The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  “He’s…um…” her friend began, but then stopped.

  Cassie waited. Suzanne pushed Paula hard on her upper arm, literally prodding her to continue. “What?” Suzanne asked, still smiling at the hilarity of all of this. “What?”

  “He’s dead,” Paula murmured.

  “He’s what?” Suzanne asked.

  “He’s dead,” Paula repeated. “Someone at the house—not his mom or dad, I’m pretty sure—got really pissed and hung up. So, I don’t know any more than that.”

  “That’s so weird and so sad,” Suzanne said, her voice softened by the absolute buzzkill of Paula’s news. But she was stunned only briefly. “Let’s Google how he died,” she said. “Maybe there’s an obituary.”

  Cassie took back her phone. It felt radioactive in her hand. Would it ring again soon? Would Alex’s mother or father call her back? Probably not. Instead she would probably get a call from Frank Hammond or someone in authority somewhere, telling her not to harass the family. But maybe not. Oh, the family certainly would tell the police she had called. They’d tell the FBI.

  And eventually it would get back to Ani.

  But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered whether this stupid little stunt would be anything other than one more black mark in her file somewhere.

  She sighed. She hoped when Ani called her next, it wouldn’t be to say that she’d had enough of her and was dropping the case.

  “Don’t waste your time Googling it, Suzanne,” she said. “I can tell you exactly how he died.”

  Paula sat up a little straighter on her stool. “Wait, what? You knew he was dead and allowed me to call his parents? Are you crazy?”

  “I tried to stop you.”

  “She did,” Suzanne agreed. “She did.”

  “Not hard enough!”

  “He was killed in Dubai at some point after I left his hotel room,” Cassie told them. “If you want to read all about it, just go to the New York Post. You can even see me. Sort of. His real name was Alex Sokolov. Not Ilyich. Sokolov.”

  She had been planning to order another margarita and stared a little longingly at the squat, lovely bottle of triple sec behind the bar. But as she glimpsed the faces of her friends as they held their phones before them and read about the death of an American trader in Dubai and the woman of interest in the security cam photos, she had a change of heart. She had a twenty-dollar bill and two ones in her wallet, which wouldn’t cover what she probably owed, but she handed it to Paula and said she was sorry—sorry, in truth, about so many things, of which not paying her share of the bar tab was pretty damn inconsequential—and said good night.

  * * *

  « «

  The next morning, Sunday, she wasn’t sure which surprised her more: the fact she slept through the night or the fact she still hadn’t been arrested. Her attorney hadn’t called to fire her for phoning Alex Sokolov’s family in Virginia.

  Of course, the day was young. A lot could still happen.

  She got up and went to the animal shelter, as if it were just another Sunday in August. It was a fifteen-minute walk if she strolled, considerably less if she was in a hurry. But as she was passing a supermarket on the avenue, once more she had the distinct sense that she was being followed. She told herself, as she had the other day, that she was being delusional. But she knew also that the FBI had reason to put her under surveillance. And there certainly were other people out there, including whoever had killed Alex, who might want to know more about the woman in the Royal Phoenician photos.

  The idea that whoever that was knew who she was caused her to feel a chill, despite the stifling summer heat. She paused and flipped open her compact to look behind her, almost hoping to see Frank Hammond or someone else who just exuded FBI, because she knew she would have preferred that to the faceless man in shades and a black ball cap.

  Unless that dude was FBI. And maybe he was. She thought of how casually the air marshals always dressed on her flights.

  In her compact she saw no one in particular on the sidewalk. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the streets on a Sunday morning in August, and among the cabs and buses and delivery vehicles she noted nothing suspicious. Still, she trusted her instincts. There again was that gift of the amygdala, the gift of fear. Ahead of her was a corner convenience store with entrances on both the avenue she was on and the cross street she was approaching. She flipped shut her compact and went in. But instead of buying even a cup of coffee, she cut through the store and left through the other exit. A few yards down that cross street was a doorway for a dry cleaner that was closed for the day. She stood flat against the side wall, invisible from the avenue, and waited. She counted slowly to one hundred, adding the word Mississippi after each number, the way she’d been taught as a little girl. Then instead of returning to the avenue and continuing north to the shelter, she walked a block west. She’d head north at the next intersection. It was a long detour, but it dialed down her panic.

  And she indeed felt safer when she was inside the shelter, though she knew that wasn’t rational. If they wanted to arrest her, they would: an animal shelter wasn’t an embassy in some faraway land giving her refuge. Likewise, if someone else was after her, they’d find her. Their…expertise…was evident.

  She went straight to the community room where the older cats lived. This morning she counted eight, dozing or draped on the cat condos and the cat trees and on the cat beds on the bookcase. She saw Duchess and Dulci were still there, a pair of eleven-year-olds whose elderly owner had died and his middle-aged son had been unwilling to adopt. (She had never met the man who had brought the animals in, but Cassie loathed him and viewed his behavior as utterly despicable.) The cats recognized her voice and went straight for her lap when she sat on the floor. She brushed them and cooed, and they purred in response, the noise reminiscent of mourning doves, and they nuzzled against her and stretched out their legs and their paws. They looked a little thinner than the last time she was here, and she hoped they weren’t so sad that they weren’t eating. She reached into her shoulder bag and offered them some of the treats she had brought, and was relieved when their appetites seemed fine.

