“If that’s the case, am I okay?”
“Maybe. But there are other issues in play. Even if the U.S. won’t send you back to Dubai, Sokolov’s family could still go after you in civil court: a wrongful death suit. Think O. J. Simpson. The criminal court acquitted him. The civil court held him responsible and the judgment was thirty-plus million dollars.”
“Oh, my God!”
“The families ended up getting nowhere near that. I heard they wound up with maybe half a million.”
“Still, I don’t have anything like that. All I have is my apartment.”
“That’s something. But none of this may even matter. On the other hand, those photos of you? Any day now they’ll be in the U.S. media. And pretty soon after that, you will be, so to speak, outed.”
“Am I that recognizable in the pictures?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to see them blown up. I’d have to see the originals. But from what you tell me, someone on the plane with you—one of the crew—will make the connection that it could be you. So will the FBI. What are your plans today and tomorrow?”
“I’m supposed to fly to Rome tonight.”
“Not Dubai?”
“No.”
“Good. Never go back there.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“I mean that.”
“I understand.”
“And after Rome?” asked Ani.
“I fly back here. We arrive in Italy tomorrow morning, Tuesday, overnight in the city, and fly back to the U.S. on Wednesday just before lunch. We’re there a little more than twenty-four hours.”
“Pretty cushy compared to what some flight attendants endure.”
She shrugged. “I did my time on the regionals. I’ve been doing this a lot of years.”
“Oh, I know the drill. I know how it works.”
“We still haven’t discussed how in the world I’m going to pay you.”
Ani put her yellow pad on the table and sat forward. She looked almost kindly at Cassie and said, “Look, it’s not yet time to burn the carbons—”
“Burn the carbons?” she asked, interrupting the lawyer.
“Just an expression. Do you know what carbon paper is?”
“Of course.”
“Hey, I’ve never actually seen a piece. But I gather people overseas in the foreign services or the CIA used to have a saying: when the world was completely falling apart and the embassy was being overrun, that’s when it was time to burn the carbons. You know, to make sure that the Soviets or the jihadists or whoever wouldn’t get the state secrets. Anyway, it’s not yet time to burn the carbons, okay? So, breathe.”
“And as for payment?”
“My sense is you might come home to a shitstorm on Wednesday. Not a burn-the-carbons shitstorm, but it could feel…distressing. It could be distressing. So, I want you to go ahead and fly to Rome because I want to be sure you remain in the airline’s good graces, and because I want to be sure you’ve behaved in no way that suggests guilt. Forgive me, no additional way. The existence of those security camera photos is likely to give this story legs in the tabloid media here in the U.S. You watch. It may be as soon as tomorrow or the day after. The police in Dubai are going to bring better photos of you—good photos of you—to the Royal Phoenician and ask around. They’ll show the pictures to the bellmen and the hostesses and the people who work in the gift shops, and ask if you might have been the woman with Alex Sokolov. I have no idea if this Sokolov guy might have been a CIA spook or a Russian spook or whatever. Doesn’t matter. The family might simply be very well connected. Either way, I am quite sure that the FBI is going to want to talk to you again and this story could be around for a while.”
“I see.”
“But here’s the good news. I am also confident that my firm will represent you pro bono. You’re attractive and you work in a job that most people still believe—I know mistakenly—is kind of sexy. I don’t like to advertise the fact that we’re media ghouls, but we are. We really are. Years ago this place was pretty white shoe, but no more. So, we can help prevent your extradition, if it actually comes to that—which I doubt it will. We can help if there is ever a civil case—which, yes, is a little more likely, but still not something to lose any sleep over just yet. And we can help if the airline ever gives you any grief.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“The airline? Oh, they might be a royal pain. My sense is the union will have your back if that ever happens. But we will, too.”
“And you’d do this just for the press?”
“The free press. Operative word is free. We may no longer be white shoe, but we also don’t pay for subway ads.”
And then they were done and Ani walked her to the elevator. There Cassie went to shake the lawyer’s hand. Instead Ani hugged her, and inside Cassie wanted to cry with gratitude.
* * *
« «
Most of the time, airlines booked the overnights for the Long Island airports at Long Island hotels. If you only had twelve hours, it made no sense to go into Manhattan, especially since Manhattan lodging rarely came with a free courtesy van: the airports were too far away and the traffic too unpredictable.
But not all of the time. If the overnight was long enough, even the U.S. carriers would send their crews into midtown and provide a van to and from the airport. Certainly many of the foreign carriers did. It was a very civilized perk for an out-of-town crew to get a night a few blocks from Times Square or a subway ride from Greenwich Village instead of one where your room overlooked the lights of Runway 4R.
