The Flight Attendant

  “I can’t allow that. I told you, I don’t want you to take that risk.”

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “I already talked to security. I told them the Cart Tart Killer is staying here and newspaper and TV people might try to sneak upstairs. They are going to be extra watchful in the lobby.”

  She sat back and appraised him. “Wow. You’re good.”

  “You’re impressed?”

  “I am.”

  He picked up the gun and held it by the grip. “And we have this. If we stay together and watch TV and play games? There’s no one in the world who can hurt us tonight.”

  She took the gun from him. She worried that he might accidentally discharge it. “I wish that were true. But it’s not.” Then she stood and with her free hand led him to his feet. She walked him to the door.

  “The chocolate box will be downstairs in the morning with your uncle’s Beretta,” she told him.

  “Text me,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “And I will see you next week?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” she said, though she didn’t believe it. She had a feeling she’d never see him again. Then she kissed him chastely on the cheek, thanked him once more, and said good night. When he was gone, she thought of what her lawyer had suggested and dead-bolted the door.

  * * *

  « «

  After he had left, she sat in the chair and turned so she was facing the door and practiced holding the Beretta with two hands. She closed one eye and stared through the sight, aiming at the peephole in the door one moment and at the handle the next. She flipped the safety on and off.

  It was late here in Rome but nearing dinnertime in Manhattan. She texted Ani to see if there was news. Ani texted back that there wasn’t. She texted her sister that she was sorry she had caused her so much worry—not just now, but over the years—and she told her she loved her. She texted her friend Gillian to thank her for all of the times she had brought her home and held back her hair while she vomited into the toilet. No, toilets. Plural. There had been toilets in bars, toilets in clubs, toilets in other people’s homes. She texted Paula to keep her shirt on, a joke they shared about how impatiently they drank when they were together and how one or the other would often wind up with her shirt off those nights. Cassie recalled holding back Paula’s hair exactly the way Gillian had held back hers. She texted Megan to please wave to the Brandenburg Gate for her. She added how much she had always enjoyed flying with her. She put the words “filet mignon” with a hashtag after the text, a reference to the time that Megan was serving a particularly despicable, angry bore in first class. He had knocked his entrée, the filet mignon, onto the cabin floor, and complained bitterly as if it were Megan’s fault. She had told him with a sincere smile, “Good thing we have extras.” Then she had brought the piece of meat to the lav, rinsed it off with the undrinkable water there, reheated it, and returned it to him on his plate.

  And she texted Buckley the answer to his most recent question:

  What’s the difference between a Pop Tart and a Cart Tart? They’re both sweet and they both get toasted, but a Cart Tart’s not nearly as good for you.

  She hoped her small joke would make him smile, but the truth of it made her cringe. It wasn’t merely the acknowledgment of her drinking; it was the reality that she was poisonous; she always risked diminishing the people she loved or might someday love. Too often she forced them to make the same bad choices she did or she forced them from her life. Best case, she forced them to care for her. Today, though sober, she had gotten a kind young man to steal a gun from his uncle for her. She had needed Makayla to bring her to the hotel after she was pepper-sprayed. And she had attacked a strange woman at an international airport.

  She wrote Buckley a second text.

  When I sent you that text (above), I meant it as a joke. But you need to know, Buckley, that it’s true, too. It’s the truest thing I have ever said. I’m not good for you. I’m not good for anyone. It’s not just the lies or the fact I’m a drunk, it’s who I am. It’s what I am. So…don’t ever wait for me. Don’t expect anything of me. I will only disappoint you and I know you deserve better. And that, also, is true.

  Would he understand this was good-bye? Perhaps not.

  But he would when she ignored his next text and the text after that, either because she was doing what was right or because she was dead.

  Finally she turned on the television and found the stations from America. She sat against the headboard with the handgun beside her and watched an old sitcom about brilliant young physicists who were socially awkward. She was going to watch anything but the news.

  She was just starting to doze off when she was awakened by the deafening, shrill, high-pitched wail of the hotel fire alarm.

