The Flight Attendant

  In the end, however, by the time she had climbed from the hotel bed and showered, she had convinced herself that even the State Department would be involved. Alex’s family would be lobbying the media for justice. People—powerful people—would be paying attention. The idea made her sick. Somewhere Miranda was sharing her story.

  “I think it will be the FBI,” she told Jada finally. “If it’s anyone…”

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to a person who was murdered.”

  “Me, either,” she said, though she thought of her father and briefly her mind dissected the distinctions between manslaughter and murder.

  Abruptly Jada looked over Cassie’s shoulder, her gaze intense and her dark eyes widening. Cassie felt a sharp spike of fear and turned around, convinced this was it, it was over, an air marshal was about to arrest her, just as Jada pushed past. And there she saw the other flight attendant helping a young mother with a toddler in her arms, lifting up the diaper bag that was twisting upside down on the woman’s shoulder, the diapers and wipes and the sippy cup in the shape of a bunny all about to tumble onto the floor of the aircraft right in front of the starboard-side first-class bathroom. The mom thanked her, rolling her eyes at the nearness of the disaster, and the two of them laughed. Jada was asking the little boy’s name as Cassie leaned against the wall with the trolleys and the trash bin, at once relieved and appalled. She wondered: was this sort of adrenal overreaction going to be the norm for the rest of her life?

  * * *

  « «

  As she was wrapping her shoulder harness around her in the jump seat in the front of the plane, as the Long Island coastline and beaches were racing below them, she thought of the three words she hoped never to say aloud or hear on an aircraft: brace for impact. That was the signal they were about to crash-land or auger in. Those four syllables? They were the cry of the raven. Imminent collision with the ground, best case a belly flop and worst case a head-on, nose-first crash that would cause the aircraft to break apart and explode, the bodies—the pieces of the bodies that were recognizable—small, charred briquettes.

  The words came to her because the captain had informed the crew somewhere over New Brunswick that they were going to be met at the gate at JFK by the authorities. He didn’t say why and whether by “authorities” he meant airport or TSA officials or some other law enforcement group, and no one on the crew was going to ask him. But they all had their suspicions. Some guessed there was a possible terrorist on board, someone high on the watch list, and the passenger would be arrested the moment they landed, but Cassie had flown long enough to know this wasn’t the case: if the captain had been told there might be a terrorist on the plane, he would have informed the crew so they could keep an eye on him every single moment they were in the air. Instead, as they had prepared the cabins for arrival, Megan and Jada and Shane had speculated aloud that it had something to do with the dead American in Dubai. What else could it possibly be, Megan had asked? He’d been with them on the flight from Paris to the Middle East.

  Cassie considered asking Megan to cover for her: not necessarily lie, but simply not volunteer the information that Cassandra Bowden had returned to the crew’s Dubai hotel in the morning barely twenty minutes before they had to leave for the airport. Cassie knew it would be easier to simply tell investigators that she had spent the night alone in her own room at the airline’s hotel than have to make up a man to account for her absence. But asking that of Megan would only implicate her further in the other woman’s eyes: it would convince Megan that she had indeed been with Alex the night he had died and very possibly had killed him. Already Cassie had felt her friend watching her as they had walked up the aisles, the two of them checking to be sure the passengers were belted in and their seatbacks were upright.

  And so she focused right now on concocting two possible stories. If she had the sense from the questioning that Miranda had not yet come forward, she would share with the authorities another hotel and another man, molding him in her mind like a golem. She would keep it simple. Give them a name and admit that she was sure the fellow had made it up because she was sure he was married. She was going to say he was some sort of consultant and she thought he was South African. The hotel would be the Armani because it was big and it was in the opposite direction from the Royal Phoenician, and the floor with his room had been somewhere in the middle. Could have been on the sixth and it could have been on the eighth. She would confess sheepishly that she had been drinking, and she couldn’t remember very much. Surely there was a single man in a room on one of those floors who spoke English with an accent she could say later (if necessary) she must have mistaken for South African. But otherwise she would say almost nothing. That was what mattered. It would be much easier to keep her story straight if the details were few.

  But what if Miranda had now told the Dubai police that she had met a flight attendant named Cassie the night before, and they had already informed the FBI in America? That would demand a very different lie, one that was more dangerous but in some ways a much easier one to pull off. That lie was simply this: Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left his hotel suite.

  Maybe, as a matter of fact, she should say that no matter what, because at some point Miranda would talk to the police, and Cassie knew that her stories should be consistent. So, yes, this was the tale. This was what had happened. This was the lie.

  In the meantime, she would brace for impact. It was, she knew, inevitable.

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  FD-302 (redacted): CASSANDRA BOWDEN, FLIGHT ATTENDANT

  DATE: July 28, 2018

  CASSANDRA BOWDEN, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents FRANK HAMMOND and JAMES WASHBURN at JFK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, immediately upon her flight’s arrival in the U.S.

  HAMMOND conducted the interview; WASHBURN took these notes.

