The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  “I would never have hurt her. I’m not violent.” At least I’m not yet, she thought. “Grabbing her was a reflex.”

  “Are you still in pain? Uncomfortable?”

  Cassie had been careful to avoid the large mirror in the hotel room. She didn’t want to see how blotchy her face most likely was. She feared her eyes were still vampire red. The nurse told her she would look much better by dinner. She hoped so. “Not really. But I’m wondering if you or your private investigator can do something for me.”

  “Go on.”

  “Can you check the passenger manifests of the planes that arrived in Rome this morning? Can we find out if there was a woman named Miranda on one?”

  “I thought you believed you were mistaken.”

  “I said I’m torn. I seem to go back and forth.”

  “Well, I can’t find that out,” said Ani, “but I’ll ask my P.I. I doubt he can, either. That kind of sounds like a job for the FBI.”

  “Okay,” Cassie said, though her lawyer’s response frightened her. “Has he told you anything more about Alex’s background?”

  “No. I’ll call him after we hang up.”

  “Thank you. Oh—and I’m sorry I didn’t say this right away—thanks also for the way you handled that reporter from the New York Post. I really appreciate it.”

  “I know you do. Trust me, so does my boss,” Ani said wryly. Then she asked, “What are you doing this afternoon? And tonight?”

  “Worried I’m going to try and find Miranda myself?”

  “No.”

  “But you do believe she exists, right? I mean, maybe she’s not in Rome. Maybe I didn’t see her. But she is out there somewhere.”

  Even across the Atlantic Cassie could hear the brief hesitation. “Most of the time I believe that. I really do. But your browbeating a strange woman in an airport doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in your mental health.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe you should just chill. What do you think? Don’t go out to dinner. Don’t go sightseeing. And for God’s sake, don’t have a drink. Pretend you’re under house arrest.”

  It may have been the word arrest, but she thought of the two FBI agents back at Federal Plaza. Was there no ceiling to the trouble she caused? To the trouble she was in?

  “And Cassie?”

  She waited.

  “Just in case, do yourself a favor: dead-bolt your door tonight.”

  * * *

  « «

  She didn’t sleep nearly as long as she expected. Her body clock was too well conditioned, too predictable, and so she awoke from her catnap around three in the afternoon. She climbed naked from the bed and opened the drapes to the summer sun, and then burrowed back under the sheets on the cool side of the bed. For a while she stared out the window at the blue sky, and then at the walls of her hotel room. At the large, framed black-and-white photograph of the Pietà at St. Peter’s. At the television. At the armoire. On the desk she had noticed a pencil cup with a single pen in it with the hotel’s name. The pen was crap, but she liked the container. It was designed to resemble an architectural ruin—a remnant of the sort of granite column that held the great portico of the Pantheon. (The columns were Corinthian, she recalled from one visit to Rome or another.) She thought she would steal the pencil cup, probably as a gift for her nephew, but maybe for her brother-in-law instead. It would probably look nice on his desk.

  No, she wouldn’t take it. She would exert a little self-control. She had been in this hotel just last week and pilfered the bookend. Perhaps housekeeping had noticed it was gone right after she had checked out and her name was now on some sort of hotel watch list. It would be yet one more example of the cruel humor that marked the world if, after all she had drunk over the years, she ended up getting fired by the airline for stealing trinkets from a hotel room in Italy.

  Of course, that was the one constant in her life: she drank. Alcohol gave her pleasure and it gave her courage and it gave her comfort. It didn’t precisely give her self-esteem (especially not the next morning), but it gave her the faith that whatever she was, was enough. She was no longer the daughter of the driver’s-ed drunk in Kentucky. She was no longer the girl alone at the college switchboard at the loneliest hours of the night. Yes, she went days without drinking, but those were mere intermissions between acts. Between acting up. Between the moments when she was most really herself.

  And, she knew, those days were growing less and less frequent.

  She checked her phone. Nothing from Ani. Nothing from Frank Hammond. Nothing from the airline. Nothing from anyone. That was probably good news.

  Finally she swung her legs over the side of the bed and ran her hands through her hair. Fuck it. Perhaps Ani was right that she should dead-bolt the door and pretend she was under house arrest, but she was who she was. She knew as well as anyone that people didn’t change. Just look at her father. The lure of the Limoncello—the Negroni, the Bellini, the Rossini, the Cardinale—was irresistible. She would shower. She would put on the cheerful floral sundress she had packed. Then she would apply her makeup and the skin cream the airport nurse had given her and go for a walk. Find a bar where (and the theme from a sitcom from before her time came to her) nobody knew her name.

  * * *

  « «

  She saw the note under her door when she emerged from the bathroom. She had just toweled herself dry and was about to get dressed. It was from Enrico, the young bartender, and it was apparent that he spoke English better than he wrote it, and was probably dependent on Google Translate. He had indeed seen the other members of her airline’s flight crew at the hotel, and so he had asked a friend in guest services if she was among them. Then he had convinced his pal to look up her room number. He hoped she would view this as “enterprised,” not “stalker.” He had found someone to cover his shift and was “desirable” of taking her for a walk and to dinner. The note was adorable.

