The Flight Attendant

  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.

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  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.

  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.