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She was aware first of the scent of the hotel shampoo, a Middle Eastern aroma reminiscent of anise, and then—when she opened her eyes—the way the light from the window was different from the light in the rooms in the hotel where the crew usually stayed. The morning sun was oozing through one slender line from the ceiling to the floor where the drapes, plush as they were, didn’t quite meet and blanching a strip of carpet. She blinked, not against the light but against the thumping spikes of pain behind her eyes. She needed water, but it would take a tsunami to avert the hangover that awaited. She needed Advil, but she feared the red pills that she popped like M&M’s at moments like this were distant. They were in the medicine bag in her own hotel room. In her own hotel.
And this definitely wasn’t her hotel. It was his. Had she come back here? Apparently she had. She was sure she had left. She thought she had returned to the airline’s considerably more modest accommodations. At least that had been her plan. After all, she had a plane to catch this morning.
Her mind slowly began to tackle the questions she would need to answer when she rolled over, the principal one being the most prosaic: what time was it? It seemed that the clock was on his side of the bed, because it wasn’t on hers. On her nightstand was the phone and a china tray with date and sugar cookies and three perfectly cubed Turkish delight candies, each skewered with a toothpick-sized silver spear. Time mattered, because she had to be in the lobby of the correct hotel—her hotel—with the rest of the crew by eleven fifteen, to climb with them all into the shuttle to the airport and then the flight to Paris. Everything else, including how she was going to find the courage inside her to swing her legs over the side of the bed and sit up—a task that, given how she felt, would demand the fearlessness of an Olympic gymnast—was secondary. She breathed in slowly and deeply through her nose, the noise a soft whistle, this time inhaling a smell more pronounced than the anise: sex. Yes, the room was rich with the unmistakable scent of a luxury hotel shampoo, but she could also smell herself and she could smell him, the evidential secretions from the night before. He was still there, an absolutely silent sleeper, and she would see him once she rolled over. Once she sat up.
God, if only she’d brought him back to her room. But at dinner he had slipped her a room key, telling her he would be back by nine and to please be waiting for him there. She had. His room was a suite. It was massive, impeccably decorated and bigger than her apartment in Manhattan. The coffee table in the living room was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the wood polished to the point that it reflected the light like a full moon. There was a bottle of Scotch in the bar—this was a real bar, not a minibar or campus fridge with a couple cans of Coke Zero on the lone shelf—that might cost more than the monthly maintenance on her apartment back in New York.
She closed her eyes against the shame, the disgust. She tried to remind herself that this was just who she was—how she was—and to ratchet down at least a little bit the self-loathing. Hadn’t they had fun last night? Of course they had. At least she presumed they had. When she had first opened her eyes, she had hoped for a moment that she had only been passed-out drunk, but no, it was clear that she had been blackout drunk. Again. The difference was not semantics. She experienced both. Passed-out drunk was more humiliating when it happened: she was the woman with her face half buried in the throw pillows on the couch, oblivious to the party moving on without her. Blackout drunk was more embarrassing the next morning, when she woke up in strange beds with strange men, and not a clue how she’d gotten there. She could recall this hotel room and this man, and that was a good sign, but clearly there were chasm-like gaps in her memory. The last thing she could recall was leaving. In her memory, she was dressed and she was exiting this suite, and he was in one of those marvelous hotel room robes, black and white zebra stripes on the exterior, terrycloth on the inside, and joking about the broken bottle of Stoli they had yet to clean up. He’d mumbled that he would deal with it—the spilled vodka, the dagger-like shards—in the morning.
And yet here she was. Back in his bed.
She sighed slowly, carefully, so as not to exacerbate her looming headache. Finally she lifted her head and felt a wave of nausea as the room spun. Instantly she sank back into the pillow’s voluptuous, downy welcome.
On the plane, he had been wearing cologne, something woody that she liked and he had told her was Russian. He loved the Russians, he said. Yes, he was an American, a southern boy, he joked, but he was descended from Russians and felt he still had a Russian soul. Pushkin. Eugene Onegin. Something about the gleamings of an empty heart. The Russians poured money into his hedge fund, he beamed—and it was a beam, not a boast, it was so childlike—and the crazy oligarchs were like uncles to him. They were like teddy bears, not Russian bears, in his hands.
