Free Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry

were out taking pictures, and there were sausage vendors all around. She went to the newspaper stand.
    “Eine Zeitung, bitte,”
she said.
    Vivian brought back the
Berliner Morgenpost
and scanned the headlines. “I wonder if anyone has reported about this.”
    “What?” I said. I glanced over Vivian’s shoulder. “No one knows he’s there. How could it be in the paper?”
    Vivian flipped through the first dozen pages. “Arvo is missing from his unit, right? The Russians who threw him off the bridge think he’s dead, but everyone else must think he ran away.”
    No wonder Vivian got a hundred percent on every quiz at school, because I never would have thought of that.
    “Those officers will be waiting for somebody to find the body,” Vivian went on. “If it doesn’t turn up somewhere along the river, they’re going to start searching for it, and I bet they’ll begin right from the spot they heaved him into the water.”
    “Oh my gosh,” Giselle said. “We need a plan.”
    I started walking toward the S-Bahn station on the west end of the park. “So we need to move the body of an almost,but not quite, dead guy. How are we going to do that? Carry him? Toy wagon? Wheelchair?”
    The glass dome over the hippo habitat started to show above the trees. I swerved onto a path going south to take us around the zoo. I could smell the sharp, sour fish smell from the penguin exhibit.
    “I don’t know, Jody,” Giselle said. “A moving target is the easiest thing to find. What if we just hid him where he is? He was hard to see today all wrapped up in green and hiding under that bush, and we knew exactly where to look for him.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “They would be looking for a dead body, so probably they’d only look along the bank and not up under the bridge.”
    “He might be fine for a while under the bridge, but there’s no way he’s going to get all the way to Estonia with no money and no paperwork,” Vivian said.
    We walked on a little farther, past the pond with flamingos. Eventually the fishy smells of animal feed were replaced with the smell of fried pork and mustard from the bratwurst cart that always stood by the zoo entrance.
    “What we need is an excuse for a grown-up to travel with three kids who are obviously too old to be his kids,” Giselle said.
    I frowned and kicked at the gravel on the path. “What we need is something like a school field trip.”
    We came out of the park and headed toward the S-Bahnstation. There was a record store, and we all automatically stopped and looked in the window at a bunch of mannequins with pink and orange Mohawks and black leather jackets. There was an album cover from U2 and one from Madonna and one from the Bangles. The Bangles were my favorite because they were an all-girl band.
    An all-girl band. I stood stock-still, hardly daring to taste the idea. I closed my eyes. Could it actually work?
    “We need something like our music teacher, Herr Arvo Kross, taking his string trio to the Solo and Ensemble Contest in Paris this Friday.”
    Vivi and Giselle turned from the window and just looked at me. I got chills.
    We headed toward the train and walked the last block very slowly. We didn’t say anything so as not to spoil the perfectness of the idea. By the time we came to the station, we were grinning like fools.
    “Oh my gosh, could we really make this work?” Vivian almost whispered. “Could we save Arvo and still get our trip to Paris?”
    I nodded. We turned to Giselle.
    “I am not giving up on Paris,” she said. “We’ll never play together again if we don’t go. We worked hard on our piece, and we could win this year, you know we could!”
    “We could win,” Vivi said. “And we could be in Paris! Just us. No diplomats to meet. No stupid receptions like we have every time I travel with my mom.”
    Just us and music, I thought. One perfect weekend before I leave Germany forever.
    “We can do this,” I said. “We have to do this. Arvo needs