Working
Catalina
The first full session was at nine sharp on Wednesday, and Rhain Solberg was eight minutes late.
I had been expecting him to be on time.
Norwegian diplomats were always on time. It was custom that you arrived at the room at the start of the hour, not the start of the meeting, with three minutes to spare for the arrangement of paperwork and the small confirmation handshake with your counterparts.
Bjorn had been at the conference suite at eight forty-three. Yuki had been in the corridor at eight fifty-five.
The U.S. delegation had been in the suite at eight fifty-nine on the dot, in the small competitive courtesy of a State Department team that had been briefed twice on Northern formality and didn’t intend to cede a single small point on it.
Rhain came in at nine-oh-eight. Deliberately. He entered with a coffee in his hand and an apology that sounded sincere enough to be insulting if you knew how much work had gone into it.
“Apologies,” was all he said.
His eyes found me, briefly and exactly. The room got briefly warmer. Then he sat down across the table from me.
I could tell he was about to spend the next two hours pretending we hadn’t stood three feet apart in a receiving hall yesterday and recognized something in one another.
I respected the discipline.
I returned the favor.
Yuki ran the meeting. The Norwegian elder Bjorn sat at her left. The U.S. ambassador’s senior trade representative sat opposite, flanked by two deputies. I sat in the translator’s chair behind the U.S. principal, my notebook open, pen uncapped, expression neutral.
Dominic was at the wall opposite the door. He had walked me up four flights of stairs at eight forty-two and had taken the angle that put the door, the windows, Yuki, Rhain, and me in the same sweep of his peripheral vision. He hadn’t moved since.
Coffee at seven. He hadn’t said more than four words. The four words had been Good morning, Ms. Cordero.
He had been at my door when I went to sleep. Still there when I woke up. He hadn’t appeared to have slept.
His left cuff was buttoned a quarter inch off. As if he had dressed at four in the morning by the light of a corridor sconce. I hadn’t mentioned it.
I translated. I did it well.
I did it without looking at Rhain Solberg for any longer than required. Rhain didn’t look at me at all. He was making a point.
I made a counterpoint of my own, which was that I was going to be excellent at my job in front of him. I was going to be the best translator in the room, the best translator he had ever sat across from, the best translator anyone in Northern Europe had heard of.
He could refuse to look at me, but I would speak so cleanly he would have no choice but to listen.
It worked. I caught him three times.
Once on a piece of internal Norwegian grammar that the senior trade rep hadn’t understood, where I rendered it twice, both ways, and added the diplomatic phrase that sat between them.
Rhain’s pen stopped moving for half a second.
Once on a Mandarin phrase the Ashenmere deputy used that carried a regional inflection.
Sichuanese, because the deputy was originally from Chengdu.
I rendered it in the Beijing standard the table was operating in, which let the Norwegian side hear what Yuki wanted them to hear and also let me, very gently, signal to the Sichuanese deputy that I had heard what she said.
She nodded at me across the table. A small unexpected gift, received and acknowledged.
The third time was a piece of code-switched English where Rhain used a Norwegian idiom in the middle of an English sentence.
? g? rundt gr?ten. To walk around the porridge. The Norwegian for beating around the bush.
I rendered it cleanly in English with the idiom intact, in the way that signaled to a native Norwegian speaker that I had understood the joke without flagging the joke for the rest of the table.
Rhain’s pen stopped moving for a full second that time. Still, he didn’t look at me. But something at the line of his jaw eased.
Dominic shifted against the wall.
The meeting continued.
Trade language has a quality when everyone in the room is pretending not to threaten one another.
The words become soft around the edges. Reliability.
Partnership. Mutual interest. Review structure.
Supply stability. Every phrase polished smooth enough so that no one cuts their hand on the blade inside.
I had spent six years learning how to see the blade.
Yuki asked for clarification on delivery penalties. Bjorn answered in Norwegian. The U.S. principal leaned back in his chair, pleased by the rhythm of a conversation he didn’t fully understand.
I translated.
Bjorn’s answer was careful. Too careful. He used the formal term for disruption but not the technical term for breach. The difference mattered. A disruption could be weather, port strikes, political pressure from a third-party clan. A breach was failure. I rendered it as disruption.
Rhain looked at his notes. Dominic looked at Rhain. Yuki looked at me.
The smallest possible pause passed between us.
The U.S. principal made a note. “So we’re discussing a review trigger, not a penalty trigger.”
I translated that into Norwegian, then back into English for Yuki’s side, because diplomacy was partly language and partly making everyone feel as if they had reached the same conclusion on purpose.
Rhain finally looked at me. Directly. Only for a second.
I kept my voice even.
The meeting broke at eleven fifteen with three unresolved clauses, two minor concessions, and one very pleased U.S. delegation that believed the morning had gone well because no one had raised their voice.
Adorable, honestly.
In the corridor, one of the U.S. deputies handed me the revised afternoon schedule. Under it, off the embassy line, four words from Davis: Noted. Expand on Solberg.
So Langley had clocked the Norwegians’ interest before my cable landed. I filed my face and went to lunch.
* * *
Rhain took me to lunch.
Officially, Rhain took the senior trade representative to lunch, and I was a translator who happened to come along because the senior trade representative didn’t speak Norwegian.
Dominic walked behind us to the dining room.
A measured distance. Close enough to mean something, far enough to look like protocol.
