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Author: Jeffery Deaver
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 homemade, 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
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 homemade, 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