8

Cassie met the union official for breakfast at a diner on the corner of Twenty-Sixth and Third. Derek Mayes had chubby salt-and-pepper caterpillars above his eyes, the brows shading tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a face just starting to grow jowly. He was mostly bald and his seersucker blazer had blotches of black city dust, but the blue matched his eyes. His wedding band was thick like his fingers. She pegged him for his late sixties.

“I went through your records,” he was saying. He was eating scrambled eggs and home fries and bacon. She was nursing a bowl of oatmeal, both because she wasn’t especially hungry and because her anxiety had made her queasy. “You were on the Hugo Fournier flight. Infamous.”

“I guess.”

“Man, some of you were in deep water on that one. Stowing a dead guy in the bathroom? That widow was pissed. And, oh my God, what a PR nightmare for the airline. For the union. Remember The Tonight Show? Conan? The New York Post? I remember the comics trotted out all the terms: Trolley dolly. Air mattress. Sky muffin. It’s like it was 1967 and you were all ‘stewardesses’ again—like there were no male flight attendants.”

“The female terms are all about sex. The male ones are degrading in a different way. A lot end with ‘boy.’ ”

He nodded. “Juice boy. Cart boy.”

“Anyway, I really wasn’t involved in the decision about what to do with the body.”

“I know. We would have met then if you had been. But we had that purser’s back and everything turned out okay. And it was never a criminal thing.”

“Like this.”

“Yeah. Like this. At least I think like this. It’s just so typical of the FBI. So typical. They don’t call the union, they don’t tell you to get a lawyer. It’s infuriating. If they were going to meet the plane, they should have told us so we could make sure there was someone in the room with you.”

“Are you going to meet with every employee who was on the plane?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, almost chuckling at the certainty as he spoke. “Look, every person the guy met the last couple of days is of interest now. Someone in Dubai or someone in America is going to want to talk to every single bellhop and waitress and concierge and, yes, flight attendant he might have said boo to. Every single one. Of course, it’s really only you and Megan and Jada I’m worried about. You’re the three.”

“Because…”

“Because you were the ones handling first class and you were the ones who were in direct contact with Sokolov.”

“And you said they both called you?”

“Damn right, they did. You should have called me, too,” he said, and she felt chastised.

“You live in the city?” she asked. After she spoke, she wondered if she should have apologized to him for not reaching out to the union on Saturday. But she had been so relieved when the FBI’s Frank Hammond hadn’t even asked about her whereabouts in Dubai that it hadn’t crossed her mind to contact them. She had been in something like shock at the way she thought she might have dodged a bullet.

Mayes nodded as he chewed. Then: “I live about ten blocks south of here. My wife and I always figured we’d move out to Long Island when we had children, but we never did, so we just stayed. And we like the neighborhood. Lot of NYU kids. Makes us feel younger than we are.”

“I like that area, too. Especially in September when the freshmen arrive. They are just so young.”

He smiled. “And they get younger every year.”

“So, what did Megan say? Or Jada?” It felt like she was feeling her way in the dark. So far she and Derek had discussed her path to the airline, but the most revealing thing she had shared was that she had made it through the University of Kentucky on financial aid and a work-study job at the college switchboard. She’d manned the console, an antique as the twenty-first century loomed, from midnight to eight a.m. two nights a week. Almost no one ever called. Mostly she alerted campus security when students locked themselves out of their rooms or when women wanted a safe ride back to their dorms. Mostly she wrote papers and worried about her kid sister and the foster home where Rosemary was parked until she finished high school. Cassie didn’t drink then. She guessed this was irony, given the way that so many of her peers seemed to live on keg beer and boxed wine.

He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, and then used it on his fingers. “They said they barely spoke to him. Hi and bye. Jada thinks she may have brought him the basket of breads midway through the lunch service and asked if he wanted another roll. She may have offered him a newspaper and asked if he wanted English or French. But they both said—when I asked—that you spoke to him a lot.”

“Why did you ask?”

“Because I needed to know who was taking care of the guy and talking to him, if they weren’t. And they both said it was you. Jada said he chatted you up pretty seriously.”

For a second she said nothing. She was grateful that Jada had told Mayes that Alex had been chatting her up, the implication being that he had paid more attention to her than she had paid to him. The truth was somewhere closer to the middle. Still, she wondered: Was this the moment when she should confess? Tell this union official that she needed a lawyer and the union’s help? Tell him that there was a woman in this world named Miranda who may have had something to do with Alex’s hedge fund, and had seen her in Alex’s hotel suite at the Royal Phoenician that night? But she let the moment pass, as she had every other opportunity she’d had to start over. Derek Mayes wanted to help her, but she rather doubted there was any variant on attorney-client privilege between the two of them that could withstand a court of law. Whatever she told him could come back to haunt her. “I told the FBI everything I knew when we landed,” she said firmly. “I know it wasn’t very much. But he was just one more passenger on just one more flight.”