She couldn’t smell the cologne now, and then she remembered showering with him. It was a large, elegant shower of black-and-white-striped marble, including a marble bench, where he had sat down and pulled her onto his lap as he washed her hair with that anise shampoo.
His name was Alexander Sokolov, and he was probably seven or eight years her junior: early thirties, she guessed. He liked to be called Alex because he said Al sounded too American. In a perfect world, he confessed, he would be called Alexander because that sounded Russian. But when he started work, his bosses had suggested he stick with Alex: it was internationally neutral, which was important given the amount of time he spent overseas. He had grown up in Virginia, though he had no trace of a southern accent at all, and lived now on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, running a fund at Unisphere Asset Management. He was a math geek, which he said was the secret to his success and why his fund delivered the sorts of returns that kept everyone on both sides of the Atlantic so happy. It was evident that he enjoyed the work, though he insisted that in reality there were few things duller than managing other people’s money, and so mostly he wanted to talk about what she did. Her war stories. He was utterly fascinated.
He had been in 2C on the flight to Dubai and he hadn’t slept much on the plane—if at all. He had worked on his laptop, he had watched movies, and he had flirted with her. He had gotten to know her much better than she had gotten to know him. Before landing, they’d agreed they’d each take a catnap and then rendezvous for dinner. They were going to meet in his hotel lobby. They’d both known that dinner would be mere foreplay. She rolled his name over again in her mind one more time before bracing herself to turn over and face the whitecap breakers of pain. To face him. One more time she thought of how much arak she had drunk last night. One hundred and twenty proof. The clear liquid becoming the color of watery milk once they added the ice. And then there was the vodka, the Stolichnaya his friend had brought later that night. She’d drunk arak before; she drank it whenever she flew into Beirut, Istanbul, or Dubai. But had she ever drunk this much? She told herself no, but she was kidding herself. She had. Of course she had. One of these days she was going to get busted by the airline; one of these days she was going to fly too close to the sun and fail a drug test, and that would be the beginning of the end. It would be the beginning of the end of everything. She would be following the trail her father had hewn, and she knew where that ended.
No, it wasn’t her father’s trail, precisely, because he was male and she was female. She knew the truth of men and women and booze: it rarely ended well for either gender, but it was the women who wound up raped.
She sighed. It was too bad the airline didn’t fly into Riyadh. The hotel minibars in Saudi didn’t even have alcohol. She’d have to wear an ankle-length abaya. She wouldn’t be out alone, ever, so she wouldn’t be out picking up men, ever. Meeting them in their hotel lobbies. Ever.
She thought she might have been fine right now if Alex hadn’t taken that call from his friend and had them get dressed. The woman—and Cassie believed that her name was Miranda, but even if this hadn’t been one of her blackout benders, her memory this morning was still pretty damn foggy—had phoned just after they’d emerged from the shower, clean and postcoital and still a little drunk, and said she was going to stop by the hotel room for a nightcap. Cassie thought she was somehow involved in the hedge fund, too, and was going to be in the same meetings with Alex tomorrow. She may also have had something to do with Dubai real estate, but Cassie wasn’t sure where she had gotten this idea.
When Miranda arrived at the suite, it was clear that she and Alex really had very little history together, and were actually meeting for the first time. And yet they had a past that transcended work: it seemed they had mutual friends and business connections in the construction that was everywhere in this science fiction–like city by the sea. She was his age, with dark almond eyes and deep auburn hair that she had pulled back into an impeccable French twist. She was wearing baggy black slacks and an elegant but modest red and black tunic. And she sure as hell could hold her booze. The three of them had sat in the suite’s sumptuous living room for perhaps an hour, maybe a little longer, as they drained the vodka Miranda had brought. It crossed Cassie’s mind that this was some sort of planned threesome, and while she wasn’t about to initiate it herself, she knew she’d be game if either Alex or Miranda did. Something about the moment—the booze, the banter, the suite—had her aroused once again. Alex and Miranda were in chairs on opposite sides of that exquisite coffee table and she was alone on the couch, and somehow the fact that the three of them were a few feet apart made the moment feel even more heated. But, in the end, this wasn’t about a threesome. Miranda left, giving both her and Alex only air kisses beside their cheeks before Alex shut the door behind her. Still, Miranda couldn’t even have reached the elevator down some distant corridor before Alex was stripping off her clothes, then his, and they were making love again, this time in the bedroom on that magnificent king with the massive headboard that was shaped like an Arabian arch.
