The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  “That’s true. Not proud that I ended up spending the night with him. But, yes, that is when we met.”

  “Was he a good guy?”

  Cassie saw another member of the flight crew approaching, a fellow a bit older than her named Justin who had pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white oxford shirt. At least she presumed he had gotten dressed again. She wondered if he often slept naked when he traveled, like some of her friends who flew, because it meant not packing pajamas. Or maybe his body ran hot (like hers), and he liked the feel of cool sheets against his skin when he fell asleep. Maybe he liked the erotic charge. Certainly some nights she did.

  “Evening, ladies,” he began. “Nothing like getting a good two hours of sleep before the alarm goes off. The fire alarm, that is.”

  “Nothing like it,” Cassie agreed. And then, perhaps because she had reached a stage where she just didn’t give a damn anymore about what people thought of her, she continued to answer Makayla’s question: “Yes. Alex Sokolov was a good guy. At least he was to me. Maybe he was up to something. Maybe he was involved in something shady. I didn’t know him well, and I probably drink too much to be trusted to judge anyone’s character. But I liked him.” She turned to Justin and explained, her voice as deadpan as she could make it—the tone, she supposed, of a woman who knew all she may once have hoped for in life had now passed her by—“We’re talking about the man I slept with in Dubai, the one who was killed in our hotel room. Excuse me, his hotel room.”

  Justin took this in for a split second. Then he put up his arms, his hands flat and framing his face, the universal sign for surrender. “I can stand right over there if you two would like to speak privately. Far be it from me to interrupt,” he said lightly.

  “No,” Cassie continued. “I don’t seem to have any secrets anymore.” As soon as the sentence had escaped her lips, however, she knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. In some ways, it was the worst kind of lie because it suggested that her secrets and lying were behind her. But, of course, she was just living a different set of secrets and lies.

  “Did you, I don’t know, think it was going to go anywhere when you were back in America?” asked Makayla.

  “My thing with Alex? Not really. But we did have fun that night. Maybe we would have seen each other again. Maybe not.” She put her phone back in her purse, sliding it in beside the pistol. “Given my history, most likely not.”

  Justin looked uncomfortably down at his sneakers. They all noticed that he hadn’t bothered to tie them, and so he knelt down, and Cassie imagined he was probably grateful to have something to do that did not involve listening to her discuss the sad end to her dalliance at the Royal Phoenician.

  “My vice has always been drinking,” she said now to Makayla. “I never smoked. I’m not sure I could quit drinking the way you just stopped smoking. Hell, I know I couldn’t.”

  “Were you drinking when the fire alarm went off?”

  “Alone in the night in the hotel room with a bottle of tequila? That could be me. But it wasn’t. Not this time. I haven’t had a drink all day—or night.”

  “There you go. You’re fine.”

  She sighed. “No. I’m not fine, Makayla, I’m not fine at all. You saw me at the airport this morning.”

  Justin stood up and said, “What happened at Fiumicino had nothing to do with drinking. You were sober, Cassie.” For a moment they stood in silence, and Cassie had the sense that he wanted to embrace her—to comfort her—but was afraid it would be construed as something less chivalrous. “I mean, you were sober, right?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I was.”

  “There you go.”

  They watched two firefighters exiting the front entrance, followed by a gentleman in a black suit and a necktie the luminescent red of a New England maple leaf late in September. First in Italian and then in English he asked for everyone’s attention. He introduced himself as the night manager and apologized profusely for the inconvenience of what was, happily, just a false alarm. He said everyone could safely return to their rooms or, if they preferred, first to the hotel bar, which was going to reopen for an hour for anyone who would like a nightcap—on the house. A free drink, he explained, was the least the hotel could do to apologize for dragging everyone out of bed in the middle of the night.

  “I’m game,” said Justin. “What about you two?”

  But Makayla glared at him, her dark eyes daggers. Cassie couldn’t miss what that stare meant. “I think we should all just go back to sleep,” she told him.

  “No, it’s fine,” Cassie said. “It really is. I won’t join you, but if you two want to go, please don’t let me put a damper on the party.”

  Instead Justin shook his head and said sheepishly, “You’re probably right, Makayla. Wheels up will come a lot sooner than we think.”

  “Yes. It will.”

  And with that the three of them returned to the hotel lobby and rode the elevator together, all of them exiting on different floors, Cassie the last to leave on the sixth. No other hotel guests left with her on her floor. She guessed they were all at the bar.

  When she got out, she stood for a long moment and stared down the corridor. The hallway wasn’t as opulent as the Royal Phoenician, nor was it as long. But it was elegant: perfectly appointed for a lovely Italian boutique hotel. The carpet was a little frayed with age, but the patterns were reminiscent of a Renaissance tapestry. She thought of the clouds and sea in a Botticelli painting and imagined the work that went into making a color or dye five hundred years ago, the transformation of the pigments into the acrylic at the tip of the brush.

  Then she started down the hallway. She felt a spike of unease, but she had lived with almost that sort of twinge since she had woken up beside a corpse, and so she disregarded it. She walked in silence down the corridor, lonely and alone, her room key in her hand, and stared straight ahead. She told herself that the air was not really charged and there was really nothing to fear, no reason to be morose. She was just going to a hotel room in the night by herself, as she had hundreds of times in the past, and there was no reason to be anxious or frightened.

