16
Ani waited to rip into Cassie until they were outside Federal Plaza and walking west toward Church Street, where they could find a cab heading north.
“What’s the plan, Cassie? To go to prison here or in Dubai? What in the name of God were you thinking?” She was walking so quickly that Cassie was almost jogging to keep up, and she was doing it in high heels.
“It just seemed…easier,” Cassie said. “Can we get a drink and talk about this?”
“We can talk about it in my office. Not in the cab.”
“I could really use a drink.”
“You could really use some common sense. It almost doesn’t matter if you are innocent: every single thing you’ve done has suggested you’re guilty. You fled the scene. You told no one you were in his hotel room. You lied by omission when you landed—”
“Not really. No one asked me anything.”
“Okay, fine. You lied by commission just now.”
“I know. I get it. It’s just…”
Ani stopped and turned to face her. Her eyes were wide with rage. “It’s just what?” she asked, her tone accusatory.
“It’s just that it was so clearly me in the photographs. It’s just that they probably have my lipstick already. And now it doesn’t matter, because I’ve admitted I was there.”
“So what? You take the Fifth. Besides, it isn’t clearly you. It’s likely you. Big difference. Very big difference. And your damn lipstick could be anywhere. Do you know what’s going to happen now?”
Cassie shook her head. She waited.
“They are going to confirm the approximate time of death with the coroner in Dubai. They won’t know the definitive time, but if they can show it was before ten forty-five in the morning, you are fucked. Pardon my French, Cassie, but you are fucked.”
Then they stood in silence for a moment, and Cassie thought she might get sick right there on the street. She looked down at the sidewalk and took a few slow, deep breaths to compose herself. Maybe she was self-destructing because she knew on some level that she had in fact killed him, and she was craving punishment. Justice. Across the street was a bar with a neon sign with a four-leaf clover. “Please,” she said, her voice quavering as she pointed at it. “I’ve got to have a drink. I really, really do.”
« «
In a voice that was quiet but intense, a fioritura of frustration and fury only barely mollified by the gin and tonic she was finishing in great gulps, Ani explained to Cassie what she believed was likely to happen next, all of it contingent only on the time it would take for three people to connect as midnight neared on the Arabian Peninsula: the FBI’s legal attaché in the United Emirates, his connection at the Dubai police, and the coroner in that massive city by the sea. Last week, Ani said, after Alex Sokolov was found, the medical examiner had autopsied the body. He—and in Dubai, Ani supposed, it was more likely a male than a female coroner—had seen how much (if any) of the veal from dinner remained in Alex Sokolov’s stomach, taken the body’s temperature, and checked to see how far rigor mortis had progressed.
“I don’t know a hell of a lot about forensic entomology, but I can also see them examining the bugs that are starting to eat at the guy’s corpse. There probably weren’t beetles and there certainly weren’t maggots yet, but there may have been houseflies,” Ani said. “In any case, the coroner will have offered an approximate time of death.”
Cassie had downed a shot of tequila as soon as they arrived, and the warmth had helped. It was pretty good tequila. Smooth. She was calmer now, at least a little bit. The tequila reminded her of Buckley and dancing barefoot in the bar, a memory that was growing sweeter and fuzzier with time. She was almost done with the margarita she had ordered immediately upon finishing the shot. “You said it would be an approximate time of death. That means there’s a window. Do you know how big that window is? Are we talking an hour? Three hours? Five, maybe?” she asked. She sat back in her stool and swiveled so she was facing Ani. Sometimes she really enjoyed a place like this: dark paneling and little light, not quite a dive, but a far cry from Bemelmans at the Carlyle. There was a pair of older men in drab brown suits at the far end of the bar, but they were the only other customers here this time of the afternoon.
“Probably in the neighborhood of two or three,” Ani replied. “But decomposition isn’t really in my wheelhouse. It could be more. It could be less.”
“They found the body late in the afternoon, right?”
“Yes.”
A notion was floating just beyond Cassie’s reach. She thought she might be able to reel it in if she could talk the idea through. “So let’s say Alex was found at five p.m. You and I know he was killed before I woke up, and that was around nine forty-five in the morning. If the window is three hours, let’s hope he was killed an hour or so before I first opened my eyes.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. By eight forty-five in the morning, there were people in the hallways: Housekeeping. Guests checking out. Guests going to breakfast. No one commits a murder in a hotel room if they have to run a gauntlet of guests and maids.”