  But she thought of Buckley back in New York. Arguably, her relationship with the actor had grown more involved in the last week. They’d slept together again, and it had been more of a date than a random hookup in a bar. Their relationship was, as her Drambuie friend Paula would say, Tinder Plus—the gray zone that was more than Tinder but not yet dating. She and Buckley might not yet be exclusive, but they had a connection that transcended libido and booze and an app for sex with strangers.

  Moreover, was there even the remotest possibility of a future with Enrico, given the difference in their ages? Of course there wasn’t. But then again, did she have a future with anyone? Of course she didn’t. Her future, eventually, was in prison. She looked at the penmanship on the paper in her hands. It was hotel stationery. The ink was blue, and Enrico wrote with careful, thoughtful strokes. He had written that he would be waiting downstairs in the bar, and he could leave with her anytime and go anyplace she liked.

  She had no idea where she’d be a year from now—or even a week or a month.

  For all she knew, she hadn’t heard from Buckley because he had read the New York Post and was justifiably appalled. He wanted nothing to do with her. And why should he? God, most of the time she wanted nothing to do with herself. That, too, was one of the reasons why she took solace in the blotto zone. It was just so much easier to look at yourself in the mirror when it took that critical extra second for your eyes to focus and in the morning you wouldn’t remember just how awful you looked or how ridiculously you had behaved.

  As she was reaching behind her to clasp her bra, she glanced out the window and gazed for a moment at the beauty of the towers of the Trinità dei Monti. She was in Rome, the city where Nero had supposedly fiddled as the buildings around him had burned. She had no idea if it was true. She didn’t know if violins even existed in the first century. No matter. She got the point. When in Rome…

  She’d go downstairs and fiddle.

/>   * * *

  « «

  As she expected, Enrico was at the bar. But he wasn’t working. He was seated on a stool before the beautifully burnished mahogany slab. He was at the near end, across from the hidden sink and the impeccable row of shakers and jiggers and stirrers and spears. He was chatting with a petite young woman in the hotel’s requisite white button-down shirt and blue vest, her hair a magnificent dusky mane. She was the bartender on duty. Cassie guessed she was in her early twenties. The world, she thought, was just so young. The bar wasn’t deserted this time, because it was nearing late afternoon. But the guests—and she counted a dozen or so people—were at the tables, not that long, inviting counter.

  Enrico noticed her right away, as if he had an eye on the entrance, and stood to greet her. He, too, was wearing a white shirt, but he had slithered inside a pair of tight jeans instead of the dressier black pants he had been wearing last week. He was gorgeous. She wondered if as soon as she’d had a drink—oh, maybe two or three or four—she would bring him upstairs to her room.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t see you,” he said, wrapping his arms around the small of her back and pulling her into him. He kissed both of her cheeks and then leaned back a little, appraising her. She felt the warmth from his fingers through the thin rayon of her dress. “You got more beautiful in the last week.”

  “I didn’t. But I did get a week older.”

  “And you were outside without sunscreen. Shame on you!”

  She nodded sheepishly. It was easier to nod than explain she had been pepper-sprayed at the airport that morning.

  “But that dress is perfect on you,” he continued.

  “I’m probably too old for it.”

  He released her and smiled. He motioned at the woman behind the bar, who was making Bellinis for a table of Brits in the corner. She had pureed fresh peaches for the drink and the Prosecco looked very good. “This is Sofia. She makes an excellent Negroni, too. I taught her myself. But let me make yours.”

  She watched Sofia place the flutes on a tray and bring them to the guests’ table. When she was silent, Enrico asked, “Is it a Bellini kind of day? Would you prefer that to a Negroni?”

  She met his eyes. Yes, she wanted a Bellini. She wanted him. She wanted to get lost in the booze and wrap her naked thighs around his naked ass and feel him inside her. She wanted to forget Alex Sokolov and Frank Hammond and the woman she had thought was Miranda. This was a new thing, this drinking to forget. Usually she just drank to get lost, which may have been a cousin in some way, but was most definitely different.

  She heard the chime from her phone that informed her she had a new text.

  “Sorry,” she told Enrico. “I should see what that’s about.” She reached into her purse and pulled out the device. The text was from Ani, and the lawyer was asking her to call back right away. Cassie took a long, slow breath to calm herself. She heard a slight ringing in her ears and felt her heart starting to race. “I need to phone my sister,” she said to the bartender.

  “You look worried. Is everything okay?”

  She watched the Brits raising their champagne flutes with their Bellinis and clinking them gently together. My life, she thought, is all hunger. Hunger and want and need. “I guess we’ll find out,” she answered, and she took her phone and retreated into the anonymity of the hotel lobby.

  25

  Elena got a spray tan at a salon across the street from Bulgari and Gucci, and she instructed the attendant to think Saint-Tropez. She wanted to look like an old Bain de Soleil ad. Then she went by a pharmacy—choosing one far down the Via Sistina from both her hotel and Bowden’s—and bought a pair of plastic gloves and a shade of hair color that was called “natural blue black.”

