The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  She closed the page on her phone and sat back in her seat. She thought of her brief time with Bowden back in Dubai: the woman was lit, sure, and dopey with drink. But so was Alex. But she’d also seemed rather kind and funny. And it was at that very moment, like a revelation, that Elena recalled the way Alex had become so attentive when Bowden said something about what her brother-in-law did for a living. It was the name of the army base. The fact, Bowden said, that he was more engineer than soldier.

  She grimaced there in her seat at the obviousness of what she had missed. Sokolov already knew that. He knew all about Bowden’s brother-in-law. She must have said something on the flight to Dubai, and instantly he had connected the dots. It was why he had brought Bowden back to his room. This may have ended up a drunken romp with a hot mess, but that wasn’t how it had begun. She hadn’t seduced him; he, in fact, had seduced her. It was a move that simultaneously reflected his brilliance and his naïveté. The courier—whoever it was, because God forbid Viktor should ever violate his “need to know” policies of spy craft and secrecy and tell her—had sensed that the FBI was circling and grown anxious. So Viktor had enlisted Sokolov to make the handoff, an assignment he had gladly accepted because he knew how much trouble he was in with his Russian clients. And into his life walked a flight attendant with connections to Blue Grass who probably needed money. Bowden must have just screamed “recruit” to Sokolov; she was the perfect offering to bring to a Cossack crazy who was trying to weaponize a drone with chemical agents.

  Elena’s father had one rule that he said had served him well both before and after the collapse: trust your instincts. He said it had saved his life when he was with the KGB, and it had saved his fortune when he was done.

  The beverage cart was well behind her now, but another flight attendant appeared out of nowhere and offered to refill her glass. He was a handsome guy with a mane of tapered, coal-colored dreadlocks held back in an immaculate ponytail.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” he said, smiling. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  She raised her glass to him in gratitude, but already her mind was elsewhere. Nothing really was wrong, and nothing really was different, she told herself. But there it was, a beacon from deep inside her, a warning light now flashing red.

  20

  News spreads like an airborne virus in the digital age, and though Cassie knew not a soul in the crew on the overnight flight to Rome, they knew her. They had all read the story on their phones on the way to the airport or as they waited to pass through security or then as they waited to board. They had been directed to the story by friends and family and coworkers who had seen it on Facebook or Twitter. After all, she worked for their airline.

  And while she wasn’t wearing a scarlet A—the uniform regulations would have prohibited that sort of accessorizing, Cassie thought darkly to herself—everyone watched her warily and she felt like Hester Prynne. No, the vibe of this madness was Russian. Anna Karenina, she corrected herself. But, of course, Anna hadn’t killed anyone. It was only her own life that she’d taken. The cabin service director, a fortysomething fellow named Brendon who was lean and stern and led spin classes in Buffalo when he wasn’t flying, asked her if she would be capable of working. She said yes. Of course. She said she knew this was coming. She added—and she said this so many times in the half hour before they walked down the jet bridge to prepare the plane for takeoff that she had begun to believe it herself—that Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left his hotel room. She had no idea who had murdered him, which she also said with conviction, though mostly she was sure that she did know: it was either Miranda or someone Miranda knew. But somehow Miranda was involved.

  Perhaps Miranda was even behind the dude in the black ball cap.

  Unfortunately, there were also still those occasional moments when she wondered if, just maybe, she was blaming Miranda needlessly—because she herself had killed Alex Sokolov. Usually she was able to walk herself in from the ledge when her mind would go there. It was just that over the years there had been so many other revelatory and appalling morning-after discoveries of what she had done when she was on the far side of the blackout zone.

  Cassie, you really don’t remember when you were kicking the jukebox? You were weirdly pissed off because they had nothing by Taylor Swift. Have you looked at your foot this morning?

  You were screaming like a porn star, girl. The people in the apartment next to mine were banging on the wall.

  You were about to give this homeless guy your credit cards, Cassie—all of them. You were, like, emptying your wallet. It was sweet, but insane.

  Houdini Bikini. That’s what you called it. You took off your top and were trying to step out of your bottom.

  Once when Paula was sober she’d ruminated that one of them was destined to die via “death by misadventure.” Apparently that was what coroners wrote on death certificates when people died doing something monumentally stupid, usually while drunk. They drowned or they fell off buildings or they tumbled down long flights of stairs. Paula had joked that it wasn’t the worst way to go.

  The small talk among the crew grew awkward fast. Usually they all would have chatted casually and gotten to know each other a bit, but how do you make small talk with a person of interest in a murder investigation in Dubai? Cassie got it. She understood. She was by no means a pariah, but no one could quite figure out how to transition from a discussion of the murder of some hedge fund manager to asking if you had any hobbies.

  Yes, she would have answered, had they asked. I drink. Want the secret to a dirty martini? Plop an ice cube and a little water in the glass and place it in the freezer for a couple of minutes before mixing together the gin, the vermouth, and the olive juice.