“There was no one around when I left the room about ten forty-five. And even if there were people in the hallways earlier in the day, doesn’t that help my case? People coming and going? A crowd? Maybe whoever did it counted on the crowds.”
Ani folded her arms across her chest: “I said there would be people. I didn’t say there would be crowds. I seriously doubt that the fifth floor of the Royal Phoenician is ever Penn Station.”
“Still. All we need is the window to work in our favor.”
“And to be big. Really big. Think picture-window big, Cassie.”
She nodded hopefully. “And they’re going to try and find Miranda now, right?”
“Yes. They will.”
Cassie was disturbed by the cadence of Ani’s words. “You make it sound like there’s a but coming.”
“There is. We already know there’s no woman named Miranda who worked with Sokolov. There’s no Miranda at Unisphere Asset Management.”
“So?”
“What if there’s no Miranda anywhere in his life?”
“Look, I didn’t make her up. I’ll admit, Alex barely knew her—if at all. I told you, maybe she’s just a friend or relative of an investor.”
The bartender glanced at the two of them, and Ani grew alert. Cassie understood that her lawyer wanted her to lower her voice.
“Another round?” he asked the two of them.
“No, thank you,” Ani told him, and Cassie felt a pang of disappointment. Then her lawyer took a deep breath and said to her, “You drink too much. You pass out. You black out. And you are, by your own admission, a liar. You lie all the time.”
The words hung in the air, revealing and hurtful. “I thought you believed me,” Cassie murmured. She could hear the devastation, almost childlike, in her response. It was as if Ani had betrayed her.
“You’re not even sure you believe you,” Ani said quietly.
“Sometimes!” she shot back. “Most of the time I am absolutely confident: I did not kill him.”
“Fine,” said Ani. “Fine. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you did, either. Does that help or make a difference? Not at all. Let’s hope there is evidence in the hotel room that this Miranda person exists.”
“There will be. Won’t her DNA be there?”
“It’s a hotel room. There’s DNA from a hundred—a thousand—guests in there.”
“Of course,” she agreed, but then an idea came to her. “Her DNA might be on the glass she used. So might her fingerprints. I wiped the glasses down, but who knows how thorough I was. I was kind of panicking.”
“Aside from the reality that wiping down a couple of glasses just screams guilt, how do they compare the DNA to a person they can’t even find? How do they compare the fingerprints? It’s not like there’s a database of DNA and fingerprints of people who say their name is Miranda.”
“I see…”
“I just don’t know what you were thinking when you volunteered the information to the FBI that you slept with the guy and spent the night in his suite. I am just…incredulous.”
“Either I wasn’t thinking, or I was thinking they already knew from the photos that I had spent the night with Alex and they were going to find my DNA or my fingerprints or my stupid lipstick in the room somewhere. I honestly don’t know which.”
“You are making the assumption that you’re even going to allow them to swab your cheek to get your DNA. Or take your fingerprints. I will still try and stall that for a very long time, but you have made my job that much more difficult.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
Ani’s face went a little pensive. “You said the day we met that the cuts on your hands were from a broken glass. Were they?”
“Yes. What are you suggesting? Do you think I tried to kill myself?”
“No, of course not. They were on your hands, not your wrists. I was thinking defense wounds. You were trying to protect yourself. You were fighting off a knife or that broken bottle. Tell me honestly: did Sokolov attack you at some point that night? Maybe—forgive me, I have to ask—some sort of creepy sex play that got out of hand?”
“He never attacked me, Ani, at least that I can recall. But that doesn’t sound like him. He was…”
“Go on.”
“He was really good in bed. It was our first time, and he was pretty gentle. Those cuts on my hands? I saw a Dubai news article with the two security camera photos of me, and I dropped the wineglass I was holding. It was in my bathroom the night before we met.”
“You even drink in the bathroom?”
“I had brought a glass of wine with me into the tub. Not the worst thing I do,” Cassie said.
“Okay, so the cuts had nothing to do with an attack,” said Ani. “I get it. You told me about Sokolov’s neck. Did he have any defense wounds on his hands or his arms? As if he were trying to parry the broken bottle?”
“You mean if I were attacking him?”
“Or someone.”
“There was blood everywhere, but I don’t think so.”
“There was absolutely no evidence of a struggle?”
“If there was a struggle, don’t you think I would have remembered it?”
The lawyer replied by raising a single eyebrow.
