The Flight Attendant(44)

She stripped off her robe and stood naked for a long minute in front of the window. She honestly wasn’t sure why. She made eye contact with none of the people in the windows across the street and had no idea whether they noticed her or cared. It was a hotel. They probably witnessed assignations and saw exhibitionists all the time. Then she went to the shower, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and scrubbed a bartender named Enrico off her body.



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? ?

Later that morning when she and Jackson, the young flight attendant from Oklahoma, were at the entrance to the aircraft and greeting the passengers as they boarded, he turned to her and said quietly, “I have a big idea.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I think we should give everyone in coach a Xanax. It should be airline policy. Can you imagine how easy our job would be if we medicated people properly before squishing them into those seats?”



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? ?

Cassie heard the passengers shrieking, a small chorus in rows thirty-three and thirty-four, the section of coach that was four seats across sandwiched between two aisles, and for a second she feared that someone had a box cutter or a gun. The panic had what she always speculated was the “this-plane-is-going-down” terror to it. But then, almost as one, the call buttons chimed and she saw the red dots on the ceiling there light up like a bough on a Christmas tree, and the simple reasonableness of passengers pressing their call buttons calmed her. She put down the large plastic bag with the service items—airline-speak for trash—and raced seven rows forward from the rear galley and into the scrum. They were below ten thousand feet now and everyone was supposed to be buckled in as they approached JFK; she herself had only moments before she was supposed to be strapped in as well. Jackson was running up the aisle parallel to her, and the two of them got to row thirty-four at almost the same time. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but she was glad there were two of them and that one of them was male.

“No, stop it! Stop it!” was the one sentence among the screams that seemed to register most cogently in her mind. For a moment she thought, Stop what?, but then she saw and she knew. There in seat D, one of the two middle seats in the middle section, was a grandmother holding her grandson—or, to be precise, holding her grandson’s little penis, grasping it with two fingers as if it were a joint (a roach clip was actually what Cassie saw in her mind)—the child’s blue jeans and underpants down around his ankles, as he stood between the rows and urinated into the airsickness bag she was clutching with her other hand.

No, he was only trying to urinate into the airsickness bag. Mostly he was missing. Mostly he was spraying the back of seat 33D and into the space between the seats, showering the passengers’ arms and laps. And the kid was, apparently, a camel. Cassie and Jackson both commanded the woman to stop the child, and then they yelled at the boy to stop, but this was a tsunami. The grandmother either didn’t speak English or was pretending not to speak English, and she did not pull up the boy’s pants until, without question, he was done. From the passengers came a cacophony of curses and groans, a choral keening of disgust. The teen girl in seat 33E was in tears as she struggled to extricate herself from a very damp orange hoodie. “Ewwww,” she sobbed each time she exhaled, a plaintive, almost biblical ululation.

Cassie chastised the grandmother, telling her that what she had done was absolutely unacceptable. The old woman ignored her, clipped shut the folds at the top of the airsickness bag, and then handed it to her, smiling as if she were presenting Cassie with a bakery bag full of cookies.



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? ?

Cassie knew that newspapers put stories online well before the actual paper went to print, so she guessed she shouldn’t have been surprised when she saw the photo of herself on the New York Post website on her phone on the Airporter bus to Grand Central. But she was surprised. She wanted to vomit, and actually feared for a moment that she might. She was the mystery woman, the unnamed “black widow spider” who may have murdered a handsome young American money manager in Dubai. Moreover, someone had spoken with the hotel and restaurant employees, all of whom agreed that the woman they had seen with Sokolov was likely American. For the moment, everyone seemed to presume she was an American who lived in the United Arab Emirates. That’s what the waitress at the restaurant had said. She’d told the Dubai police that Alex had said something that made it clear that while he was a visitor to the Emirates, the woman he was with was not. Cassie couldn’t imagine what that was, but guessed it must have been some remark between them about how well she knew the city. She’d said something like that, because she had bid on the route often the last year and a half. In any case, the Dubai authorities were scouring the American community there, seeing who might have hooked up with him at the hotel.

She wished that Ani would call her back. She’d called the lawyer the moment she was inside the terminal and left a message.

This was water torture, she decided, this slow, relentless drip. The authorities had to work backward to get to her: they had to rule out all of the women he might have already known in the city and all of the women living there it was possible that he had met. They had to show those photos to all of his friends and all of his business associates. They were probably showing them to the people he worked with at Unisphere in America. And so it felt like it was taking forever for them to, once and for all, focus only on her.