The Flight Attendant

  He exhaled and she felt him move, and a little wave of relief left her momentarily giddy. He reached his arm across her hips and belly and pulled her against him.

  “Good morning,” he murmured. “But don’t roll over. I have a feeling I have serious morning breath. Serious hangover breath.”

  “I probably do, too,” she said, and rose to get them both Advil. She knew he was watching her.

  “You’re beautiful naked,” he said.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  In the bathroom mirror she looked at the red lines in her eyes and the bags below them. She didn’t feel beautiful. But at least this hangover was a piker compared to the one that had welcomed the morning after in Dubai. She wondered if Buckley would want to go to brunch. She rather hoped not. She liked him, but she really wasn’t hungry. The fact was, she was almost never all that hungry. After years of boozing it up, it was as if her body craved its calories from alcohol. There was a reason she was likely to have canned soup and stale crackers for dinner.

  She considered bringing him two or three of the red pills, but then wondered if he was similar to her and downed them like peanuts or the sort who followed the instructions on the label and would begin with just one. So she brought the whole bottle along with a glass of water. She opened the blinds and squinted at the way the cone of the New York Life Building shimmered in the sun, and then crawled back under the sheets. She watched a plane as it crossed the skyline outside her window, flying north before banking east to LaGuardia.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You sound sad.”

  “One syllable gave all that away? Nah. Just not hungry.”

  She heard him put the glass and the bottle down on the nightstand on his side of the bed.

  “When you’re in Germany, do you ever begin the day with eggs in mustard sauce?”

  “No. Never. And what in the name of God made you think of Germany just now?”

  “You were in Berlin yesterday.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you’re a fan of eggs.”

  “Not with mustard.”

  “They’re hard-boiled. And delicious,” he insisted. Then: “I like your apartment.”

  She wished she could will into existence the woman she had been last night. The one who danced barefoot and made this very gentle actor happy. The one who wasn’t repulsed by the idea of brunch and his hints about eggs and food. But that person didn’t exist in the morning. Most of the time, that person didn’t exist sober. It was almost fascinating how rapidly her resolve not to drink could dissipate: it was like the thin coat of ice on a Kentucky pond in late January, there one day and just gone the next. And yet she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t drink today. That wasn’t how it worked for her. She’d send Buckley on his way, go to the animal shelter and nurture the depressed cats—the new arrivals that had just been deserted by their owners for one reason or another and were shocked to be living in a cage in a loud, strange world—and then finish the day at the gym. Tonight she would cocoon, her body clock happily adjusted once again to Eastern Daylight Time. She would read and she would watch TV. She would see no one tonight. She would be fine. She had until Tuesday here. Then, with a crew full of strangers—not even Megan and Shane would be on the plane—she would fly to Italy. The August routes she had bid on were Rome and Istanbul. Both were direct flights from JFK. No Dubai.

  “Can I tell you something?” she asked. She needed to scare him away to get on with her day and, more importantly, with her life.

  “Sure. But this sounds ominous. Will it be as sad as all that melted ice cream?”

  “No. Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know yet what I’m going to tell you.”

  “Wow. It sounded like you had something in mind. Usually when a person begins, ‘Can I tell you something?’ they’re thinking of some pretty specific revelation or pretty specific bit of news.”

  She was still on her side. She brought her knees closer to her stomach and rested her hands together under the pillow as if she were praying. “I was just thinking about my day and what I’m going to do this afternoon. The main thing is I’m going to the animal shelter. I love the shelter. I go when I’m home because my mother wouldn’t let me have pets as a girl, and now I’ve managed to pick a career where I travel too much to have one—at least in good conscience.”

  A moment ago, he had sat up to swallow the Advil and drink the water. She imagined if she rolled over, she would see he was watching her. Perhaps he was propped up on his elbow, looking down at her.

  “I mean, we did have a pet when I was little. Very little. We had a dog. My parents had gotten him before I was born. Years before I was born. But when I was five, my father ran him over. The dog was old and asleep in the grass beside the driveway, and my dad was so drunk when he came home that afternoon, he missed the pavement and—quite literally—ran him over. Didn’t just hit him. Crushed him. And so we never had pets after that. My mom was afraid something would happen to them.”

