The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Are you going to meet with every employee who was on the plane?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, almost chuckling at the certainty as he spoke. “Look, every person the guy met the last couple of days is of interest now. Someone in Dubai or someone in America is going to want to talk to every single bellhop and waitress and concierge and, yes, flight attendant he might have said boo to. Every single one. Of course, it’s really only you and Megan and Jada I’m worried about. You’re the three.”

  “Because…”

  “Because you were the ones handling first class and you were the ones who were in direct contact with Sokolov.”

  “And you said they both called you?”

  “Damn right, they did. You should have called me, too,” he said, and she felt chastised.

  “You live in the city?” she asked. After she spoke, she wondered if she should have apologized to him for not reaching out to the union on Saturday. But she had been so relieved when the FBI’s Frank Hammond hadn’t even asked about her whereabouts in Dubai that it hadn’t crossed her mind to contact them. She had been in something like shock at the way she thought she might have dodged a bullet.

  Mayes nodded as he chewed. Then: “I live about ten blocks south of here. My wife and I always figured we’d move out to Long Island when we had children, but we never did, so we just stayed. And we like the neighborhood. Lot of NYU kids. Makes us feel younger than we are.”

  “I like that area, too. Especially in September when the freshmen arrive. They are just so young.”

  He smiled. “And they get younger every year.”

  “So, what did Megan say? Or Jada?” It felt like she was feeling her way in the dark. So far she and Derek had discussed her path to the airline, but the most revealing thing she had shared was that she had made it through the University of Kentucky on financial aid and a work-study job at the college switchboard. She’d manned the console, an antique as the twenty-first century loomed, from midnight to eight a.m. two nights a week. Almost no one ever called. Mostly she alerted campus security when students locked themselves out of their rooms or when women wanted a safe ride back to their dorms. Mostly she wrote papers and worried about her kid sister and the foster home where Rosemary was parked until she finished high school. Cassie didn’t drink then. She guessed this was irony, given the way that so many of her peers seemed to live on keg beer and boxed wine.

  He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, and then used it on his fingers. “They said they barely spoke to him. Hi and bye. Jada thinks she may have brought him the basket of breads midway through the lunch service and asked if he wanted another roll. She may have offered him a newspaper and asked if he wanted English or French. But they both said—when I asked—that you spoke to him a lot.”

  “Why did you ask?”

  “Because I needed to know who was taking care of the guy and talking to him, if they weren’t. And they both said it was you. Jada said he chatted you up pretty seriously.”

  For a second she said nothing. She was grateful that Jada had told Mayes that Alex had been chatting her up, the implication being that he had paid more attention to her than she had paid to him. The truth was somewhere closer to the middle. Still, she wondered: Was this the moment when she should confess? Tell this union official that she needed a lawyer and the union’s help? Tell him that there was a woman in this world named Miranda who may have had something to do with Alex’s hedge fund, and had seen her in Alex’s hotel suite at the Royal Phoenician that night? But she let the moment pass, as she had every other opportunity she’d had to start over. Derek Mayes wanted to help her, but she rather doubted there was any variant on attorney-client privilege between the two of them that could withstand a court of law. Whatever she told him could come back to haunt her. “I told the FBI everything I knew when we landed,” she said firmly. “I know it wasn’t very much. But he was just one more passenger on just one more flight.”

  “Yes and no.”

  She waited. It took control not to sit back in the seat and fold her arms across her chest. The waitress refilled their coffee, and Mayes poured the last of the milk in the small, tinny creamer into his mug.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Yes, to you he was just one more passenger on just one more flight,” he said carefully, and for a moment she began to relax. His construction suggested that no one really knew anything about her involvement with the man. “But I don’t think he was just a hedge fund guy. Yesterday was busier than I like for a Sunday in the summer. I think the FBI is going to want to speak to you again.”

  “Me or the cabin crew?” she asked. She heard the quiver in her voice. Her mouth had gone dry.

  “Cabin crew.”

  “The FBI told you that?”

  “They did.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Look, you spent the most time with the guy on the plane. That’s a fact.”

  “So?”

  “He was part of your section in first class. You were the one serving him. Don’t get me wrong, the other flight attendants aren’t throwing you under the bus. But both Megan and Jada said you two were yakking it up every time you brought the guy a glass of wine or refilled his coffee cup. You spent a hell of a lot more time with two C than you did with, I don’t know, four C.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You two weren’t yakking it up?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Look, even if it were true, why would that be a problem?”

  “I was polite to him.”

  “I’m serious, Cassie. Even if you were flirting with the guy, why would that be an issue?”

  “Because it would be unprofessional.”

  He chuckled, but it was a mean laugh. “Yeah, flight attendants never flirt with passengers—or pilots. Never.” He rolled his eyes. “You know how high the divorce rate is in your profession. I guess that’s why flight attendants and pilots only wind up married to…each other. You’re away from home all the time, you’re flirting all the time, you’re in hotels all the time. And…”

  “And what?”

