32

Cassie stood in the crowd that had spilled out onto the street and the sidewalk across from the hotel and watched the fire trucks arrive and the firefighters race into the building. She was grateful that when the siren in her room had started to shriek and the alarm began flashing bright red, she had still been dressed. She had just started to doze off; she had just lost track of whatever was occurring on the sitcom. And so it had taken almost no time to slip into a pair of sandals and toss the gun into her shoulder bag with her passport and wallet and room key. She was glad this was August in Rome. It was the middle of the night, yes, but it was rather pleasant outside. She guessed there were close to two hundred people milling about, none of them alarmed in the slightest, most in some version of nightclothes or sweatpants. She was among the few women she saw in a skirt or a dress. For a moment she watched a gorgeous young couple nuzzling, and grew at once envious and happy for them. The guy could pull off a vandyke beard without looking like Satan, and she was clearly naked (or almost naked) underneath a bright orange shawl she had wrapped loosely around herself. They noticed her gaze and he smiled at her, so she quickly glanced down at her phone. She was scrolling through the spam that had come in when she heard her name and looked up. It was Makayla. She had climbed into a pair of black leggings and a white T-shirt. Cassie saw that she slept in braids.

“Well, this is fun,” the other flight attendant said, joining her by the streetlight where she was standing.

“Were you asleep?” Cassie asked.

“I was. Sound asleep. I assume it’s a false alarm.”

“Yeah. I do, too. I don’t see anything that would suggest there’s a fire. No smoke. Nothing.”

“Unless maybe it’s something stupid and minor in the kitchen.”

“That could be.”

The woman leaned against the lamppost and surprised Cassie when she said, “It’s times like this I wish I still smoked.”

“You used to smoke?”

Makayla nodded. “I stopped when my husband and I decided we wanted to start a family.”

“Was quitting hard?”

“Not at all. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. I just stopped. We said it’s time for kids, and the next day, when I came out of an ATM before heading to the airport, I smoked what I knew was my last cigarette. There were nine or ten left in the pack, and I pitched them. I pitched my lighter. Of course, I’d always been a pretty casual smoker. I only started because of a high school play.”

“You’re kidding.”

She rolled her eyes. “Nope. A Raisin in the Sun. I was Ruth. And the director had me smoking these stage cigarettes. They have chalk or something in them so it looks like there’s smoke. But I had no idea how to hold a cigarette. So, after rehearsal one afternoon I bought a pack of real cigarettes to practice. It was kind of a drama diva move.”

“When would you smoke?”

“You mean years later?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Usually at times like this.”

Cassie raised an eyebrow. “Fire alarms?”

“When I was bored. Or walking. Or after sex.”

“Alex Sokolov was like that.” She hadn’t planned to say it out loud. She wondered a little why she had.

“The fellow who was killed in Dubai?”

“Yes. He only smoked when he was overseas in Europe or Russia or the Middle East. At least that’s what he told me.”

Makayla seemed to take this in. “How well did you know him? I thought you only met him on the flight from Paris.”

“That’s true. Not proud that I ended up spending the night with him. But, yes, that is when we met.”

“Was he a good guy?”

Cassie saw another member of the flight crew approaching, a fellow a bit older than her named Justin who had pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white oxford shirt. At least she presumed he had gotten dressed again. She wondered if he often slept naked when he traveled, like some of her friends who flew, because it meant not packing pajamas. Or maybe his body ran hot (like hers), and he liked the feel of cool sheets against his skin when he fell asleep. Maybe he liked the erotic charge. Certainly some nights she did.

“Evening, ladies,” he began. “Nothing like getting a good two hours of sleep before the alarm goes off. The fire alarm, that is.”

“Nothing like it,” Cassie agreed. And then, perhaps because she had reached a stage where she just didn’t give a damn anymore about what people thought of her, she continued to answer Makayla’s question: “Yes. Alex Sokolov was a good guy. At least he was to me. Maybe he was up to something. Maybe he was involved in something shady. I didn’t know him well, and I probably drink too much to be trusted to judge anyone’s character. But I liked him.” She turned to Justin and explained, her voice as deadpan as she could make it—the tone, she supposed, of a woman who knew all she may once have hoped for in life had now passed her by—“We’re talking about the man I slept with in Dubai, the one who was killed in our hotel room. Excuse me, his hotel room.”

Justin took this in for a split second. Then he put up his arms, his hands flat and framing his face, the universal sign for surrender. “I can stand right over there if you two would like to speak privately. Far be it from me to interrupt,” he said lightly.

“No,” Cassie continued. “I don’t seem to have any secrets anymore.” As soon as the sentence had escaped her lips, however, she knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. In some ways, it was the worst kind of lie because it suggested that her secrets and lying were behind her. But, of course, she was just living a different set of secrets and lies.