  After being advised of the nature of the interview, BOWDEN provided the following information.

  BOWDEN said that she has been with the airline since she finished college 18 years ago, and this is the only job she has ever had.

  BOWDEN confirmed that ALEXANDER SOKOLOV was seated in 2C on Flight 4094 on Thursday, July 26, from Paris to Dubai. He introduced himself to her on the plane before they took off. She said they met for the first time when the aircraft was still at the gate and passengers in the economy cabin were still boarding. He drank red wine, coffee, and water on the flight.

  She described him as “low-maintenance” and said it was clear that he was traveling alone. She did not recall him speaking to the passenger across the aisle (2D) or to the passenger beside him (2B), but thought it likely if he spoke to anyone it would have been 2B. She based this solely on her experience that passengers are more likely to speak to the person beside them than across the aisle.

  She said that she and SOKOLOV spoke mostly during the food service, and talked almost entirely about the wine and entrée and dessert choices.

  She characterized him as a polite and “charming” young man. She said he was “a bit of a flirt” and liked the uniform/dress she was wearing. He told her he worked for a hedge fund and had meetings in Dubai. He said something about clients and real estate holdings there, but added that what he did was just too boring to discuss. He did not say with whom he was meeting or where.

  SOKOLOV did not sleep on the plane, which she found normal because it was a daylight flight. She said he ate, he watched a movie, and he worked. She reported that she saw documents open on his laptop, but she did not look at them. She saw no papers on his tray table. Likewise, she said that while she was aware that at one point he was watching a movie, she did not observe which one.

  Finally, she said he seemed calm and content—not at all agitated. She characterized the flight as completely uneventful.

  6

  Usually the drug tests w
ere random: not every flight attendant and member of the flight crew was tested. One or two people would be singled out by an airline employee as they disembarked and asked to take what they called the “whiz quiz.” This was different. They were all tested: the entire crew. And all of their bags were searched.

  Everyone passed the drug test. And nothing illegal was found in any of their rollers or kits.

  * * *

  « «

  It was odd, Cassie thought, it was strange. It was as if the FBI had no interest in knowing her whereabouts during the flight crew’s overnight in Dubai. It was as if Frank Hammond and James Washburn had no reason in the world to suspect that she might have been with Alex Sokolov when he was killed. Hammond was a handsome guy roughly her age with a countenance that had seemed slightly bemused—as if he had seen it all. His hair was short, the color of cinnamon, and just starting to recede. Washburn was younger, with pale, perfect skin and rather professorial, rimless eyeglasses. The two of them acted as if they were concerned only with what she had seen of the man on the flight, and whether he had said something that might have been revealing. Did that mean they were hoping somehow to entrap her in a lie? It seemed not, because they never asked anything that would have necessitated one. Rather, it was as if they honestly didn’t know that one of Alex’s colleagues had come to the suite in Dubai and had a drink with her.

  In hindsight, she realized, her fear had been almost comic. They didn’t even record the interview. Apparently that was FBI policy. Hammond asked her questions and Washburn wrote down her answers using a ballpoint pen and yellow legal pad as if it were 1955. When she had asked about the lack of a recorder—good God, they didn’t even use their phones—Washburn had said later that he’d type it up on some form he called an FD-302.

  She wished she had been a little more detailed about Alex’s and her flirting during the interview, but only because there was always the chance that one of the other crew members had mentioned it. Even her friend Megan might have said something. But Megan had insisted that her interview had been cursory, too. The agent who had talked to her was a woman named Anne McConnell, and Megan said that she had asked very little about the rest of the crew.

  Probably the real suspects were the employees who worked at the hotel. Or, perhaps, the investors he was supposed to see in Dubai. Or maybe it was the desperate underground that risked Arabian justice to prey upon the scads of rich foreigners who descended upon the city daily. These were the sorts of people the Dubai police most likely were interested in.

  And, in truth, it probably was one of them who had killed Alex. She could ruminate forever on why they had spared her and probably never figure it out. It was best to let go of that sort of self-scrutiny. It wasn’t helpful.

  But she couldn’t exhale completely because there was still Miranda. At some point, that was the loose end that Cassie feared was going to trip her. As much as the ghost of Alex Sokolov might dog her, she knew if necessary she could drown that specter with an extra shot of Sipsmith or Jose Cuervo. But Miranda? She had shown up in the suite with the bottle of Stoli, glass chips of which were probably still embedded in that plush carpet in a room at the Royal Phoenician. By now she had almost certainly said something to the Dubai police, and no amount of tequila or gin was going to make Miranda go away.

  * * *

  « «

  She left her suitcase in the hallway of her apartment and pressed Frank Hammond’s business card onto the refrigerator in her windowless kitchen with a magnet from the animal shelter. She wasn’t sure what else to do with it. Then she went to her bedroom. The apartment was a small one bedroom, but it had a valuable asset: it was on the fifteenth floor and had a magnificent, unobstructed view of New York Life’s pyramidal gold cone and, a little further away, the Empire State Building. She’d come a long way from the bottom bunk in a crash pad in Queens. She kicked off her shoes and collapsed on her bed and gazed for a moment at the two buildings. The sun was just beginning to set. She fell asleep in her uniform when it was still light out.