  She recalled her parents’ fights about pets—about cats and dogs. She and her sister would cry, and her father would lobby with slurred words on their behalf. And he would fail. Did her father feel demeaned? Emasculated? She assumed so now. Her mother once said if her father stopped drinking, they could consider a cat or a dog, but that was never going to happen, even after his DUI or after the high school fired him as the driver’s ed teacher. (Much to everyone’s astonishment, he was still allowed to teach P.E.) As a girl, she had felt only the unfairness of her mother’s edict. It was as if she and her sister were being punished for their father’s misbehavior.

  “I think it’s really sweet that you go to the shelter on your day off,” said Buckley.

  “I guess I do it for me.”

  “And for them.”

  “I should get dressed,” she told him.

  “Is that a hint?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got it. You know, if you want me to leave, there are easier ways than dredging up a horrible memory about a dead dog. I’m pretty chill, trust me.”

  She didn’t roll over. “Oh, I never seem to do things the easy way.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Then: “And I’m sure you have someplace you need to be, too. Right?”

  She felt him swinging his feet over the bed. She expected him to stand up. But he didn’t. He sat there a long moment and then said softly, “Just so you know, I don’t usually do this. I don’t sleep with strangers when I’m on tour or in a theater out of state, and I don’t when I’m home here in the city.”

  She sighed. “I do.”

  “Okay, of all the things you’ve told me in the last twelve or whatever hours, that’s got to be the saddest.”

  And with that he finally stood. He picked up his clothes from the floor by her closet, his body angular and taut. She heard him go into the bathroom to throw some water on his face before going home, but she kept her hands under her pillow, her knees bent, and tried to lie there as quiet and fixed as a corpse.

  * * *

  « «

  And in the night, she wept. It was, she tried to convince herself, because of the cats. They always got to her. The thirteen-year-old calicos that had lived together their whole lives, discarded because their owner had a new boyfriend and he insisted he was allergic to them. The rough and ruddy orange tom, dropped off because the family was moving. He probably weighed twenty pounds, all muscle, and now was unwilling to lift his head and emerge from his cage. There were rail-thin black cats from a crazy hoarder, one with her ear half gone from a fight, all of them awash in fleas and ticks when they arrived.

  She was too depressed for the gym. Instead she went to a bookstore and browsed the shelves of paperback fiction, pausing in the aisles that held Chekhov and Pushkin and Tolstoy. She consider
ed a Turgenev collection because Alex had mentioned him and she was unfamiliar with his work, but the only title the store had was Fathers and Sons, and that relationship held little allure for her that afternoon. Eventually she bought a small book by Tolstoy (small for Tolstoy, but still nearly four hundred pages), because the first story in it was called “Happy Ever After.” She suspected the title was likely ironic, but she could hope.

  At home, however, she discovered the book was quite possibly the worst choice she could have made (which perhaps shouldn’t have surprised her, given her predilection for bad choices). At least the first story started out badly given her own personal history. On the very first page the narrator, a seventeen-year-old woman named Masha, shares that she is mourning the death of her mother. Cassie had been a teenager, too, when her mother had died. Masha also has a younger sister. Cassie didn’t get beyond the fourth page before putting the book down and taking a lint brush to her clothes, removing the evidence of her day at the shelter. But she didn’t change. Nor that night did she drink. Not a drop.

  And so she was still dressed and sober and sad when she got the call from a fellow who introduced himself as Derek Mayes. She couldn’t put a face to the name, and she presumed it was a lover or Tinder score who didn’t realize or didn’t understand that she didn’t want to see him again and confront what they’d done, but hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings.

  “I’m with the union,” he explained, his tone clipped, a trace of a New York accent. He said that two other members of the cabin crew on the flight to Dubai had reached out to him and he had already met with one of them: Megan Briscoe. He, in turn, had called the FBI, and it was clear that he needed to see her, too, and get up to speed fast on whatever she knew about the passenger in 2C. “I want to know what really went on between you two on the flight and what really happened in Dubai,” he said.

  And with that there was a sudden ringing in her ears, her legs grew wobbly, and she wondered if this—this, not waking up beside the cold, still body of Alex Sokolov—was the demarcation between before and after. This, she thought with a terrible certainty, might really be the moment she would look back upon as the point where it all began to unravel.

  Part Two

  BURN THE CARBONS

  «

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  FD-302 (redacted): MEGAN BRISCOE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT

  DATE: July 28, 2018

  MEGAN BRISCOE, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents ANNE McCONNELL and BRUCE ZIMMERUSKI at JFK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, immediately upon her flight’s arrival in the U.S.

  McCONNELL conducted the interview; ZIMMERUSKI took these notes.

