“I know it’s a song,” the tramp replied with an unpleasant sneer on his half-hidden face. Then he crooned a line of it, in the voice of a long-dead American singer she’d heard when her mother and father played music on their cheap hi-fi to remind themselves of their days in the States, before they returned to a new, free Poland in search of different lives. The name of the singer came back to her: Dean Martin. And the tune too, so she played it, pitch perfect, from memory, improvising a little after the fashion of Stéphane Grappelli, putting a leisurely jazz swing on each inflected run of notes until the original was only just recognizable.
She was good at the fiddle. Sometimes, if she was bored or there seemed to be someone musical in her audience, she would pull out some sheet music stuffed into the case, ask a spectator to hold it, then play Wieniawski’s Obertass mazurka, with its leaping fireworks of double stopping, harmonics and left-hand pizzicato. Both of her parents were musical, her mother a violinist, her father an accomplished pianist. Together they had provided her with a musical education from before she could remember, in a household where music was as natural and easy as laughter, right up until the black day they disappeared and she found herself under the wing of Uncle Henryk.
The tramp stared at her as if she’d committed a sin.
“You screwed with it,” he spat. “Bad girl. You ought to know your place.” He stared at his own clothes: a grimy overcoat that stank of sweat and urine, with a belt made, perhaps a little theatrically, out of rope. “One little step up from me. Nothing more.”
Then he threw a single euro in her violin case and stomped off toward Largo Argentina, the open space where she used to catch the bus back home, fascinated always by the wrecked collection of ancient temples there–a ragged, shapeless gathering of columns and stones populated by a yowling community of feral cats, a piece of history only she and the passing tourists seemed to notice any more. She didn’t like cats. They were bold, aggressive, insistent, climbing into her fiddle case when it was open to collect money. So she kept a small water pistol, modeled on something military, alongside her music and rosin, and used it to shoo them away when the creatures became too persistent.
The bum caught up with her four times after that. Twice at the Trevi Fountain. Once in the Campo dei Fiori. Once outside the new museum for the Ara Pacis, the peace monument erected by Augustus that now lived in a modern, cubist home by the hectic road running alongside the Tiber. She was surprised to see him there. It didn’t seem the usual kind of place for street people, and she caught him staring through the windows, engrossed in the beautifully carved monument inside she had only glimpsed from the street too, since paying the entrance fee was beyond her. Homeless men rarely looked at Imperial Roman statuary, she thought. Most of them never looked much at anything at all.
And now he was back near her again–on this hot, sunny summer morning in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure at the weekly market her uncle had told her about. It took place at the foot of the Via dei Polacchi–the street of Poles–and made her homesick every time she went. This was where the poor, migrant Polish community gathered in an impromptu bazaar that was part economic necessity, part reaffirmation of their distant roots. There were cars and vans, all rusty, all belching diesel as they arrived bearing plates from Warsaw and Gdansk. Quickly, not wishing to draw the attention of the police, they threw open their doors and trunks and began selling all the goods that Polish immigrants could not find or, more likely, afford in their new home: spirits and sausage, ham and pastries; some clearly home made, a few possibly illegal.
Felicia knew none of these people. But sometimes the poor were the most generous, particularly when they knew she was Polish too, alone in the city, still a little lost. The Berlin Wall had tumbled to the ground when she was 12 months old, an infant in some small apartment in a suburb of Chicago. She knew this because her parents had told her so often of the joy that followed. Of their own expectant return to the country they had fled in order to throw off the shackles of Communism.
There had always been a shadow in their eyes when they spoke of that decision. As she grew older she knew why. When they left Poland it was a world of black and white, and they returned to one that was a shifting shade of gray. The bad days before she was born was a time of secret police and cruel, arbitrary punishment of dissent, but no one had to travel thousands of miles to a distant country to earn a living. They said something good had been lost alongside the visible, more easily acknowledged bad. Talking to the old men and women who gathered at the foot of the Via dei Polacchi she had come to realize there was a gulf between them and her that could never be bridged, a strange sense of guilty loss she could never share. Yet there was a bond too. She was Polish, she was poor. When she played the right notes–a mazurka, a polonaise–there were misty eyes all around and a constant shower of small coins into the fiddle case.
And on this day there was the tramp too, with a hateful look in his eyes, one that said, she believed…shame on you, shame on you.
As she bowed a slow country dance she told her self that, if he continued with these attentions, she would upbraid him, loudly, in public, with no fear. Who was a tramp to talk to anyone of shame? What gave him the right…?
Then, feeling a hand on her shoulder, she ceased playing and turned to find herself staring into the amiable, bright blue eyes of a middle-aged man in a gray suit. He had a pale, fleshy face with stubbly red cheeks, receding fair hair and the easy, confident demeanor of someone official, like a civil servant or a school headmaster.
“You play beautifully, Felicia,” he said in Polish.
“Do I know you?”
He took out an ID card from his jacket and flashed it in front of her face, too quickly for her to make much sense of the words there.
