The Flight Attendant(106)

He wasn’t a hockey player, of course; he was Russian intelligence. Maybe a Cossack, but perhaps a part of the FSB’s Center 18: the cyber spies. After she had absorbed all she could glean from his tablet—two e-mail addresses and some names she barely could spell—she retreated to the first-class galley and wrote down what she saw. She presumed she was giving the agency nothing they didn’t already have. But you never knew. She liked this sort of walk-on role, which was about all they would offer her at this stage. She’d been sober two years now, but she had a long history of drinking to overcome, and so this special surveillance group was the extent of the leash. She had new hair and a new name. She had a new base. And when they needed a flight attendant, they used her. Apparently, they had an Aegean stable–sized pool of actors available for this sort of bit part. And she was good at the work: the circumlocutions of the functioning alcoholic were not unlike the daily subterfuge of a spy.

The irony to this particular assignment, of course, was that an awful lot of what the agency knew about the gentleman in 4C they had learned from Evgeny—or Buckley as she still thought of him sometimes. The passenger was a friend of Viktor’s. Evgeny’s knowledge ranged from drop sites to bank account numbers. He knew what everyone liked to drink and their tastes in women and men. He had a new identity, too, but they were still keeping him in a safe house just outside of Washington, D.C. His debriefing, given his history, could last a lifetime.

Cassie had seen him just one time since Rome. Four months ago, when Masha was almost a year old, a handler had brought them together at an apartment near Dupont Circle. It was maybe a block from the Carnegie Endowment, and the handler had made it clear that this was not where Evgeny lived. The purpose of the meeting was for the Russian to share firsthand what he knew about a woman whom Cassie was supposed to watch on a flight to Beirut. They never told her Evgeny’s new name and he didn’t volunteer it, but his hair now was short, a creamy mix of white and blond, and Cassie wondered if it was bleached or whether the chestnut she recalled when they’d first met had been the dye. Probably his natural color was the shade she recalled from that summer: the nights when they’d danced together at a grunge bar south of her apartment and walked through the West Village beneath a perfect half moon.

Or the night when he’d killed a woman named Elena and tried to kill a man named Enrico. The night when he would just as easily have killed her.

When they met in Washington, Evgeny had struck Cassie as neither happy nor unhappy: mostly he seemed comfortable and businesslike in his new role.

But when he smiled, she glimpsed the playfulness she remembered. Cassie had made a small joke about her boyfriend, a TV writer in L.A., and Evgeny confessed that he had watched a few episodes of the fellow’s show. For a moment Cassie had been taken aback that he knew so much about her, even now, but then she had nodded. Of course he did. Then he’d said, “They really should stick to family drama. WASPy family drama. And if they want me to play the rebellious son who becomes an actor, I’m their man.” His eyes went wide when he said that, and Cassie honestly wasn’t sure if he was pulling her leg.

Before they parted, Cassie had asked if there was anyone he missed in Russia or America. She wasn’t sure why: she guessed it was because they all presumed he was dead. He’d chuckled and said, “Trust me, you don’t want to meet my friends. You just don’t. They make me look pretty damn…American.”

“What does that mean?”

“Wimpy.” Again, she had a sense he was teasing her. But then he sat forward and folded his hands together. “How wimpy, you ask?”

She waited, wondering whether he was going to make a joke at the expense of the United States. But instead he continued. “So wimpy I am very, very glad you screwed up when you loaded that gun. I wouldn’t have wanted you on my conscience.”

“Because…”

“Because you are just too damn much fun. You’re a mess—or, I don’t know, maybe you were a mess—but you sure as hell were good company.” Then he unclasped his fingers as if they were a balloon exploding and added, “And I have a feeling you’re not nearly the shitstorm of a mother you probably figured you’d be.”

She rolled her eyes. “Being sober helps.”

“You named her Masha, right?”

She nodded.

“That can’t possibly be a family name.”

“Tolstoy. The young woman in ‘Happy Ever After.’ She’s my happy ending.”

“God, I remember you reading that,” he said, his own happiness at the recollection genuine. Then: “You still dance barefoot?”

“I have other pleasures. Board books. Sippy cups shaped like animals. Teething.”

He made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue, pretending to reproach her. Then they parted.

Now, as she stood in the dimmed cabin light and looked at the notes she had written down about the passenger in 4C, she recalled—as she did rather often—the way Masha would nurse. She would latch on to Cassie and drink with the same fervor with which Cassie knew she had once drunk tequila. Those little baby eyes would grow intense, then sated, and it was in those moments that Cassie could see in them Masha’s father, that enigmatic man who had loved Tolstoy and washed her hair ever so tenderly in a lavish hotel suite one night in Dubai.

She thought of that quote she’d seen on a blackboard outside a West Village boutique: “Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.” She wasn’t completely sure this was who she wanted to be, but she found the work offered the same adrenaline rush as drinking, but without the hangovers and humiliations. It gave her life purpose. She knew, however, that the person who had most assuredly saved her life was Masha, because Masha was the reason she had stopped drinking and Masha was warmth in the morning when Cassie was home and they would wake together, and Masha was a euphoric squeal when she would return to her from a trip. Masha was the word moon, her first word, and how with her authoritarian little pointer finger she had looked skyward at dusk at a sickle moon and elongated that single, lovely syllable almost into song. Masha gave her something she loved more than herself—something that didn’t come in a glass with ice cubes or a paper umbrella or a straw.