But then she had gotten dressed. She had. She knew she had. She was going to return to the airline’s hotel. Hadn’t she said good-bye to him at the entrance to his suite? Hadn’t she even gotten as far as the elevator, wherever it was, on his floor?
Maybe. Maybe not.
It really didn’t matter, because clearly she had come back to his room and climbed back into his bed.
Assuming, of course, that she had even really left. Maybe she was remembering the walk alone from the restaurant to his hotel room after dinner, when Alex had said he had a brief meeting with an investor. He’d told her he wanted her waiting for him naked in his room. She’d obliged.
And now here she was, naked again.
Finally she took a breath, cringing against the spikes behind her eyes, and turned 180 degrees in the bed to face Alex.
And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body’s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey.
Reflexively, despite the pain, she threw off the sheet and leapt from the bed, retreating into those drapes against the window. It was while standing there, her arms wrapped around her chest like a straitjacket, that she noticed there was blood on her, too. It was in her hair and on her shoulder. It was on her hands. (Later, when she was in the elevator, she would surmise that the only reason she hadn’t screamed was self-preservation. Given the way her head was pulsating, the sound of her own desperate, panicked shriek might have killed her.)
Had she ever seen so much blood? Not from a human. A deer, maybe, back when she was a kid in Kentucky. But not a person. Never.
On the other side of the body, on the far side of the bed, was the clock. It was digital. It read 9:51. She had not quite ninety minutes to be in the lobby of another hotel and ready to leave for the airport and the flight back to Paris and then, tomorrow, home to JFK.
Her back against the drapes, she slid first into a baseball catcher’s pose and then onto the floor. She tried to focus, to make decisions. Her mind only slowed when she spotted the swath of broken glass on the floor, a constellation on the carpet between the foot of the bed and the elegant credenza inside which was the TV. Once upon a time, it had been the bottle of Stoli that Miranda had brought; now it was mostly slivers and triangular fragments that were almost pretty, though the neck was still attached to the shoulder and the shoulder was a jagged edge. And then, when she realized what that might mean, she felt the nausea rising up inside her. She raced to the bathroom with her hands on her mouth, as if her fingers really had any chance—any chance at all—of damming such a gravity-defying waterfall, and made it to the toilet. But just barely.
She sat with her back against the bidet, facing the shower, and watched the nozzles from the ceiling and the walls sway. She started to make a list in her mind of all she could remember from last night, but she was beginning to realize just how much was on the far side of that curtain of arak and vodka and whatever else they had drunk. She tried to imagine what might have led her to take a broken bottle and slash open the guy’s neck as if she and her father were gutting a deer. She wasn’t a barroom brawler. She’d never hurt anyone—at least not physically. But her behavior when she was drinking, when she had drowned all reason in tequila or gin, was legendary. In theory, there was a first for everything, though it made no sense to her that she would have killed him. Most of what people told her she did during blackouts was degrading and caustic and (on occasion) dangerous to herself. But it wasn’t violent.
She realized that the very first thing she had to do was make sure that the “Do Not Disturb” sign was on the hotel room door. She needed to keep housekeeping at bay while she figured out what the hell to do. She blinked. She blinked again. She was astonished at how fast the body of Alex Sokolov had sobered her up and made the pain of yet another tectonic hangover and the remorse from yet another one-night hookup seem rather inconsequential.
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She stared for a moment at the hotel phone in the living room of the suite, and the button for the front desk. In the end, she didn’t pick it up.
Instead she showered. She shampooed the blood from her hair and scrubbed it off her shoulder and hands as if it was tar. She didn’t know the specifics of the death penalty in the United Arab Emirates, but presumed it was more civilized than next door in Saudi Arabia. (She had a vague sense from the TV news that public beheadings were only a little less popular than soccer in Saudi.) Still, she didn’t want to find out.
