The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  She considered calling Paula, one of her friends who could keep up with her drink for drink, whether the drink of the day was wine or tequila or Drambuie. Paula had a weird thing for Drambuie: it was her Proustian madeleine from a ninth and tenth grade spent getting sloshed on her father’s MacKinnon. When Cassie was with Paula, dullness disappeared and it was like they were skydiving. They might create chaos for the women and men around them—sharing too much, dancing too aggressively, berating a hostess or a bartender for the music that was playing or the fact it was raining outside—but they also dialed up the energy, didn’t they? Maybe they did. But in her lucid moments the next morning, she wondered if in fact they just sucked the energy from the room.

  Which was why she also had friends like Gillian. Gillian drank, but only like a reasonable person. She didn’t get drunk, and so it was Gillian who would grab Cassie’s purse at the end of the night when she left it dangling over the back of the bar stool or tell the strange, aggressive guy with the face tats that Cassie wasn’t going home with him.

  In the end, however, she called no one and texted no one. Not tonight. Instead she booted up her laptop on the kitchen counter and stood before it as she drank. It was time to learn all that she could about the dead American in Dubai. It was time to search for Miranda. She decided to begin with the social networks. There she could read about Alex Sokolov and perhaps discover Miranda among his followers or friends.

  Alex had mentioned that he had Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, though he said that he rarely used them. She discovered right away that they were gone, if they had ever existed at all. She found no trace of him on LinkedIn and Tinder. She presumed his family had deleted the pages, but she also thought if Derek Mayes had been correct and Sokolov had indeed been a spy, then it might have been just as likely that some government agency (one of ours or one of theirs, she thought cryptically) had made the pages disappear.

  Unfortunately, this also meant that she couldn’t search among the man’s Facebook friends or Twitter followers for this other woman. This was going to demand more digging. And so she switched gears and started to surf among different travel and news websites for stories about the murder. There were plenty, though none were long and they merely corroborated what he had told her about his family life: He was an only child. He had parents in Virginia. They described his job with the hedge fund. The strangest part of the articles? None of them mentioned another Unisphere employee or investor named Miranda having seen a woman with Alex in his suite hours before he was executed.

  She recalled him mentioning that his mother’s name was Harper, and Cassie was able to find her Facebook page quickly. She half expected to see a photo of Alex and a desperately sad in memoriam from a mother about her son. But there wasn’t. Harper Sokolov hadn’t posted anything in a week, since she had added a photo of herself, her husband, and another couple in tennis whites on the terrace of a country club. She looked wholesome and athletic and fit in the short dress. Cassie saw Alex in her smile. She searched among the woman’s friends for Miranda, though she wasn’t confident she’d be there: if Alex was meeting her for the first time that night in Dubai, why in the world would his mother know her? But she had to check. And as she expected, there was no one named Miranda among Harper’s friends.

  Next Cassie visited the Unisphere website and typed the word “Miranda” into the search box. Nothing came up. The company was too big to include an employee directory. But there was a list of offices around the world, and while they didn’t have individual websites, they did list phone numbers. She glanced at the clock on the oven and saw that even eight time zones to the east no one would be in the Dubai office yet. But she could call them later and ask for Miranda. See what happened.

  She refilled her glass a third time and placed Mayes’s business card directly beside Frank Hammond’s on her refrigerator. She had scribbled on it the phone number of the lawyer he had recommended, a woman with the melodious name of Ani Mouradian. She hadn’t heard from any reporters. The FBI hadn’t contacted her again. She tried to convince herself that Derek Mayes was wrong and she would never hear from the FBI again and she would never need to call this Ani Mouradian. But she guessed she would have to be a good deal drunker to believe that, and so she ran herself a bath and brought the bottle and the glass and her phone into the bathroom with her. There was no reason to be sober: she was alone, and she hadn’t touched alcohol since the small hours of Sunday morning. Forty-two hours. Almost two days ago now.

