The problem, she had told Viktor now that she was here, was that Bowden lived in a building with doormen and porters. Lots of them. This morning, a Saturday, Elena had watched as many as three different people behind the front desk at the entrance or sweeping the sidewalk or opening the door for residents and waving them politely out into the August heat. There also were cameras filming the reception area and the elevator up from the basement and the parking garage that was attached by an underground, cinder-block corridor. She knew from experience that it was much more difficult to remain invisible from the cameras in a private apartment building than it was in a hotel. There were so many fewer people coming and going in an apartment, and the lobby was dramatically smaller. So it would be difficult to get inside Bowden’s apartment, which was unfortunate because home was where most suicides—80 percent—occurred. (A person’s place of business accounted for nearly 10 percent, but even Viktor had joked that no one wanted Elena to entertain that possibility. Sure, pilots occasionally brought down whole planes in a fit of selfish, suicidal madness, but no one wanted an Airbus on that side of the ledger.) And if Elena couldn’t easily get in and out of Bowden’s apartment, then the flight attendant would have to take her life in some private nook in some relatively public space.
The second issue, which Elena knew was painfully clear to everyone, was time. It was absolutely unimaginable what kind of damage a loose cannon like Cassandra Bowden could cause if Alex had told her something or if suddenly she felt compelled to broadcast to anyone who would listen that another woman had come to room 511 that night in Dubai.
And, of course, the clock was running for her, as well. Certainly there were people in Moscow who were shaking their heads at the way that Dmitry’s overly Americanized daughter had allowed the flight attendant to leave Dubai. They were at best confused and at worst alarmed. For all they knew, Bowden was CIA. Perhaps she was part of some military intelligence task force. And so they were angry, and these were the Cossacks. She knew what happened to anyone who pissed off this clandestine old guard. Her own father would have been appalled at what she had done—or, to be precise, at what she had failed to do. She knew she was on thin ice. Viktor had made that clear, not even masking the threat in a polite understatement.
A thought came to her. The media still hadn’t identified the woman in the sunglasses and scarf in the Royal Phoenician security camera photos. No one in the Dubai police had leaked the name of the flight attendant. Elena decided she would tell Viktor that she needed that reveal before proceeding: Cassandra Bowden’s suicide would be considerably more plausible if she’d been publicly shamed.
She picked up her phone and watched the little blue dot. It would be great to take care of this—one way or another—before Bowden flew to Rome tomorrow evening, but now she could wait until the story broke. If Bowden’s name wasn’t online or in the newspapers by tomorrow morning, she’d go ahead and make the phone call to a newspaper or a cable news network herself. She’d offer an anonymous tip.
And in the meantime? She’d continue to watch Bowden and see if an opportunity of some sort presented itself. She wondered where the flight attendant and her family were having dinner tonight, and whether it might demand that the woman take a subway home.
18
Cassie joined Rosemary and her family for dinner Saturday night at a crowded Cantonese restaurant that Rosemary had discovered online. It was a block south of Canal and closer than she would have liked to the FBI building on Broadway and Worth. She guessed she was only a five-minute walk from yesterday afternoon’s debacle.
The restaurant catered to a tourist crowd that wanted to try dim sum. It was massive and loud and packed. But Cassie was surprised at how delicious the dumplings and pan-fried noodles were, and then felt guilty for having experienced a little culinary snobbishness before they had joined the throngs inside. Yes, she traveled a lot and had eaten all around the world, but just because tourists liked something didn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful. Exhibit A? The peppermint macarons at the bakery near the Eiffel Tower. Besides, she was a flight attendant. It wasn’t as if she was dining in La Pergola when she was in Rome.
And she appreciated the sheer ordinariness of her sister and her family—the lack of drama—and the way the four of them knew each other’s rhythms so well. There was just such comfort in the predictability. Cassie understood that she would never feel anything like this: love born of certainty and ritual.
“Do you remember that awful Chinese restaurant in Grover’s Mill?” Rosemary was asking her now.
She nodded. Her sister rarely brought up their childhood around Tim and Jessica. There were too many land mines, and you never knew when a memory would trip one. “Of course I do.”
“It’s now a weirdly expensive clothing boutique. Kind of like Anthropologie. I mean, they had tops in there for two hundred bucks.”
“They must need a place to launder their crystal meth money,” Cassie said, only half kidding. “That’s certainly one possible explanation.”
“I agree.”
“I don’t know what’s stranger: the fact the store exists or the fact you know it’s there. Were you actually back in Grover’s Mill recently?”
“We all were,” said Dennis. “It was when we took the kids to that new amusement park that opened at the end of June. It’s pretty close.”
“They have the steepest water slide in Kentucky,” Jessica added. The girl was using her spring roll a bit like a spoon to get as much peanut dipping sauce into her mouth as she could with each bite.
“And then you detoured to Grover’s Mill?” Cassie asked.
“We did,” her sister answered. “I thought it was time these two saw where their mother grew up.”
“I think we got the PG version,” Tim said. Cassie couldn’t believe how many dumplings the boy had consumed, but he seemed sated now. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, watching as the waiters wheeled the carts through the narrow spaces between the patrons.
“Maybe,” his mother agreed. “But at least you saw the house.”
“It was so tiny,” said Jessica.
It was, Cassie thought, it really was. It was a small saltbox, shabby with age, on less than half an acre. Their parents kept the booze in a kitchen cabinet, on the bottom shelf, which accommodated the taller bottles. The first time she started watering them down was when she was nine. Her father had come to the elementary school that day in June to watch the end-of-year Field Day contests: The three-legged races. The sack races. The sponge battles. (She never did find out why he wasn’t in the high school where he was supposed to be that afternoon, but he must have had an excuse. Wouldn’t he have been fired if he’d just disappeared or they’d known he was drunk when he left?) It was right after lunch. He had interfered in the egg race—a relay race—meeting her on the center-field grass where they were playing, and trying to coach her on how best to transfer the egg to her partner’s spoon. It was shocking to see her father there, in the midst of the game, instead of with all the other teachers and administrators and a smattering of parents—the other grown-ups—off to the side. As he tried to assist her, breaking the rules in every imaginable way, he accidentally knocked the raw egg in her spoon to the ground, where it broke open, the bright yellow sun of the yolk exploding like a star, a supernova of shame. It had been mortifying, and Cassie hoped desperately that everyone supposed her father was merely clumsy and a cheater—not also a drunk. In her desperate embarrassment, she hoped they thought he was only an idiot.
He had left soon after that, mumbling something about having to get back to the high school.