She really had two choices: either she called someone the moment she emerged from the shower or she didn’t. She was either here for a long time—a very long time—or she was on the flight to France in a couple of hours. The words echoed inside her: a very long time. Good Lord, she recalled some poor American college student who spent years in a prison in Italy awaiting trial for a murder she swore she didn’t commit. She shuddered to think what loomed for her here in the Middle East, especially since she presumed no one would believe that someone else had come into the suite, nearly decapitated Alex Sokolov, and spared her. And if she did choose the first option, alerting people to the corpse in the bed where she’d slept, did she call the front desk or did she call the airline? Did she call the American embassy?
The choice hinged in part on whether she really had killed this young hedge fund manager. Despite the evidence, a part of her—the biggest part of her—honestly believed that she hadn’t. Certainly she had done other batshit crazy things when she was in the blotto zone: when she was blackout crazy drunk. She’d hear the next morning about the things she had said. She’d hear the next day about the things she had done. Sometimes she’d hear when she was back at a particular bar.
You were doing this insanely provocative, pretend karaoke—without music, Cassie, without music! There was no karaoke machine!—while standing on a stool in the corner.
Oh, God, you had an epic face plant just outside the ladies’ room. How did you not break your nose?
You were taking off your clothes and trying to get the bartender to do naked yoga with you.
It was only dumb luck that she had no DUIs, no crimes and misdemeanors in her history, and thus was still allowed to fly. She thought once more of her father. As she dried herself—quickly, roughly—she recalled the men and the mistakes in her own past, and she counted once more all the different countries in which she had slept with strangers and woken up sick in unfamiliar beds. Even now, probably no one in the crew was thinking anything about the fact that she was not with them at their own hotel. Most of them barely knew her, but most of them knew women and men just like her. Her behavior might have been extreme, but it was not uncommon.
If she hadn’t slashed the throat of the man who had tenderly washed her hair in the shower, she guessed she should be deeply grateful that whoever did hadn’t bothered to kill her. And that, in turn, suggested either a respect for human life or a distaste for collateral damage that was rather at odds with the ferocity with which he (or she or they) had murdered last night’s drunken dalliance. It also might mean that she was being set up. Someone—perhaps even that woman who had come to their room for a drink—wanted her to be blamed for this crime. Two thoughts crossed her mind, and she was unsure whether to categorize them as paranoid or uncharacteristically clearheaded: the first was that she hadn’t killed Sokolov, but her fingerprints were nevertheless all over the neck of the broken bottle. The second was the notion that it wasn’t the arak that had put her out so thoroughly: she’d been drugged. They’d been drugged. Maybe it was the vodka in that very bottle that Miranda had brought. The woman claimed she’d brought it because she wasn’t sure if the minibars at the Royal Phoenician had liquor; in Dubai, some hotel minibars did, some didn’t. Perhaps there was no more to the gift than that; perhaps there was.
She took a little comfort in the fact that no one she knew had any idea that she was here in room 511 at the Royal Phoenician. Sure, Megan and Shane had seen her flirting with Alex in 2C, but she’d never told the two flight attendants that she was going to see him. She and Alex had been discreet when they’d discussed where and when they would meet. She hadn’t given him her cell because he hadn’t asked for it—which meant that she wouldn’t be in his phone.
There was only Miranda.
But Miranda knew a lot. Miranda knew that she was a flight attendant. Miranda knew her name—at least her first name. Miranda would, Cassie assumed, be the one to call the hotel when Alex missed whatever meeting he was supposed to be in and didn’t answer his cell.
In the end, she told herself that she did problematic things when she drank, but slashing people’s throats wasn’t among them. At least she didn’t think it was. But she also wasn’t going to take the bait and call the front desk. She was going to get as far away from Dubai and the Arabian Peninsula as she could, and she would deal with Miranda’s allegations—and, yes, her own guilt—when she was back in the United States.
And so she put the soap and washcloth she had used in the shower into her shoulder bag. She would take the towel, too, though she imagined that her DNA was all over the bedsheets. Nevertheless, after she was dressed she ran a second washcloth over everything she could recall handling in the bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room, hoping to expunge her prints. She wiped down the glasses, the minibar, and the bottles—all those empty bottles. The remote to the entertainment system. Then, because much of the night before was a blur with yawning black holes in between, she ran the washcloth over everything she was even likely to have touched. The hotel room’s doorknobs and closet handles, its hangers, the footboard to the bed. That beautiful headboard, too.
