The Mafia Boss’s Translator Dropped Dead Mid-Deal — Then the Sandwich Delivery Woman Opened Her Mouth
Part 1
Eighty pounds of hot pastrami nearly got me executed by three crime syndicates on a Tuesday afternoon.
My name is Molly.
I’m thirty-two, I deliver catering for a deli that pays me almost nothing, and I have a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Georgetown that hangs above a mattress on the floor of my apartment in Queens.
Academia doesn’t pay rent.
An anxiety disorder makes office work a minefield.
Sandwiches it is.
That afternoon the service elevator died on the fortieth floor of a glass hotel tower in Manhattan, so I hauled two insulated bags up the last flights myself — pastrami, potato salad, garlic pickles, all of it steaming against my back.
Sweat glued my hair to my cheeks.
My uniform pants, cheap maroon polyester, were losing their battle with my hips.
I shouldered through the heavy oak doors of the penthouse suite without knocking, because delivery people are furniture and nobody ever cares.
Every gun in the room swung toward my chest.
A dozen of them.
On the floor beside a long mahogany table, a man in a beautiful suit lay twisted and still, foam drying at the corner of his mouth.
The room smelled like copper and cologne.
At the head of the table stood the most frightening, most beautiful man I had ever seen, charcoal suit, dark eyes, perfectly motionless.
Around him sat three men I would later learn controlled shipping lanes, ports, and cartel supply routes on three continents.
The huge one bellowed something in Russian and waved his pistol at me.
He was telling his men to shoot the intruder and be done with it.
The elegant one in glasses sneered a line of crisp Mandarin — something about a clumsy elephant blundering into a dragon’s den.
The one spinning a gold lighter drawled a Spanish comment about my thighs that I will not repeat.
Here’s the thing they couldn’t have known.
I understood every single word.
Something inside me, the part that had been underpaid and talked over and laughed at for thirty-two years, simply ran out of fear.
I sighed.
The bags hit the marble with a wet thud.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, planted my feet, and looked the Russian dead in the eye.
In flawless Moscow dialect, I told him I’d prefer he not point that thing at me unless he planned on settling the catering bill before he killed me.
His jaw dropped.
The gun actually wavered.
Before anyone could breathe, I turned to the man in glasses and switched to Mandarin, tones crisp as new bills.
I am not an elephant, I told him, but I know exactly how rude that was, and if the gun didn’t go down, lunch was about to get very ugly.
He stepped back like the floor had moved.
Then I looked at the lighter spinner and let him have it in raw, colloquial Mexican Spanish — touch one hair on my head and I’d feed him the spicy mustard through his nose.
Silence fell over that penthouse like snow.
Twelve armed men stared at the sweating fat girl in the maroon uniform as if she had grown a second head.
The man in the charcoal suit stared hardest of all.
He looked at me the way drowning men look at lifeboats.
“You,” he whispered, voice hoarse.
“You speak their languages.”
The adrenaline was wearing off, and my hands had started to shake.
“I have a master’s in applied linguistics and advanced interpretation,” I heard myself say.
“But academia doesn’t pay the rent, so I deliver sandwiches.”
A beat.
“The total comes to six hundred forty-two dollars.”
“Can I please just get a signature?”
He didn’t laugh.
Instead he stepped over the body of the dead man — his translator, I’d realize later, poisoned by a neurotoxin in his espresso minutes before I knocked — and walked straight to me.
Gently, almost reverently, he took the clipboard out of my shaking hands.
His eyes found my name tag, then my face.
“Molly,” he said, like he was tasting the word.
“I’m going to give you two million dollars.”
I blinked at him.
“What?”
“Two million.”
“Cash, wire, whatever you want.”
“One condition.”
He gestured at the empty chair beside his at the head of that blood-spattered table, the seat still warm from a dead man.
“You sit down, you eat a pastrami sandwich, and you translate the rest of this meeting for me.”
The three monsters at the table watched me, guns lowered but not away, and the dead translator’s shoes peeked out from where someone had shoved him toward the closet.
My anxiety screamed at me to run.
My rent screamed louder.
The man in the charcoal suit leaned in, and his voice dropped so low only I could hear it.
“Because if you don’t, none of us leave this room alive.”
