It might have occurred moments before he fell in the living room. Most likely it did. But maybe not. Perhaps it had been a slow bleed that had commenced when he had nearly hit his head outside on his driveway.
He had always been such an old father: he was fifty-six when Elena was born, her mother thirty-five. She was an only child. Her parents had divorced when she was eight, and it had been nasty. Their marriage couldn’t survive the crazy amounts of money he made when, as a former KGB officer with boxes of surveillance files at his disposal, he was allowed to buy thousands of shares of the Yukos oil conglomerate at a fraction of their real value. He’d then invested in real estate in St. Petersburg, New York, Doha, and Dubai. There was the fund, some of which was fueled by all that bricks and mortar and some of it—and she didn’t believe this—pilfered from the Russian treasury in a complex tax scam. She didn’t believe that because she knew how close her father was to the president of the Russian Federation. The president had been a protégé of her father when they’d both been KGB. But then there were those who hinted that the president, too, had been involved.
Even years later, when she left her Swiss boarding school for college in America, her parents still spoke mostly through their few mutual friends. Neither remarried. And so she was the one who had had to figure out what to do with him when he had that stroke when she was twenty and it was clear he could no longer live alone in the apartment in Moscow or the dacha in Sochi. She’d come home from school and stayed nearly six months. She brought in Spartak and Spartak was wonderful. He was perhaps a decade older than she was, and he had sobbed and sobbed at her father’s small memorial for his Black Sea acquaintances in the woods behind the house. (The funeral had been in Moscow and it had been considerably larger. The Russian president himself hadn’t attended, but he had sent staff.) Spartak had cried in ways that she hadn’t; she had cried only when she was alone, because in public she felt the need to represent the strength of the Orlovs. But alone she had wept. She had loved him the way a girl can love both her father and her grandfather. She had loved him because he had spoiled her as his only child and because he had respected her intellect and her resourcefulness; he saw so much of himself in her and always, no matter what, had been proud of her.
Elena knew instantly why she was thinking of her father this evening, alone in her bed in Dubai. Part of it was the no-win situation that had greeted her when she had gone to Sokolov’s hotel room that first time. Yes, she could have killed him and that flight attendant together when she’d had the chance. Just taken the twenty-two and been done with it. The problem was that while Sokolov had to die, the flight attendant didn’t. The stakes were high and she probably could have rationalized the double hit. But there certainly would have been fallout from killing Bowden, too. In hindsight, the double bind was unsolvable.
Still, if Bowden hadn’t returned, she wouldn’t now be facing this fiasco. That was a fact. She honestly wasn’t sure how long she could forestall the inevitable.
Moreover, Elena knew there would be consequences for her, as well—mistakes were seldom forgiven in her line of work—and in the end the flight attendant might still be dead.
Be realistic: one of you has to die. I think it’s your choice.
Had her father been as cold-blooded as Viktor? Without a doubt. She just never saw that side of the man. She saw the doting father who would deny her nothing.
That afternoon she’d been scrolling through news stories on her phone and come across the assassination of a prominent Russian opposition leader on a sidewalk in Kiev. She had known it was coming. The victim had been a member of the Russian Parliament before defecting. His killer was a little younger than she was: twenty-seven years old. He’d shot the politician and his bodyguard on the street and disappeared. But he’d been recognized by a nearby politician, and a spokesperson for Ukraine’s interior ministry alleged that he was a Russian agent. The Russian president said that was absurd.
It wasn’t. She knew the executioner.
She turned over her pillow to the cool side, and rolled over. She wanted desperately the escape of sleep. But whenever her mind roamed from the flight attendant, it landed once more on her father. She missed him. She missed him as much as she missed anyone. And she always seemed to think of him when she was given an assignment like this. He was the first person she may have killed.
No, she had only finished him off. Maybe she hadn’t even done that.
She knew the real truth of that first stroke. It was why she did what she did. It was why she was who she was.
Nevertheless, memories of her father and the things she had done because she was his daughter kept her tossing and turning into the small hours of the morning.
12
Cassie awoke just before four in the morning, recalled where she was, and reached out to the side of the bed where Enrico had been. She knew she would feel only empty sheets there: he’d been gone for seven hours now. It had been a little before nine at night when she’d been resting beside him, her head on his chest, and she’d heard herself murmuring that she was exhausted and should get some sleep. He was so young that at first he hadn’t understood this was her way of gently excusing him. He’d pulled her closer to him. She’d had to explain that she preferred sleeping alone (which wasn’t always the case, but was last night). She’d reassured him that she’d see him again in a week or so, when she was back in Rome, but in her heart she doubted she would. The airline would most likely be using the same hotel, but she’d steer clear of the bar. Now that she was sober, she wondered what in the name of God she’d been thinking picking up the bartender at the hotel where she was staying, but she knew the answer: she wasn’t thinking. She was on her third Negroni. By the time he had finished his shift and they went upstairs to her room, she’d finished five.