When she was done, she picked up all the pieces of the bottle she could find. She gazed for a moment at the jagged edge of the bottle’s shoulder. Could this thing have really cut open Alex Sokolov’s neck with the thoroughness of an autopsy scalpel? She had no idea. Then she took it, too, rolling it up in the towel.
She pulled aside the drapes and blinked at the sun and the flat blue water a few blocks distant. Though their room was only on the fifth floor, the lobby was as tall and cavernous as a casino, and they had had an unobstructed view of the azure sea.
She told herself that when she was safely back in the United States—assuming she made it back there—she would talk to a lawyer. One step at a time. The important thing right now was to get back to her own hotel, make up a man from the night before if anyone asked, and be in the lobby at eleven fifteen. She had a feeling that she wasn’t going to breathe easy until the plane lifted off the runway. No, she knew in her heart that she wasn’t going to relax even then. At least not completely. Of all the horrible things she had done when she was drunk, nothing topped leaving behind a body that had bled out in the bed beside her.
And, much to her dismay, she was doing this sober.
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She left the “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling by its elegant gold braid around the hotel room doorknob to keep Alex’s body undiscovered for as long as possible, and stood for a moment trying to remember where the hell the elevator was. The hotel was massive, with corridors that seemed to snake in all directions. Finally she started off, walking quickly down empty hallways, and eventually she found the elevator bank. The lift seemed to take forever to arrive, but she reassured herself that time was just passing slowly because she was nervous. No, not nervous: she was terrified. She calmed herself by thinking how she could still tell someone at the front desk what had happened and tell them—insist—that she had done nothing wrong. After all, at this point, she had done nothing irrevocable: she was simply getting into the elevator (which was empty, too, a good omen). But then she was crossing the magnificent lobby with its palm trees and oriental carpets and opulent Moorish canopies (and, yes, security cameras), her face hidden behind her sunglasses and the scarf that she’d bought before leaving the Dubai airport yesterday, and then she was passing the row of stores inside the hotel. The shop for Christian Louboutin shoes. The one that sold nothing but Hermès scarves. A rather elegant arts and trinkets boutique. She remembered now, the images a fog, that she had ventured into all three of them. It was after dinner, on her way to the elevator. When she was waiting for Alex to return from his meeting. In one of the stores she had seen a leopard-print scarf—luminous, black and yellow swirls of spots, gold beading along the borders—that she had longed for but knew she couldn’t afford.
And now she walked ever faster, risking eye contact with no one, ignoring the concierge and the bellmen and the greeters offering tea, and then she was back outside in the world of blistering desert heat and the hotel’s line of fountains around twin reflecting pools. She almost climbed into a cab, but then stopped herself. Why give anyone additional proof that she had ever been at this hotel since, it seemed now, she had made her choice? She was outside. She was leaving. And with every step she took the idea of turning around grew more problematic—if not impossible—because every step took her from perceived innocence to perceived guilt. She was corroborating the allegations that this Miranda person was sure to make.
She checked her watch: she guessed she was a ten-minute walk from her own hotel, which would give her perhaps fifteen minutes to change into her uniform and get downstairs to the lobby. Maybe even twenty, because obviously they wouldn’t leave without her. She started to text Megan that she was on her way, but then stopped herself. Texts left a trail. For a moment, she took comfort in the fact that Megan hadn’t texted her, but then she was hit hard by a revelation: she disappeared in foreign cities, even here in the Middle East, with such disturbing frequency that Megan, the person she had flown with most often over the years, didn’t seem at all worried by her absence.
God, she was a mess. An absolute mess.
And yet she moved forward because like the planes on which she lived so much of her life, that was the only direction that allowed for survival. Think shark. She turned right, down the great oval of the hotel’s driveway. She gazed one last time at the palms and the fountains and the long line of town cars with their bulletproof glass windows, and started toward the airline’s less opulent accommodations. She sighed. She had made her choice—just one more bad choice in a life riddled with them—and there was no turning back.