  After all, this time she was actually sober.

  When that realization came to her, she smiled.

  But the smile didn’t last long, because when she turned the corner she saw a man and she jumped. For a split second she feared that her anxiety had a specific cause: it was every woman’s fear when she’s alone and sees a man in her path. He was about twenty yards from her room, and she almost turned and ran. But then she realized that it was only Enrico, and she relaxed. He was sitting in a small chair against the wall, his face in the shadow from the sconce behind him. There was a table with a hotel phone next to him. He stood when he saw her and went to embrace her, but she pushed him away.

  “You just scared the you-know-what out of me,” she told him.

  “I thought I would be a nice surprise,” he said, his tone apologetic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “God. It’s best if I’m alone, Enrico. I told you that.”

  “And I was going to leave you alone. I was down at the bar when the fire alarm went off. I was helping them close. And I thought, my beautiful flight attendant must be terrified.”

  “By a fire alarm? No.”

  He shook his head. “By being outside in the dark—instead of safely in bed in your room.”

  “I’m back now. I’m fine.”

  “Then I will escort you to your room and leave you there.” He held out his elbow, and she took it. Together they walked down the corridor. Then she slid her key into the slot and opened the door.

  33

  He had just finished dragging Elena’s body into the bathroom and dropping it into the bathtub when he heard Enrico’s voice in the corridor. It didn’t give him time to rethink his plan. But at least he was ready.

>   The moment both the bartender and the flight attendant were inside the hotel room, the door shut behind them, he emerged from the darkened bathroom. He slammed the grip of his pistol into the back of Enrico’s skull with his left hand and rammed the tip of Elena Orlov’s stun gun against Bowden’s gauzy little dress—high on the rear of her thigh—with his right. The bartender instantly collapsed to the carpet, unconscious, his shirt sponging up wet remnants of Elena’s blood. The flight attendant grunted loudly, shuddered, and then went limp like a rag doll. Just melted against him. She stared up at him as he lowered her to the rug beside the bartender, and he could see the terror in her eyes. She would be able to speak soon enough, and he did want to talk to her. But first he had to reevaluate what he was going to do.

  He dumped out the woman’s purse and saw that she had gotten a gun. Perfect. He didn’t care where she got it; he could use it. Elena had set the table rather nicely when she’d called the newspaper. The woman wouldn’t overdose on the barbiturates the American spy had brought. Instead he would leave behind a tableau for the world in which it seemed evident that Cassandra Bowden had killed her Italian lover and her new, wealthy Russian friend from Sochi, and then shot herself in the head with the gun she must have gone to such great lengths to acquire.

  First, however, he had to transfer the silencer from his Beretta to hers.

  34

  The taser was excruciating, and Cassie wanted to scream—in her mind, she imagined a blue streak of expletives, a woman with a foul mouth and an impressive vocabulary unleashing it all in the throes of labor—but she could only moan, long and low. And then she was on her stomach on the hotel room floor, just outside the bathroom door, and there was Buckley crouching beside her.

  Yes, it was the actor. Of course it was.

  He was actually wearing that same black ball cap. Here she had been so obsessed with Miranda, and all along it had been a person she thought was sweet and well meaning and actually a bit of a puppy dog. It was a testimony to just how badly she appraised people and picked her friends, and it might have been comic if he weren’t going to kill her the way that he or one of his associates had, she presumed, killed Alex. He was going to grab a handful of her hair, pull back her head to expose her neck, and cut her throat—probably poor Enrico’s, too—and leave her facedown on the hotel room rug to bleed out.

  Cassie hoped it wouldn’t hurt, but she knew it would. She realized that she was most afraid of the pain, the sharp, brief, razor-like sting of the blade slicing into her skin, and maybe that explained why she drank. Pain came in all colors and sizes, much of it far worse than the pricks and aches and fever dreams that affected the body. This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person’s self-respect. This was the pain that caused you to gaze at yourself in the mirror and wonder why in the name of God you were here. Cassie understood that her life was a study in precisely this sort of palliative management. Or, to be precise, mismanagement.

  Her tongue felt thick and heavy from the taser, and as she watched the contents of her purse spilled out in front of her, she tried to turn her guttural moaning into words. She had one sentence she had to say, and she wished it was the two words, I’m sorry. Or maybe something more specific: I’m sorry I didn’t do more. I’m sorry I was unlovable or incapable of being loved. I’m sorry I never had children. Or even a cat of my own. I’m sorry, Rosemary, I’m sorry, Jessica, I’m sorry, Dennis, I’m sorry, Tim.

  I’m sorry, Alex.

  I’m sorry, Enrico.

  God, Enrico. About to be killed for no other reason than that he was chivalrous. A young romantic who had walked her back to her room. She never should have let him. One more mistake of hers with consequences for others.

  Would any of these people miss her? Would Megan? Gillian? Paula? Would anyone really and truly miss her? Supposedly, whatever we do that’s selfish goes with us to the grave; whatever we do that’s selfless lives on. She couldn’t imagine a single thing she had done, a single act, that had even hinted at immortality. Her legacy? She had no legacy.