  And yet somehow she had done her job for three hours now. She was working the business-class cabin with a kind woman her age named Makayla, and it probably helped that the other flight attendant was almost heroically competent. She was always a step ahead of Cassie on the hot towels and warmed nuts, opening the different wines and gently—very gently—helping her remain on task as they warmed the trays with the steaks or the salmon or the risotto. When Cassie introduced herself to the passengers, she used her middle name, Elizabeth, and asked them to call her Ellie. (She had taken off the badge with her name, which was technically a uniform violation, but she didn’t care this evening. She just didn’t care.) She was pretty sure that the paunchy guy in the ugly, short-sleeve jacquard shirt knew who she really was, but he was traveling alone and hadn’t bothered to share his reconnaissance with anyone else on the plane. He just eyed her knowingly, as if he got it, he was in on the joke.

  Now for the first time, in the dark over the Atlantic when most of the passengers were starting to sleep, she was able to sit down in her jump seat and stare at her phone. To read and reread the story. To see her “no comment,” which seemed profoundly incriminating in the context of this nightmare, but also the deft way that Ani Mouradian managed to defend her and deflect the allegations. She couldn’t help but scan the comments from readers that followed the story, most of them fatuous and some accusatory, but all of them hurtful and cruel. She examined the way that the saga was being discussed on the social networks. Finally she returned to her own e-mails, including the ones from Ani and Megan and her sister. Rosemary chastised her, writing that she couldn’t understand why Cassie hadn’t told her what was going on, either on the phone immediately after she returned to the United States from the Emirates or at some point on Saturday. After all, we spent all Saturday together, she reiterated. Her sister was angry and sad and worried about her. The e-mail was as judgmental as ever, and Cassie knew that she had earned every word.

  And then there was the e-mail from her friend Gillian: it was a well-meaning but appalling joke about just how bad this guy must have been in bed for her to cut his throat.

  Brendon a
nd Makayla and the rest of the crew left her alone, undoubtedly aware of what she was facing.

  She honestly wasn’t sure what was worse: the online jokes or the online hatred. There were lots of both, all of it mean-spirited and sexist. The news story didn’t include her confession (quasi-confession, if she were honest with herself) to the FBI on Friday that she had indeed spent the night with Alex Sokolov; no one at the FBI had leaked that bit of information. But the story certainly suggested that she had, based on both the hotel surveillance camera footage of her and an interview with a hotel employee who said he had seen the flight attendant with the murdered businessman. She was sipping Coke to settle her stomach, but she wanted a drink. She sighed. She didn’t dare try and sneak one. Not now.

  The strangest part of the news story, she decided, was a quote from Alex’s father. It was after his rather straightforward expression of his faith that the FBI and the Dubai police would find his son’s killer. It was after his lovely observation about the gentleness of his son’s interests, such as Alex’s “childlike” fascination with numbers and the way he had built it into a career. After that, however, Gregory Sokolov had volunteered how surprising and unwarranted he found the allegations that his son was a spy. The idea had crossed Cassie’s mind numerous times, the seed planted originally by Derek Mayes when they had first had breakfast. But it was almost as if Alex’s father was protesting too much. Moreover, she hadn’t realized that the notion was out there in the zeitgeist. Sure enough, however, when she Googled Sokolov now she found the innuendo and the rumors that had emerged with the suddenness of dandelions in May. There was plenty of speculation that he worked for the CIA and plenty that he worked for Mossad and MI6 and the FSB. There were even a few conspiracy theorists who argued that he worked for some assassin squad far darker than the CIA or the FSB, and he reported directly to the American or the Russian president. She saw groups with names like Double O (British), Cossacks (Russian), Phoenix (American), and Kidon (Israeli). None of it matched well with the young man she had dined with in Dubai, a gentle fellow from Virginia. The guy was into money and math, for God’s sake. He liked to read books from the nineteenth century. She was pretty sure that she knew more about guns than he did.

  But he did have a Russian last name. He had Russian interests. Russian cologne and books and alcohol.

  A passenger, a slender young woman in leopard tights that were disturbingly reminiscent of those luxurious bathrobes at the Royal Phoenician, smiled down at her, and Cassie assumed that she was about to slide into the lavatory beside her. Her hair was long and dark and parted in the middle. Her eyes looked a little sleepy. But she didn’t enter the bathroom. Instead she leaned against the handle beside the exterior door—the one that was attached to the interior of the fuselage and that Cassie was supposed to hold on to in the event of an evacuation so she wouldn’t be pushed from the plane in the desperate scrum to get out.

  “The bathrooms are free,” Cassie said to her.

  The woman nodded, but didn’t go in. “I just needed to stretch my legs,” she murmured. Then: “What’s happening in the world?”

  “Nothing at the moment. Thank God. Mostly it’s just the midterm election madness.”

  “I like a slow news day. It means some corner of the planet hasn’t blown up. A hospital wasn’t shelled in the Middle East. A school wasn’t attacked by some crazy person with a gun in Kentucky.”

  “I grew up in Kentucky,” said Cassie.

  “I’ve never been there. I hear it’s very pretty.”

  “It is.”

  “I’m Missy.”

  “Hi. Ellie.”

  “Can I ask you something”—and she paused before saying her name—“Ellie?”