“No,” said Cassie. “You’re right. I wouldn’t have remembered. But I don’t think there was a struggle. I don’t recall seeing any cuts on his hands or his arms. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Well, it’s not a good thing. I wish I’d thought to have photographs taken on Monday morning of the cuts on your hands. That’s on me, that’s my bad. If they do decide you killed him, it would have been nice to claim there was a fight and you were desperately defending yourself.”
Cassie looked at her hands. She hadn’t even bothered with Band-Aids today. The cuts no longer looked like very much. “I guess it’s too late now.” Nevertheless, Ani took out her phone and used the camera to take a series of pictures, posing Cassie’s fingers and hands on a white paper placemat on the bar.
“These are probably worthless since the wounds are five days old and I’m using a camera phone, but what the hell?” the lawyer said. “By the time I find a photographer on a Friday afternoon in August, the cuts will be completely healed.”
“There is one good thing about Alex not having any defense wounds,” Cassie said.
“Go on.”
“Maybe it means that he didn’t feel any pain. I’ve been hoping he just never woke up.”
“That’s sweet. But not helpful.”
“I know.”
“Remind me,” Ani asked. “What time did you pass out?”
“It was a blackout. It seems like I was still up and about. Functioning, sort of. I wish I had just passed out.”
“Okay. What is the very last thing you remember?”
Cassie put her face in her hands and thought. Her fingers were moist from the perspiration on her glass. Finally she looked up and answered, “Here’s the chronology. Miranda is there and I’m dressed and we’re drinking. We’re in the suite’s living room. She says she’s going to leave, and I’m going to leave with her.”
“But you didn’t leave with her, right?” Ani interrupted. “You were there when Alex broke the vodka bottle.”
“That’s correct. He convinced me to stay, which wasn’t that hard. We drank some more and we had sex again, this time in the bedroom. But then I got dressed.”
“You’re positive?”
“No. But almost positive. I’m pretty sure. I really did plan to return to the airline’s hotel. That was my intention, anyway. Miranda had left and now I was going to leave, too.”
“Do you know what time Miranda said good night? Perhaps they could find her on the security camera.”
“Eleven? Eleven thirty? Midnight?”
“That helps. So you would have left when?”
Cassie shrugged. “Twelve thirty? One? An hour later, I guess.”
“Okay.”
“But they didn’t see me at that time—or, at least, they didn’t publish any photos from the lobby security cameras of me leaving in the middle of the night. That would suggest I didn’t leave until the morning.”
“Or, at least, that you didn’t get as far as the lobby.”
“Yes,” she said, and an idea, fuzzy and inchoate, began to form. She tried to gather it in, to mold it: to imagine where else she might have gone. She focused on the corridor. She saw so many hotel corridors, but few as elegant as the one at the Royal Phoenician. There were the long, endless hallways, which was typical, but the Oriental carpets had been beautiful and the elevator doors—when you got there—were black and gold; there had been the sconces along the walls, at once Aladdin-like and futuristic, as if the genie had instead been a Martian, and there had been the exquisite guest-room doors with their Moorish cross-hatching bordering the panels. There were the divans with the ornate blue and gold upholstery by the elevators and by the windows and in the nooks at the corners. She had stood beside one when she first exited onto Alex’s floor with the key he had given her at dinner, enjoying the view out the window on the way to his room. No, it had been beyond his room. She had walked to the end of the corridor to see the city from there.
“Sometimes I make a wrong turn when I leave a hotel room—even when I’m sober,” Cassie said. “I am just in so many hotels. We all make that mistake. Pilots, flight attendants. The elevator was to the left and around the corner in Berlin, for instance, but then it’s to the right and straight ahead in Istanbul. It happens all the time.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. This might sound pathetic, but I have a vague memory of panicking in the hallway after leaving his room.”
“Because someone was after you?” Ani asked, clearly a little stunned.
“No. Because I was lost. It was the middle of the night and I couldn’t find the elevator and I couldn’t find his room. I couldn’t even remember his room number. I mean, now five-eleven is branded into my brain. But it wasn’t then. Think of all the room numbers I see every month of my life. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. I think…”
“You think what?”
“I think I collapsed on a divan in one of the corners of the corridor. I think it was by a window that overlooked the city.”
“This was after Miranda left.”
“Yes. This was after she left. And so there I was alone in the corridor. But I was so drunk—so very, very drunk. Maybe I got lost and gave up. Maybe I just sat down on the thing and tried to figure out what the hell to do. And maybe there I passed out. In other words, I never made it to the lobby. I got lost in the hallway and crashed on the couch for, I don’t know, half an hour. An hour. Maybe less, maybe more. But I woke up before anyone from hotel security or room service happened down the hallway.”