Negronis in Rome. Akvavit in Stockholm. Arak in Dubai. Her life was a drinking tour of the world.
If only she had brought Sokolov back to her hotel room in the Emirates and then kicked him out. If only she had followed through on her intentions to leave his. Instead she had blacked out. That was how much she had drunk that night last week.
And it was last week. God. Somewhere the hyenas were circling…
She understood enough about her body clock to know that she probably wasn’t going to fall back to sleep now, but she wasn’t due downstairs in the lobby for hours. And so she climbed out of bed, switched on the light, and pulled the terrycloth robe from the closet. She didn’t mind the sight of her naked body in the mirrors—and this hotel room indeed had a lot of them—but the room was chilly. The digital thermostat was set for Celsius, so she upped it a few digits and hoped she wasn’t going to cook herself.
She saw she had phone messages. Her lawyer again. The FBI again. Her sister. She listened only to the one from Rosemary, just to make sure that nothing horrid had happened to her nephew or niece. Nothing had. Rosemary was calling to say hello and remind her that she and her family were coming to New York that weekend. She wanted to know if Cassie could join them at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday and then go to dinner in Chinatown.
She couldn’t bring herself to listen to the messages from Ani or Frank Hammond. But she didn’t delete them either. Perhaps she should splurge and have some oatmeal and an Irish coffee sent up to her room. The kitchen was open twenty-four hours. Even if they didn’t have someone in the kitchen who could properly top the drink at this hour—the thick cream was actually her favorite part—they could toss a shot of Jameson’s into the coffee. Then, properly fortified, she could hear what Ani and Frank had to say and take stock of her situation.
* * *
« «
She Googled “trauma” on her tablet as she spooned the oatmeal in small bites and sipped her spiked coffee. She wondered if people who woke beside corpses were scarred for life, though she presumed there was, at best, a very small body of evidence from which to make deductions. For a
few minutes she took comfort in the essays and research papers she found that suggested the families of murder victims often needed serious counseling and medication to get over the loss, equating herself with those poor souls, but then she recalled Alex Sokolov’s parents and began to imagine what they were experiencing.
Finally she braced herself and listened to the messages from Ani and Frank Hammond. Her lawyer said that she had information on extradition laws she wanted to share. Cassie couldn’t decide from the woman’s voice whether it was good news or bad. The FBI agent said he was just crossing a few t’s and had a couple quick questions, and he was wondering if she’d mind coming downtown to the agency’s offices. He sounded casual, but she had a sense—that gift of fear—that he was playing dumb. That he was playing her. Surely he suspected she was the woman in the security camera photos. And if this was just a minor follow-up, why the request that she visit the office in lower Manhattan?
She recalled her moment on the subway platform the day before, her fear that someone was tailing her, and then the figure she had seen at the sidewalk entrance as her cab sped away. Maybe it hadn’t been an overreaction. Perhaps this was what FBI surveillance felt like: there was always someone just beyond your peripheral vision. Then again, the FBI knew what they were doing. Would she know she was being watched? Probably not. Maybe this was what paranoia felt like.
Though the sun was rising here, it was still late at night in New York. She couldn’t yet call back either Ani or Hammond. And given that the flight’s wheels up from Fiumicino was 11:05 a.m., she wouldn’t be phoning either of them until the plane landed at JFK. By the time the passengers had deplaned and she was free, it would be close to 3:30 in the afternoon on the East Coast. So be it.
She sent Ani a text that she had heard the message and would connect with her as soon as she had landed in New York. She added that Frank Hammond had called her twice, but she wouldn’t ring him back until they had spoken. She pulled the drapes and gazed out the window. She could see a few blocks in the distance the twin bell towers of the Trinità dei Monti, the church that stood atop the Spanish Steps. It dawned on her that any day now Alex Sokolov was probably going to be buried. By now his body had to be back in the United States. She wondered who he was—who he really was. She recalled the way he had gently washed her hair, massaging her scalp rather expertly as she’d sat on his lap on that marble bench in that elegant bathroom, and how that night he had kept up with her drink for drink. Few men could do that.
Likewise, she contemplated Miranda with her serene smile and her French twist, her gift of a bottle of Stoli. Who was she?
Cassie swallowed the last of her coffee, and fantasized traveling to Virginia to say something to Alex’s parents. Tell them how sorry she was that their son had died and she had left him behind in the bed. Ask them what they knew of this woman named Miranda. But she understood that she couldn’t—or, to be precise, that she shouldn’t. And that only made her feel worse. She told herself that her sadness was part of her trauma.
Her guilt. Yes. Guilt.
She wondered if people—ordinary people, not serial killers or Tony Soprano—who got away with murder made promises to be better people. Did they vow they would do good work in the future? Actively search out and find God? Did they…atone? She wasn’t convinced she had any of that in her. She wished that she did. But she wasn’t sure it mattered because she hadn’t gotten away with murder: she continued to believe, even if she was pathetically deluding herself, that she hadn’t hurt Alex Sokolov. Perhaps no one else would believe that, but she did. Moreover, so far she hadn’t gotten away with anything. The FBI still wanted to see her. The photos of her from the Royal Phoenician were now online. Soon she would be exposed, fully and irrevocably.