“Did you, I don’t know, think it was going to go anywhere when you were back in America?” asked Makayla.

“My thing with Alex? Not really. But we did have fun that night. Maybe we would have seen each other again. Maybe not.” She put her phone back in her purse, sliding it in beside the pistol. “Given my history, most likely not.”

Justin looked uncomfortably down at his sneakers. They all noticed that he hadn’t bothered to tie them, and so he knelt down, and Cassie imagined he was probably grateful to have something to do that did not involve listening to her discuss the sad end to her dalliance at the Royal Phoenician.

“My vice has always been drinking,” she said now to Makayla. “I never smoked. I’m not sure I could quit drinking the way you just stopped smoking. Hell, I know I couldn’t.”

“Were you drinking when the fire alarm went off?”

“Alone in the night in the hotel room with a bottle of tequila? That could be me. But it wasn’t. Not this time. I haven’t had a drink all day—or night.”

“There you go. You’re fine.”

She sighed. “No. I’m not fine, Makayla, I’m not fine at all. You saw me at the airport this morning.”

Justin stood up and said, “What happened at Fiumicino had nothing to do with drinking. You were sober, Cassie.” For a moment they stood in silence, and Cassie had the sense that he wanted to embrace her—to comfort her—but was afraid it would be construed as something less chivalrous. “I mean, you were sober, right?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I was.”

“There you go.”

They watched two firefighters exiting the front entrance, followed by a gentleman in a black suit and a necktie the luminescent red of a New England maple leaf late in September. First in Italian and then in English he asked for everyone’s attention. He introduced himself as the night manager and apologized profusely for the inconvenience of what was, happily, just a false alarm. He said everyone could safely return to their rooms or, if they preferred, first to the hotel bar, which was going to reopen for an hour for anyone who would like a nightcap—on the house. A free drink, he explained, was the least the hotel could do to apologize for dragging everyone out of bed in the middle of the night.

“I’m game,” said Justin. “What about you two?”

But Makayla glared at him, her dark eyes daggers. Cassie couldn’t miss what that stare meant. “I think we should all just go back to sleep,” she told him.

“No, it’s fine,” Cassie said. “It really is. I won’t join you, but if you two want to go, please don’t let me put a damper on the party.”

Instead Justin shook his head and said sheepishly, “You’re probably right, Makayla. Wheels up will come a lot sooner than we think.”

“Yes. It will.”

And with that the three of them returned to the hotel lobby and rode the elevator together, all of them exiting on different floors, Cassie the last to leave on the sixth. No other hotel guests left with her on her floor. She guessed they were all at the bar.

When she got out, she stood for a long moment and stared down the corridor. The hallway wasn’t as opulent as the Royal Phoenician, nor was it as long. But it was elegant: perfectly appointed for a lovely Italian boutique hotel. The carpet was a little frayed with age, but the patterns were reminiscent of a Renaissance tapestry. She thought of the clouds and sea in a Botticelli painting and imagined the work that went into making a color or dye five hundred years ago, the transformation of the pigments into the acrylic at the tip of the brush.

Then she started down the hallway. She felt a spike of unease, but she had lived with almost that sort of twinge since she had woken up beside a corpse, and so she disregarded it. She walked in silence down the corridor, lonely and alone, her room key in her hand, and stared straight ahead. She told herself that the air was not really charged and there was really nothing to fear, no reason to be morose. She was just going to a hotel room in the night by herself, as she had hundreds of times in the past, and there was no reason to be anxious or frightened.

After all, this time she was actually sober.

When that realization came to her, she smiled.

But the smile didn’t last long, because when she turned the corner she saw a man and she jumped. For a split second she feared that her anxiety had a specific cause: it was every woman’s fear when she’s alone and sees a man in her path. He was about twenty yards from her room, and she almost turned and ran. But then she realized that it was only Enrico, and she relaxed. He was sitting in a small chair against the wall, his face in the shadow from the sconce behind him. There was a table with a hotel phone next to him. He stood when he saw her and went to embrace her, but she pushed him away.

“You just scared the you-know-what out of me,” she told him.

“I thought I would be a nice surprise,” he said, his tone apologetic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“God. It’s best if I’m alone, Enrico. I told you that.”

“And I was going to leave you alone. I was down at the bar when the fire alarm went off. I was helping them close. And I thought, my beautiful flight attendant must be terrified.”

“By a fire alarm? No.”

He shook his head. “By being outside in the dark—instead of safely in bed in your room.”

“I’m back now. I’m fine.”

“Then I will escort you to your room and leave you there.” He held out his elbow, and she took it. Together they walked down the corridor. Then she slid her key into the slot and opened the door.