“No. I am a Polish police officer on attachment here in Rome. There is no need for you to know me.”
She must have looked startled. He placed a hand on her arm and said, in a voice full of reassurance, “Do not be alarmed. There is nothing for you to worry about.” His genial face fell. “I am simply performing an unhappy task which falls to this profession from time to time. Come, I will buy coffee. There is a small place around the corner.”
The man had such a pleasant air of authority that she followed him automatically into the Via dei Polacchi, even though she couldn’t remember any cafe in this direction.
They were halfway along when he stopped her in the shadow of an overhanging building. There was such sadness in his eyes, a sense of regret too.
“I am sorry,” he said in his low, calm voice. “There is no easy way to say this. Your uncle Henryk has been killed.”
Her stomach clenched. Her eyes began to sting. “Killed?”
“Murdered, as he worked. With two other people too. Such a world we live in.”
“In Warsaw?”
He shrugged. “This would never have happened before. Not in the old days. People then had too much respect. Too much fear.”
There were so many questions, and none of them would form themselves into a sensible sentence in Felicia’s mind. “I must go home,” she said finally.
The man was silent for a moment, thinking, a different expression in his eyes, one she couldn’t work out.
“You can’t afford to go home,” he observed, frowning. “What’s there for you anyway? It was never your country. Not really.”
The narrow street was empty. A cloud had skittered across the bright summer sun casting the entire area into sudden gloom.
“I can afford a bus ride,” she answered, suddenly cross.
“No you can’t,” he replied, and took her by both arms. He was strong. His blue eyes now burned, insistent, demanding. “What did your uncle give you? To come here?”
She tried to shake herself free. It was impossible. His grip was too firm.
“Some money…Two thousand euros. It was all he had.”
“Not money,” the man barked at her, his voice rising in volume. “I’m not talking money
.”
He turned his elbow so that his forearm fell beneath her throat and pinned her against the wall as he snatched her fiddle case with his free hand. Then he quickly bent down, flipped up the single latch with his teeth and scrabbled open the lid.
“This is a pauper’s instrument,” he grumbled, and flung the fiddle to the ground. Crumpled sheets of music followed, fluttering to the cobblestones like leaves in autumn. “What did he give you?”
“Nothing. Nothing…”
She stopped. He had discarded the bow and her last piece of rosin, and now had her one remaining spare string, a Thomastik-Infeld Dominant A, in his fingers. He took away his elbow. Before she could run off, he jerked her back and punched her hard in the stomach. The breath disappeared from her lungs. Tears of pain and rage and fear rose in her eyes.
As she began to recover, she saw he had turned the fiddle string into a noose and felt it slip over her head, pushing it down until it rested on her neck. He pulled it, not so tight, only so much that she could feel the familiar wound metal become a cold ligature around her throat.
“Poor little lost girl,” he whispered, his breath rank and hot in her ear. “No home. No friends. No future. One last time…What did he give you?”
“Nothing…Nothing…”
The Thomastik-Infeld Dominant A started to tighten. She was aware of her own breathing, the short, repetitive muscular motion one always took for granted. His face grew huge in her vision. He was smiling. This was, she now realized, the result he wished all along.
Then the smile faded. A low, animal grunt issued from his mouth. His body fell forward, crushing hers against the wall, and a crimson spurt of blood began to gush from between his clenched teeth. She turned her head to avoid the red stream now flowing down his chin, and clawed at the noose on her throat, loosening it, forcing the deadly loop over her hair until it was free and she could manage to drag it over her head.
Something thrust the gray-suited man aside. The tramp was there. A long stiletto knife sat in his right fist, its entire length red with gore.
He dropped the weapon and held out his hand.
“Come with me now,” he said. “There are three of them in a car round the corner. They won’t wait long.”
‘Who are you?’ she mumbled, her head reeling, breath still short.
A car was starting to turn into the narrow street, finding it too difficult to make the corner in one go. The cloud worked free of the sun. Bright, blinding light filled the area around them, enough to make their presence known. She heard Polish voices, and other accents, ones she didn’t recognize. They sounded angry.
“If you stay here you will die,” the tramp insisted. “Like your uncle. Like your mother and your father. Come with me…”
She bent down and picked up her fiddle and bow, roughly pushing them into the case, along with the scrappy sheets of music.
And then they ran.
He had a scooter round the corner. A brand new purple Vespa with a rental sticker on the rear mudguard. She climbed on the back automatically, hanging tight, the fiddle case still in her grip, as he roared through the narrow lanes trying to lose the vehicle behind.
It wasn’t easy. She turned her head and saw the car bouncing off the ancient stone walls of the quarter, following them down narrow alleys the wrong way. She knew this area. It was one of her favorites for its unexpected sights and the way the buildings ranged across the centuries, sometimes as far back as the age of Caesar.