“Yes and no.”

She waited. It took control not to sit back in the seat and fold her arms across her chest. The waitress refilled their coffee, and Mayes poured the last of the milk in the small, tinny creamer into his mug.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Yes, to you he was just one more passenger on just one more flight,” he said carefully, and for a moment she began to relax. His construction suggested that no one really knew anything about her involvement with the man. “But I don’t think he was just a hedge fund guy. Yesterday was busier than I like for a Sunday in the summer. I think the FBI is going to want to speak to you again.”

“Me or the cabin crew?” she asked. She heard the quiver in her voice. Her mouth had gone dry.

“Cabin crew.”

“The FBI told you that?”

“They did.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Look, you spent the most time with the guy on the plane. That’s a fact.”

“So?”

“He was part of your section in first class. You were the one serving him. Don’t get me wrong, the other flight attendants aren’t throwing you under the bus. But both Megan and Jada said you two were yakking it up every time you brought the guy a glass of wine or refilled his coffee cup. You spent a hell of a lot more time with two C than you did with, I don’t know, four C.”

“That’s not true.”

“You two weren’t yakking it up?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Look, even if it were true, why would that be a problem?”

“I was polite to him.”

“I’m serious, Cassie. Even if you were flirting with the guy, why would that be an issue?”

“Because it would be unprofessional.”

He chuckled, but it was a mean laugh. “Yeah, flight attendants never flirt with passengers—or pilots. Never.” He rolled his eyes. “You know how high the divorce rate is in your profession. I guess that’s why flight attendants and pilots only wind up married to…each other. You’re away from home all the time, you’re flirting all the time, you’re in hotels all the time. And…”

“And what?”

“And no one gets you except people like you. No one gets the weirdness of the lifestyle. No one else could possibly understand.”

She sighed. “It’s inevitable we wind up together. It’s simply because we all work together. I’m sure ad people marry ad people, and lawyers marry lawyers. All professions have office romances.”

“Yeah, but you don’t all work together. You don’t. That’s the thing. You almost never have the same people on the same crew. I mean, you and Megan are bid buddies, and I guess she and Shane are bid buddies. But there were ten flight attendants on that airplane to Dubai, and seven of you had never seen each other before that JFK/Dubai sequence and may never, ever see each other again. Or, if you do, it will be years from now. And that’s just the cabin crew. Add in the folks in the cockpit. When will you fly next with any of those pilots? A year from now? Two? Ten? No, Cassie, sorry: you don’t work together.”

“Where is this going? I thought you wanted to help me.”

“I do. And that’s why I need to be sure that this Sokolov character didn’t tell you something meaningful or you didn’t learn something about him that you should be sharing with a lawyer or just maybe the FBI.”

“Nope.”

“Because by now the FBI knows you were flirting with him. And by now they know that you were not having dinner that night in Dubai with any member of the crew, including your friend Megan. If I know that from my limited conversations, then they do from their interviews.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Maybe it doesn’t. But just in case: anything you want to tell me about that night in Dubai?”

“I went to bed.”

“In the airline’s hotel?”

“Yes!”

“Did you go out to eat?”

“No,” she answered, wondering the moment the syllable had escaped her lips whether she had spoken too quickly. There surely were witnesses at the restaurant. But she also knew instantly that his next question would be about room service—and it was.

“So you had something sent up to your room?”

“No.”

“You didn’t eat?”

“I wasn’t feeling great. I ate some peanuts from the minibar. I fell asleep.” She couldn’t imagine they could actually check such a thing. How accurate really was hotel monitoring of the minibar?

“So you didn’t go out?”

“Did someone say I did?”

“Not to me.”

“Okay, then.”

“But according to two airline employees in the cabin with you, you were flirting with Alex Sokolov. And then, it seems, you weren’t hanging out with anyone from the flight crew that night. No one. You just disappeared—”

“Into my hotel room!” she snapped, cutting him off. She saw over Mayes’s shoulder that she had spoken so harshly that the two older men having breakfast together at the next table turned, their heads swiveling like owls’.

Mayes opened his hands, palms up, and sat back. “Got it,” he said. “Got it. But for all we know, the FBI is going to talk to the passengers who were seated near Sokolov on the flight, and it’s possible that one or more of them is going to say you and the guy were friendly. I don’t know yet if Sokolov was from some wealthy or well-connected family, or whether he just wasn’t what he said he was. I don’t know what he was really doing in Dubai. Maybe it really was just a meeting with investors. But this story has legs, so I want to be sure you do three things. Okay?”