  “And no one gets you except people like you. No one gets the weirdness of the lifestyle. No one else could possibly understand.”

  She sighed. “It’s inevitable we wind up together. It’s simply because we all work together. I’m sure ad people marry ad people, and lawyers marry lawyers. All professions have office romances.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t all work together. You don’t. That’s the thing. You almost never have the same people on the same crew. I mean, you and Megan are bid buddies, and I guess she and Shane are bid buddies. But there were ten flight attendants on that airplane to Dubai, and seven of you had never seen each other before that JFK/Dubai sequence and may never, ever see each other again. Or, if you do, it will be years from now. And that’s just the cabin crew. Add in the folks in the cockpit. When will you fly next with any of those pilots? A year from now? Two? Ten? No, Cassie, sorry: you don’t work together.”

  “Where is this going? I thought you wanted to help me.”

  “I do. And that’s why I need to be sure that this Sokolov character didn’t tell you something meaningful or you didn’t learn something about him that you should be sharing with a lawyer or just maybe the FBI.”

  “Nope.”

  “Because by now the FBI knows you were flirting with him. And by now they know that you were not having dinner that night in Dubai with any member of the crew, including your friend Megan. If I know that from my limited conversations, then they do from their interviews.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t. But just in case: anything you want to tell me about that night in Dubai?”

  “I went to bed.”

 
; “In the airline’s hotel?”

  “Yes!”

  “Did you go out to eat?”

  “No,” she answered, wondering the moment the syllable had escaped her lips whether she had spoken too quickly. There surely were witnesses at the restaurant. But she also knew instantly that his next question would be about room service—and it was.

  “So you had something sent up to your room?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t eat?”

  “I wasn’t feeling great. I ate some peanuts from the minibar. I fell asleep.” She couldn’t imagine they could actually check such a thing. How accurate really was hotel monitoring of the minibar?

  “So you didn’t go out?”

  “Did someone say I did?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “But according to two airline employees in the cabin with you, you were flirting with Alex Sokolov. And then, it seems, you weren’t hanging out with anyone from the flight crew that night. No one. You just disappeared—”

  “Into my hotel room!” she snapped, cutting him off. She saw over Mayes’s shoulder that she had spoken so harshly that the two older men having breakfast together at the next table turned, their heads swiveling like owls’.

  Mayes opened his hands, palms up, and sat back. “Got it,” he said. “Got it. But for all we know, the FBI is going to talk to the passengers who were seated near Sokolov on the flight, and it’s possible that one or more of them is going to say you and the guy were friendly. I don’t know yet if Sokolov was from some wealthy or well-connected family, or whether he just wasn’t what he said he was. I don’t know what he was really doing in Dubai. Maybe it really was just a meeting with investors. But this story has legs, so I want to be sure you do three things. Okay?”

  “Fine. Tell me.” She hoped that her lies and her fear would be misconstrued for aggravation.

  “I want you to get a lawyer.”

  “I can’t afford a lawyer!” she said, even though she recalled vividly her vow in the hotel suite in Dubai that she would find one if somehow she made it back to America. “I can barely afford my apartment. You know what I make. I’m broke. We’re all broke. We all need more money than we have.”

  “So does everyone, so relax. I can help you find a lawyer you can afford. Not a big deal. It’s what we do.”

  “I’m not saying yes—because I don’t see why I need one—but what else?”

  “Two, I want you to keep me informed with exactly what’s going on. Again, this is so we can help you.”

  “Fine.”

  “And, three, I want you to tell me the second a reporter calls you.”

  She hadn’t imagined a reporter contacting her. But she realized that was naïve. Of course one might, especially if Sokolov was from a prominent family or wasn’t really a hedge fund manager. “I can do all of that, sure,” she agreed. And perhaps because of the specter of a news camera in her face or the proximity of the New York Post that a fellow at another table was reading, she added, “And if you have a name for a lawyer, that would be great. Cheap, but good. But tell me something.”

  “Name it.”

  “If Sokolov wasn’t a money manager of some sort, then what was he? A spy?”

  “He had a job that demanded he travel. That’s a great cover for a lot of things.”

  “Is that a yes? He might have been an American spy?”

  “Or Russian. Or German. Or Israeli. Or South African. I don’t know. Maybe he was some kind of go-between or courier.”

  She thought of the paperback she’d bought yesterday. “He was into his Russian DNA—at least a little bit.” When she said the word DNA, she felt another one of those pinpricks of misgiving and fear: it was her lipstick. The lipstick she had lost somewhere in Dubai; the lipstick she had possibly left behind in room 511. She imagined a police tech lifting it off the hotel room floor with tongs and dropping it into a clear plastic bag. There it was, the smoking gun.