He was going the wrong way and she knew it but they were there before she could tell him. The Vespa screamed to a halt in a dead-end alley sealed off by freshly painted black iron railings, a view point over the tangled ruins around the Pescaria, the imperial fish market that led to the vast circular stump of the Theatre of Marcellus, like some smaller Colosseum cut short by a giant’s knife. There was no road, only a narrow pathway down into the mess of columns and shattered walls.
They ran and stumbled across threadbare grass through the low petrified forest of dusty granite and marble. She could hear shouts behind and anguished cries in Polish. Then she heard a shot. The tramp’s strong hand grasped her as she tripped over a fluted portion of shattered column. Panting for breath, she found herself in the angry mass of traffic beneath the looming theatre. He dragged her into the mob of vehicles. Halfway across the road there was a young man on a scooter, long black hair falling out from beneath his helmet.
The tramp kicked him out of the seat, then screamed at her to get onto the pillion.
She didn’t need to think any more. She didn’t want to. They wound a sinuous route through the snarled-up vehicles, found the sidewalk on the river side of the road, roared over the cobbles, out to the Lungotevere. The traffic was just as bad there.
She dared to turn. Over the road, fighting through the cars, were three men, guns in their hands.
She swore. She prayed. And then they were through, on the Tiber side of the road, rattling down the steps that led down to the water and the long broad concrete of the flood defenses.
Two days before she’d walked here, wondering, thinking, trying to work out where she belonged. Not yet 20, born in a country that had forgotten her, without parents. And now, she reflected, without her uncle who had come to her rescue when she found herself orphaned. She clung on, tears in her eyes, determined they’d be spent before this man who had both rescued and kidnapped her would look into her face again.
After half a mile, they raced up a long walkway and returned to the road, riding steadily through San Giovanni, past the street where she lived. In her head she said good-bye to the few belongings she had there: a Bible little read; some photos; a few cheap clothes; a music case with some much-loved pieces.
They found the autovia and she saw the sign to the airport. A few miles short of Fiumicino he turned the Vespa into the drive of a low, modern hotel, found a hidden space in the car park at the rear, stopped and turned off the engine.
She got off the scooter without being asked.
“You did well,” the man said simply, staring at her.
“Did I have a choice?”
“If you want to live, no, you don’t. Have you already forgotten you are in grave danger?”
She glanced at the scooter. “Is that what you are? A thief?”
He nodded, and she wondered if there was the slightest of smiles behind the matted, grubby beard. “A thief. That’s correct, Felicia. We must go inside now.”
He waved the key as they rushed past reception, and went to the first floor where he opened the door and ushered her into his room. It was a suite, elegant and expensive, the kind she had only seen in movies. There were two large suitcases already packed on the floor. The pillows of the bed were covered with scattered chocolates. He picked up a couple and gave them to her. She ate greedily. It was good chocolate, the best. The room, she understood, had been waiting here, empty, running up a bill, perhaps for weeks.
“Do you have a passport with you?” he asked.
“Of course. It is the law.”
She showed him.
“I meant the other. You have dual nationality. This is important.”
“No.” She shook her head forcefully. “I am Polish only. That was an accident of birth.”
“A lucky accident,” he grumbled, and picked up a briefcase by the side of the bed. The man–she could no longer think of him as a tramp–pulled out a blue document, an American passport.
“Your name now is Joanna Phelps. Your mother was Polish, which explains your accent. You are a student at college in Baltimore. Remember all this.”
She didn’t take the passport, though she couldn’t stop herself staring at the gold eagle on the cover.
“Why?” she asked.
“You know why, Felicia,” he replied.
“I don’t, really…”
His strong hands suddenly held her shoulders, shaking her slender frame. His eyes were fierce and unavoidable.
“What’s your name? What’s your nam
e?”
“My name is Felicia Kaminski. I am nineteen years old. A citizen of the Polish Republic. I was born…”
“Felicia Kaminski is dead,” he cut in. “Be careful you don’t join her.”
Stepping back, he said, “Do not answer the door to anyone. Eat and drink from the mini bar if you need something. I must–” he stared at the grubby clothes, hating them–“do something.”
He took new clothes out of one of the cases and disappeared into the bathroom. She looked at the second piece of luggage. It seemed expensive. The label bore the name Joanna Phelps and an address in Baltimore. Felicia opened it and found that it was full of new jeans, skirts, shirts and underwear. They were all the right size, and must have cost more than she earned in an entire month.
When he came out he was wearing a dark business suit with a white shirt and elegant silk red tie. He was no more than 40, handsome, Italian-looking, with a sallow skin, clean shaven, rough and red in places from the razor. He had dark, darting eyes and long hair wet from the shower, slicked back on his head, black mostly, with gray flecks. His face seemed more lined than she felt it ought to be, as if there had been pain somewhere, or illness.
He had a phone in his hand.
“In an hour, Joanna, we will go to Fiumicino,” he said. “There will be a ticket waiting for you at the first class Alitalia counter. You show them your passport, check in and go straight to the lounge. I will meet you there. I shall be behind you all the way. Do not stop after immigration. Do not look at me. Do not acknowledge me until we have landed and I approach you.”
The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller Page 3