  She sighed. Was there anyplace she was more useful than the shelter? Was there anyplace she was happier when she was sober? She knew the answer to both of those questions. There wasn’t.

  * * *

  « «

  As she was walking back to her apartment, once again she had the unmistakable feeling that she was being watched. She guessed she probably was. She recalled the way the half brother of the North Korean leader had been killed in broad daylight with a fast-acting nerve agent by a stranger in an airport concourse in Malaysia and found herself giving a wide berth on the sidewalk to anyone approaching her from the other direction.

  And yet soon she was home and the walk had been, by any objective standard, uneventful. And still she hadn’t been arrested. She sat down on the couch and called Ani.

  “Oh, I wish I could tell you that you’re off the hook and this all will pass,” Ani said. “Maybe it’s just taking time.”

  “In that case, do I report to work and fly back to Rome? If so, I should be out the door in an hour.”

  “Go.”

  “Okay. And maybe I should just stay there. Never come back,” she said wryly.

  “Maybe,” Ani agreed, but Cassie understood the lawyer wasn’t being serious.

  “I did something stupid last night,” she confessed, and she told Ani what had occurred at the bar. But instead of firing or even chastising her, Ani sounded as if she had come to expect this sort of bad behavior from her client. There was an edge of disappointment to her response, but mostly she just sounded sad.

  “Someday you’ll hit bottom,” she said. “For most people, that would have been Dubai. Not you, apparently. We’ll see.”

  “How much trouble am I in?�
�� she asked.

  “For calling the Sokolov family in Virginia? Oh, probably no more than yesterday. You should be embarrassed, but I’m not sure it’s really possible to shame you, Cassie.”

  “It is,” she said. “It really is.”

  “Just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Just, please, act like a grown-up.”

  * * *

  « «

  While packing, Cassie called Derek Mayes.

  “Have you heard anything from the airline about, I don’t know, their asking me to take a leave of absence?” she asked. “Are there any threats to my job?”

  “Not yet,” he told her.

  “Does the airline know I’m the woman in the photos?”

  “They might. If I had to guess, I would guess yes. I’m quite sure that someone from the FBI has contacted them. But no one from the airline has gotten in touch with you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, they haven’t called me, either.”

  “Your niece says I should go ahead and fly to Rome.”

  “My niece is very smart. Listen to her in all things.”

  “I will,” she said, though she instantly recalled how she hadn’t with the FBI agents that Friday afternoon.

  A half hour later, unsure whether it was the August humidity or that nagging sense that there was always someone just beyond her gaze who was watching her, she said good-bye to Stanley, the doorman. Briefly she considered taking the subway to the Dickinson and hitching a ride with the crew for the Madrid flight, but she couldn’t cope. She just couldn’t. Instead she hailed the cab nearing her apartment building’s awning. Her instinct was to ask him to take her to Grand Central, where she would catch the Airporter bus, but she couldn’t face that, either. Not now. Not today. And so even though she couldn’t afford a cab to JFK—with tip that would cost seventy-five bucks—she asked him to take her to the airport.

  And there in the cab, somewhere in the snarl of traffic that dogged the Van Wyck Expressway even on a Sunday afternoon in August, her phone rang. It was a number she didn’t recognize. When the woman said hello and introduced herself as a reporter, Cassie instantly forgot her name and had to ask for it a moment later, because her mind could focus only on the tabloid banner of the writer’s newspaper. When she recovered, she said she had nothing to say and hung up, blocked the number on her phone, and called Ani Mouradian.

  19

  In the end, Elena chose the New York Post for the simple reason that the New York Times had covered the story responsibly. They understood the death of Alex Sokolov was not an act of terrorism and seemed, as far as she could tell now, to have moved on. They might be preparing a longer story on the hedge fund manager and Unisphere’s connections to select members of the Russian political leadership—there might be the usual innuendo about corruption and crime, intimations that the White House was indebted to the Kremlin—but the financial machinations of a hedge fund were at once too complex and too dull to ever elicit much readership or interest. And if they were preparing a story on the utter randomness of dying on a business trip far from home? Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.

  After planting her seed—her anonymous tip—she phoned Viktor. He was finishing dinner but took the call and went outside the restaurant. She wondered whom he was with and worried when he didn’t volunteer the companion’s name. Usually he did because most of the time it was someone she knew or at least knew of. It was a further indication of the sort of trouble she herself was in. He didn’t trust her. At least not completely.

  “Are you going to go with the flight attendant?” he asked.

  “Back to Italy?” She heard incredulity instead of obedience in her voice, a reflex, and took a breath to rein in her emotions.

  “If that’s where she’s going, yes.”