“And then you found your way back to his room?”
“That’s right. I had a key. Maybe the catnap helped me to focus. Or sobered me up just enough that his room number came back to me.”
“You wouldn’t have to have been gone all that long. I’m guessing even ten minutes would have been enough for someone else to enter his room and kill him.”
“Oh, it’s very possible I was gone at least ten minutes. Those hotel couches and divans looked really, really comfortable.”
“And when you return the room is dark?”
“At least the bedroom is,” she answered. “Maybe there was a light on in the living room.” She had to believe that even she wasn’t ever so drunk that she would knowingly crawl into bed with a corpse. Still, the reality of what she was suggesting was beginning to become clear.
“God, Cassie. What if Alex was killed at one or two in the morning? That’s why you take the Fifth.” Ani’s frustration was evident as she paused to take another long, last swallow of her drink. “I wish I knew more about how precise an autopsy could be at pinpointing a time of death.”
“Aren’t you glad I told them about Miranda? At least now they have a suspect other than me.”
The lawyer stared at her but said nothing.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I am. I’m just built…weird.”
“Irresponsible would be a more precise word. So would insane.”
“Will we know what happens before I fly to Rome?”
Ani put both of her hands on Cassie’s knees. “You are assuming that the next time I see you isn’t after you’ve been arrested—at, let’s see, a bail hearing. You are assuming that you haven’t turned over your passport by then. You are assuming you still have a job.”
Cassie picked up her margarita and ran her tongue along the very last of the salt on the rim. The glass was otherwise empty. “I’m taking my niece and nephew to the zoo tomorrow,” she said, her voice a little numb in her ears. It was as if she had headphones on. Then: “Will I be fired?”
“The zoo. Your job. Really? Are you hearing a word I’m saying?”
She nodded. “I am.”
“The union will have your back. My uncle will have your back. Call him tonight and let him know what’s going on. I’ll call him, too. I rather doubt the airline can fire you. Presumption of innocence and all. But at some point they may put you on a leave of absence. There is a whole branch of law that studies precisely when you can fire an employee for off-duty conduct—and when you can’t.”
“I see.”
“I’m not sure you do. I’m really not.”
“You know what’s the damnedest thing?”
“Right now? After you decided to just drop by Unisphere yesterday afternoon? After your performance with the FBI today? That’s one hell of a high bar. I don’t know. Tell me.”
“It’s this, that expression you just used. Presumption of innocence. Who knows what I’m capable of when I’m that blotto and the memory’s collateral damage. But I really do know in my heart that I didn’t kill Alex. I do stupid things when I’m drunk and I do irresponsible things, but I don’t do…that. I don’t cut people’s throats. And so if the hammer comes down hard on me this time, it will be a kind of awful irony.”
“Cassie?”
She waited.
The waves of Ani’s anger were receding now, and in their wake was only sadness and worry. “I promise you: you’ve done nothing so bad that you deserve what might be coming.”
« «
Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.
Cassandra, Kentucky-born daughter of no one who would ever be construed for royalty, pondered the disbelief that she, too, left in her wake and the apprehension and fear that now marked her every step. The reality of what she had done (and what she had not done) had become incontestable fact in her mind, but she rather doubted the FBI ever would believe it if she were to volunteer the chronological truth: she said good night to Alex Sokolov and left the palatial digs that existed behind the door to room 511 sometime around twelve thirty or one in the morning and then wandered the hallways in search of an elevator. He was most definitely still alive at that point. But she never made it to the elevator. She just never found it. And so she collapsed, an appalling, drunken, boneless marionette on an ornate Middle Eastern divan, and dozed. When she awoke, she still didn’t reach the elevator, either because once more she couldn’t find it or because she hadn’t even remembered that it had been her original destination. Either way, she returned to Alex’s suite, stripped naked, and climbed into his bed…utterly oblivious to the fact that he was dead. Or almost dead.
No, in the morning she had seen his neck. He had bled out quickly. He was dead.
And she had slept the rest of the night beside his corpse. In the same sheets. Her head on the pillow beside his pillow. His blood clinging to her hair.
This was a spectacular, revolting fail even by her standards for indignity and mortification. She guessed if she weren’t already such a lush, the revelation would have driven her to drink.