  When she was settled under the bubbles, she closed her eyes and tried to lose herself in her ablutions—clearing her mind was of more importance to her tonight than cleaning her body—but it was impossible. She kept thinking of Alex and she kept wondering what would have happened if she had called the front desk at the hotel. But she knew. At least she thought she knew. Everyone would believe that she had killed the poor bastard—which, she had to admit, would be very difficult to refute—and she would be in jail in Dubai. She would know someone from the U.S. embassy very, very well, probably having grown acquainted with him or her from behind bars.

  She noticed that the polish on her nails was reminiscent of the Chianti and that it was starting to chip. She would have to get a manicure tomorrow. The flight to Rome didn’t leave until seven p.m., so she could sleep late and still go to the gym and the salon. Easy.

  She reached down and put her wineglass on the floor beside the tub and grabbed her phone. She decided to search Twitter for news stories about Sokolov, see if there was anything she might have missed, and scrolled through the ones that had been online for a day that she’d scanned just a few minutes ago in the kitchen. But then she saw a tweet from a news agency in Dubai that was only seconds old. She clicked the link and instantly felt her stomach lurch as if she were on a plane that had just dropped a thousand feet in a wind shear. There she was. There she was twice, as a matter of fact. There were two images of her. She wasn’t recognizable—at least not really recognizable, because the photos were grainy stills taken from the Dubai hotel’s security camera footage, and because in both images she was wearing sunglasses and the scarf she had bought at the airport when they had landed. In the first she was in the lobby, meeting Sokolov before they went out to dinner; they were near the entrance and she had hooked her arm around his elbow. She was smiling; they both were. In the second she was alone, exiting the hotel the next day. This time, her jaw was set. It was the scarf that had likely led the investigators to pick her out the second time.

  The sunglasses were pretty common Ray-Bans—one of their classic black frames.

  But the scarf? It was distinct. It was a red and blue arabesque with one large cluster of tendrils and palmettes in the center, and then a series of smaller versions framed along the four sides. Also, it had a series of small red tassels. The footage was black and white, but the pattern was vivid.

  She’d been with Megan and Jada when she bought it. She’d been wearing it when she’d returned to the airline’s hotel. She’d been wearing it in the van with the entire crew Friday morning.

  The article said the woman was not considered a suspect, but was merely wanted for questioning. Not a suspect? Ridiculous. Of course, she was. There was an image of her with Sokolov at the hotel at night and then another one of her leaving the hotel alone the next morning.

  Almost desperately she reached for her wine, and in her haste, as she transferred the goblet from her left hand to her right, she managed to clang it against the porcelain soap dish built into the tile wall, shattering the glass and spilling the wine into the water. The soap bubbles had long vanished, and so she watched, absolutely immobile, as the red wine spread and then dissipated, leaving the water and the shards of glass—some resting on her thigh, some on her abdomen, some sunk to the bottom where she could feel the edges like pinpricks or rough sand—a soft, almost soothing pink.

  It was only as she started to carefully pick the glas
s from her body that she saw the two long cuts on the side of her hand.

  9

  Elena watched half a dozen U.S. sailors laughing and cavorting on the sidewalk from Viktor’s window on the fifth floor—the top floor—of the nondescript little office building, and knew right away they were lost. This neighborhood had a Sikh temple, a Coptic Orthodox church, a Greek Orthodox parish, and the Dubai Evangelical Center. It also had dentists and accountants. It did not have the gold or jewelry or electronics stores that usually drew the sailors north from the port at Mina Jebel Ali. The carrier battle group was due in tomorrow, and so the day after tomorrow the city would be awash with American seamen and women.

