The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  She sat with her back against the bidet, facing the shower, and watched the nozzles from the ceiling and the walls sway. She started to make a list in her mind of all she could remember from last night, but she was beginning to realize just how much was on the far side of that curtain of arak and vodka and whatever else they had drunk. She tried to imagine what might have led her to take a broken bottle and slash open the guy’s neck as if she and her father were gutting a deer. She wasn’t a barroom brawler. She’d never hurt anyone—at least not physically. But her behavior when she was drinking, when she had drowned all reason in tequila or gin, was legendary. In theory, there was a first for everything, though it made no sense to her that she would have killed him. Most of what people told her she did during blackouts was degrading and caustic and (on occasion) dangerous to herself. But it wasn’t violent.

  She realized that the very first thing she had to do was make sure that the “Do Not Disturb” sign was on the hotel room door. She needed to keep housekeeping at bay while she figured out what the hell to do. She blinked. She blinked again. She was astonished at how fast the body of Alex Sokolov had sobered her up and made the pain of yet another tectonic hangover and the remorse from yet another one-night hookup seem rather inconsequential.

  * * *

  « «

  She stared for a moment at the hotel phone in the living room of the suite, and the button for the front desk. In the end, she didn’t pick it up.

  Instead she showered. She shampooed the blood from her hair and scrubbed it off her shoulder and hands as if it was tar. She didn’t know the specifics of the death penalty in the United Arab Emirates, but presumed it was more civilized than next door in Saudi Arabia. (She had a vague sense from the TV news that public beheadings were only a little less popular than soccer in Saudi.) Still, she didn’t want to find out.

  She really had two choices: either she called someone the moment she emerged from the shower or she didn’t. She was either here for a long time—a very long time—or she was on the flight to France in a couple of hours. The words echoed inside her: a very long time. Good Lord, she recalled some poor American college student who spent years in a prison in Italy awaiting trial for a murder she swore she didn’t commit. She shuddered to think what loomed for her here in the Middle East, especially since she presumed no one would believe that someone else had come into the suite, nearly decapitated Alex Sokolov, and spared her. And if she did choose the first option, alerting people to the corpse in the bed where she’d slept, did she call the front desk or did she call the airline? Did she call the American embassy?

  The choice hinged in part on whether she really had killed this young hedge fund manager. Despite the evidence, a part of her—the biggest part of her—honestly believed that she hadn’t. Certainly she had done other batshit crazy things when she was in the blotto zone: when she was blackout crazy drunk. She’d hear the next morning about the things she had said. She’d hear the next day about the things she had done. Sometimes she’d hear when she was back at a particular bar.

  You were doing this insanely provocative, pretend karaoke—without music, Cassie, without music! There was no karaoke machine!—while standing on a stool in the corner.

  Oh, God, you had an epic face plant just outside the ladies’ room. How did you not break your nose?

  You were taking off your clothes and trying to get the bartender to do naked yoga with you.

  It was only dumb luck that she had no DUIs, no crimes and misdemeanors in her history, and thus was still allowed to fly. She thought once more of her father. As she dried herself—quickly, roughly—she recalled the men and the mistakes in her own past, and she counted once more all the different countries in which she had slept with strangers and woken up sick in unfamiliar beds. Even now, probably no one in the crew was thinking anything about the fact that she was not with them at their own hotel. Most of them barely knew her, but most of them knew women and men just like her. Her behavior might have been extreme, but it was not uncommon.

  If she hadn’t slashed the throat of the man who had tenderly washed her hair in the shower, she guessed she should be deeply grateful that whoever did hadn’t bothered to kill her. And that, in turn, suggested either a respect for human life or a distaste for collateral damage that was rather at odds with the ferocity with which he (or she or they) had murdered last night’s drunken dalliance. It also might mean that she was being set up. Someone—perhaps even that woman who had come to their room for a drink—wanted her to be blamed for this crime. Two thoughts crossed her mind, and she was unsure whether to categorize them as paranoid or uncharacteristically clearheaded: the first was that she hadn’t killed Sokolov, but her fingerprints were nevertheless all over the neck of the broken bottle. The second was the notion that it wasn’t the arak that had put her out so thoroughly: she’d been drugged. They’d been drugged. Maybe it was the vodka in that very bottle that Miranda had brought. The woman claimed she’d brought it because she wasn’t sure if the minibars at the Royal Phoenician had liquor; in Dubai, some hotel minibars did, some didn’t. Perhaps there was no more to the gift than that; perhaps there was.

  She took a little comfort in the fact that no one she knew had any idea that she was here in room 511 at the Royal Phoenician. Sure, Megan and Shane had seen her flirting with Alex in 2C, but she’d never told the two flight attendants that she was going to see him. She and Alex had been discreet when they’d discussed where and when they would meet. She hadn’t given him her cell because he hadn’t asked for it—which meant that she wouldn’t be in his phone.

  There was only Miranda.

  But Miranda knew a lot. Miranda knew that she was a flight attendant. Miranda knew her name—at least her first name. Miranda would, Cassie assumed, be the one to call the hotel when Alex missed whatever meeting he was supposed to be in and didn’t answer his cell.

