The Interpreter's Twin

Chapter 3: Aunt Ruth's Kitchen

POV: Nadia Brandt

~

The fire report was in a box on the top shelf of her closet, buried under two winter scarves and a bag of tangled cables she kept meaning to sort.

Nadia had not opened it in two years.

That night she took it down and sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor with the lid off, the way another person might sit with an old photo album. Then she went through it slowly, page by page.

Forty pages of dense Italian from the Milan fire authority. A floor plan of the Hotel Aurelia with the third floor shaded in grey. A stack of photographs she turned face down without looking.

And near the end, one summary line, which she read three times.

"L'identificazione della vittima di sesso femminile è avvenuta tramite cartelle dentarie ed effetti personali, ovvero un anello d'argento." (The identification of the female victim was made through dental records and personal effects, namely one silver ring.)

The report called it an accident. An electrical fault in a service corridor, a fire that climbed through the walls faster than the sprinklers could answer. Two dead.

The second victim was a man, and she noticed now, with a strange delayed chill, that his name appeared nowhere in the document. There were only two words where it should have been, and the rest of the line was blacked out.

"Maschio, adulto." (Male, adult.)

Nadia sat there looking at that black bar for a long time.

She had signed the release for her sister's body without reading a single page of this. She had been standing in a hospital corridor in Milan with her ears ringing, and Aunt Ruth had put a pen in her hand and steadied the paper against the wall.

Sign here, tesoro (sweetheart). Just here.

And Nadia had signed exactly where she was told.

---

Ruth lived on the Upper West Side, in a fifth-floor walk-up that smelled like lemon polish and old paper. The door opened before Nadia could even knock.

"Sit, sit. You look like you haven't eaten since Tuesday."

"It is Tuesday."

"Then you haven't eaten since last Tuesday." Ruth waved her inside.

She was sixty-three, small and very upright, with silver hair pinned at the back of her head and a green cardigan she had owned for twenty years. She had held Nadia's hand at their mother's funeral, and again at Vera's. She had held Vera first, when the twins were three days old and Ruth had just come back from a long posting overseas, an old friend of their mother's from before either of them could remember.

If Nadia had any family left in the world, it was mostly this woman and this kitchen.

The soup was already on the table. It was chicken and rice, thin and salty and exactly the way it had been every winter of Nadia's life. The tea came after, in the mismatched cups Ruth refused to replace.

On the shelf above the stove sat their mother's dented recipe tin, the one Ruth had offered her after the funeral. Nadia had taken it home and held onto it for a week. Then she had carried it back and set it on that shelf, because she couldn't stand the way her apartment smelled every time she opened the lid.

It smells like her kitchen, she had said. It should stay in one.

Ruth had only nodded.

Tonight Nadia told her about the offer. She did not tell her all of it. She left out the word she had changed, and the way Lev Sorokin's eyes had gone still on her ring, and she could not have said why. It felt like something she needed to keep to herself a little longer before anyone else got their hands on it.

"He offered me a job," she said.

"Who did?"

"Lev Sorokin."

Ruth's cup stopped halfway to her mouth. She lowered it carefully into the saucer.

"Well," she said.

"I said no."

"Did you?"

Ruth studied her over the rim of her glasses, and the look went on a beat too long, as if she were weighing something she hadn't yet decided to say.

"Tesoro (Sweetheart), I have to be honest with you. I think you should take it."

"You want me to work for the man who—"

"I want you to look him in the eye every single day, and find out what he knows."

Ruth reached across the table and covered Nadia's hand with her own. Her fingers were dry and warm and smelled faintly of lemon.

"Two years you have been asking what happened to your sister. You ask it in this kitchen, and I keep giving you soup. Maybe it is time you asked it in his."

"That is dangerous."

"It's Vera," Ruth said gently. "Vera would have done it."

It was the only argument that had ever really worked on Nadia, and Ruth knew that. They sat for a while in the small yellow light while the radiator knocked against the wall.

Nadia thought about telling her everything. The phone call in the dark. The train station. The ring, and the strange careful way that Lev had asked her never to take it off.

She almost did.

But Ruth refilled her tea, and asked, in the mildest voice in the world, "Did the clerk hold up, at least? The one from Genoa?"

"He was fine," Nadia said.

Ruth smiled and patted her hand, and the moment passed.

She was at the door with her coat half buttoned before the question caught up with her.

Which clerk?

She was almost certain she had not mentioned any clerk. She had said she'd been at a hearing. She had said it was for Sorokin Freight. She had said nothing at all about Genoa.

But she had been tired for two days, and lately she said a great many things that she could not remember saying.

Ruth kissed her on both cheeks and said, "Take the job." Then the door closed, and Nadia went down five flights of stairs with the question still turning quietly at the back of her mind.

---

It was nearly nine o'clock when she came out onto the stoop and into the cold.

Across the street, under a streetlight that had been burned out for weeks, a man stood with his phone raised.

He was photographing her.

She did not run. That was the strange part. She stood on the pavement with her hands in her coat pockets and her breath clouding in front of her, and she looked straight back at him.

After a moment, he lowered the phone and crossed the road without any hurry at all.

Grey suit. Cropped dark hair. She had seen him yesterday, sitting alone against a wall.

"Ms. Brandt," said Dmitri Volkov. His accent was faint, Russian worn smooth by years of living somewhere else. "Mr. Sorokin likes to know who he is dealing with."

"Then he can ask me himself."

"He did. You left."

He studied her face the way he had in the conference room, for far too long to be polite, as if he were checking it against something he carried in his head. Then he shook his head, very slightly.

"You look exactly like her."

"I know."

"No." His voice dropped, and there was no threat in it, which somehow made it worse. "I mean exactly. Be careful, Ms. Brandt. There are people who will not notice the difference."

He slid the phone into his pocket and walked back into the dark.

Nadia was left standing on the cold stone, turning the ring on her finger. Around and around.

She was still there when the phone in her coat pocket began to ring.

She did not need to look at the screen.

Somehow, she already knew what it would say.

~

Yes, it was small. Yes, it was on purpose.