“Fine. Tell me.” She hoped that her lies and her fear would be misconstrued for aggravation.

“I want you to get a lawyer.”

“I can’t afford a lawyer!” she said, even though she recalled vividly her vow in the hotel suite in Dubai that she would find one if somehow she made it back to America. “I can barely afford my apartment. You know what I make. I’m broke. We’re all broke. We all need more money than we have.”

“So does everyone, so relax. I can help you find a lawyer you can afford. Not a big deal. It’s what we do.”

“I’m not saying yes—because I don’t see why I need one—but what else?”

“Two, I want you to keep me informed with exactly what’s going on. Again, this is so we can help you.”

“Fine.”

“And, three, I want you to tell me the second a reporter calls you.”

She hadn’t imagined a reporter contacting her. But she realized that was naïve. Of course one might, especially if Sokolov was from a prominent family or wasn’t really a hedge fund manager. “I can do all of that, sure,” she agreed. And perhaps because of the specter of a news camera in her face or the proximity of the New York Post that a fellow at another table was reading, she added, “And if you have a name for a lawyer, that would be great. Cheap, but good. But tell me something.”

“Name it.”

“If Sokolov wasn’t a money manager of some sort, then what was he? A spy?”

“He had a job that demanded he travel. That’s a great cover for a lot of things.”

“Is that a yes? He might have been an American spy?”

“Or Russian. Or German. Or Israeli. Or South African. I don’t know. Maybe he was some kind of go-between or courier.”

She thought of the paperback she’d bought yesterday. “He was into his Russian DNA—at least a little bit.” When she said the word DNA, she felt another one of those pinpricks of misgiving and fear: it was her lipstick. The lipstick she had lost somewhere in Dubai; the lipstick she had possibly left behind in room 511. She imagined a police tech lifting it off the hotel room floor with tongs and dropping it into a clear plastic bag. There it was, the smoking gun.

And there was something else: a lip balm. A lip balm with her airline’s logo. Sure, it was a generic, but she liked it and she used it, too. It had a coconut scent. When she had been emptying her purse before throwing it away in Dubai, she hadn’t seen it either. Sometimes she moisturized her lips with the balm before applying her lipstick. Had she done that in 511? Was there a lip balm somewhere in that room that had both her airline’s logo and her DNA?

“Maybe it’s just that simple,” Derek was saying about Sokolov. “Maybe he’s FSB.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“What used to be the KGB. Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Counterintelligence. Spy stuff. Often very nasty spy stuff.”

“But he still seemed awfully American to me,” she told him, hoping Mayes hadn’t heard the small tremor in her voice.

“Means nothing. If you’re undercover, you want to seem American. But what do I know? He could just as easily be CIA. Or maybe he was a seriously nasty crook selling arms. Or girls. Or drugs. You know, whatever he was doing may have had nothing to do with espionage. I’m just saying, he may not have been what he said he was, given the way he was killed.”

“Didn’t some Dubai police officer say it was a robbery?”

“It wasn’t.”

“Really?”

“Nothing was stolen.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “I asked. I asked the FBI agent who interviewed Megan. The woman wouldn’t tell me much, but she said nothing was stolen. At least they don’t think anything was stolen. His wallet, his watch, his credit cards were all there, according to the FBI chief in the Emirates. His computer was still there. His briefcase was still there.”

She wanted to kick herself for not stealing Sokolov’s wallet and wristwatch and dumping them in the very same trash can in Dubai where she had tossed the washcloth and soap and the shards of the bottle of Stoli. It hadn’t crossed her mind to suggest that the poor guy’s death had been part of a robbery. But then she recalled an expression that a philosophy class had debated ad nauseam in college: you can’t prove a negative. In the end, the class as a whole had decided that you could. But the expression had stayed with her.

“Well, if something was stolen, it wouldn’t be in the hotel room, so you wouldn’t know it was gone,” she said.

“Agreed. I’m sure the authorities in Dubai, ours and theirs, will compile an inventory as best they can of what he had brought with him. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone at the hotel. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone who was supposed to be in the meeting with him—assuming there really was a meeting. In any case, the vibe I’m getting is pretty clear: this wasn’t a hotel room robbery that went bad. This was an execution.”

The word lingered in the air. She looked down at the last of the runny eggs and toast crumbs on the union official’s plate. Mayes was probably—almost certainly—correct. She had reminded herself dozens of times how easy it would have been for someone to slash her throat, too. And yet they hadn’t. They’d spared her. Still, she would never be able to erase the memory of that body in the bed, so cold and still. She would never forget all that blood.