  In the end, she told herself that she did problematic things when she drank, but slashing people’s throats wasn’t among them. At least she didn’t think it was. But she also wasn’t going to take the bait and call the front desk. She was going to get as far away from Dubai and the Arabian Peninsula as she could, and she would deal with Miranda’s allegations—and, yes, her own guilt—when she was back in the United States.

  And so she put the soap and washcloth she had used in the shower into her shoulder bag. She would take the towel, too, though she imagined that her DNA was all over the bedsheets. Nevertheless, after she was dressed she ran a second washcloth over everything she could recall handling in the bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room, hoping to expunge her prints. She wiped down the glasses, the minibar, and the bottles—all those empty bottles. The remote to the entertainment system. Then, because much of the night before was a blur with yawning black holes in between, she ran the washcloth over everything she was even likely to have touched. The hotel room’s doorknobs and closet handles, its hangers, the footboard to the bed. That beautiful headboard, too.

  When she was done, she picked up all the pieces of the bottle she could find. She gazed for a moment at the jagged edge of the bottle’s shoulder. Could this thing have really cut open Alex Sokolov’s neck with the thoroughness of an autopsy scalpel? She had no idea. Then she took it, too, rolling it up in the towel.

  She pulled aside the drapes and blinked at the sun and the flat blue water a few blocks distant. Though their room was only on the fifth floor, the lobby was as tall and cavernous as a casino, and they had had an unobstructed view of the azure sea.

  She told herself that when she was safely back in the United States—assuming she made it back there—she would talk to a lawyer. One step at a time. The important thing right now was to get back to her own hotel, make up a man from the night before if anyone asked, and be in the lobby at eleven fifteen. She had a feeling that she wasn’t going to breathe easy until the plane lifted off the runway. No, she knew in her heart th
at she wasn’t going to relax even then. At least not completely. Of all the horrible things she had done when she was drunk, nothing topped leaving behind a body that had bled out in the bed beside her.

  And, much to her dismay, she was doing this sober.

  * * *

  « «

  She left the “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling by its elegant gold braid around the hotel room doorknob to keep Alex’s body undiscovered for as long as possible, and stood for a moment trying to remember where the hell the elevator was. The hotel was massive, with corridors that seemed to snake in all directions. Finally she started off, walking quickly down empty hallways, and eventually she found the elevator bank. The lift seemed to take forever to arrive, but she reassured herself that time was just passing slowly because she was nervous. No, not nervous: she was terrified. She calmed herself by thinking how she could still tell someone at the front desk what had happened and tell them—insist—that she had done nothing wrong. After all, at this point, she had done nothing irrevocable: she was simply getting into the elevator (which was empty, too, a good omen). But then she was crossing the magnificent lobby with its palm trees and oriental carpets and opulent Moorish canopies (and, yes, security cameras), her face hidden behind her sunglasses and the scarf that she’d bought before leaving the Dubai airport yesterday, and then she was passing the row of stores inside the hotel. The shop for Christian Louboutin shoes. The one that sold nothing but Hermès scarves. A rather elegant arts and trinkets boutique. She remembered now, the images a fog, that she had ventured into all three of them. It was after dinner, on her way to the elevator. When she was waiting for Alex to return from his meeting. In one of the stores she had seen a leopard-print scarf—luminous, black and yellow swirls of spots, gold beading along the borders—that she had longed for but knew she couldn’t afford.

  And now she walked ever faster, risking eye contact with no one, ignoring the concierge and the bellmen and the greeters offering tea, and then she was back outside in the world of blistering desert heat and the hotel’s line of fountains around twin reflecting pools. She almost climbed into a cab, but then stopped herself. Why give anyone additional proof that she had ever been at this hotel since, it seemed now, she had made her choice? She was outside. She was leaving. And with every step she took the idea of turning around grew more problematic—if not impossible—because every step took her from perceived innocence to perceived guilt. She was corroborating the allegations that this Miranda person was sure to make.

  She checked her watch: she guessed she was a ten-minute walk from her own hotel, which would give her perhaps fifteen minutes to change into her uniform and get downstairs to the lobby. Maybe even twenty, because obviously they wouldn’t leave without her. She started to text Megan that she was on her way, but then stopped herself. Texts left a trail. For a moment, she took comfort in the fact that Megan hadn’t texted her, but then she was hit hard by a revelation: she disappeared in foreign cities, even here in the Middle East, with such disturbing frequency that Megan, the person she had flown with most often over the years, didn’t seem at all worried by her absence.

  God, she was a mess. An absolute mess.

  And yet she moved forward because like the planes on which she lived so much of her life, that was the only direction that allowed for survival. Think shark. She turned right, down the great oval of the hotel’s driveway. She gazed one last time at the palms and the fountains and the long line of town cars with their bulletproof glass windows, and started toward the airline’s less opulent accommodations. She sighed. She had made her choice—just one more bad choice in a life riddled with them—and there was no turning back.