  Now she turned away from the window and leaned against Viktor’s credenza. His office here was an amalgam of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. There was dark wood paneling on the walls and a silver tray with crystal cognac snifters emblazoned with the two-headed eagle on a side table, but there was also a flip-top panel for video conferences and a touch-screen computer built into a chrome and walnut desk. “She wasn’t there. I swept the room,” she said to him, hoping she didn’t sound defensive. She was just stating the facts. Unfortunately, this was getting messy and had the potential to spin wildly out of control. One’s vision was always crisper in hindsight, but Elena knew now that she’d made an egregious mistake. It would have been terrible, but perhaps she should have killed the flight attendant with Alex when she’d had the chance—when she’d come to the room and found that Alex had brought a little arm candy from the airline upstairs. If she’d wanted, she could have made it look like a murder suicide. A crime of passion. She could have left behind the knife.

  But she hadn’t, because this flight attendant wasn’t her usual sort of game. She didn’t kill bystanders. She didn’t kill innocent people.

  And now Viktor was furious. She knew that look. He was rather like her father when her father felt that someone had failed: he didn’t rant, he didn’t vent, he didn’t throw tantrums. He seethed. It was far more unsettling. But the ramifications for whoever had screwed up? Just as deadly.

  “Oh, I believe you. I believe you swept the room. But the security photos on the news sites are clear. You’ve seen them, Elena. The woman was definitely at the hotel in the morning and she was wearing the exact same clothes from the night before,” Viktor reminded her. “Alex never told you he had company when you called?”

  “No. I wouldn’t have gone to his room if he had.”

  Viktor seemed to think about this. “Had he done this sort of thing in the past?”

  “If he did, no one told me. He was never part of a honey pot.”

  “That’s true.”

  She heard the sailors outside on the street laughing a little too boisterously. If the latch mechanism on the window weren’t so complicated, she would have opened it and pointed them in the right direction for the sorts of stores they were after. “Look, I almost took care of business then and there. When we were drinking. But I didn’t want to risk a scene. I didn’t want to risk the noise. Two people? Who knows what could go wrong. The woman said something about going back to her own hotel because of her flight the next day, and so I left and waited for her to leave.”

  “And then you returned to Alex’s suite,” Viktor murmured.

  “Yes.”

  He sighed and she felt a flicker of unease. It grew more pronounced when he said, “Obviously it would have been better if you’d taken that risk, Elena. If he was as drunk as you say he was, who knows what he told her. Who knows what she knows now.”

  “I don’t think we need to worry,” she tried to reassure him, but she could feel his disapproval. She knew how much trouble she was in.

  “I do worry. And, frankly, I am”—and he paused, allowing the moment to grow ominous as he pretended merely to be searching for the right word—“vexed by the fact that you didn’t tell me there had been someone with him in the first place.”

  “I should have,” she admitted. “I know.”

  “Yes. You should have.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So what did you find? When you returned to his hotel room?” he asked.

  “Alex was already passed out in his bed. He was out like a light. The suite was even worse than it had been when I’d stopped by earlier in the evening. Both rooms. It was squalid, it really was. He or that idiot woman had managed to break the bottle of vodka I’d brought and one of the hotel’s glasses.”

  “This was after you left.”

  “Correct.”

  “But she definitely wasn’t present when you took care of our Mr. Sokolov.”

  “I’m positive.”

  “So, it would seem that she did indeed return to his room afterward and find him dead,” said Viktor.

  “But she didn’t call the front desk or the embassy. She just…what? Found the body and did nothing? Spent the night with a corpse?”

  He gave her a dark, lopsided smile, but remained silent.

  “The suite was pretty large,” Elena told him, but she knew she was grasping a little desperately for vines around the quicksand. “Maybe she only went back to the living room. Maybe she forgot something in the living room and didn’t even peer into the bedroom.”

  Viktor folded his arms across his chest dismissively and rocked back in the chair. “You can’t possibly believe that. The surveillance cameras suggest she was there all night. She knows he was dead. She saw the body.”

  “In that case, is it actually possible that she believes she killed him?” Elena asked, thinking aloud.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m serious. This flight attendant struck me as a pretty serious party girl. Think ‘Chandelier.’ ”

  “I suppose that’s a club drug?”

  “It’s a pop song. Sia. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has serious memory problems when she drinks.”

