18
Cassie joined Rosemary and her family for dinner Saturday night at a crowded Cantonese restaurant that Rosemary had discovered online. It was a block south of Canal and closer than she would have liked to the FBI building on Broadway and Worth. She guessed she was only a five-minute walk from yesterday afternoon’s debacle.
The restaurant catered to a tourist crowd that wanted to try dim sum. It was massive and loud and packed. But Cassie was surprised at how delicious the dumplings and pan-fried noodles were, and then felt guilty for having experienced a little culinary snobbishness before they had joined the throngs inside. Yes, she traveled a lot and had eaten all around the world, but just because tourists liked something didn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful. Exhibit A? The peppermint macarons at the bakery near the Eiffel Tower. Besides, she was a flight attendant. It wasn’t as if she was dining in La Pergola when she was in Rome.
And she appreciated the sheer ordinariness of her sister and her family—the lack of drama—and the way the four of them knew each other’s rhythms so well. There was just such comfort in the predictability. Cassie understood that she would never feel anything like this: love born of certainty and ritual.
“Do you remember that awful Chinese restaurant in Grover’s Mill?” Rosemary was asking her now.
She nodded. Her sister rarely brought up their childhood around Tim and Jessica. There were too many land mines, and you never knew when a memory would trip one. “Of course I do.”
“It’s now a weirdly expensive clothing boutique. Kind of like Anthropologie. I mean, they had tops in there for two hundred bucks.”
“They must need a place to launder their crystal meth money,” Cassie said, only half kidding. “That’s certainly one possible explanation.”
“I agree.”
“I don’t know what’s stranger: the fact the store exists or the fact you know it’s there. Were you actually back in Grover’s Mill recently?”
“We all were,” said Dennis. “It was when we took the kids to that new amusement park that opened at the end of June. It’s pretty close.”
“They have the steepest water slide in Kentucky,” Jessica added. The girl was using her spring roll a bit like a spoon to get as much peanut dipping sauce into her mouth as she could with each bite.
“And then you detoured to Grover’s Mill?” Cassie asked.
“We did,” her sister answered. “I thought it was time these two saw where their mother grew up.”
“I think we got the PG version,” Tim said. Cassie couldn’t believe how many dumplings the boy had consumed, but he seemed sated now. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, watching as the waiters wheeled the carts through the narrow spaces between the patrons.
“Maybe,” his mother agreed. “But at least you saw the house.”
“It was so tiny,” said Jessica.
It was, Cassie thought, it really was. It was a small saltbox, shabby with age, on less than half an acre. Their parents kept the booze in a kitchen cabinet, on the bottom shelf, which accommodated the taller bottles. The first time she started watering them down was when she was nine. Her father had come to the elementary school that day in June to watch the end-of-year Field Day contests: The three-legged races. The sack races. The sponge battles. (She never did find out why he wasn’t in the high school where he was supposed to be that afternoon, but he must have had an excuse. Wouldn’t he have been fired if he’d just disappeared or they’d known he was drunk when he left?) It was right after lunch. He had interfered in the egg race—a relay race—meeting her on the center-field grass where they were playing, and trying to coach her on how best to transfer the egg to her partner’s spoon. It was shocking to see her father there, in the midst of the game, instead of with all the other teachers and administrators and a smattering of parents—the other grown-ups—off to the side. As he tried to assist her, breaking the rules in every imaginable way, he accidentally knocked the raw egg in her spoon to the ground, where it broke open, the bright yellow sun of the yolk exploding like a star, a supernova of shame. It had been mortifying, and Cassie hoped desperately that everyone supposed her father was merely clumsy and a cheater—not also a drunk. In her desperate embarrassment, she hoped they thought he was only an idiot.
He had left soon after that, mumbling something about having to get back to the high school.
That night was the first time that Cassie had crept from her bed while everyone else in the house was asleep and opened the cabinet where her parents stored the liquor. There was Jack Daniel’s, of course, but Cassie knew that was reserved for “special” occasions. Mostly her father drank a Scotch whiskey called Black Bottle, and the level of liquid was about at the top of the label. It was three-quarters full. She poured out an inch and then added an inch of tap water. She did the same with the vodka and the bourbon and the gin. She wished she could do the same with the beer in the refrigerator, but each can was sealed and so that was impossible.