Cassie knew the departures for most of her airline’s overseas JFK flights by heart, and even which domestic sequences were likely to have a layover long enough that the crew would be staying in midtown. And she knew that frequently the airline used the Dickinson on Lexington and Forty-Ninth. So whenever she could, she would take the subway from her apartment three stops north to the hotel and hitch a ride with a flight crew to the airport. The alternative? Get off at Grand Central and take the Airporter bus. The Airporter only cost ten bucks with her airline discount, which was about what she could afford. But in the summer she would sweat like a marathon runner—the polyester uniform didn’t help—and her makeup would melt on her way to the subway. In the winter, she would freeze or her suitcase and clothing would be sprayed with road salt and slush. There were flight attendants who thought she was insane to live in Manhattan when her base was JFK, but Manhattan was everything that her childhood home in rural Kentucky wasn’t. She was never going to give up that apartment. Never. Besides, she knew lots of flight attendants who would waste a valuable day off or have to get up early commuting from Buffalo or Boston or Detroit to their base—including Megan, who came in from D.C.—and then spend a half day or an overnight in some squalid crash pad near the airport. She’d lived in one once, the bottom bunk in a basement bedroom in a ramshackle townhouse in Ozone Park, Queens. There were at least a dozen other flight attendants who lived there—or, to be precise, crashed there for a few nights or few days or few hours a month.
Today she didn’t waste time on a manicure, not after spending so much of the morning with the lawyer. But the subway was delayed, and the crowd on the platform grew as she stood there, her roller beside her and her phone in her hand. It wasn’t near rush hour, so the hordes from New York Life hadn’t yet descended into the tunnel, but still there were droves because this was Manhattan. And it was when she had been standing there nearly ten minutes that the claustrophobia was replaced by something deeper: unease. She began to inventory the people around her. There were the young mothers with their small children, the high school kids and the college students, the white collar and the blue collar and all manner of delivery women and men. It was just another midsummer melting pot of the aged and the youthful, an abstract of smileless faces above polo shir
ts and summer dresses, above blazers and sweats and tees for the local sports teams.
But she had the sense, real or imagined, that in this crush was someone who was there just for her. There was someone watching her. She could tell herself that this was mere paranoia, absolutely understandable after what she had seen in Dubai. It was, perhaps, an inevitable if mean-spirited trick of the mind.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling. She was a woman, and she had spent enough time alone on subway platforms or streets late at night to know when something was wrong. When someone approaching was sketchy. When it was time to move and to move fast.
And so she did. She put her phone in her purse and grabbed the handle of her suitcase and began to push her way through the throngs, plowing forward with her head up and alert, scanning for that single individual who saw her and knew her and…
And what? Was someone actually going to attack her?
She couldn’t say. Maybe she was just being watched. Maybe it was all in her head. But she wasn’t going to risk that.
As she struggled to pull her suitcase through the revolving bars, she glanced behind her to see if anyone else was trying to fight their way upstream on the platform. She checked again as she lugged her suitcase up the stairs. But a train hadn’t arrived at the station, and so she was all alone as she made her way back up to the sunlight on the street. There was a cab across Park Avenue, heading north and slowing for the red light at the corner. It hadn’t a passenger, and so she raced for it, climbing into it from the street side.
“The Dickinson, please,” she told the driver, and looked back at the subway entrance as the light changed and the vehicle started north. There, emerging onto the sidewalk was a solitary figure in shades and a black ball cap, the brim pulled low on his head. A man. She couldn’t see his face; already they were too far away. But he seemed to be scanning the sidewalks, and then his gaze paused on her cab.
She told herself it was nothing; it was a coincidence that someone else had grown impatient and decided to walk or take a cab rather than wait for the next train.
But she didn’t believe that.
* * *
« «
By the time she got to the Dickinson, her own airline’s shuttle had left. She had missed it by no more than five minutes.
Fortunately, Lufthansa used the Dickinson as well. So, as she had at least three or four times in the past, she slipped the shuttle driver a ten and thumbed a ride with a German crew that was about to leave.
It was awkward: the pilots ignored her and the flight attendants whispered a few jokes to each other at her expense, but no one really cared. Mostly they understood because their salaries were as unimpressive as hers. A ride to the airport for a fellow flight attendant? Really, not that big a deal. Still, she stared out the window, half expecting to see a faceless man in a ball cap on the sidewalk snapping a cell phone picture of her in the van. When they had left the stop-and-start traffic of Manhattan, she read the paperback Tolstoy she had with her and tried not to be envious of the fact that she was not a part of the flock. She tried not to think paranoid thoughts, but she was sure she overheard one woman say something about Dubai to another. She feared she heard the syllable mord multiple times, and when she looked it up on her phone using Google Translate, it meant—as she suspected—“murder.” But she told herself that it was unlikely she had heard the word correctly. Why would they even be aware of Sokolov’s death? It would mean that someone in the shuttle had flown to Dubai recently, too, or would be flying there soon.
Which, alas, was possible. Very possible.
Before leaving her apartment, she had checked her computer one last time to see if the photos of her from the Royal Phoenician had gone viral. She’d done this every twenty minutes that day when she was home, it seemed. They hadn’t. At least not yet. But she knew that Ani was right and they would. She knew any moment she would get a text from Megan or Jada, because she had to believe that they were following the story, too—though, of course, not with her own vested interest.
