The Flight Attendant(12)

Her father had tried to console her. Well, he said, sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.

Her father, alas, never took that advice. After his wife—her mother—died, he only drank more. And Cassie had neither forgotten nor gotten over the counsel he had offered her when she was in the third grade. She would think of it when her mother would die when she was fifteen and when her father would die when she was nineteen, and often after bidding farewell to the men she had seduced or been seduced by, especially those times when she would be so drunk that she hadn’t insisted they wear one of the condoms she carried with her wherever she went. The truth was, there was nothing casual about casual sex. When it worked, it was intense. When it didn’t, it was particularly unsatisfying. Either way, it left scars, some that were similar to the blackout scars, but some that were different: the violation was less pronounced, but the self-loathing could be fierce. (One time she had shared her father’s wisdom with a stranger in bed. It was another morning after, and they were agreeing rather amicably that the night before had been a drunken, God-awful mistake. They might have become friends and should never have slept together. He, in return, had observed that as dark and inappropriate as the advice might have been, it was about what you might expect from a dad who had named his first daughter Cassandra.)

Likewise, there was no longer anything casual about her drinking, and there hadn’t been for years.

There was a knock on the bathroom door and then Megan’s voice. “Cassie, I hate to be a pain, but you are either okay to work this flight or you’re not. This is the last time I am going to ask.” Cassie imagined this was what Megan sounded like when she was urging one of her daughters to buck up and behave. The other flight attendant had beautiful children and a husband who was a management consultant in Washington, D.C., and a lovely house in northern Virginia. The woman had it all, she really did. “Cassie?”

She stood up straight in the bathroom. “I’ll be right out,” she said. “I’ll be ready to rock and roll.” Then she brushed her mascara back onto her eyelashes and ran the new lipstick she’d bought at the airport over her mouth. Landing lips, they called it. She was quick, but careful. The shade was similar to the one she had lost in Dubai. And then she emerged, promising herself that if somehow this all turned out okay, she was never going to drink again. Never. She made this promise or one like it monthly, but this time—this time—she told herself that she meant it.





4




Elena supposed that among the reasons why she was good at what she did was the simple reality that she was neither beautiful nor homely. She could look pretty when she dressed well and wore the right makeup—and so she tried to do both—but the goal was not to stand out. She was five-foot-four with deep brown eyes and chestnut-brown hair, which she kept parted in the middle when she wasn’t working and in a French twist when she was. She rarely wore sunglasses in America and Russia, because she thought that sunglasses made you more noticeable. She realized here in Dubai that the opposite was true: it was the Westerners who didn’t wear sunglasses who were the most memorable, and so she bought a first pair soon after landing and a second pair at one of the hotel stores right after finishing her iced tea with Viktor.

She was walking through the souk, her head scarf pulled tight, and she rather liked the absolute anonymity. She stood in a narrow aisle of spices, unsure whether the smell nearest her was the cumin or the merchant. Elena didn’t cook much, but she had used cumin just enough to know that the stench could be either. He was standing behind the long buffet of containers rich with the phosphorescent colors of saffron and curry. On the racks behind him were small glass replicas of the most prominent new buildings in Dubai, each a little reminiscent of a chess piece. She’d loved chess as a child. She’d played it at school and at home with her father until she was sent away to a boarding school in Switzerland. She was rather good at it. Beside the trinket buildings were a variety of ornate, ocean-blue hookahs. She appreciated the way the market seemed to cater to both locals and tourists, though she could imagine tourists bringing home spices as well as a souvenir Burj Al Arab, the iconic Dubai hotel that looked like a gigantic—as in fifty-six-story gigantic—sail. She thought of the Eastern Market near the apartment she’d had when she’d been in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, and how you could find there fresh local fruit as well as paper-weight-size Washington Monuments and snow globes of the White House.

Now she looked up because the spice vendor was asking her if she spoke English. She nodded and smiled.

“What would you like?” he inquired. He was an older man, his beard trim and gray. His thobe was spotless: as white as the cherry blossoms and not a stain on it, despite the spices that surrounded him.

There really was nothing here that she wanted, at least today. The apartment they had given her had a tidy kitchen, but she didn’t know yet how long she would be in Dubai. A week or two, she expected, but the next few days would tell. They wanted to be sure there was no fallout from Alex Sokolov that she would need to clean up.

God, she thought, imagine if they knew about the flight attendant. She felt a deep pang of disquiet—almost alarm—when she imagined the possible repercussions from her decision not to kill her, too. She took a breath to calm herself. To compartmentalize. It was, she understood, how she functioned. She was capable of focusing acutely on a problem and thinking many steps ahead. It was why she had been such a capable chess player. She could be farsighted to the point of prescience. But her mind also divided and conquered, squirreling away the nuggets she someday might need, while putting the fears that might paralyze her behind a firewall.