She Googled “trauma” on her tablet as she spooned the oatmeal in small bites and sipped her spiked coffee. She wondered if people who woke beside corpses were scarred for life, though she presumed there was, at best, a very small body of evidence from which to make deductions. For a few minutes she took comfort in the essays and research papers she found that suggested the families of murder victims often needed serious counseling and medication to get over the loss, equating herself with those poor souls, but then she recalled Alex Sokolov’s parents and began to imagine what they were experiencing.
Finally she braced herself and listened to the messages from Ani and Frank Hammond. Her lawyer said that she had information on extradition laws she wanted to share. Cassie couldn’t decide from the woman’s voice whether it was good news or bad. The FBI agent said he was just crossing a few t’s and had a couple quick questions, and he was wondering if she’d mind coming downtown to the agency’s offices. He sounded casual, but she had a sense—that gift of fear—that he was playing dumb. That he was playing her. Surely he suspected she was the woman in the security camera photos. And if this was just a minor follow-up, why the request that she visit the office in lower Manhattan?
She recalled her moment on the subway platform the day before, her fear that someone was tailing her, and then the figure she had seen at the sidewalk entrance as her cab sped away. Maybe it hadn’t been an overreaction. Perhaps this was what FBI surveillance felt like: there was always someone just beyond your peripheral vision. Then again, the FBI knew what they were doing. Would she know she was being watched? Probably not. Maybe this was what paranoia felt like.
Though the sun was rising here, it was still late at night in New York. She couldn’t yet call back either Ani or Hammond. And given that the flight’s wheels up from Fiumicino was 11:05 a.m., she wouldn’t be phoning either of them until the plane landed at JFK. By the time the passengers had deplaned and she was free, it would be close to 3:30 in the afternoon on the East Coast. So be it.
She sent Ani a text that she had heard the message and would connect with her as soon as she had landed in New York. She added that Frank Hammond had called her twice, but she wouldn’t ring him back until they had spoken. She pulled the drapes and gazed out the window. She could see a few blocks in the distance the twin bell towers of the Trinità dei Monti, the church that stood atop the Spanish Steps. It dawned on her that any day now Alex Sokolov was probably going to be buried. By now his body had to be back in the United States. She wondered who he was—who he really was. She recalled the way he had gently washed her hair, massaging her scalp rather expertly as she’d sat on his lap on that marble bench in that elegant bathroom, and how that night he had kept up with her drink for drink. Few men could do that.
Likewise, she contemplated Miranda with her serene smile and her French twist, her gift of a bottle of Stoli. Who was she?
Cassie swallowed the last of her coffee, and fantasized traveling to Virginia to say something to Alex’s parents. Tell them how sorry she was that their son had died and she had left him behind in the bed. Ask them what they knew of this woman named Miranda. But she understood that she couldn’t—or, to be precise, that she shouldn’t. And that only made her feel worse. She told herself that her sadness was part of her trauma.
Her guilt. Yes. Guilt.
She wondered if people—ordinary people, not serial killers or Tony Soprano—who got away with murder made promises to be better people. Did they vow they would do good work in the future? Actively search out and find God? Did they…atone? She wasn’t convinced she had any of that in her. She wished that she did. But she wasn’t sure it mattered because she hadn’t gotten away with murder: she continued to believe, even if she was pathetically deluding herself, that she hadn’t hurt Alex Sokolov. Perhaps no one else would believe that, but she did. Moreover, so far she hadn’t gotten away with anything. The FBI still wanted to see her. The photos of her from the Royal Phoenician were now online. Soon she would be exposed, fully and irrevocably.
Below her on the street she watched a blue Vespa race by, the driver a young girl with blond hair and blue jeans. She saw an older woman on the sidewalk with a canvas bag filled with, among other items, a large loaf of bread. There was a delivery truck parked beside a store that sold lighting fixtures, and there were two men unloading large cardboard boxes. And in the apartment building across the street she watched the tenants through the windows: A fellow her age tucked his necktie into his shirt before sipping his espresso from a small cup and gazing down at something on the kitchen counter. A woman in a black blazer and skirt was blow-drying her hair in what looked like a rather petite living room. Another woman vacuumed.
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.
* * *
? ?
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?”
* * *
? ?
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.