  Cassie waited. Usually when a passenger asked her a question in the middle of a flight this tranquil, it was an innocuous question about her job. They couldn’t sleep and wanted to talk, and sometimes the utter marvel of aviation—of flying—became real for them at moments like this.

  “Of course.”

  “When you refilled my wine during dinner…”

  “Go ahead. Ask.”

  “Your hands were trembling. And just now, well, you look kind of like you just want to cry.”

  “And the question is?”

  “Why are you torturing yourself and reading what’s out there? I write a style blog for Enticement, which isn’t exactly hard news, but I still see my share of crap on the web. Maybe I see even more. Crazy fat shaming. Slut shaming. Fashion shaming. I know who you are, and I know what’s out there about you. I was probably just reading the same articles and reactions you were. That stuff is absolutely toxic. So why don’t you just, I don’t know, download a novel and read that instead?”

  “I actually have a paperback with me,” she said. She had responded automatically.

  Missy nodded. “Good. I think you should do yourself a favor and stay off-line for a while.”

  Cassie couldn’t decide whether this was kindness or invasiveness smirking behind kindness. But Missy’s gaze was gentle.

  “My parents are both shrinks,” she went on. “And so I know what a total disaster these well-intentioned little chats can be. So, I’m sorry if this isn’t helpful advice at all. But you just looked so…so forlorn that I had to say something.”

  “It’s fine,” Cassie said, and she felt her eyes welling up. “It’s good.”

  “Do you know people cry on airplanes more than anywhere else?”

  “I didn’t know it was a fact,” she answered, “but I might have suspected as much from my years up here.”

  “Yeah, you’d probably know better than me. But on a plane, you’re often alone. Or you’re stressed. Or you’ve just had some meaningful experience. Movies and books will really get to you at thirty-five thousand feet.”

  “You’re right.” She squirted Purell onto her fingers, rubbed it in, and then wiped the tears off her cheeks.

  “Have you shut down your Tinder?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do it. Just shut it down. Shut down Tinder, Facebook, Instagram. Twitter. God, especially Twitter. Whatever you have. Just hit pause.”

  She sniffled. “That’s good advice. I will, thank you.”

  Missy smiled. It was a beautiful smile. Cassie stood and hugged her, wondering why she didn’t have more friends like this younger woman—friends whose interactions with her weren’t about either drinking or the fallout from drinking—and wishing she could stay in her arms for the rest of the flight.

  * * *

  « «

  After Missy had retaken her seat, Cassie took her advice and hit pause. She didn’t merely deactivate most of her accounts on the social networks, she deleted the apps from her phone.

  Then she finished the Tolstoy novella she had started days ago but put aside. Much to her surprise, “Happy Ever After” was not an ironic title at all. She wept at the ending. Masha, she thought. Masha. Such a beautiful name.

  * * *

  « «

  Many of the flights from the United States landed at Fiumicino in the same window: midmorning. The crush at passport control was not all American, not by a long shot, but in a provincial sort of way it felt like it was. Cassie heard accents in the throng from the South and from New England and from New York.

  But the flight crews had their own line and passed through more quickly than the passengers.

  Now she was walking beside Makayla, and they were just beyond security, nearing the exit to the baggage carousels (which they did not need), and then the terminal exit, where they would meet the van that would bring them all into Rome. Makayla was telling her about a vegetarian restaurant she liked on the Via Margutta and suggesting they go there for dinner. Cassie was aware that one of the wheels on her roller was not quite right. The bag was dragging ever so slightly. She was trying to listen to the other flight attendant, but her
mind kept wandering to what might be going on that moment in the cities of New York and Dubai. Yes, most of New York was still asleep, but perhaps not the FBI. In her mind she envisioned FBI investigators and Dubai detectives e-mailing or texting or sharing encrypted files. Videos of her. Photographs. Her e-mails, perhaps, which they had downloaded from a server. Interviews with hotel employees.

  She imagined someone was somehow searching through a central trash repository on the outskirts of Dubai, looking for exactly the sorts of things she had thrown away. She wondered if they would take a screenshot from the security camera footage and enlarge her purse, and look for precisely that bag in the mountains of garbage in the desert somewhere. Or maybe they would look for the missing hotel towels. Or a knife. Could a coroner make a reasonable guess about whether it was a knife or a broken bottle based on the way that Alex’s throat had been cut? Probably. She told herself that no one could even begin to find something as small as a shoulder bag or the precise shard of glass in a city as big as Dubai. And so while the idea of a search caused her anxiety, she was mostly able to quell that fear.

  And it was then that she stopped. She put her hand on Makayla to stop her, too. There, on the far side of passport control, in the lines and lines of passengers who were not from the European Union—largely Americans, mostly businesspeople arriving on a Monday morning, though certainly there were also some vacationers and people whose passports were from other non-EU nations—was a woman with auburn hair and a French twist. She was putting a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses into her purse, and had a beautiful, calfskin leather duffel slung over her shoulder. When the traveler looked up, Cassie was sure she knew who it was, she hadn’t a doubt in the world. And so reflexively she whispered to herself one small expletive and the woman’s name: “Fuck. Miranda.”

  Part Four