  And there was something else: a lip balm. A lip balm with her airline’s logo. Sure, it was a generic, but she liked it and she used it, too. It had a coconut scent. When she had been emptying her purse before throwing it away in Dubai, she hadn’t seen it either. Sometimes she moisturized her lips with the balm before applying her lipstick. Had she done that in 511? Was there a lip balm somewhere in that room that had both her airline’s logo and her DNA?

  “Maybe it’s just that simple,” Derek was saying about Sokolov. “Maybe he’s FSB.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “What used to be the KGB. Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Counterintelligence. Spy stuff. Often very nasty spy stuff.”

  “But he still seemed awfully American to me,” she told him, hoping Mayes hadn’t heard the small tremor in her voice.

  “Means nothing. If you’re undercover, you want to seem American. But what do I know? He could just as easily be CIA. Or maybe he was a seriously nasty crook selling arms. Or girls. Or drugs. You know, whatever he was doing may have had nothing to do with espionage. I’m just saying, he may not have been what he said he was, given the way he was killed.”

  “Didn’t some Dubai police officer say it was a robbery?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Nothing was stolen.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I asked. I asked the FBI agent who interviewed Megan. The woman wouldn’t tell me much, but she said nothing was stolen. At least they don’t think anything was stolen. His wallet, his watch, his credit cards were all there, according to the FBI chief in the Emirates. His computer was still there. His briefcase was still there.”

  She wanted to kick herself for not stealing Sokolov’s wallet and wristwatch and dumping them in the very same trash can in Dubai where she had tossed the washcloth and soap and the shards of the bottle of Stoli. It hadn’t crossed her mind to suggest that the poor guy’s death had been part of a robbery. But then she recalled an expression that a philosophy class had debated ad nauseam in college: you can’t prove a negative. In the end, the class as a whole had decided that you could. But the expression had stayed with her.

  “Well, if something was stolen, it wouldn’t be in the hotel room, so you wouldn’t know it was gone,” she said.

  “Agreed. I’m sure the authorities in Dubai, ours and theirs, will compile an inventory as best they can of what he had brought with him. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone at the hotel. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone who was supposed to be in the meeting with him—assuming there really was a meeting. In any case, the vibe I’m getting is pretty clear: this wasn’t a hotel room robbery that went bad. This was an execution.”

  The word lingered in the air. She looked down at the last of the runny eggs and toast crumbs on the union official’s plate. Mayes was probably—almost certainly—correct. She had reminded herself dozens of times how easy it would have been for someone to slash her throat, too. And yet they hadn’t. They’d spared her. Still, she would never be able to erase the memory of that body in the bed, so cold and still. She would never forget all that blood.

  “Cassie?”

  She looked up.

  “I thought I’d lost you there for a minute,” Mayes was saying. “I was about to snap my fingers. You know, wake you up from your trance.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  He sat back in his chair and smiled. He folded his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not completely sure you are,” he said. “But you know what?”

  She waited.

  “I got a feeling some poor dead guy you met one time on an airplane is the least of your problems.”

  “I think I should be insulted.”


  “Nah. I’m speaking as an old guy who wanted to be a dad and never was.” He picked up the bill the waitress had left on the table—Cassie wondered when that happened, because she couldn’t recall the waitress returning—and watched Mayes head for the cashier to pay it.

  * * *

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  That night Cassie opened the Chianti alone in her apartment, swirling it in a hand-painted wineglass. It was one of a pair that Rosemary had given her years before she had realized that she probably shouldn’t encourage her older sister’s drinking. The glasses had white orchids rising from the base of the bowl to the rim, the petals erotic and lush. As she was swallowing her first sip, her phone pinged and she saw that she had a text from Buckley. He was asking how she was. He added that he regretted how short they had been with each other before he’d left Sunday morning, and hoped he’d see her when she was back in New York. She didn’t reply, but neither did she delete it. Usually she would have. Usually when she picked up a guy in a bar like that, there would have been a gap in her memory—an hour or two or ten—that she didn’t want to hear about on a second date. Maybe she didn’t delete the text this time, she thought, because while she had gotten drunk with Buckley, she hadn’t accelerated when she hit her drunken V1 and then broken the blackout barrier with a concussive, window-rattling boom. So, maybe tomorrow she would text something back. Maybe not. Probably not. Still, she kept the text on her phone and told herself that this suggested evolution, a supposed impossibility at midlife when, in theory, no one changed. She thought it was rather kind of him to suggest they had been short with each other on Sunday morning. In reality, she had only been short with him.

  The irony of blackouts was this: you had to have a spectacular alcohol tolerance to black out. Amateur drinkers passed out long before they put the hippocampus—those folds in the gray matter where memories are made—to sleep. She was a pro. Partial blackouts happened when the blood alcohol hit the magic 0.2; en bloc or total blackouts occurred when you ratcheted up the number to an undeniably impressive 0.3. The bar for drunk driving, by comparison, was a fraction of those numbers: a mere 0.08.