  2

  “You could film science fiction here. Crazy science fiction. Imagine giving a filmmaker like Tarkovsky this palette. Look out a window on the ninety-ninth floor of the Burj Khalifa, especially when the fog is just right in the morning. The spikes are above the clouds. The spires are in the sky—literally in the sky. They’re growing from the mist. The best new buildings in this city? I tell you, they were built for the Martians.”

  Elena nodded. She’d seen plenty of pictures of Dubai before arriving and watched hours of video. She’d had a window seat on her flight, and though she hadn’t been able to glimpse those massive man-made harbors that were shaped like palms as the plane descended, on their final approach she’d enjoyed the Blade Runner-esque skyscrapers. Even this hotel bar was a series of futuristic black columns, glass obelisks, and chandeliers that fell from the ceiling like slender icicles. The barstools were the highest she’d ever seen in her life. Dubai was a vertical world between the flatness of sand and the flatness of sea, a cutting-edge outpost just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. It was utterly different from Gaziantep, the Turkish city where she’d spent most of the last month stalking her prey. Parts of that city still felt like B-roll footage from a movie set in the Middle East during the First World War. She half expected to see Peter O’Toole in his Lawrence of Arabia garb in the souk.

  “How was your meeting?” she asked Viktor. He’d just come from NovaSkies.

  “They have a drone that hunts drones,” he said, not really answering her question, and she couldn’t decide if he was dismissing what he saw or whether he was still ruminating on its potential for Syria. Then: “Any trouble with Alex’s computer?” He was wearing a black suit and a white oxford shirt without a necktie. The bar was air-conditioned—it was easily a hundred degrees outside, though no more than sixty-five inside the lounge—but he had seemed utterly impervious to the heat when they had walked here. She had nearly wilted. But then she had been melting ever since the moment she had first emerged from the airport terminal.

  “Not at all,” she said, handing him a flash drive that masqueraded as the sort of tiny toothpaste tube that came with an airline travel kit. “The Dubai police are good. They’ll presume it was some angry investor. They know we have a tendency to overreact.”

  “You are an angry investor. At least you should be. He was stealing from you, too.”

  “I know.”

  She was drinking iced tea because of all the Stoli she’d had to drink last night to keep up with that pair of idiot Americans. But, then, she rarely drank at lunch. Viktor was savoring a cocktail made with rye and Arabian bitters. The bar was on the first floor, and she gazed out at the midday sun. “Yes, the Dubai police are good. Very good,” he said, echoing her darkly. “Excellent, really. So are the security forces. I was thinking of that story from a couple of years ago, when that Hamas leader was murdered in his hotel room.”

  She nodded. She knew the story; they all did. The Dubai authorities were able to track the executioners with the cameras they had placed across the city. They followed them from the airport to a tennis club, where they rendezvoused, and then to the hotel where they executed the military commander. It was Mossad, of course—and Dubai was so furious that no one had told them the hit was coming that they had burned the agents. They’d published the security camera footage and outed them all. “It was more than a couple years ago. More like ten. I was still in college,” she corrected him.

  “Of course you were. Of course. Your father was still alive,” he said, and he offered a smile tinged ever so slightly with meanness. Not outright cruelty, but spite: he didn’t like to be corrected. He knew how much she had loved her father, and reminding her of his death was a small rebuke. But once he had made his point, his face changed: “And Alex was asleep?”

  “He was. Passed out would be more accurate.”

  “You didn’t shoot him?”

  “I brought the twenty-two and a silencer, but no, in the end I didn’t. I saw no reason to risk any noise at all. And, I imagine, this will be viewed in some circles as especially Arabian justice—and a more dramatic message.”

  He dabbed at his mouth with the back of his hand, and then glanced at his watch. “I don’t like drama.”

&nbs
p; On some level, she knew this. It was why she hadn’t yet told him about the flight attendant. She’d planned to, but couldn’t decide now whether she should. After all, the woman had been hammered; she’d barely remember anything from her one-night hookup with Sokolov. Besides, who would she tell? Why would she tell? When the woman announced that she was going to leave—return to her own hotel—because she had a flight to Paris the next morning, Elena had decided to wait. She’d leave, too, and return later to take care of Sokolov. He was at least as drunk as his new acquaintance, and so it had been easy to slide one of his room keys off the side table and into her purse.

  “I was efficient,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She watched the bartender mixing chocolate liqueur and raspberries, and tried to pick out the lightweight in the bar who it was for. She decided the likely recipient was the American blonde with a man twice her age. In a moment, she saw she was right.

  “I do worry. You should, too. It’s when we stop worrying that we grow careless and bad things happen.”

  She hated it when he lectured her, but it never made sense to try and defend oneself to a man like Viktor—especially after a comment that was pretty damn innocuous by his standards. He was capable of far worse. He’d come of age in the Spetsnaz, the Soviet army’s special forces, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and had proven particularly adept at convincing Mujahideen to talk. In places like Kunduz and Faizabad, her father told her, Viktor’s superiors had often had to look the other way: he got results, but his methods were reminiscent of the Lubyanka basement in the 1950s. Today he was among those who didn’t give a damn about the Chemical Weapons Convention, and shrugged at the dead children of Khan Sheikhoun. Before traveling back to Dubai, he’d been in Damascus.