the end actually smiled at me.
“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 r
est 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.
Second Fiddle Page 9