« «
And yet, for whatever the reason, despite her performance at the FBI office that afternoon, the authorities did not come for her that night. She and Ani shared a cab uptown, Cassie exiting on Twenty-Seventh Street, and she was back in her apartment by a quarter to six. She called Derek Mayes, Ani’s uncle at the union, and he actually seemed considerably less shocked by the story she shared—beginning with the body in the bed and building to her confessing to the FBI that she had spent the night with Sokolov—than she might have expected. She attributed this more to his rather low expectations of her as a person than to his experience with flight attendants generally. He assured her that he and Ani would talk and together they would look out for her. He was comforting. He reminded her that she hadn’t definitely killed anyone, though he did add, a dig that was more ominous than funny, “at least that’s your story this week.”
And then, buoyed by Mayes’s generally can-do attitude and the Washington State Riesling she opened and poured over ice, she called Buckley. Didn’t even text him. The actor suggested they meet for a drink later that evening, after he’d seen a friend’s show at the Barrow, and since it was rare for her ever to say no to a drink, she said yes. They picked a bar in the West Village this time, one near the theater.
Then she collapsed onto her couch and stared up at the Empire State Building. She pulled the paperback Tolstoy from her purse and sipped her wine and read, hoping to lose herself in the narrative and escape the reality of her life—and yet somehow also to glean insights into Alex Sokolov’s. It was an impossible balancing act: if she was reading to learn more about the man who had died on the sheets on which they’d made love, then certainly she wasn’t reading to take her mind off the utter precariousness of her future. Before returning to “Happy Ever After,” she paused on one particular paragraph about Ivan Ilyich that had stayed with her: “He had an affair with a lady who threw herself at the elegant young lawyer.” But the relationship meant nothing to him, “it all came under the heading of the French saying, ‘Il faut que la jeunesse se passé.’ ” Translation? Youth must have its fling.
It made her feel old. She reminded herself that she had viewed Alex as but a harmless romp, too.
Eventually she phoned her sister, who was already at her hotel in Westchester, and they picked a time to meet tomorrow morning at the zoo. They’d rendezvous at ten thirty at the fountain near the sea lions, just inside the Fordham Road entrance. She was grateful that she wasn’t going to be alone with the kids. She was actually relieved. It would be such a disaster if she were alone with her nephew and niece when she was arrested.
« «
Buckley took her hand as they walked from the bar to his apartment. It was only a few minutes after midnight, and so the West Village was still vital and vibrant, the narrow streets crowded, the bistro tables along the sidewalks full.
“You were checking your phone a lot,” he murmured. She had told him nothing, nothing at all. Either he hadn’t seen the photos in the newspapers that day or he had looked at them so quickly that the fact they were her hadn’t registered.
“I haven’t been reserve in years, but the airline asked me to be available,” she lied.
“Didn’t you say that you’re flying to Rome on Sunday night?”
“They might want me for another route tomorrow instead.” The air was cool, and she wished that she had brought more than a sleeveless blouse. She felt the hair on her arms rising.
“Would you still get to go to the zoo tomorrow? I’d hate to see you miss the sea lions—and your family.”
“We’ll see,” she said, though in her mind, she imagined herself replying, If I’m not at the zoo, it’s probably because (best case) I’m meeting my lawyer and getting my cheek swabbed for DNA. Worst case? I’m being arrested for murder. But she didn’t say any of that. “Tell me more about your audition,” she said. “Tell me more about the pilot. You said it’s a drama.”
“Sort of. Based on the script, there’s also a lot of very dark humor. It’s about a Staten Island drug family. Apparently there will be a lot of scenes on the ferry and a lot of nighttime shooting—and shooting during the shooting. It looks crazy violent. I’d be one of the brothers. Think Edmund in King Lear. I’d be the younger brother and a bastard—literally and figuratively.”
“Do you think you have a chance?”
“Yes, but only because it’s a small role. It’s a recurring character, but not one of the four major leads.” He pointed at a squirrel clinging to a second-story screen window and peering into the apartment. “Peeping Tom,” he murmured.
Looking up at the squirrel from the sidewalk was a huge orange tomcat, his fur so thick that Cassie could see only a bit of the collar. His tail was thwapping back and forth, sweeping the concrete. She thought about her cats at the shelter—and so many of them were her cats in her mind, at least until they found permanent homes—and wondered what they would do without her. Oh, there were other volunteers, but she didn’t know how diligent they were about sneaking in catnip and treats and toys, and brushing the poor things for hours and hours on end.
“When will you know?” she asked.