  * * *

  « «

  Terrain, terrain! Pull up, pull up!

  The mechanical female voice on the far side of the flight deck door. The remnants of another dream. She knew the voice from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of landings when she was in the jump seat nearest the cockpit on certain planes. On some aircraft, the ones where the passengers were staring straight at you, they called it the Sharon Stone Seat. The Basic Instinct Bench.

  When she awoke, when she understood they were neither landing nor crashing, it was nighttime and the peak of the Empire State Building was colored red. One time when her sister’s family was visiting, she had looked up online what color the building would be that night, hoping she would be allowed to share the view with them and explain to her nephew and niece the reason behind that evening’s selection, but Rosemary had made it clear that they would not be going to Murray Hill and she did not want Cassie alone with the kids.

  She wasn’t hungry, but she figured she should eat something and went to the kitchen. She recalled again how Alex had ordered the blanquette de veau at the restaurant in Dubai. She imagined herself telling the FBI agents that the deceased had no objection to eating veal and was a tender and rather exquisite lover in the shower. He read—no, he reread—doorstop novels by long-dead Russian writers. In her head, she heard herself volunteering that for one night, at least, he drank as much as she did, and that had been a lot—enough for her to black out. What would Frank Hammond have said to any of that? She gazed for a moment at the portion of his business card that peeked out from behind the magnet.

  The refrigerator wasn’t empty—far from it—but there was still little in there that was edible. It was mostly unfinished Indian takeout that had gone bad, condiments, diet soda, and yogurt that had expired months ago. She found a can of tomato soup in the pantry and some crackers, a little soft with age but edible, and made herself the sort of meal that she recalled her mother might have prepared for her when she was home from school with the flu.

  She ate in silence on the living room couch, watching the moon high above the Manhattan skyline. She ate in the dark but for the light from the kitchen. She thought she might look for news stories about Sokolov on her phone when she was finished. She might even boot up the laptop she rarely used. But she feared she wouldn’t sleep if she did, and it was going to be hard enough going back to bed after having slept five hours already that evening.

  A sentence came to her: I awoke beside a dead man.

  Then another: I may have gotten away with murder.

  But then she shook her head because while it was conceivable that she had killed Alex, she continued to feel deep inside that she hadn’t. Oh, there had been moments when she had lost faith and felt waves of debilitating self-hatred: her body actually spasmed ever so slightly once in the elevator in her building. But usually she was able to convince herself that she hadn’t killed him. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not even in self-defense. For better or worse, that wasn’t how she was wired.

  She also reminded herself that it remained highly unlikely that she had gotten away with anything. All she had done so far was make it back to America, where she would at least have a decent lawyer—assuming she could find one who would work for the pittance she really could pay.

  Her only definite crime, literal and metaphoric, was leaving the poor guy behind in the hotel room in Dubai. And if she hadn’t killed him, then she was relieved now to have so many time zones between herself and whoever had. Either they had misjudged her and assumed she would call the hotel or the police and wind up a suspect in the homicide—perhaps she would even confess to it—or they had figured she would flee and didn’t care. In this scenario, whoever had killed Alex had been a pro at this sort of thing—an executioner—and knew that she was just in the wrong bed on the wrong night and spared her. They understood that she was uninvolved in whatever
nastiness had led Alex to get himself practically beheaded.

  As she was putting her soup bowl into the dishwasher, she pondered how someone gets into a locked hotel room. Perhaps when she had the courage to Google Alex Sokolov, she would Google hotel room security. If whoever killed Alex worked at the Royal Phoenician, it was probably simple to unlock the door.

  She had a bottle of unopened red wine, a Chianti she rather liked and was saving for a special occasion, but remembered her vow that she wasn’t going to drink. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock. She considered going to one of the late-night drugstores and getting a bottle of a pain reliever with the letters PM on it, or perhaps some flu remedy with a specifically drowsy formulation to knock a person out.

  Instead she thought to herself, fuck it, fuck it all, she wasn’t going to be able to sleep. All that loomed if she stayed here at home was the prospect of tossing and turning and waiting for the lights on the Empire State Building to finally blink out, and then, at two or two thirty in the morning, when she was desperate, uncorking that Chianti. She swiped across a few of the men who came up in her Tinder account, but none of the faces interested her. She thought of the different women she knew whom she could text and see where they were and what trouble they were getting into, moving in her mind first through her friends who tolerated her drinking (some barely) and then those who applauded it and drank with her. She had an equal number of both and needed both in different ways: the former to protect her and apologize to the party hosts and restaurant patrons and wedding guests she appalled with her behavior and her mouth, the latter to goad her on as she took off her bikini top or hurled a pool cue like a javelin. But she didn’t text anyone. Tonight she would be a lone wolf. Sometimes that was best for everyone.