  “No. I hadn’t planned on it,” she admitted. She wasn’t a pilot or a flight attendant, and her body wasn’t wild about the idea of flying east to Rome days after flying west from Dubai.

  “You might want to consider it.”

  Might want to. Was there ever a more passive-aggressive phrasing? There was a threat behind it, only thinly veiled, but there was also a message. She was responsible for Bowden. This was a mess of her making. Their patience was almost up.

  “Do you want me to finish the job in Rome?” she asked guardedly.

  She heard him lighting a cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs. “Well, I like your idea of a suicide. In some ways, I like it even more in Rome than in New York. Just be sure that she has had time to really feel the pain from the media swarm. You know, cause and effect. But a hotel suicide in Rome the day the story appears in the New York Post? Makes perfect sense.”

  “Then I’ll go.”

  “Just don’t be on her flight.”

  “Viktor?”

  “Yes?”

  She almost told him that she wasn’t born yesterday. She felt the need to defend herself and convey at least a hint of her annoyance at the imposition of another trip across the Atlantic. But she knew that sort of flippancy would be ill advised at the moment. And so instead she said simply, “You’re absolutely right. I’ll make sure I’m not.” It was the politic response, and she loathed herself for saying it.

  * * *

  « «

  She flew out of Newark since Bowden was based at JFK. She didn’t want to risk the flight attendant spotting her at the terminal on Long Island.

  She was stopped at security, a random pat-down and wanding. The TSA officer opened her leather duffel and commented on both the wig and the straw sun hat with pretend strands of hair attached to the side and rear panels. She volunteered that they were for her sister in Orvieto who was about to begin chemotherapy. On the other side of the full body scanners, people were standing like storks on single legs as they pulled their boots over their shins or slipped back on their sneakers and espadrilles.

  A moment later when she was repacking the wig and the sun hat properly—the way she liked, not the way the TSA agent had mashed them inside her bag—she wondered if she wore them in Rome tomorrow or the day after tomorrow whether someone would recall them from a woman’s bag back in Newark. Not likely. They were all too busy looking for shoe bombs.

  * * *

  « «

  There were actually a few empty seats in coach on the Sunday-night flight, including the middle seat beside her. She had grown interested in flight attendants in a way that she hadn’t been before Bowden had shown up in Alex’s hotel room, and now—almost curiously—she watched a slim woman with white hair and athletic calves work the aisles, asking passengers what they would like to drink as she stood behind the cart, but occasionally responding to lengthier questions about when the cabin lights would be dimmed and whether they could have an extra blanket or pillow.

  When the beverage cart reached her row, the flight attendant looked down at her. Elena—who had donned the cosmetic tortoiseshell eyeglasses for the flight she’d bought months ago at a costume shop—glanced up from her Vanity Fair just enough to be polite, because rudeness was memorable. She asked (please) for a Diet Coke, no ice. From the corner of her eye she watched the woman pouring the can into the plastic cup and noticed that the flight attendant’s nails were almost the same shade of red as hers.

  She placed her magazine in the seat pocket and unfolded her tray table for her soda. Then she logged on to the aircraft’s Wi-Fi and immediately went to the website for the New York Post. And there it was. The story was live. She stared for a long moment at Cassandra Bowden’s name as if the syllables were an incantation or the two words an eponym: she grew lost in her connection to the flight attendant. She blinked to regain her focus.

  Bowden had o
ffered no comment and the FBI had offered no comment, but an anonymous source with the Dubai police had confirmed that Cassandra Bowden of New York City was, at the very least, a person of interest. Another flight attendant could not corroborate the story but had volunteered that Bowden was “a bit of a party girl” and “kind of a wild woman.” She’d added something that on the surface sounded contradictory, but Elena understood how it made all the sense in the world and that in fact the woman had probably been coached: “Cassie is sweet and kind of a loner. When she’s home, she goes to this animal shelter a lot because she really likes the stray cats. I think sometimes she’s as depressed as they are. And when we’re working, she’s not always out somewhere going crazy until one in the morning. Sometimes she just clicks shut her hotel room door and sleeps. I mean, the job is just too demanding and that’s not how she’s hardwired.” Elena knew the ebb and flow of binge behavior, and the way a person sometimes just wanted to retreat into the bleached white sheets of a Hilton or into the fur of an equally needy, equally wounded cat. But she doubted that Bowden was actually depressed: that was expediency finessing the truth.

  The article also quoted her lawyer: a woman named Ani Mouradian said that Bowden was cooperating fully with investigators and had absolutely nothing to do with Alex Sokolov’s death. Finally, a representative for the airline said the flight attendant had not been charged with a crime in either the United Arab Emirates or the United States and had violated no airline policy. And so they had no comment.

  Nevertheless, the Post already had a nickname for Bowden and for the crime. Now that she was no longer a mystery woman, she was no longer a rather generic “black widow spider.” They knew she was a flight attendant, and so they had christened her the “Cart Tart Killer.”

  It wasn’t brilliant, Elena thought, but it wasn’t bad. It had rhythm and alliteration, and best of all was the way it combined sluttiness and murder.