“But I had my own bedroom there,” Rosemary said, and Cassie felt herself wincing inside at the word there. Rosemary would go from there to the foster home, where she would share a strange bedroom with a strange girl—another teen in the foster care system—who was angry and violent but could dial it down just enough in front of their foster parents to stick around. It was hard to believe that the saltbox with the watered-down gin and their father’s drinking and their mother’s weeping and their weekly fights about money and booze was a well with sufficiently happy memories that Rosemary wanted to share the house with her children. How many evenings had Cassie tried to drown out their fights by cocooning inside her Walkman headset? How many nights had poor Rosemary crawled into bed with her, sobbing and scared?
“More tea, Cassie?” Dennis was holding the pot near her teacup.
“Yes, please,” she said, though she would have preferred a Long Island iced tea: tequila, gin, vodka, rum, triple sec. The whole damn cabinet in a highball glass. At the table beside them, everyone had a bottle of Tsingtao beer. She wanted one of those, too.
“And we actually had a very nice swing set and playhouse in the backyard,” Rosemary went on. “It was made of wood—not metal that rusted out as soon as it rained. My friends and I used to play Little House on the Prairie on it. The timbers were so thick and sturdy, they looked like they belonged on a log cabin.”
“That sounds like the lamest game ever,” her son said.
“Oh, it was,” Rosemary agreed. “Totally lame. But we were little.”
Cassie sipped her tea and recalled that moment after college when she broke her vow of alcohol abstinence. She was twenty-three and was at the swimming pool at a hotel in Miami. There were afternoon thunderstorms in the Northeast and their flight back to New York had been canceled, and so the crew was sent to a hotel. It was in Coral Gables and had a rooftop pool. There were crews late that afternoon from three different carriers because the hotel filled its rooms in the summer—the off-season—with airline employees. Everyone was drinking, except her. The flight attendant on the chaise beside her, a motherly veteran who had been flying twenty-five years, was sipping a piña colada, and it smelled heavenly. Cassie considered ordering a virgin colada, but the waiter wasn’t nearby, and the idea of getting up and going to the bar seemed like a lot of work at five in the afternoon, the temperature still in the mid-eighties. And so she had taken a sip. And it was good. Better than a virgin colada, the taste sharper, the tingle deep, deep inside her. She inhaled the aromas of coconut and pineapple, yes, but there was also something else. Something more. Rum. Had there ever been rum in her parents’ kitchen in Kentucky? Probably. But she had no memory of watering down a bottle or of her mother cascading rum down the sink. It felt different and new, and though she sensed she was flirting with something so wonderful but—for her—so reckless that it would kill her, she pushed herself to her feet and walked to the pool bar in her bikini. She ordered a piña colada for herself. Did she even bother to nibble on the pineapple wedge? Probably not. She drank it fast because it was sweet and she could feel the way it warmed her insides and made her worries go away. Suddenly, she wasn’t fretting about her hips. They were fine. She was fine. She was no longer that girl who was scared in the backseat of the car as her drunken father tried to control their hideous robin’s-egg-blue Dodge Colt on the winding road between Landaff and Grover’s Mill, her mother yelling at him to please, please, please, for God’s sake let her drive. She wasn’t that anxious college student, awake at four a.m. at the college switchboard, praying to herself that her kid sister would be okay in the foster home. She wasn’t that diligent, joyless, unremittingly responsible twenty-three-year-old flight attendant who strove for perfection in all things, because anything else was the start of the downward slope that would lead her back to the small, sad village where her father drank and her mother cried and she was pouring Black Bottle down the sink. She was…free. And she liked that. She enjoyed the taste, sure, but more than that she liked the sound of her laugh when the first officer made a joke (not especially funny, but he was cute) about the way a particular cloud in the sky over Miami looked like a puppy with a cigar. That evening he would seduce her, or she would seduce him; in hindsight—even the next morning—she really hadn’t a clue. She learned quickly that music sounded better, people were nicer, and she was prettier when life’s rough edges had been smoothed over with a little alcohol. Or, better still, with a lot. What fault could anybody possibly find in any of that? God, it was good, it was all good, and it was all Cassie could do that very moment in the Chinese restaurant not to violate Rosemary’s Rules and summon the waiter to bring her a Tsingtao, too. Or, better yet, a gin and tonic made with Beefeater or Sacred or Sipsmith, if they had it.
“I’m reading a book about a pilot,” her niece was saying to her, and Cassie turned to her and tried to focus.
“Oh? Tell me about it,” she said.
And her niece did and she tried to pay attention, but a part of her was recalling the denial that marked her drinking in her early and midtwenties, and how she convinced herself that she wasn’t her father’s daughter and she wasn’t repeating his mistakes. She wouldn’t let alcohol destroy her the way it had destroyed him. And for over a decade and a half—until Dubai—on some level she had even believed that. Because it wasn’t until Dubai that she had really become one with her father by allowing her addiction to lead her to the dead. You can repair anything but dead. You can’t fix that.