  31

  Who really burned most of Moscow to the ground in 1812? Tolstoy seemed to believe it was the occupying French army and it was an accident: too many soldiers starting too many fires. Myriad small blazes igniting one massive one that drove Napoleon from the Kremlin—though only briefly. He would return and reside there a month before the long French retreat would commence. But Elena knew that her father and her father’s friends thought otherwise: the Russians themselves, the few that remained in the city, set torch to the wooden buildings. Hadn’t the Russian commander himself demobilized the firefighting corps? Hadn’t he ordered that the firefighting wagons be wrecked? No one would ever know for sure where on the spectrum the inferno fell between suicide and sabotage, but Elena had grown up confident that it was the Muscovites themselves—citizens and soldiers alike—who had destroyed the great city.

  Which, in her mind, fit the Russian character to a tee. She saw herself in the light from those flames. She knew her people, and she knew the way the West looked down on them: certainly the West had in 1812 and certainly the West did today. Hadn’t she felt that when she had been a student in Switzerland and Massachusetts, hadn’t she heard that in the derogatory comments in political science classes about serfs and gulags and oligarchs? Well, North Americans had their crimes, too: genocide and slavery and, yes, oligarchs of their own. So be it. She and her ancestors lived with a chip on their shoulders that made them at once defiant and fatalistic—and conquerable only by themselves. Always it had been Russians themselves who, in the end, vanquished or annihilated or finally broke Russians.

  She was considerably more frightened of Viktor than she was of any man or woman she had ever met in the West.

  * * *

  « «

  Her mind, as it did often now, meandered to Sochi and her father’s dacha there. Her home there. Mostly it had been spared the madness of the Olympic construction, but the view of the mountains to the southwest had changed: you could see roads that had been cut through the forest in the distance, and in the winter you could spot the alpine trails that had been added when there was snow. Her father would have been appalled had he lived to see it. But the vista to the east was unchanged, as rustic and primeval as when Stalin had summered nearby, and she had a sense that despite his disappointment, her father would have adapted: perhaps he would have grown accustomed to sitting on the porch on the eastern side of the house instead of the one on the west, and arranged his days so he could bask in the sunrises instead of the sunsets. You didn’t survive in the Soviet Union if you didn’t adapt. You didn’t thrive in the post-Soviet world if you weren’t a chameleon. Certainly her father was. But he was also a realist and he was disciplined. It was one more reason why she had both respected and loved him.

  And he was Russian: unconquerable by forces from beyond the border. The only person who had ever defeated him was his equally Russian wife.

  * * *

  « «

  She read the message from Washington twice to be sure. Then a third time.

  There was no ambiguity. She was done
. Finished. They agreed with her: the Cossacks knew she’d been turned.

  Inside she was an uncharacteristic riot of emotions. There was (and it pained her to admit this, because she liked to believe that she was above an emotion as pedestrian as fear) relief, because she herself was evidence of Viktor’s brutality toward his enemies. She knew what loomed for her. But there was also shame, because she felt like a failure. She had failed the agency, yes, but more than that she had failed her father. She did what she did to fuck Viktor. And there were other discordant, confusing waves that broke over her, too, all of which began and ended with the unexpected fog that was her future.

  Her orders were to get the flight attendant and get out. She was to get the two of them out.

  She’d go ahead and pull the fire alarm as she had planned because she suspected that Bowden had a gun and she didn’t really want the woman to shoot her the moment she walked into her hotel room. But the rest of her evening was going to be rather different.

  So be it.

  How funny that she’d just been thinking about her beloved Sochi. She felt a pang in her heart, knowing she’d never see Russia again.

  * * *

  « «

  Elena understood that the blue dot on her phone could tell her more or less where the flight attendant was when it came to a street address, but it certainly couldn’t confirm whether the woman had left her hotel room. The frog’s heart was going to beat at this address, but it could not discern whether she was outside on the street or ensconced upstairs in her room.

