Felicia Kaminski left the airport with none of her new clothes — none but what she wore, that is. Her fancy new suitcase was somewhere in the bowels of the airport, already checked and on its way to the aircraft that would dead-head it to New York. She kept the money too, but beyond that, she carried only those items that were rightfully hers — her backpack and her violin.
She had the taxi drop her at the foot of Via dei Polacchi, and she added a generous tip to the fare. What was the point of a windfall if it couldn’t be shared with others? The driver thanked her effusively and offered three times to wait for her while she ran whatever errand she was on, but after she’d steadfastly refused, he finally understood that her insistent “no” meant just that, and he drove on.
She waited until the taxi was out of sight around the corner before she started walking up the hill. She’d never actually visited the shop she was looking for — La Musica — but she’d sipped coffee with Abe Nowakowski, the proprietor, several times since she’d arrived in Rome. Signor Abe and her uncle had shared a childhood, it turned out, living only a few houses away from each other in the old country. Uncle Henryk had asked his friend to look in on her from time to time. During their last meeting, at a cafe near the Pantheon, only a few dozen meters from the spot where she had first encountered the man who called himself Faust, Abe’s demeanor had been different than it had been before. His easy humor seemed clouded by something dark.
During one of her visits, she asked, “Are you feeling all right?”
He’d smiled, but it wasn’t convincing. “I am just getting old, that is all,” he said. He paused a moment before adding, “I am concerned for you, Felicia.”
So that was it. “I enjoy my life, Signor Abe. I understand that you worry about me, but as I’ve told you before—”
He cut her off with a dismissive flick of his hand. “I know what you have to say, so let’s pretend that you have already said it and move on. I want you to promise me something.”
She cocked her head, waiting. When dealing with her uncle’s generation, it never paid to make a promise before all terms had been revealed.
“If anything happens to you, if ever you are in any trouble, I want you to come to me.”
Looking back on the conversation now, she wondered if Signor Abe hadn’t known something. Even at the time, she’d felt her pulse quicken with his sense of urgent mystery.
He’d read her expression exactly, and hurried to soothe her. “I don’t mean to frighten you,” he’d said. “As I get older I sometimes worry about things that perhaps I shouldn’t. But if there ever comes a time when you feel as if you are in danger — or even if there comes a time when you merely feel lonely or hungry for some of my fettuccini — I want you to promise that you will come by the shop. I worry that I am not showing you the hospitality that I should. I don’t want to disappoint my dear friend Henryk.”
That conversation had taken place only two weeks ago. Now, as she walked purposefully up the hill, she forced her mind to think of music. If she could bridge the synapses of her brain with triplettes and chromatic scales, maybe there would be no room left for her fear. No room left for the looming grief that awaited her when she finally confronted the fact of her uncle’s death.
She walked faster. The increased tempo brought to her imagination the sound of American bluegrass music — fiddle music instead of the violin — a music form that she’d never taken seriously until she’d listened to a CD that featured Yo Yo Ma bringing sounds out of his cello that she had never heard before. She heard alternating strains of joy and melancholy. She’d tried to recreate the sounds in her own violin, but could never quite discover them. It was if those particular strands of musical DNA could not be found in an instrument played by a Polish girl whose childhood was steeped in classical training.
Kaminski saw the sign for La Musica from a block away, and instantly wished that the walk could have been longer. With a few more steps, perhaps she could have found the emotional strength she craved, the strength she needed before breaking terrible news to such a nice man. But it was not to be. She had arrived, and she could think of no reason not to enter the shop.
Passing across the threshold was like stepping backward a hundred years. Narrow, dark and deep, the shop reminded her of a cave; where there would be bats, dozens of violins and violas and cellos hung instead from the ceiling, each of them glimmering as if they’d been freshly dusted. Double basses lined the left hand wall, and along the right, countless pages of sheet music peeked out from above their wooden racks. At the very back of the store…
Actually, she couldn’t see the back of the store through the shadows that cloaked it.
“Felicia?”
The voice came from behind her — from the cash register she had not seen, hidden away as it was around the corner at the very front of the store. She instantly recognized the heavily accented voice as that of Signor Abe, but she jumped anyway as she whirled to look at him.
“Felicia, what’s wrong?” Even as he spoke, he was on his way around to the front of the tiny counter, moving as quickly as his arthritic hips would allow him. “What has happened?”
The flood of emotion hit out of nowhere, all at once. “Uncle Henryk is dead,” she managed to say, but her next words were lost in her sobs.
Abe Nowakowski locked the door to his shop at mid-day, something he’d never done before, and helped his beautiful young friend up the back steps to his flat on the second floor. There he fixed her some tea and listened to her story.
Kaminski hated herself for losing control of her emotions this way, but there were times in the next hour when she feared that her tears would never stop. They did, of course, eventually, but she sensed that Signor Abe would have sat with her for as long as he needed to.
“These things take time,” he said. He was a little man, a round man, with leathery skin and thick white hair that could never be tamed by a comb. When he spoke softly like this, his normally strong voice grew raspy. “I lost my Maria six years ago now, and while sometimes it feels as though the hole in my heart has healed, there are days when the pain is as raw as the day she died. I’ve come to think of the pain as proof that I loved her as much as I told her I did.”
The tea was awful, overly strong and overly sweet. “Did you know this might happen to my uncle, Signor Abe?” she asked.
The question seemed to startle the old man.
“The other day, when we met for coffee, you asked me to make a promise. I made it, and here I am. But I was wondering…”
She let her voice trail as Signor Abe let his gaze fall to his lap. The body language answered her question; now she hoped that he wouldn’t dishonor her uncle’s memory with a transparent lie to protect her feelings.
“I had an inkling, yes,” he said. “Your uncle called me shortly before you and I met. He seemed…agitated. He spoke hurriedly, as if he were trying to get his message out before he could be interrupted. Or perhaps before he could change his mind.” Nowakowski took a deep breath and let it go slowly. When he resumed speaking, his rasp had deepened. “He told me that he would be sending me a package for safe keeping. He said that it would be too dangerous for him to have the package with him, and that by sending it to me it would truly be safe.”
“Did the package come?”
He ignored the interruption. “I of course agreed, but then he called the very next day. This time, he was clearly frightened. He said that he hadn’t thought things through very clearly before he mailed it, and he was terrified that people might think that he had sent it to you instead. It’s what people would naturally think of anything he sent to Rome. He asked me to check in with you more frequently, and to try and find out if you had been in any danger. He wanted me to do this without alarming you, of course.”