The Interpreter's Twin

Chapter 4: What the Note Said

POV: Nadia Brandt

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By the time she dragged the phone out of her pocket, it had stopped ringing.

The screen was still lit. Nadia stood on the freezing pavement outside Ruth's building and stared at the two words on it, which were the only two words she had been afraid of seeing.

Missed call: VERA. 8:58 p.m.

Her hands were shaking so badly that she nearly dropped the phone. She pressed the name and lifted it to her ear, and she listened to the line connect, click, and hiss.

Then a recorded woman spoke, cool and polite and impossibly calm.

"Il numero da lei chiamato non è al momento raggiungibile." (The number you have called is not reachable at the moment.)

Nadia closed her eyes.

"Riprovi più tardi." (Please try again later.)

She lowered the phone. Somewhere behind her a taxi hissed through a puddle, and a couple laughed on the corner, and life on the Upper West Side went on being ordinary, as if her sister had not just tried to call her from the dead for the second time in twenty hours.

She did not know whether the number was real. She did not know whether the voice on the first call had been Vera's, or a recording, or a cruel stranger with a phone and a grudge. She only knew that in three days, a dead woman's number had rung twice, a man had photographed her from the dark, and someone had slipped a note into her mailbox that had made her lie to a court.

And every single strange thing had led her back to the same place.

Lev Sorokin.

---

She took the train home, because her legs would not have carried her forty blocks a second time.

The subway car was almost empty. A tired man in a kitchen uniform slept against the window. A teenager bobbed her head to music that leaked from her headphones. Nadia sat beside the door with her bag on her knees and watched her own reflection slide along the dark glass.

She made herself think it through in order, the way she would break down a difficult sentence.

Monday, a witness says a name, and she erases it. That was one.

Monday, a man against the wall looks at her as if she has walked out of a grave. That was two.

Tuesday, Lev Sorokin knows about the word, tells her he knows, and offers her a job instead of a lawsuit. That was three.

Tuesday, Dmitri Volkov takes her photograph and warns her that some people will not notice the difference. That was four.

And beneath all of it, the calls at 3:12 and 8:58, and a voice on a train platform in a country where her sister had supposedly burned to death.

Nadia pressed her forehead against the cold glass.

It was not a coincidence. She had spent eleven years listening for the moment a sentence stopped making sense, and she knew the sound of one that had been arranged. Somebody was moving pieces around her. She could not see their hands, but she could feel the board shifting under her feet.

Ruth was right about one thing. Sitting in that kitchen, drinking soup, would never show her who it was.

The only place she could get closer to the truth was the same place she was most afraid to go.

She got off at Astoria Boulevard and walked the last three blocks without seeing any of them.

---

Her apartment was dark and cold. She did not turn on the overhead light. She lit the small lamp on the kitchen table and sat down with her laptop, still in her coat, and opened Katherine Doyle's email from that morning.

The offer was attached. She read it all the way through, every clause, the way she read everything. One year. Full-time. Three times her current rate. Travel to New York, Milan and Como at the client's expense.

It was a very good contract.

It was also, she thought, exactly what a spider would offer a fly, if the spider were polite.

She sat with her fingers hovering over the keys for a long time.

Then she typed four lines.

Ms. Doyle, please tell Mr. Sorokin that I accept. I will need the full terms in writing, including the travel schedule. I can start Monday. Nadia Brandt.

She read it once. She did not let herself read it twice.

She pressed send, and the small whooshing sound it made seemed far too loud in the empty room.

Her stomach turned over. She had just agreed to spend a year beside the man she believed had killed her sister, and she had done it in the space of about ninety seconds.

But it was done. And underneath the fear, if she was honest, there was something else, small and hard and steady, like a coal being blown on in the dark.

For the first time in two years, she was doing something.

---

It was after midnight when she finally took the note out of her coat.

She had not looked at it since yesterday morning. She had carried it through a deposition and a forty-block walk and a bowl of soup, folded small in her pocket, and she had not had the courage to open it again. Some part of her had been afraid that in daylight, it would turn out to be nothing.

She smoothed it flat on the table beneath the lamp.

It was an ordinary square of white paper, torn from a notepad, the kind with a thin blue line. The handwriting was small and slanted and looped in the strangest places. The tail of every y curled back on itself like a fishhook. The sevens had a crossbar through the middle, the way Europeans write them.

Nadia knew that handwriting the way she knew her own pulse.

It was on grocery lists that had once been stuck to the refrigerator. It was on birthday cards with too many exclamation marks. It was on a hundred notes tucked into two school lunch bags, one for each twin, always the same words underneath.

Be brave. Be kind. Come home.

Her mother's handwriting.

She read the note through slowly.

Nadia. On Monday, a man named Enzo Ferri will say the name Amsel in that room. When he does, do not repeat it. Say that the manager signed. Do not ask me why. Trust me the way you used to. Mama.

Nadia read it once. Then again. Then a third time, and something in her chest went very cold and very quiet.

It was not the handwriting that frightened her.

It was the name.

A woman who had died five years ago could not have known that a port clerk from Genoa would be sitting in a conference room in Manhattan on Monday. She could not have known that he would say a name. She could not have known that Nadia would be the one who spoke for him.

Her mother had been dead for five years.

Nadia had watched the coffin close. She had held Vera's hand while they lowered it, and she had thrown a fistful of cold earth onto the lid, and it had made a sound she still heard sometimes when she couldn't sleep.

So who had written this?

She stared at the little slanted letters, at the fishhook tails and the crossed sevens, until they blurred. Whoever it was had known her mother's hand well enough to copy it without a single flaw. Whoever it was had known exactly what to sign at the bottom, and exactly how to reach her.

Trust me the way you used to.

Nobody alive should have known that phrase.

Nadia sat perfectly still in the yellow circle of the lamp, with the note trembling faintly between her fingers, and the whole dark apartment listened around her.

~