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 herself 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.”