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

  BRISCOE said that she has been with the airline for 24 years. Prior to that, she had worked in guest services for DOVER STAR hotels in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, MD, and Pittsburgh, PA.

  BRISCOE said that she had very little contact with ALEXANDER SOKOLOV on Flight 4094: he was being cared for by flight attendant CASSANDRA BOWDEN. She thought BOWDEN and SOKOLOV had flirted, but she said BOWDEN “was always a bit of a flirt.” She had seen BOWDEN flirt with other passengers on other flights. BRISCOE explained that she and BOWDEN are friends and sometimes work their schedules so they share the same routes and can fly together. Though she lives now in Virginia, her base remains JFK.

  She did not know what BOWDEN and SOKOLOV may have discussed.

  When asked whether she and BOWDEN saw each other in Dubai, she said no, they did not. She said there were thirteen crew members on the flight and they separated into different groups, which was normal. She herself went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant with JADA MORRIS, SHANE HEBERT, and VICTORIA MORGAN.

  She did not explain why she did not have dinner with her friend, CASSANDRA BOWDEN.

  7

  Elena’s mother always had corgis. These days she had three, one of which was a descendant of the two dogs she’d had when she divorced Elena’s father. She trained the animals to come with an antique silver summoner patterned after the onion-shaped domes that adorned St. Basil’s in Moscow or the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg. It predated the First World War and, thus, the revolution. According to the antique dealer, it may have belonged once to the Romanovs. (Elena presumed he was lying and her mother probably did, too. But that never stopped her mother from telling people that the summoner had resided once at the Winter Palace.) The nails on the dogs’ paws would click along the hardwood floors when they scampered to her across her palatial apartment near the Kremlin. If her mother was seated, they would stand up on their hind legs and put their front legs onto her lap, exactly the way she had taught them: her own lady-with-lapdog moment, but played to oligarchic excess.

  The animals traveled with her on the plane she bought after the divorce. She had special in-seat safety harnesses created for them for the flights. The straps were lined with the same mink that adorned the safety belts on the Art Deco–inspired Manhattan airship seats she’d had designed for the humans.

  Her mother never remarried. Neither did her father. Sometimes Elena would see her mother on the gossip or society pages in an evening gown with waterfalls of jewelry dangling from her ears and around her neck, a Moscow robber baron on her arm. Sometimes she would see a photo of her on the social networks that someone had taken at the Bolshoi or the botanical garden.

  She knew that one of her father’s friends had suggested poisoning the dogs after the divorce. Now that gentleman assisted the Syrian government in Damascus; he’d helped Assad squirrel away sarin in 2013, when the international monitors were destroying the rest of the stockpile. But her father had refused to kill the animals. Unlike some of his friends—now, she guessed, some of hers—her father didn’t approve of incidental killing or the slaughter of noncombatants.

  Elena had inherited that trait from him, she supposed. Certainly that was one reason why the flight attendant was still alive. In some ways, her mother had a far more entrenched killer instinct than her father. Exhibit A? The divorce settlement. She was ruthless.

  And her mother had realized early on that her daughter was a daddy’s girl—though maybe that was inevitable given the woman’s disinterest in child-rearing. Or maybe that had been the plan all along. Her mother had visited her just the one time when she was a teenager in Switzerland, and she’d never once come to Boston when Elena went there for college. The truth was, Elena hadn’t seen her mother in years and really didn’t miss her. She doubted her mother missed her either.

  She looked down once more at the Moscow newspaper she had opened a few minutes ago. More violence in Donetsk. The continued rebound of the ruble. An American drone strike in Yemen. She knew it was this last story that was most likely to catch Viktor’s interest: America and China remained the only countries in the world that had successfully weaponized drones, and America’s were far beyond China’s. It was among the reasons why the Russians had such pathologic drone envy and why Russian military intelligence was obsessed with the American program. It was why Viktor was spending so much time with the Emirates drone manufacturer. ISIS used toy drones as IEDs. Imagine a stealth drone or even a jet drone with a chemical payload.

  She finished her tea and recalled her father’s samovar. It was rare, a tombac bronze, and once it had belonged to his great-grandmother. Somehow the family had retained it through both revolution and world war. Through Stalin and Malenkov and Khrushchev. It resided now with her mother. Of course. Somehow the woman had gotten even that, the samovar that neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis had been able to wrest from the Orlovs.

  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 tortoisesh
ell 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.”