17
Against the allegations that his people were brutish, Elena’s father would smile and bring up the Bolshoi. Chekhov. Tchaikovsky. “We can be merciless,” she once heard him remark as he studied the Ararat cognac in his snifter, “but we are no more and no less brutish than anyone else.” It was over dinner with his old comrades from the KGB, most of whom now were more focused on their trophy dachas and trophy wives, and the riches that they had found in the rubble of the once iconic wall. He reminded them how much Lenin loved novels, and how literature was a part of the political world in which Lenin grew up. When Lenin wanted to belittle his rivals, he’d refer to them as particularly stupid or especially loathsome characters from Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, and Goncharov. “The biggest difference between an Oblomov and an oligarch?” he asked that night, the setup for what he viewed as a bon mot. “If an oligarch spends the day in bed, it’s because he has a hooker and he’s getting his money’s worth.” In his heart, of course, he knew that wasn’t the biggest difference. Not at all. The oligarchs now had the wealth of Oblomov, but they weren’t lazy and they hadn’t inherited their vast fortunes. Most of them were self-made. Corrupt, of course. Corrupt on a positively titanic scale. But they worked hard. And perhaps the only man before whom they would bow was the Russian President. They were alpha males who took no prisoners.
Viktor was, in her mind, a perfect example of that balancing act between barbarism and refinement: he was cold-blooded and feral beneath his crisp black suits, but he had constructed a veneer that compelled him to eat in small bites. He spoke multiple languages fluently and appreciated the aesthetic of films by Tarkovsky.
And he wasn’t alone. Supposedly even Stalin, as uncultured as they came and absolutely no fan of art for art’s sake, died in 1953 with Russian pianist Maria Yudina’s recording of Mozart’s Concerto no. 23 playing on the nearby turntable.
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Elena opened the app on her phone and watched the little blue dot beat like a small, tiny heart. A frog’s heart. It pulsed, in and out, in and out, sending a fainter blue wave away from it in a perfect circle, before the wave would disappear and a new one would follow. The dot was her prey and her prey was at the zoo.
She put her phone down on the wooden bench and folded her arms across her chest. She looked up once at the Flatiron Building a block and a half to the south, and then at the young parents playing with their toddlers on the grass or walking their dogs along the paths that looped throughout Madison Square Park. The simple normalcy of the tableau was affecting: she felt a forlorn tug at her heart and shook her head ever so slightly, willing the melancholy away. This wasn’t her world or her life and it never would be. Not in Moscow and not in Manhattan.
She was wearing nondescript khaki shorts, a sleeveless white blouse, and beige espadrilles. She had a magazine and a bag with a bagel in it, but only so it looked like she had a reason to be sitting on the bench. It was sunny but hot, the air damp and still, and she wished for a breeze.
She really didn’t know much about this neighborhood. The section of New York she knew best was midtown west of Fifth, the great wide blocks of skyscrapers where Unisphere had its Manhattan office, and she’d probably only been there four or five times in her life. The family money. The family business—or part of the family business, anyway. The part that came of age after the final collapse in 1991. She’d been but a toddler then. When she thought of this city, she thought first of lunches in the dark oak dining rooms with her father and the American managers of the fund while she was at college—before he was poisoned—the dining rooms packed with administrators and executives who seemed to eat and drink as if it were another era. (The older adults occasionally still called each other comrade—they even called the Americans comrade—though there was now a trace of irony to the term.) Of dinners alone with her father in nearby restaurants that were largely empty because they timed their meal to begin after the pre-theater crowd had left for their shows. Her father enjoyed coming to America, and he loved it when she was a freshman and a sophomore and would come south from Massachusetts to New York to meet him. He enjoyed these people. He probably would have enjoyed Sokolov—or at least gotten a kick out of him until he showed his true colors—because Alex’s blood was so rich with Russian DNA. But her father was Russian through and through, and his trips to the United States were brief. He took pride in his accent. (She, by design, had worked hard to lose any trace of hers.)
She’d certainly never been to the Empire State Building or the Metropolitan Museum or the Bronx Zoo.
She rolled her eyes as if she weren’t alone. The zoo, she thought. Really? The woman’s life was unraveling, and Cassandra Bowden had gone to the zoo. Based on the homework Elena had done on the flight attendant, she was most likely with her sister’s family. She’d probably be with them all day, since they were in from Kentucky. Tomorrow night she was supposed to fly out to Rome.
The problem, she had told Viktor now that she was here, was that Bowden lived in a building with doormen and porters. Lots of them. This morning, a Saturday, Elena had watched as many as three different people behind the front desk at the entrance or sweeping the sidewalk or opening the door for residents and waving them politely out into the August heat. There also were cameras filming the reception area and the elevator up from the basement and the parking garage that was attached by an underground, cinder-block corridor. She knew from experience that it was much more difficult to remain invisible from the cameras in a private apartment building than it was in a hotel. There were so many fewer people coming and going in an apartment, and the lobby was dramatically smaller. So it would be difficult to get inside Bowden’s apartment, which was unfortunate because home was where most suicides—80 percent—occurred. (A person’s place of business accounted for nearly 10 percent, but even Viktor had joked that no one wanted Elena to entertain that possibility. Sure, pilots occasionally brought down whole planes in a fit of selfish, suicidal madness, but no one wanted an Airbus on that side of the ledger.) And if Elena couldn’t easily get in and out of Bowden’s apartment, then the flight attendant would have to take her life in some private nook in some relatively public space.
The second issue, which Elena knew was painfully clear to everyone, was time. It was absolutely unimaginable what kind of damage a loose cannon like Cassandra Bowden could cause if Alex had told her something or if suddenly she felt compelled to broadcast to anyone who would listen that another woman had come to room 511 that night in Dubai.
And, of course, the clock was running for her, as well. Certainly there were people in Moscow who were shaking their heads at the way that Dmitry’s overly Americanized daughter had allowed the flight attendant to leave Dubai. They were at best confused and at worst alarmed. For all they knew, Bowden was CIA. Perhaps she was part of some military intelligence task force. And so they were angry, and these were the Cossacks. She knew what happened to anyone who pissed off this clandestine old guard. Her own father would have been appalled at what she had done—or, to be precise, at what she had failed to do. She knew she was on thin ice. Viktor had made that clear, not even masking the threat in a polite understatement.
A thought came to her. The media still hadn’t identified the woman in the sunglasses and scarf in the Royal Phoenician security camera photos. No one in the Dubai police had leaked the name of the flight attendant. Elena decided she would tell Viktor that she needed that reveal before proceeding: Cassandra Bowden’s suicide would be considerably more plausible if she’d been publicly shamed.
She picked up her phone and watched the little blue dot. It would be great to take care of this—one way or another—before Bowden flew to Rome tomorrow evening, but now she could wait until the story broke. If Bowden’s name wasn’t online or in the newspapers by tomorrow morning, she’d go ahead and make the phone call to a newspaper or a cable news network herself. She’d offer an anonymous tip.
And in the meantime? She’d continue to watch Bowden and see if an opportunity of some sort presented itself. She wondered where the flight attendant and her family were having dinner tonight, and whether it might demand that the woman take a subway home.