Below her on the street she watched a blue Vespa race by, the driver a young girl with blond hair and blue jeans. She saw an older woman on the sidewalk with a canvas bag filled with, among other items, a large loaf of bread. There was a delivery truck parked beside a store that sold lighting fixtures, and there were two men unloading large cardboard boxes. And in the apartment building across the street she watched the tenants through the windows: A fellow her age tucked his necktie into his shirt before sipping his espresso from a small cup and gazing down at something on the kitchen counter. A woman in a black blazer and skirt was blow-drying her hair in what looked like a rather petite living room. Another woman vacuumed.
She stripped off her robe and stood naked for a long minute in front of the window. She honestly wasn’t sure why. She made eye contact with none of the people in the windows across the street and had no idea whether they noticed her or cared. It was a hotel. They probably witnessed assignations and saw exhibitionists all the time. Then she went to the shower, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and scrubbed a bartender named Enrico off her body.
* * *
« «
Later that morning when she and Jackson, the young flight attendant from Oklahoma, were at the entrance to the aircraft and greeting the passengers as they boarded, he turned to her and said quietly, “I have a big idea.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I think we should give everyone in coach a Xanax. It should be airline policy. Can you imagine how easy our job would be if we medicated people properly before squishing them into those seats?”
* * *
« «
Cassie heard the passengers shrieking, a small chorus in rows thirty-three and thirty-four, the section of coach that was four seats across sandwiched between two aisles, and for a second she feared that someone had a box cutter or a gun. The panic had what she always speculated was the “this-plane-is-going-down” terror to it. But then, almost as one, the call buttons chimed and she saw the red dots on the ceiling there light up like a bough on a Christmas tree, and the simple reasonableness of passengers pressing their call buttons calmed her. She put down the large plastic bag with the service items—airline-speak for trash—and raced seven rows forward from the rear galley and into the scrum. They were below ten thousand feet now and everyone was supposed to be buckled in as they approached JFK; she herself had only moments before she was supposed to be strapped in as well. Jackson was running up the aisle parallel to her, and the two of them got to row thirty-four at almost the same time. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but she was glad there were two of them and that one of them was male.
“No, stop it! Stop it!” was the one sentence among the screams that seemed to register most cogently in her mind. For a moment she thought, Stop what?, but then she saw and she knew. There in seat D, one of the two middle seats in the middle section, was a grandmother holding her grandson—or, to be precise, holding her grandson’s little penis, grasping it with two fingers as if it were a joint (a roach clip was actually what Cassie saw in her mind)—the child’s blue jeans and underpants down around his ankles, as he stood between the rows and urinated into the airsickness bag she was clutching with her other hand.
No, he was only trying to urinate into the airsickness bag. Mostly he was missing. Mostly he was spraying the back of seat 33D and into the space between the seats, showering the passengers’ arms and laps. And the kid was, apparently, a camel. Cassie and Jackson both commanded the woman to stop the child, and then they yelled at the boy to stop, but this was a tsunami. The grandmother either didn’t speak English or was pretending not to speak English, and she did not pull up the boy’s pants until, without question, he was done. From the passengers came a cacophony of curses and groans, a choral keening of disgust. The teen girl in seat 33E was in tears as she struggled to extricate herself from a very damp orange hoodie. “Ewwww,” she sobbed each time she exhaled, a plaintive, almost biblical ululation.
Cassie chastised the grandmother, telling her that what she had done was absolutely unacceptable. The old woman ignored her, clipped shut the folds at the top of the airsickness bag, and then handed it to her, smiling as if she
were presenting Cassie with a bakery bag full of cookies.
* * *
« «
Cassie knew that newspapers put stories online well before the actual paper went to print, so she guessed she shouldn’t have been surprised when she saw the photo of herself on the New York Post website on her phone on the Airporter bus to Grand Central. But she was surprised. She wanted to vomit, and actually feared for a moment that she might. She was the mystery woman, the unnamed “black widow spider” who may have murdered a handsome young American money manager in Dubai. Moreover, someone had spoken with the hotel and restaurant employees, all of whom agreed that the woman they had seen with Sokolov was likely American. For the moment, everyone seemed to presume she was an American who lived in the United Arab Emirates. That’s what the waitress at the restaurant had said. She’d told the Dubai police that Alex had said something that made it clear that while he was a visitor to the Emirates, the woman he was with was not. Cassie couldn’t imagine what that was, but guessed it must have been some remark between them about how well she knew the city. She’d said something like that, because she had bid on the route often the last year and a half. In any case, the Dubai authorities were scouring the American community there, seeing who might have hooked up with him at the hotel.
The Flight Attendant Page 14