The Flight Attendant(37)

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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.