“If I got the part? Next week, I guess.” Then: “There’s lots of great sibling stuff in the script, too. That’s the kind of material that fuels my jets. My relationship with my brother and sister in real life is pretty complicated.”
“Yeah. Mine, too.”
“Are you and your sister close?”
“Not really.”
“You wouldn’t be friends if you weren’t related?”
“Probably not.”
“Even after all you two endured together growing up?”
“Even after that.”
He asked her what her sister did for a living and then what her brother-in-law did. He found her brother-in-law’s work far more interesting. Everyone did. No one asked follow-up questions when you said your sister was an accountant. But an engineer at an army base that disposed of poison gas and nerve agents? People were fascinated—especially men.
“I’ll bet he doesn’t talk about it much,” he said.
“Because it’s all so classified?” she asked.
“Because it’s all just so dark. Chemical weapons? That’s crazy. We’ve all seen the pictures from Syria.”
“I think he’s in charge of getting rid of them. Or one of the people in charge, anyway. But, yes, it is classified.”
“And not exactly Thanksgiving dinner table conversation, in any case.”
“Nope.” Then, feeling uncharacteristically defensive of her family, she continued. “He’s really not a dark person at all. He’s pretty chill. He’s very sweet. I get along better with him than I do with Rosemary.”
“Well, you and Rosemary have a lot more history together.”
“Yeah, we do. And most of it’s kind of dark,” she said. She asked him to tell her about his family, and he laughed a little bit, but then he started to talk, making jokes about Westport and WASPs and how his family’s Thanksgivings would have rivaled Martha Stewart’s when it came to detail and production values.
She leaned into him as he regaled her with tales of the crested blazers he would wear as a boy and his mother’s impeccable Christmas trees. She was tipsy, and she liked herself best when she was tipsy. She thought she was prettiest when she was just on the cusp of drunk. She’d spied herself (or studied herself) in enough mirrors—at parties, on airplanes, in her compact—to know that her eyes looked a little more wanton and her lips a little more inviting when she was just starting to leave the sadness of sobriety behind. When she was working, when she’d snuck a drink or two on the flight, she knew that men watched her differently, their own eyes more rapacious. She could feel their gaze on her hips, her ass, as she worked her way up and down the thin aisle. And so she stopped walking, which led Buckley to stop. She had to take her mind off this kind man’s childhood and the shelter cats and the travel and the liquor—all that she might be about to lose.
She felt no one was following her now. No one.
He stared at her for a long moment, regarding her.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s you,” she said. “It’s a starry night in the city.” Then, for reasons that she didn’t precisely understand, she brought his fingers to her lips and kissed them.
« «
And in the morning, it seemed, they still weren’t looking for her. Or, at least, they hadn’t come for her. The only text she had was a brief one from Ani asking if she had heard anything. She texted back that she hadn’t, and watched Buckley sleep for another moment more. It crossed her mind that she might never see him again after today. She just didn’t know what awaited her in the coming hours. The coming days. The indignities. The accusations. The public and private pain.
He was still asleep when she climbed from beneath the sheet and sat for a moment on the side of his bed. The shade was down, but she could tell it was sunny outside. It would be a delightful day at the zoo.
She checked the weather on her phone, punching in Charlottesville, Virginia. She saw it was going to be hot and sunny there, too. It was going to be, as these things went, a perfectly lovely day for a funeral.
« «
A pair of sea lions popped effortlessly from the water onto the stone platform, spraying the young woman with the bucket of fish as if they were playful black labs that had just come in from the rain. The trainer smiled at them and tossed them each a couple of sardines.
Cassie was standing along the rail beside Rosemary. Next to her sister were her two children, Tim and Jessica. Dennis, Rosemary’s husband, had moved a few dozen yards away from them, photographing the animals from what he believed was going to be a vantage point that would allow him to capture both the animals and his family. Jessica hadn’t yet started third grade, so she was still young enough to laugh and squeal at the sea lions’ antics, but Cassie observed that Tim was watching with the feigned disinterest of a rising middle-schooler. At least she presumed it was feigned: how could you not enjoy watching sea lions frolic on a Saturday morning in August? Still, he seemed considerably more fascinated by the small drone the zoo had hovering above the sea lions for a video feed inside a nearby gift store. Cassie knew he had one at home that was probably just as sophisticated. Drones were such a guy thing, she thought. It was downright chromosomal.