The hallways were beginning to develop an opinion about this.
Two Ashenmere aides stopped talking as we passed. One looked at Dominic first, then Rhain, then me, and immediately discovered something fascinating about the floor.
The problem wasn’t that they looked at Dominic. Everyone looked at Dominic eventually. The problem was the order: Dominic, me, then the space between us. As if the distance itself meant something.
The lunch was in the smaller staff dining room because Lord Solberg preferred the salmon there. He said this to the senior trade representative with an easy smile, as if his preferences were charming and not, in fact, a rearrangement of protocol around his appetite.
Dominic took the wall by the kitchen pass. He didn’t order food.
The senior trade representative, who had been told the enforcer was standard hospitality protocol, nodded politely and didn’t ask.
The senior trade representative was a good man. Competent. Well-briefed. Reasonably careful. He was also, unfortunately, susceptible to excellent questions from attractive men.
Rhain listened to him with a friendly, attentive face. He was, of course, making absolutely political use of every word. Within twenty minutes, the senior trade representative had told Rhain three things he had been instructed not to say.
Useful things. Not classified. Not fatal. Just useful enough.
I translated. I didn’t editorialize. Three times, I preserved the senior trade representative’s exact phrasing instead of cleaning it up, because the exact phrasing was the part Rhain wanted to hear.
Rhain caught it.
The first time, he stopped mid-bite.
The second time, his eyes touched mine over the rim of his water glass.
The third time, he smiled at the senior trade representative as if the man had said something mildly amusing, then turned that smile toward me.
The senior trade representative excused himself to take a phone call halfway through dessert. The moment he left the table, the silence became approximately the loudest silence I had ever sat in.
Rhain put his fork down. “Ms. Cordero.”
“Lord Solberg.”
“You translated ? g? rundt gr?ten without a beat of hesitation.”
“It’s an idiom.”
Something behind the amusement sharpened. “It’s an idiom most translators with three years of professional Norwegian have to think about.”
“I trained at Frogner.”
“Yes.”
He leaned back slightly. He looked at me as if I had become more interesting by refusing to become less dangerous.
“And you rendered the Sichuanese inflection in Beijing standard.”
“Standard practice for a multilateral meeting.”
He turned the water glass a quarter turn. “Standard practice would’ve been ignoring that the inflection existed.”
“Then I suppose we’ve both learned something today.”
His smile moved slowly.
Across the room, Dominic’s gaze landed on the side of my face.
Rhain noticed that too.
I set my water glass down.
Rhain looked at me properly then.
He had blue eyes. The briefing hadn’t done them justice. North Sea blue, in late afternoon. Gray in some lights, deep in others, never quite the color you expected.
The briefing had also missed that his eyes seemed perpetually amused. The agency file on Rhain Solberg had described him in the language of a serious diplomat. Trained. Composed. Effective.
The agency hadn’t used the word amused.
The agency file had been written by an analyst who had spent three weeks on Rhain’s open-source record. None of the pages had conveyed what was sitting across from me now: a man who had decided, somewhere in his many decades, that the world was a thing he was going to find continuously interesting.
Heat bloomed behind my hipbones.
Irritating.
“You’re not a translator, Ms. Cordero,” he said conversationally. Without inflection. The voice for telling a waiter the soup is cold.
I didn’t blink. “I am, actually. The State Department issued paperwork and everything.”
He gave a small tsk before using my first name. “Catalina.”
My body reacted.
I matched his tone. “Rhain.”
The set of his shoulders shifted.
Dominic’s head turned.
Not only to me and Rhain, but to the space around me, as if proximity had rules no one had bothered translating.
Older than jealousy. More formal. A claim. The thought landed cold and hot at once.
“What’s your real designation?” Rhain asked.
“State Department translator. Cleared for diplomatic protocol up to and including state dinners with sovereign supernatural entities. My paperwork is on file with both the Norwegian embassy and the Ashenmere council.” I paused. “Would you like me to email it to you?”
“Yes.”
I almost laughed.
He had said yes the way Dominic said no. Flat. Declarative. Infuriating. He meant it. He had asked for the email and would, when the email arrived, read it carefully.
“This is going to be a long week,” I said.
His smile changed. The room felt smaller. “Yes.”
The senior trade representative returned from his phone call brightly. He had no idea the table he was returning to had briefly become a diplomatic hazard.
Lunch resumed.
We didn’t speak again about anything that mattered.
Rhain told a story about his grandmother in Frogner. I asked him a question that I knew the answer to from his Wikipedia page. He said something charming. I said something less charming. The senior trade representative didn’t notice that he was sitting in the middle of a low-grade duel.
When lunch ended, Rhain stood smoothly, offering the room exactly as much of himself as it needed.
“Ms. Cordero,” he said.
“Lord Solberg.”
“I look forward to your email.”
“Of course.”
His gaze rested on me again. “And to our next conversation.”
His hand brushed the back of his chair on the way past.
“That sounds optimistic.”
“It usually is.”
Dominic was at my shoulder before Rhain took his second step away from the table. Never touching. Close. Rhain’s gaze flicked to the distance between us, then back to me.
The look he gave me was curiosity. Then he walked away.
I stayed where I was for one breath too long.
Dominic’s voice came from beside me, pitched so no one else at the table could hear. “Ms. Cordero.”
“Yes?”
His weight shifted toward the door. “We should go.”
I picked up my notebook. “Of course.”