Sign for Me

The cello under my hands is worth nine million euros, and a man built it for me.

Tonight I’m going to tell forty people it’s a lie.

Chapter 1

My phone lights up at 2:04 in the morning.

Mira: come down. fire escape. I need to tell you about the violin

I’m awake anyway. I’ve been lying on my bed in my jeans for an hour, doing the math on my bank account. It doesn’t take long. There isn’t much to add up.

The phone buzzes again.

Mira: now tess. please

I sit up.

Mira doesn’t say please. I’ve lived across a tiny kitchen from her for three weeks, and I’ve never heard it once. She says move, Callan. She says you’re boring, Callan. She says one more cigarette and then bed, which is always a lie.

I shove my feet into my boots without lacing them and go.

We live on the fourth floor of the student wing, the old part of the Cäcilia where the pipes bang all night and the stairs smell of floor polish. The fire escape is an iron staircase bolted to the back of the building. It comes down into the lane behind the school, where the bins are. Nobody walks there at night. That’s why Mira smokes on the bottom step. The night porter can’t see her from his desk.

I take the inside stairs two at a time. Fourth floor. Third.

The second floor landing has a tall window that looks straight down into the lane. I don’t mean to stop. I just look, the way you look out of any window you pass.

She’s there.

Bottom step, knees pulled up, a cigarette between her fingers. She’s still in her salon makeup, the dark lipstick she stole off me at seven o’clock. She’s changed into one of her big white linen shirts, and it almost glows under the one lamp. Her hair is piled up in the messy knot she does when she plays.

A car turns into the lane with its lights off.

That’s the first wrong thing. Cars don’t come down here. The lane is barely wide enough for the bins.

It stops right by the steps. A man gets out. He’s big, in a long dark coat, and he doesn’t rush. That’s the second wrong thing. People rush at two in the morning. They’re cold, or they’re drunk, or they’re lost.

He isn’t any of those.

Mira stands up. She says something to him. I can see her mouth moving and her hands going, the way they always go when she talks. She shakes her head.

He takes her arm.

She pulls. He doesn’t let go. He opens the back door of the car with his free hand, calm, like he’s holding it for her outside a nice restaurant.

I bang my palm on the window. It’s old glass, thick, painted shut a hundred years ago. It makes a dull little thud and nothing else.

Mira looks up.

She looks straight at me. For one second it’s just her face. Freckles. Smudged lipstick. Then she gives me one small shake of the head.

No. Stay there.

He puts his hand on top of her head and pushes her into the back seat. The door shuts. It doesn’t even slam.

I run.

Down the last two floors. Along the back corridor. I hit the fire door so hard it bounces off the wall. The alarm’s been broken since before I got here, so nothing screams. Nothing at all.

The lane is empty.

No car. No engine. No red lights at the end of the street. Just the bins, and the lamp, and a cold that goes straight through my T shirt.

Her cigarette is on the bottom step. Still burning.

I stand there and watch it burn, because my brain won’t give me anything else to do. Then I look at my phone.

2:10.

I call her. It rings. And rings. Then her voicemail picks up, and it’s her, laughing, saying something in Czech and then it’s Mira, you know what to do.

I call again. This time it doesn’t ring at all. Straight to voicemail.

Her phone’s off.

“Fuck,” I tell the empty lane. “Fuck. Fuck."

The porter’s desk is empty. His chair is pushed back. There’s a paper cup of coffee next to his keyboard, and when I touch it, it’s stone cold.

I go back upstairs and sit at the kitchen table with my phone in front of me.

I type in the number for the police. One, three, three. My thumb hangs over the call button.

No. Stay there.

She knew him. That’s what I keep coming back to. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She argued with him, the way you argue with someone you’ve met before. And then she looked up at me and told me to stay out of it.

So I don’t press it. I tell myself she’ll text. Mira always texts. She texts me from the toilet. She texts me from the next room.

On the fridge there’s her milk, with a label in her big loopy writing: MIRA NOVÁK, HANDS OFF, CALLAN. She’s drawn the little line over the A so big and so slanted it looks like it’s flying off the word.

The first night, she caught me saying her name wrong and made me practice it until I got it right. No-vaak. The line makes it long, Tess. It’s important. Without it, it’s not my name. It’s some other girl.

I sit and stare at that little line until the window goes gray.

She doesn’t text.

At eight I’m outside the admin office before they even unlock it.

The woman behind the desk has a neat gray bob and reading glasses on a chain. She gives me the smile everyone here gives the scholarship girl. Polite. Already a bit tired of me.

“I need to report something,” I say. “My flatmate. Mira Novák. Someone took her last night. A man put her in a car behind the building at two in the morning, and her phone’s been off ever since.”

She doesn’t write anything down. She types. She reads her screen.

“Miss Novák has withdrawn from the Akademie,” she says.

I actually laugh. It comes out wrong. “She’s what?”

“Withdrawn. A family matter. We were informed this morning.”

“It’s eight o’clock.”

“The notice came in overnight.” She takes her glasses off. “The first weeks can be very hard, Miss…?”

“Callan.”

“Miss Callan. Students go home. It happens every year.”

“She didn’t go home. She played a salon last night. She came back at two. She was sitting on the step having a fag.” I can hear my voice climbing, getting more Manchester with every word. “She told me they were giving her a Guarneri to play. A real one, three hundred years old. She was over the moon about it. Nobody packs up and fucks off back to Brno the same night someone hands them a Guarneri.”

Her face shuts like a door.

“Language, please,” she says. “Miss Novák’s decision is her own. If you have concerns, the police are the correct place for them. Is there anything else?”

There’s a lot else. There’s a man in a long coat, and a car with no lights, and a cigarette nobody finished.

But she’s already looking past me, at the boy waiting behind me with his cello case.

When I get back upstairs, Mira’s door is open.

It wasn’t open when I left.

I stand in the doorway for a long time before I go in.

The room is empty. Not Mira empty, the way she left it yesterday, with dresses on the floor and three coffee cups on the windowsill. Actually empty. The bed is stripped to the bare mattress. The wardrobe door hangs open, and there’s nothing inside but hangers. The fairy lights she pinned over her bed are gone. The ashtray she hid from the porter is gone. Her violin case is gone.

The little blue dish on her windowsill is gone too. That’s where she leaves her green stone every morning. Her mum gave her that pendant with one rule: never wear it before midnight. Before midnight it’s just a rock, Tess. After midnight it’s magic. Mira is the least careful person I’ve ever met, and she never once broke that rule.

I didn’t see if she had it on last night. I was too busy watching his hands.

Someone cleared all this out in the forty minutes I was downstairs.

The only thing left of her is the smell. Cigarettes, and the cheap vanilla perfume she buys three bottles at a time.

And an envelope on the bare mattress, with my name typed on the front.

I open it. One sheet. Typed too.

Tess, I am sorry to leave like this. There is trouble at home and I have to go back. Please don’t worry about me and please don’t make a fuss. Thank you for being my friend. Mira

Under that, signed in blue pen, small and neat: Mira Novak.

Mira doesn’t write small and neat. Mira doesn’t say don’t make a fuss. Mira is the fuss.

And there’s no line over the A.

I read it three times. Then I sit down on her bare mattress with the letter in my lap, and for the first time since 2:10, my hands stop shaking.

I’m not scared anymore. I’m fucking furious.

Someone in this building took her.

And they think I slept through it.