“Cassie?”

She looked up.

“I thought I’d lost you there for a minute,” Mayes was saying. “I was about to snap my fingers. You know, wake you up from your trance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re okay?”

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

He sat back in his chair and smiled. He folded his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not completely sure you are,” he said. “But you know what?”

She waited.

“I got a feeling some poor dead guy you met one time on an airplane is the least of your problems.”

“I think I should be insulted.”

“Nah. I’m speaking as an old guy who wanted to be a dad and never was.” He picked up the bill the waitress had left on the table—Cassie wondered when that happened, because she couldn’t recall the waitress returning—and watched Mayes head for the cashier to pay it.

---

« «

That night Cassie opened the Chianti alone in her apartment, swirling it in a hand-painted wineglass. It was one of a pair that Rosemary had given her years before she had realized that she probably shouldn’t encourage her older sister’s drinking. The glasses had white orchids rising from the base of the bowl to the rim, the petals erotic and lush. As she was swallowing her first sip, her phone pinged and she saw that she had a text from Buckley. He was asking how she was. He added that he regretted how short they had been with each other before he’d left Sunday morning, and hoped he’d see her when she was back in New York. She didn’t reply, but neither did she delete it. Usually she would have. Usually when she picked up a guy in a bar like that, there would have been a gap in her memory—an hour or two or ten—that she didn’t want to hear about on a second date. Maybe she didn’t delete the text this time, she thought, because while she had gotten drunk with Buckley, she hadn’t accelerated when she hit her drunken V1 and then broken the blackout barrier with a concussive, window-rattling boom. So, maybe tomorrow she would text something back. Maybe not. Probably not. Still, she kept the text on her phone and told herself that this suggested evolution, a supposed impossibility at midlife when, in theory, no one changed. She thought it was rather kind of him to suggest they had been short with each other on Sunday morning. In reality, she had only been short with him.

The irony of blackouts was this: you had to have a spectacular alcohol tolerance to black out. Amateur drinkers passed out long before they put the hippocampus—those folds in the gray matter where memories are made—to sleep. She was a pro. Partial blackouts happened when the blood alcohol hit the magic 0.2; en bloc or total blackouts occurred when you ratcheted up the number to an undeniably impressive 0.3. The bar for drunk driving, by comparison, was a fraction of those numbers: a mere 0.08.

She considered calling Paula, one of her friends who could keep up with her drink for drink, whether the drink of the day was wine or tequila or Drambuie. Paula had a weird thing for Drambuie: it was her Proustian madeleine from a ninth and tenth grade spent getting sloshed on her father’s MacKinnon. When Cassie was with Paula, dullness disappeared and it was like they were skydiving. They might create chaos for the women and men around them—sharing too much, dancing too aggressively, berating a hostess or a bartender for the music that was playing or the fact it was raining outside—but they also dialed up the energy, didn’t they? Maybe they did. But in her lucid moments the next morning, she wondered if in fact they just sucked the energy from the room.

Which was why she also had friends like Gillian. Gillian drank, but only like a reasonable person. She didn’t get drunk, and so it was Gillian who would grab Cassie’s purse at the end of the night when she left it dangling over the back of the bar stool or tell the strange, aggressive guy with the face tats that Cassie wasn’t going home with him.

In the end, however, she called no one and texted no one. Not tonight. Instead she booted up her laptop on the kitchen counter and stood before it as she drank. It was time to learn all that she could about the dead American in Dubai. It was time to search for Miranda. She decided to begin with the social networks. There she could read about Alex Sokolov and perhaps discover Miranda among his followers or friends.

Alex had mentioned that he had Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, though he said that he rarely used them. She discovered right away that they were gone, if they had ever existed at all. She found no trace of him on LinkedIn and Tinder. She presumed his family had deleted the pages, but she also thought if Derek Mayes had been correct and Sokolov had indeed been a spy, then it might have been just as likely that some government agency (one of ours or one of theirs, she thought cryptically) had made the pages disappear.

Unfortunately, this also meant that she couldn’t search among the man’s Facebook friends or Twitter followers for this other woman. This was going to demand more digging. And so she switched gears and started to surf among different travel and news websites for stories about the murder. There were plenty, though none were long and they merely corroborated what he had told her about his family life: He was an only child. He had parents in Virginia. They described his job with the hedge fund. The strangest part of the articles? None of them mentioned another Unisphere employee or investor named Miranda having seen a woman with Alex in his suite hours before he was executed.