So you buried the dead and moved on.
You burned the carbons.
The proof was in the proof.
And yet she wanted that gin and tonic. Even now. Even as she waited for a phone call from Ani Mouradian or Frank Hammond. She wanted it badly.
“Can I borrow the book when you’re done?” she asked Jessica.
“Sure, but it’s a kids’ book.”
She shrugged. “A lot of the best books are kids’ books. Charlotte’s Web. The Giver. Matilda. It’s a long list.” She smiled at the girl and then told the table that she was going to the ladies’ room. She planned to drop a ten with the bartender on the way there, curl her tongue into a funnel, and drain a shot glass of gin.
Dennis didn’t mind driving in New York City. He rather liked it, in fact. His big complaint was the cost of parking. But the hotel where they were staying in White Plains was reasonable, and so he had driven to the Bronx Zoo, which had made it easy for them all to drive to Chinatown. Then, after dinner, he insisted on chauffeuring Cassie back to her apartment. She invited them all upstairs, but it had been a long day and Dennis really didn’t want to park again. So she said her good-byes in the car and exited at the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street, waving at Noah the doorman the moment she emerged from the car. She was in her apartment by eight o’clock.
« «
If she hadn’t had a shot of gin at the bar at the restaurant in Chinatown, would she have stayed home once she had settled down inside her apartment? Probably not, because Paula phoned, her siren song drawing Cassie once more toward the rocks: the magical cubes that added such beauty to the luminescent brown of Drambuie and transformed the waters of arak into clouds. Briefly she considered not answering when she saw Paula’s name on her phone’s screen, but willpower had never been her strong suit. And so she did answer, which meant that by nine she was drinking at the bar at a Mexican restaurant near Union Square with her friend and a woman from Paula’s ad agency named Suzanne, and by ten she was telling the two of them a version of her nightmare in Dubai in which Alex Sokolov himself didn’t appear, but instead she slept with a fictional commodities trader named Alex Ilyich—a surname she commandeered on the fly from Tolstoy. But she was certainly imagining the real Alex as she spoke, giving her fictional one that same peculiar jones for the Russians and Russian literature. Alex, she said, had told her that he would be back in the States and visiting his parents in Virginia this week. The man, she added, had promised to call her when he was stateside but never had. Never even texted.
Which, perhaps, was why now she was allowing them to prod her to call him at his parents’ place in Charlottesville.
“Do it!” Paula said raucously over the sound of the crowd and clinked glasses and the thrum of the bass from the speakers on the far side of the bar. “Do it! Call him! Give him shit for fucking and forgetting!”
Cassie gazed at her friend and at her friend’s friend. Their eyes hung heavy with tequila, and their smiles had that Saturday-night smirk, thin-lipped and derisive, but also eager for a rush to cap the weekend with a pulsating vibrato of hilarity and chaos.
“I don’t have his number,” she said.
“So? Call Charlottesville! Call his parents! How many people there have unpronounceable Russian last names?”
And so to appease them she pretended to search for Ilyich in that Virginia city, but actually looked up Sokolov. She found that name instantly. She pressed in the digits, let it ring once, and then hung up. She felt at once mournful and brutish. She knew she would be unable to endure the sound of Alex’s mother’s or father’s voice on an answering machine, or the voice of whoever was screening calls at the house the night after the funeral.
“Busy,” she said.
“Like hell it was!” said Suzanne, rapping her knuckles on the wood of the bar, then laughing and moaning at how she had banged them so hard that she’d hurt herself. “You’re a coward and a wimp.”
“No, it was busy,” she insisted. “It really was!”
“No way!” Paula laughed, rolling back her head. With the speed of an attacking snake she grabbed Cassie’s phone and pressed on the number that Cassie had just dialed. Cassie tried to wrestle the phone away, but Suzanne held down her right arm and then her left, and then bear-hugged her and giggled. Cassie didn’t struggle, not because she feared making a scene—she never feared making a scene—but because a part of her had to see where this speeding train was going to crash and just how cataclysmic would be the carnage.
“Hi, this is Cassie Bowden,” Paula said when someone answered. “I met Alex last week in Dubai and I want to speak to him right now! I want to know why he hasn’t called me!”
She watched as Paula’s drunken eyes went wide and her jaw actually went slack in disbelief. She said nothing more, nothing at all. She just handed the phone back to Cassie, as Suzanne released her arms.
Cassie looked at the screen and saw the connection was gone.
“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.