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.