She recalled him mentioning that his mother’s name was Harper, and Cassie was able to find her Facebook page quickly. She half expected to see a photo of Alex and a desperately sad in memoriam from a mother about her son. But there wasn’t. Harper Sokolov hadn’t posted anything in a week, since she had added a photo of herself, her husband, and another couple in tennis whites on the terrace of a country club. She looked wholesome and athletic and fit in the short dress. Cassie saw Alex in her smile. She searched among the woman’s friends for Miranda, though she wasn’t confident she’d be there: if Alex was meeting her for the first time that night in Dubai, why in the world would his mother know her? But she had to check. And as she expected, there was no one named Miranda among Harper’s friends.

Next Cassie visited the Unisphere website and typed the word “Miranda” into the search box. Nothing came up. The company was too big to include an employee directory. But there was a list of offices around the world, and while they didn’t have individual websites, they did list phone numbers. She glanced at the clock on the oven and saw that even eight time zones to the east no one would be in the Dubai office yet. But she could call them later and ask for Miranda. See what happened.

She refilled her glass a third time and placed Mayes’s business card directly beside Frank Hammond’s on her refrigerator. She had scribbled on it the phone number of the lawyer he had recommended, a woman with the melodious name of Ani Mouradian. She hadn’t heard from any reporters. The FBI hadn’t contacted her again. She tried to convince herself that Derek Mayes was wrong and she would never hear from the FBI again and she would never need to call this Ani Mouradian. But she guessed she would have to be a good deal drunker to believe that, and so she ran herself a bath and brought the bottle and the glass and her phone into the bathroom with her. There was no reason to be sober: she was alone, and she hadn’t touched alcohol since the small hours of Sunday morning. Forty-two hours. Almost two days ago now.

When she was settled under the bubbles, she closed her eyes and tried to lose herself in her ablutions—clearing her mind was of more importance to her tonight than cleaning her body—but it was impossible. She kept thinking of Alex and she kept wondering what would have happened if she had called the front desk at the hotel. But she knew. At least she thought she knew. Everyone would believe that she had killed the poor bastard—which, she had to admit, would be very difficult to refute—and she would be in jail in Dubai. She would know someone from the U.S. embassy very, very well, probably having grown acquainted with him or her from behind bars.

She noticed that the polish on her nails was reminiscent of the Chianti and that it was starting to chip. She would have to get a manicure tomorrow. The flight to Rome didn’t leave until seven p.m., so she could sleep late and still go to the gym and the salon. Easy.

She reached down and put her wineglass on the floor beside the tub and grabbed her phone. She decided to search Twitter for news stories about Sokolov, see if there was anything she might have missed, and scrolled through the ones that had been online for a day that she’d scanned just a few minutes ago in the kitchen. But then she saw a tweet from a news agency in Dubai that was only seconds old. She clicked the link and instantly felt her stomach lurch as if she were on a plane that had just dropped a thousand feet in a wind shear. There she was. There she was twice, as a matter of fact. There were two images of her. She wasn’t recognizable—at least not really recognizable, because the photos were grainy stills taken from the Dubai hotel’s security camera footage, and because in both images she was wearing sunglasses and the scarf she had bought at the airport when they had landed. In the first she was in the lobby, meeting Sokolov before they went out to dinner; they were near the entrance and she had hooked her arm around his elbow. She was smiling; they both were. In the second she was alone, exiting the hotel the next day. This time, her jaw was set. It was the scarf that had likely led the investigators to pick her out the second time.

The sunglasses were pretty common Ray-Bans—one of their classic black frames.

But the scarf? It was distinct. It was a red and blue arabesque with one large cluster of tendrils and palmettes in the center, and then a series of smaller versions framed along the four sides. Also, it had a series of small red tassels. The footage was black and white, but the pattern was vivid.

She’d been with Megan and Jada when she bought it. She’d been wearing it when she’d returned to the airline’s hotel. She’d been wearing it in the van with the entire crew Friday morning.

The article said the woman was not considered a suspect, but was merely wanted for questioning. Not a suspect? Ridiculous. Of course, she was. There was an image of her with Sokolov at the hotel at night and then another one of her leaving the hotel alone the next morning.

Almost desperately she reached for her wine, and in her haste, as she transferred the goblet from her left hand to her right, she managed to clang it against the porcelain soap dish built into the tile wall, shattering the glass and spilling the wine into the water. The soap bubbles had long vanished, and so she watched, absolutely immobile, as the red wine spread and then dissipated, leaving the water and the shards of glass—some resting on her thigh, some on her abdomen, some sunk to the bottom where she could feel the edges like pinpricks or rough sand—a soft, almost soothing pink.

It was only as she started to carefully pick the glass from her body that she saw the two long cuts on the side of her hand.