  Back in her room, she meticulously worked the dye into her hair and set the timer on her phone for forty-five minutes. She had no gray yet, not a single strand, but she wanted to be sure that the color was solid. She thought she might enjoy having hair the shade of ravens’ wings for the rest of the summer and the beginning of autumn.

  As she waited, she sat on her bed and used the encrypted network on her laptop to dig deep into Dennis McCauley. See if there was anything new. Anything they’d been unable to tell her. She went underground, hacking into his life through a variety of dark sites she accessed through the Lewis Carroll–like looking glass of RATs and rootkits the Cossacks preferred. She looked at the meetings on his calendar that week at the military base in Kentucky and the one the next week at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland. She noted his predilections in porn, which were far more conventional than a lot of guys in the military or the male defense contractors she had dealt with, and she saw that his fantasy baseball team had done especially well that week. She scanned his family’s bank and investment accounts.

  But she could find no indication that he was a Cossack asset or that he was getting rich selling them what he knew.

  She thought once more of her revelation on the plane last night, the idea that for so long she had had the Dubai seduction backward: she had been assuming that Cassandra Bowden had picked up Sokolov on the flight to the Emirates, when it was quite probably the other way around.

  God, he’d been such a rank amateur. He was up against people who’d grown up in a culture in which paranoia was a survival skill.

  After she’d killed him, she’d switched flash drives, giving Viktor one with dramatically dumbed-down data. It had specs on the stealth drone, but nothing that Russia probably wouldn’t have on its own or through NovaSkies within months. It was, they hoped, just enough to satisfy Viktor. They were wrong. Then she’d left the evidence that Sokolov was stealing from the fund on his laptop. No one could miss it. The CIA would know why he was dead, and eventually National Intelligence would share what they knew with the FBI. But the Dubai police would just see it as Russian business—cold-blooded and unflinching—as usual. The price for a regular hit when a deal went bad was pennies. Her father had once paid an underling a measly fifteen-grand bonus to execute a commodities trader who had tried (and failed) to bilk him out of the steel he’d bought from a Lipetsk mill. Another time, he’d paid a pittance—five thousand dollars—to have some poor British contracts manager in Donetsk killed when his bosses back in London had refused to renegotiate a contract. (They did after that. Right away.) The American agencies weren’t thrilled that Sokolov was dead, but he wasn’t an especially good egg, and no one wanted to see him on trial. He knew too much. Mostly they were just grateful that no one’s cover had been burned. It was weirdly polite. It also wouldn’t demand a public escalation, which nobody wanted.

  She logged off her computer and tried to slip into place the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but there were too many and she was too tired. And so she willed herself to relax. She thumbed through the Italian and British fashion magazines she had bought at a kiosk on the street and read news stories on her tablet. But she kept coming back to the flight attendant and what she was supposed to do and what she had planned to do. There were just so very many ways to kill yourself. There were pills and there was bleeding out in the bath. There was falling from great heights and falling into oceans or rivers or deep, beautiful chasms. There were streetcars and subways and buses. There was hanging. There were guns—just so many kinds of guns.

  She considered it likely that an absolute train wreck such as Cassandra Bowden might have one last surprise for her. If she had to bet, she would bet on the bartender; after all, he combined Bowden’s two principal interests in one tidy package. That, of course, would be a disaster. The last thing she wanted was him, too, on her conscience. Unfortunately, a murder-suicide involving Cassandra Bowden and some Italian hookup would look just as plausible to the world as a suicide, and it was possible that they might ask this of her.

  She had promised herself a few days alone in Sochi when she was done, though of course she would not be completely alon
e. No doubt, some of her father’s old friends would come by. There would be someone who was long out of the loop and didn’t know how badly she had screwed up with the flight attendant. Maybe it would be someone who knew only that Sokolov was dead and wanted to thank her. It was pretty simple: you went for the jugular. It was—to use their old joke—cut and dried.

  But she’d have plenty of time to watch the bears from the porch and listen to the owls as she dozed beneath the pergola. She would try to regain her emotional equilibrium after Diyarbakir and Dubai and now Rome.

  She sat back against the headboard and closed her eyes, savoring the air conditioning in her hotel room but agitated because of all the things that she didn’t know and all the things it was possible they had chosen not to tell her.

  26

  In the hotel lobby, Cassie took a seat on a plush, ruby-red Renaissance fainting couch, perching herself on the end that was backless. She smiled at the concierge. She smiled at the handsome guy in the dark suit and earpiece who was clearly hotel security.

  “So, are you in your room?” Ani was asking.

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “Good. I’m sure there are reporters ferreting out from the airline where you are. Someone will find your hotel. That’s another good reason to lay low.”

  “Really? The crime occurred in Dubai, not Perugia or Rome. Why would an Italian reporter care?”

  “Why would any reporter care? Sex and murder.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  “I heard back from my investigator.”

  “About the passenger manifests?”

  “No. He doubts he can get us much there. But he has done some other nosing around.”

  Cassie listened carefully, trying to focus. “And?”