“Well, if something was stolen, it wouldn’t be in the hotel room, so you wouldn’t know it was gone,” she said.
“Agreed. I’m sure the authorities in Dubai, ours and theirs, will compile an inventory as best they can of what he had brought with him. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone at the hotel. I’m sure they’re talking to everyone who was supposed to be in the meeting with him—assuming there really was a meeting. In any case, the vibe I’m getting is pretty clear: this wasn’t a hotel room robbery that went bad. This was an execution.”
The word lingered in the air. She looked down at the last of the runny eggs and toast crumbs on the union official’s plate. Mayes was probably—almost certainly—correct. She had reminded herself dozens of times how easy it would have been for someone to slash her throat, too. And yet they hadn’t. They’d spared her. Still, she would never be able to erase the memory of that body in the bed, so cold and still. She would never forget all that blood.
“Cassie?”
She looked up.
“I thought I’d lost you there for a minute,” Mayes was saying. “I was about to snap my fingers. You know, wake you up from your trance.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re okay?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
He sat back in his chair and smiled. He folded his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not completely sure you are,” he said. “But you know what?”
She waited.
“I got a feeling some poor dead guy you met one time on an airplane is the least of your problems.”
“I think I should be insulted.”
“Nah. I’m speaking as an old guy who wanted to be a dad and never was.” He picked up the bill the waitress had left on the table—Cassie wondered when that happened, because she couldn’t recall the waitress returning—and watched Mayes head for the cashier to pay it.
* * *
? ?
That night Cassie opened the Chianti alone in her apartment, swirling it in a hand-painted wineglass. It was one of a pair that Rosemary had given her years before she had realized that she probably shouldn’t encourage her older sister’s drinking. The glasses had white orchids rising from the base of the bowl to the rim, the petals erotic and lush. As she was swallowing her first sip, her phone pinged and she saw that she had a text from Buckley. He was asking how she was. He added that he regretted how short they had been with each other before he’d left Sunday morning, and hoped he’d see her when she was back in New York. She didn’t reply, but neither did she delete it. Usually she would have. Usually when she picked up a guy in a bar like that, there would have been a gap in her memory—an hour or two or ten—that she didn’t want to hear about on a second date. Maybe she didn’t delete the text this time, she thought, because while she had gotten drunk with Buckley, she hadn’t accelerated when she hit her drunken V1 and then broken the blackout barrier with a concussive, window-rattling boom. So, maybe tomorrow she would text something back. Maybe not. Probably not. Still, she kept the text on her phone and told herself that this suggested evolution, a supposed impossibility at midlife when, in theory, no one changed. She thought it was rather kind of him to suggest they had been short with each other on Sunday morning. In reality, she had only been short with him.
The irony of blackouts was this: you had to have a spectacular alcohol tolerance to black out. Amateur drinkers passed out long before they put the hippocampus—those folds in the gray matter where memories are made—to sleep. She was a pro. Partial blackouts happened when the blood alcohol hit the magic 0.2; en bloc or total blackouts occurred when you ratcheted up the number to an undeniably impressive 0.3. The bar for drunk driving, by comparison, was a fraction of those numbers: a mere 0.08.
She considered calling Paula, one of her friends who could keep up with her drink for drink, whether the drink of the day was wine or tequila or Drambuie. Paula had a weird thing for Drambuie: it was her Proustian madeleine from a ninth and tenth grade spent getting sloshed on her father’s MacKinnon. When Cassie was with Paula, dullness disappeared and it was like they were skydiving. They might create chaos for the women and men around them—sharing too much, dancing too aggressively, berating a hostess or a bartender for the music that was playing or the fact it was raining outside—but they also dialed up the energy, didn’t they? Maybe they did. But in her lucid moments the next morning, she wondered if in fact they just sucked the energy from the room.
Which was why she also had friends like Gillian. Gillian drank, but only like a reasonable person. She didn’t get drunk, and so it was Gillian who would grab Cassie’s purse at the end of the night when she left it dangling over the back of the bar stool or tell the strange, aggressive guy with the face tats that Cassie wasn’t going home with him.
In the end, however, she called no one and texted no one. Not tonight. Instead she booted up her laptop on the kitchen counter and stood before it as she drank. It was time to learn all that she could about the dead American in Dubai. It was time to search for Miranda. She decided to begin with the social networks. There she could read about Alex Sokolov and perhaps discover Miranda among his followers or friends.
Alex had mentioned that he had Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, though he said that he rarely used them. She discovered right away that they were gone, if they had ever existed at all. She found no trace of him on LinkedIn and Tinder. She presumed his family had deleted the pages, but she also thought if Derek Mayes had been correct and Sokolov had indeed been a spy, then it might have been just as likely that some government agency (one of ours or one of theirs, she thought cryptically) had made the pages disappear.
Unfortunately, this also meant that she couldn’t search among the man’s Facebook friends or Twitter followers for this other woman. This was going to demand more digging. And so she switched gears and started to surf among different travel and news websites for stories about the murder. There were plenty, though none were long and they merely corroborated what he had told her about his family life: He was an only child. He had parents in Virginia. They described his job with the hedge fund. The strangest part of the articles? None of them mentioned another Unisphere employee or investor named Miranda having seen a woman with Alex in his suite hours before he was executed.
She recalled him mentioning that his mother’s name was Harper, and Cassie was able to find her Facebook page quickly. She half expected to see a photo of Alex and a desperately sad in memoriam from a mother about her son. But there wasn’t. Harper Sokolov hadn’t posted anything in a week, since she had added a photo of herself, her husband, and another couple in tennis whites on the terrace of a country club. She looked wholesome and athletic and fit in the short dress. Cassie saw Alex in her smile. She searched among the woman’s friends for Miranda, though she wasn’t confident she’d be there: if Alex was meeting her for the first time that night in Dubai, why in the world would his mother know her? But she had to check. And as she expected, there was no one named Miranda among Harper’s friends.