The Flight Attendant(36)

“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 shirts 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.