  She could feel her cheeks were wet and she was crying, which she hadn’t expected. She had been told over the years by pilots, usually when they were having a drink, that the last words of most captains before their aircraft augured into the side of the mountain or broke apart before breaking the plane of the sea were these: Mother. Mommy. Mom. That lovely woman who once upon a time had read to her from Beverly Cleary would have been devastated at the way her older daughter had followed so rigorously her husband’s swath of self-destruction. Any mother would.

  Finally she found just enough motor control to form a sentence. But it was neither the two-word apology that was bubbling up inside her nor the plea to spare her or Enrico the pain that loomed. It was the deepest truth of who she was because it spoke to how she had lived, and the plain unvarnished reality that we cannot escape who we are and most of the time we die as we lived.

  She turned her head as much as she could so she could meet Buckley’s eyes and asked, her voice still fuzzy from the shock and paralysis, “Please. Can I have a drink?”

  He paused, seeming to give the request serious, genuine consideration, his eyes almost mystified, and for a long second Cassie believed that she had bought another moment of life. One last taste of the essentia, the ambrosia, the amrita that filled her veins and her soul and kept her pain at bay. But then he shook his head ever so slightly, almost wistfully, and attached a long, circular tube—a silencer, Cassie presumed—to the end of Enrico’s uncle’s Beretta.

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  FD-302 (redacted): MAJOR DENNIS McCAULEY, ARMY CHEMICAL CORPS

  DATE: August 6, 2018

  DENNIS McCAULEY, date of birth—/—/——, SSN #————, telephone number (—)————, was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents RICHARD MARINI and CATHY MANNING in a private conference room at the BLUE GRASS ARMY DEPOT in Richmond, Kentucky.

  MANNING led the interview; MARINI took these notes.

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

  McCAULEY acknowledged seeing his sister-in-law CASSANDRA BOWDEN on Saturday afternoon and evening, August 4, in New York City, and insisted that her behavior was “mostly” normal. She went with his family to the Bronx Zoo and then to a restaurant in lower Manhattan. He noticed that she was checking her phone more than most adults would throughout the day and during dinner, and “definitely seemed nervous about something.”

  He said he cannot recall ever seeing her without his wife ROSEMARY BOWDEN-McCAULEY present. He said the two of them have never e-mailed or spoken on the phone.

  He stated firmly that he has never shared any classified information with BOWDEN, and BOWDEN has never asked him for any. He said that while they have discussed life in the military very generally and his background as an engineer, they always talked more about her job than his. He denied ever giving her papers, data, diagrams, flash drives, or e-mails that had anything to do with the disposal of chemical weapons or the remaining U.S. stockpile; he insisted that he never shared any information on sarin, VX, or any chemical weapons not yet destroyed in the U.S. arsenal.

  He said he never took work home; he said there was no way that his wife ROSEMARY could have shared any information with her sister or provided CASSANDRA BOWDEN with classified intelligence, because he didn’t tell her anything.

  He said he was shocked that his sister-in-law might have killed ALEX SOKOLOV, though he acknowledged that she has a drinking problem. He volunteered that he does not believe she is a Russian spy.

  35

  But Buckley didn’t shoot.

  Instead, almost as if it were happening to someone else, as if it were an out-of-body experience, Cassie saw him dragging her by her arms further into the hotel room and away from the door. Her dress had rolled up near her hips and she felt
the rug burning her thighs. Intellectually she welcomed the discomfort: it suggested that feeling and mobility were returning. When they reached the bed, he let her go, dropping her unceremoniously onto the floor beside it as if she were a canoe dragged from the beach, and then sat down on the edge of the mattress and pointed the Beretta down at her chest.

  “Yell for help and I’ll kill you,” he said.

  Cassie tried to shake her head. She was indeed able to move it. “I won’t,” she murmured, her voice still mushy and hoarse. She tried to focus anywhere but on the tip of the long silencer at the end of the pistol.

  “Tell me about Elena.”

  “Elena?”

  Instantly he switched the gun to his other hand, grabbing it by the barrel, and rapped her hard on the shin with the grip. She closed her eyes and cried out reflexively against the pain, and when she opened them he was already aiming the weapon at her once more. She collected herself and whimpered, “I don’t know who that is.”

  “The woman who came to Alex Sokolov’s suite in Dubai.”

  “Miranda?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Miranda,” he repeated.

  “We had a drink. The vodka she brought. Then she left.”

  He pounded her other shin with the gun, but either because she was expecting it or had just experienced precisely this agony, this time she merely grunted through her tears.

  “What were you doing with her?”

  “I told you, drinking! That’s all!”

  “Did she recruit you?”

  “Recruit me?”

  “Cassie, let me be clear: the only chance you have of walking out of this hotel room alive is if you give me the names. You knew Elena, obviously. Who else is embedded?”

  “Embedded? I don’t know what you mean, I don’t understand any of this,” she told him. She was crying now and didn’t care. “Recruits? Embedded? I’m not a spy! I’m nothing. You know me. You know what I am. I’m just…”