She breathed in slowly and deeply and almost managed to convince herself that no one had been watching her on the subway platform. Almost. She took comfort in the fact that now she had a lawyer. She definitely felt better. But as the van inched its way along the Long Island Expressway, she sure as hell didn’t feel good.
* * *
« «
For a moment she paused before the window and watched the winking light at the edge of the wing, the distinct blink-blink of an Airbus. She shook her head, coming back to herself before she grew lost in the slow, rhythmic strobe. She had coach on this flight because it was Rome and she didn’t yet have quite enough seniority to always hold business or first class en route to the Eternal City. Of course, a lot of flight attendants preferred coach. These days, no one felt entitled to anything in economy, and so the passengers—especially on an overnight flight to Europe—were rather docile: the airlines had beaten out of them the idea that they had virtually any rights at all. Moreover, most people checked their suitcases on international flights, unlike on domestic ones, and so there was far less stress as people fought and jockeyed for space in the overhead compartments. Her only issue with coach? You really couldn’t flirt. There were too many people and the aisles were too thin and there were just too many families. Of course, she wasn’t in the mood to flirt. Not tonight. She wanted a drink—she needed a drink—and so when most of the cabin was sleeping or reading or watching movies on their laptops or tablets and she had a moment alone in the rear galley, she did something she almost never did: she took a plastic Cutty Sark single and downed it in one shot. Then she filled her mouth with Altoids, crunching them into bits and using her tongue to run the sand over her teeth.
* * *
« «
When they landed in Rome, it was still the middle of the night in America, and she had neither e-mails nor texts that were alarming. Mostly, she had e-mails from clothing and lingerie companies. The world had stood still.
* * *
« «
In the van, traveling from Fiumicino Airport into Rome, some of the crew made plans to meet in the lobby and stroll to the Spanish Steps. Apparently the Spanish Steps weren’t far from their hotel, and the Steps, in turn, weren’t far from some pretty tony shopping. The extra, a young flight attendant who had been called up from reserve to work the route, had never been to Rome and was so excited to be there that he was orchestrating a group visit to the Vatican. He was at once so enthusiastic and so charismatic that even one of the pilots said he might go.
“God, it’s been years since I’ve been to the Vatican,” that captain said. He was an older guy who commuted to work from West Palm Beach. His hair was the silver she liked in a pilot, and his skin was dark and leathery from years in the Florida sun. “Sign me up.”
“I say we do the museum, too,” said the young guy masterminding the trip. His name was Jackson, and he had been working coach with her. He was from a small town in Oklahoma near the Texas panhandle—“Nothing but grain elevators, crazy preachers, and people looking for Route 66,” he’d said—and couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five. He was a baby. From their conversations in the galley and while playing Words with Friends on their phones in their jump seats, she had come to believe that his childhood had been a thousand times better than hers, but in some ways just as provincial. Becoming a flight attendant was at once rebellion and escape.
“You know there’s a secret room at the museum with nothing but statue penises,” the captain added. “My daughter studied abroad in Rome for a semester and said this is no urban legend.”
“Yup. I think it was a pope who had their junk broken off and covered with fig leaves,” said another flight attendant, a part of the team who had been working the business class cabin. Her name was Erica and she was a grandmother, but that was all Cassie knew about her. “But they actually kept them? Ha
d not heard that. Wow. Who knew?”
“Okay, I have a mission in life. It’s probably above my pay grade to get the marble men back their privates, but someday I will see that secret room,” Jackson told them.
“Imagine: the Vatican has secrets,” Cassie said. She hadn’t spoken in a while and found the good cheer in the van infectious. But her pleasure was short-lived.
“Yeah, imagine,” said Erica. “God, the whole world has secrets. We all have secrets. Why should the Vatican be any different? A friend of mine was working a flight from Paris to Dubai last week. When they landed at JFK at the end of the sequence, the crew was met by the FBI. Why? A guy on the plane to Dubai was murdered in his freaking hotel room!”
“I’m not following,” said Jackson. “A passenger was killed in Dubai. Why did the FBI want to talk to the flight crew?”
“Well, they’re saying it was just a robbery that went bad, but my friend doesn’t believe that. Not for a second. The FBI asked the flight attendants if they’d seen anything unusual on his laptop or noticed any papers on his tray table or he’d said something that might be helpful. She thinks the fellow was a spy or one of the other flight attendants was a spy. You know, CIA? KGB? Something like that. My point? There are people out there with pretty serious secrets.”
“An airline is still a great cover for a spy,” said the pilot. “Always has been, always will be. You have a reason to travel. It’s easy—easier, anyway—to smuggle whatever you’ve stolen from the Pentagon or the Kremlin from one side of the planet to the other.”
Cassie watched from her seat in the van as several members of the crew started searching their phones for news of a dead man in Dubai. She reached into her purse for her sunglasses. She stared out the window, wishing she had an excuse here in Italy to hide herself in a scarf.