  And so she pulled the fire alarm on Cassandra Bowden’s floor, but along a different corridor. Then she went quickly to the flight attendant’s hallway and watched, occasionally moving with the herd as the guests emerged, hoping to blend in by looking as frazzled and sleepy as they. She was wearing a nondescript black hoodie and sweatpants.

  It seemed as if most of the guests presumed this was either a drill or a false alarm, but she noted how most were obediently—albeit, begrudgingly—taking the stairs rather than the elevators to the lobby and exiting the hotel. Most had climbed back into their clothes, though none were as well dressed as they would have been just a few hours earlier. She saw women and men in blue jeans and sweatpants like her, their shirts untucked, their sneakers or shoes barely tied. She saw flip-flops. She saw women without makeup and men with their hair wild with sleep. She noted the couples who had clearly been having sex when they were interrupted, the evidence the way they looked at once sheepish and annoyed and clung a little hungrily to each other. She saw three children—all girls—and supposed they were sisters. The youngest was only three or four and was in her father’s arms, using her fists to wipe at her eyes.

  And she saw Bowden. There she was. Alone. She was still dressed in the sundress she had worn to dinner with the bartender, but the bartender wasn’t with her. She couldn’t decide what that meant, but it would make her job easier.

  The flight attendant had slipped on her sandals. She had with her a shoulder bag, which Elena was quite sure now held a gun.

  This time the woman hadn’t noticed her. There would be no repeat of the madness that morning at Fiumicino.

  It was then that her phone buzzed and she saw it was Viktor. She didn’t dare ignore Viktor, even now. So she took her phone and retreated into the stairwell, secure in the knowledge that Bowden was gone.

  “Yes?”

  “Where are you?”

  She told him, and he responded by telling her in great detail what he had enjoyed that night at dinner.

  “I should go,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  When she emerged, the corridor was clear, but the firefighters had not yet arrived to scan the hallway. She pulled the dry-erase marker from her purse and slipped the tip into the small hole with the power jack at the bottom of the lock on the flight attendant’s door. There was a satisfying pop as the bolt inside it opened.

  Then Elena slid into the room. Bowden had left the lights and the television set on. The drapes already were closed, which she deemed a lucky break. She was prepared to close them, but if she did there was the chance that the flight attendant would notice the change the moment she opened the door and either retreat or shoot. This was one less worry.

  She surveyed the room carefully, noticing the open suitcase with the clothes rolled meticulously into tubes or folded and pressed flat. The woman may have been a mess in most ways, but she was one hell of a good packer. She saw the tin with Perugia chocolates on the dresser, the nightstand with her tablet and power cables, and the desk with a rather handsome pencil cup: it looked like the foot of an old Roman column. Like the vast majority of hotel rooms, the space was dominated by the bed, a queen with a faux headboard screwed into the wall. Most importantly, she noted the location of the two mirrors.

  As she was positioning herself just inside the doorway to await the flight attendant’s return, the woman’s bathroom to her left, she felt the movement before she saw it and tried to turn. But it was too late. She knew that and was more dumbfounded by her stupidity than horrified by the realization that she was about to die. Someone had entered Bowden’s room when she had gone to the stairwell: when she had been drawn to the stairwell by the phone call from Viktor. There was the strong arm around her neck, the crushing vise of the V of someone’s arm against her larynx, as he pulled her into the bathroom. There was the agony of the knife in her lower back, the peculiarly sonorous grunt of her own gasp. She knew, despite the incapacitating pain, what was next, and it happened in seconds exactly the way she saw it in her mind: he withdrew the knife and ran it across her throat. Instinctively she tried to cry out, a reflex, but already she was gagging on blood—he had cut through the muscle and cartilage, exactly the way she had with Alex Sokolov—and so all she heard was the small sound of someone gargling with mouthwash. And, of course, this was not exactly the way she had executed Sokolov. He’d been asleep. Sound asleep. In her last seconds of life, in the midst of all that pain and all that surprise, she despaired mostly that they were killing her when she was awake.

  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 woma
n 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.”