  He steepled together his fingers. “I guess it’s conceivable.”

  “So maybe this works to our favor. It shouldn’t take long for the police to figure out that she was in the room with Alex and pin the murder on her. My impression of the woman is that she’s a disaster, she lacks all common sense.”

  “Maybe. But it’s complicated. I spoke with our lawyer here.”

  She waited.

  “Alex wasn’t a citizen of the United Emirates,” he continued. “He was an American. It would take a lot of work to bring this woman back to Dubai and put her on trial, and the authorities here don’t have an especially vested interest in this case.”

  Outside one of the sailors screamed something in frustration about how lost he was and how his phone wasn’t helping. She realized they, too, had been drinking. How was it that Russians had been saddled with the reputation for inebriation? “Is there any chance she might be tried in the U.S.?”

  “Only if someone thought Alex’s death was a terrorist act,” he replied, and then he scoffed. “Can you imagine? A terrorist stewardess.”

  “Flight attendant,” she corrected him reflexively.

  There was a long beat as he raised one eyebrow. “Flight attendant,” he repeated finally.

  “No one will view his death as a terrorist act,” she said. “No one will view this flight attendant as a terrorist.”

  “I agree. Which is fine. Frankly, a trial does no one any good. Not us. Not them. And speaking frankly, Elena, not you.”

  “I understand.” She couldn’t bear the ruckus outside on the street any longer. She vowed that when this meeting was over, she was going to march downstairs and tell the sailors precisely where to go.

  “I’m not sure you do. The problem, as you have made very clear from your time with Sokolov, is that he was drunk. Peasant drunk. The toxicology report will confirm that, I’m sure. God knows what he might have shared. I think we all need to move forward on the assumption that he said something
—that he told her something. You’ve said yourself that she’s an irresponsible drinker, too.”

  She knew this was coming, but still her heart sank. “Does she have any family?” she asked.

  “Have you grown a conscience, Elena Orlov?”

  “I simply want to understand what we have to contain,” she said.

  “No. She has no children and no husband. Not even an ex-husband. It should be very easy for you to fix this. She should have an accident. A terrible, unforeseen, but eminently realistic accident.”

  “I just…”

  “You just what?”

  “I just feel bad. She did nothing wrong. She’s just a pathetic drunk who got in bed with the wrong man on the wrong night.”

  “She’s dangerous,” Viktor reminded her.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps? You should have taken care of them both when you found them together. You know that. I know you do. Besides…”

  “Besides what?”

  “She saw you, Elena. She saw you. Be realistic: one of you has to die.” He shrugged. “I think it’s your choice.”

  10

  The cuts looked far worse than they were. She wouldn’t need stitches, Cassie decided. In the end, she stood naked over the bathroom sink, sobered by the photos she had seen of herself on her phone, and pressed a cold, damp washcloth on each gash until the blood slowed. Then she pressed a couple of cotton balls along the wounds and held them in place with Scotch tape she wrapped around her left hand as if she were a mummy. It looked like a kindergartner had attempted the first aid. Tomorrow morning she would have to buy Band-Aids.

  She climbed into her sleep shirt and tried to convince herself that the rest of the crew wasn’t searching out stories about Alex Sokolov the way she was, and so they might never see the images of her at the Royal Phoenician in Dubai. But she failed. Of course they were Googling him: He’d been on their flight. He’d been in her and Megan’s and Jada’s cabin. She lay in bed waiting for the lights of the Empire State Building—the tower was the signature white tonight—to blink out. Eventually someone in the crew would spot the photos. By now the grainy stills had no doubt been shared with the FBI here in the United States and it was inevitable that eventually investigators would explore whether the woman beside Sokolov had been on the plane. First they would rule out friends and acquaintances and clients and hotel employees, but then they would work their way back to the flight. Who had he sat with? Who had he seen? They would ask the crew (They would ask her!) if she recognized the person walking beside the dead man. What would finally give her away, the scarf? The sunglasses? The sharp slope of her aquiline nose?