They were both attractive children: Tim was in the midst of a growth spurt, but he was already lanky and slender, his hair the same reddish blond as hers. His jeans were baggy and his Royals T-shirt so faded it looked almost like denim. Jessica was overdressed for the zoo, but Rosemary said the child was overdressed for life: though she was eight and this was Saturday and it was the middle of the summer, she was wearing violet wedge heels, a black skirt that had been part of one of her costumes from her June dance recital, and a red velvet blouse with a scoop neck but very long sleeves. Cassie recognized the blouse from the American Girl store. She recognized as well the rhinestone headband Jessica was using to pull back her hair. Cassie had bought her niece the blouse when she had taken her shopping in the spring, and she had bought her the headband at the grand bazaar in Istanbul. It had cost maybe a buck.
“I want one,” Rosemary was saying, smiling at the animals. Her sister had gotten a job a year earlier crunching numbers with a health insurance company in Lexington and had fallen in love with the gym and the spin classes at the headquarters. Cassie thought she’d never looked healthier. “I think a sea lion would make a great pet.”
“You know that’s ridiculous,” Tim chastised his mother, rolling his eyes.
“I do,” she said. “But I still want one.”
“I kinda do, too,” Cassie admitted. She looked at her watch. In Virginia, Alex Sokolov’s funeral was under way. She conjured in her mind a southern brick church with a clean steeple, and a sloping, manicured lawn that was a deep green. She thought of his parents and his extended family in the front pew, the wood polished and gleaming in the sun through the stained-glass windows. She saw black clothes and white handkerchiefs. She saw the old and the young, and in her head she heard their occasional, choked sobs. She heard laughter when someone shared a story about Alex that was charming or funny, or hinted at whatever it was that made him special.
Whatever it was…
How was it that she knew so little of the man who had died beside her in bed? How was that possible? But she knew the answer. Of course she did. The proof, as she was wont to joke, was in the proof. All that wine. All that vodka. All that arak.
By now, she supposed, the Sokolov family had been informed that the presumed killer—that alleged black widow—was not an expat American living in the Emirates, but a flight attendant living in the United States. She imagined the father demanding news and progress from the FBI, and someone from the Bureau reassuring him that the noose was tightening. An arrest was imminent.
But was it? The United Emirates couldn’t arrest her here. Unless this was deemed a terrorist act, neither could her own country. An extradition could take years. Was it possible that everyone in the world who followed this story would believe she was a killer and there was absolutely nothing they could do?
No, not nothing. There was still a civil sword of Damocles dangling by a thin thread above her. And the FBI was interested. That was a fact. That was why Ani was so worried about her.
She looked at her phone once again. Still nothing from either Frank Hammond or Ani Mouradian.
“Who in the world are you expecting to call you?” Rosemary asked. “You’re like a teenager, you’re checking your phone so much.”
“The airline,” she said. She figured she might as well use the same lie on her family that she had used on Buckley last night. “They might need me on the flight to Rome this evening.”
“I thought we were all having dinner together.” Her sister’s lips grew pursed.
“We are,” said Cassie. “It’s a long shot. I’m sure I’ll be here with you.” But she wasn’t sure. Despite the silence from both her lawyer and the FBI, she in fact wondered if she’d get to have dinner with them tonight. She had a canvas bag over her shoulder, and in it was the Romulus and Remus bookend she had stolen from the hotel in Rome and a pair of her own earrings. They were small gold cats she had bought years ago in an antique store in Frankfurt but had decided when she was back in America were too precious for a grown woman. This morning she had repackaged them in a little box from the greeting card store near her apartment and had brought them as a gift for her niece. She’d decided that she shouldn’t wait until Christmas to give her nephew the bookend—today might be her last (her only) chance—and so she wanted to be sure that she had a present for Jessica, too.
The word present gave her pause. A memory. Her mother reading aloud to her before bed in Kentucky. Her mother was sitting on the mattress beside her, and Cassie was perhaps six years old and curled against her in the narrow twin bed. They were leaning against Cassie’s headboard, and Cassie was already in her pajamas. The story tonight was one of Beverly Cleary’s books about Beezus and Ramona.
“Now, you sit here for the present,” her mother read aloud. In the book it was the first day of school, and a schoolteacher was telling Ramona to remain in her seat…for the moment. And so Ramona absolutely refused to move because she mistakenly believed there was a gift—a present—waiting for her if she sat perfectly still. Cassie recalled being so happy that evening. She had been roughly Ramona’s age, she was enjoying her own first days at school, and her mother was wearing a floral perfume that smothered the coppery scent that usually stuck to her when she came home from the wire factory where she was the receptionist.
