The Flight Attendant(66)

“It does have its moments,” she admitted. Tim waited chivalrously for his younger sister to open the box before pulling apart the red tissue paper that swaddled his gift. The girl cooed when she saw the earrings, and Cassie bent over so her niece could hug her.

“I love them!” she said. Then, the words at once strange and precocious coming from a girl so young, she added, “They are perfectly elegant.”

Over her shoulder, Tim rolled his eyes.

“I’m glad you like them,” Cassie said. “Your turn,” she said to her nephew.

Tim pulled off the blue ribbon and then tore off the red tissue. “A sculpture,” he said simply, and for a moment Cassie thought of that old joke: When someone opens a gift and says aloud what it is—a juicer, a car vac, napkin rings—they hate it. And she felt bad. But the moment lasted only a second, because then he went on. “I know this story. It was in a book about the myths that was on my summer reading list. No one connects the twins to werewolves, but I think that’s the coolest link.”

“Is it a paperweight?” Everyone turned at the voice. The children’s father had appeared almost out of nowhere and inquired. His camera was around his neck, and he was cleaning his sunglasses with a handkerchief. Dennis McCauley was a big man, not fat and not muscular, but tall and stocky with a stomach that was just starting to grow bulbous. He was handsome, his hair now more white than black, but still lustrous and thick. He parted it in the middle and swept it back, and her sister often teased him about having movie-star hair and said he looked like an actor when he was in one of his uniforms. He wasn’t wearing a uniform today, however, he was wearing khaki cargo shorts. In Cassie’s opinion, that eliminated instantly any chance at all that he might be mistaken for an actor. Sometimes her sister called him absentminded, but Cassie rather doubted that he was ever inattentive at work. He was an engineer and probably just compartmentalized. Everyone knew how bloody brilliant he was. She wished that she had told Buckley that last night. Shown a little more pride in what he did. She’d said Dennis was sweet; she should have said he was smart. The guy, after all, helped dispose of chemical weapons. It was work, Cassie suspected, that was more dangerous than he was ever likely to admit to his family.

“No, it’s a bookend,” Cassie answered. “I bought it at an antique store near the Spanish Steps in Rome.”

“They only had half?”

She nodded.

“I love it. A bookend about twins and half has gone missing,” Dennis said. “That may be the definition of irony. What will you use it for, son?” he asked Tim.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. But I like it. It’s cool.”

“I agree,” said Dennis. Then he bent over to look at the earrings that Cassie had brought his daughter, oohing and aahing at their beauty. When he was done, he stood up straight and put back on his sunglasses. “You find the damnedest things in your travels, Cassie.”

“I guess.”

“No, I mean that. You bring back the most creative things. Me? Ask these two: the stuff I bring them back when I travel is way less interesting.”

“That’s because you only go to places like Maryland and Washington, D.C.,” Rosemary tried to reassure him.

“Nah. Cassie has a much better eye,” he said. “Really, they’re perfect gifts.”

“Thank you,” she said. She was touched. He was always so much kinder to her than Rosemary was, Cassie thought, even though he knew just as much as Rosemary did about her peccadilloes great and small. But he was less judgmental. She had a feeling that when her name was attached to the dead body in Dubai, he would be far more surprised than his wife.





17




Against the allegations that his people were brutish, Elena’s father would smile and bring up the Bolshoi. Chekhov. Tchaikovsky. “We can be merciless,” she once heard him remark as he studied the Ararat cognac in his snifter, “but we are no more and no less brutish than anyone else.” It was over dinner with his old comrades from the KGB, most of whom now were more focused on their trophy dachas and trophy wives, and the riches that they had found in the rubble of the once iconic wall. He reminded them how much Lenin loved novels, and how literature was a part of the political world in which Lenin grew up. When Lenin wanted to belittle his rivals, he’d refer to them as particularly stupid or especially loathsome characters from Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, and Goncharov. “The biggest difference between an Oblomov and an oligarch?” he asked that night, the setup for what he viewed as a bon mot. “If an oligarch spends the day in bed, it’s because he has a hooker and he’s getting his money’s worth.” In his heart, of course, he knew that wasn’t the biggest difference. Not at all. The oligarchs now had the wealth of Oblomov, but they weren’t lazy and they hadn’t inherited their vast fortunes. Most of them were self-made. Corrupt, of course. Corrupt on a positively titanic scale. But they worked hard. And perhaps the only man before whom they would bow was the Russian President. They were alpha males who took no prisoners.

Viktor was, in her mind, a perfect example of that balancing act between barbarism and refinement: he was cold-blooded and feral beneath his crisp black suits, but he had constructed a veneer that compelled him to eat in small bites. He spoke multiple languages fluently and appreciated the aesthetic of films by Tarkovsky.