Cassie heard the crowd around them laughing. One of the sea lions was using its flipper to shake the trainer’s paw and then gently slapped at the woman’s open hand as if giving the trainer a high-five.
“I’ve got something for you,” Cassie said to Jessica. The girl looked up at her. She was beaming. Clearly her niece loved the animals. Cassie noted that today she was wearing the starfish studs that Rosemary had given her when she had gotten her ears pierced at the start of the summer. “Consider it a back-to-school present,” she added, handing the girl the small box.
Tim turned toward his sister and smiled. “Oh, good. More stuff you can lose in that mess you call a bedroom.” Already the way her niece left her bedroom looking like it had been ransacked by drug addicts was legendary in the family. Apparently, she considered at least three or four outfits before school every day, leaving the rejects scattered on the rug or her bed or the window seat.
“I have something for you, too,” she told the boy, handing him the small, wrapped sculpture. “Jessica, I got your gift in Frankfurt. Tim, I got yours in Rome.”
“It’s heavier than it looks,” he said.
“God, your life sounds glamorous. Frankfurt. Rome. If people didn’t know better,” Rosemary murmured. Over the years, Cassie had shared with her sister dozens of the experiences—some appalling, some merely degrading—that came with the job, so she did know better.
“It does have its moments,” she admitted. Tim waited chivalrously for his younger sister to open the box before pulling apart the red tissue paper that swaddled his gift. The girl cooed when she saw the earrings, and Cassie bent over so her niece could hug her.
“I love them!” she said. Then, the words at once strange and precocious coming from a girl so young, she added, “They are perfectly elegant.”
Over her shoulder, Tim rolled his eyes.
“I’m glad you like them,” Cassie said. “Your turn,” she said to her nephew.
Tim pulled off the blue ribbon and then tore off the red tissue. “A sculpture,” he said simply, and for a moment Cassie thought of that old joke: When someone opens a gift and says aloud what it is—a juicer, a car vac, napkin rings—they hate it. And she felt bad. But the moment lasted only a second, because then he went on. “I know this story. It was in a book about the myths that was on my summer reading list. No one connects the twins to werewolves, but I think that’s the coolest link.”
“Is it a paperweight?” Everyone turned at the voice. The children’s father had appeared almost out of nowhere and inquired. His camera was around his neck, and he was cleaning his sunglasses with a handkerchief. Dennis McCauley was a big man, not fat and not muscular, but tall and stocky with a stomach that was just starting to grow bulbous. He was handsome, his hair now more white than black, but still lustrous and thick. He parted it in the middle and swept it back, and her sister often teased him about having movie-star hair and said he looked like an actor when he was in one of his uniforms. He wasn’t wearing a uniform today, however, he was wearing khaki cargo shorts. In Cassie’s opinion, that eliminated instantly any chance at all that he might be mistaken for an actor. Sometimes her sister called him absentminded, but Cassie rather doubted that he was ever inattentive at work. He was an engineer and probably just compartmentalized. Everyone knew how bloody brilliant he was. She wished that she had told Buckley that last night. Shown a little more pride in what he did. She’d said Dennis was sweet; she should have said he was smart. The guy, after all, helped dispose of chemical weapons. It was work, Cassie suspected, that was more dangerous than he was ever likely to admit to his family.
“No, it’s a bookend,” Cassie answered. “I bought it at an antique store near the Spanish Steps in Rome.”
“They only had half?”
She nodded.
“I love it. A bookend about twins and half has gone missing,” Dennis said. “That may be the definition of irony. What will you use it for, son?” he asked Tim.
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. But I like it. It’s cool.”
“I agree,” said Dennis. Then he bent over to look at the earrings that Cassie had brought his daughter, oohing and aahing at their beauty. When he was done, he stood up straight and put back on his sunglasses. “You find the damnedest things in your travels, Cassie.”
“I guess.”
“No, I mean that. You bring back the most creative things. Me? Ask these two: the stuff I bring them back when I travel is way less interesting.”
“That’s because you only go to places like Maryland and Washington, D.C.,” Rosemary tried to reassure him.
“Nah. Cassie has a much better eye,” he said. “Really, they’re perfect gifts.”
“Thank you,” she said. She was touched. He was always so much kinder to her than Rosemary was, Cassie thought, even though he knew just as much as Rosemary did about her peccadilloes great and small. But he was less judgmental. She had a feeling that when her name was attached to the dead body in Dubai, he would be far more surprised than his wife.