? ?
If she hadn’t had a shot of gin at the bar at the restaurant in Chinatown, would she have stayed home once she had settled down inside her apartment? Probably not, because Paula phoned, her siren song drawing Cassie once more toward the rocks: the magical cubes that added such beauty to the luminescent brown of Drambuie and transformed the waters of arak into clouds. Briefly she considered not answering when she saw Paula’s name on her phone’s screen, but willpower had never been her strong suit. And so she did answer, which meant that by nine she was drinking at the bar at a Mexican restaurant near Union Square with her friend and a woman from Paula’s ad agency named Suzanne, and by ten she was telling the two of them a version of her nightmare in Dubai in which Alex Sokolov himself didn’t appear, but instead she slept with a fictional commodities trader named Alex Ilyich—a surname she commandeered on the fly from Tolstoy. But she was certainly imagining the real Alex as she spoke, giving her fictional one that same peculiar jones for the Russians and Russian literature. Alex, she said, had told her that he would be back in the States and visiting his parents in Virginia this week. The man, she added, had promised to call her when he was stateside but never had. Never even texted.
Which, perhaps, was why now she was allowing them to prod her to call him at his parents’ place in Charlottesville.
“Do it!” Paula said raucously over the sound of the crowd and clinked glasses and the thrum of the bass from the speakers on the far side of the bar. “Do it! Call him! Give him shit for fucking and forgetting!”
Cassie gazed at her friend and at her friend’s friend. Their eyes hung heavy with tequila, and their smiles had that Saturday-night smirk, thin-lipped and derisive, but also eager for a rush to cap the weekend with a pulsating vibrato of hilarity and chaos.
“I don’t have his number,” she said.
“So? Call Charlottesville! Call his parents! How many people there have unpronounceable Russian last names?”
And so to appease them she pretended to search for Ilyich in that Virginia city, but actually looked up Sokolov. She found that name instantly. She pressed in the digits, let it ring once, and then hung up. She felt at once mournful and brutish. She knew she would be unable to endure the sound of Alex’s mother’s or father’s voice on an answering machine, or the voice of whoever was screening calls at the house the night after the funeral.
“Busy,” she said.
“Like hell it was!” said Suzanne, rapping her knuckles on the wood of the bar, then laughing and moaning at how she had banged them so hard that she’d hurt herself. “You’re a coward and a wimp.”
“No, it was busy,” she insisted. “It really was!”
“No way!” Paula laughed, rolling back her head. With the speed of an attacking snake she grabbed Cassie’s phone and pressed on the number that Cassie had just dialed. Cassie tried to wrestle the phone away, but Suzanne held down her right arm and then her left, and then bear-hugged her and giggled. Cassie didn’t struggle, not because she feared making a scene—she never feared making a scene—but because a part of her had to see where this speeding train was going to crash and just how cataclysmic would be the carnage.
“Hi, this is Cassie Bowden,” Paula said when someone answered. “I met Alex last week in Dubai and I want to speak to him right now! I want to know why he hasn’t called me!”
She watched as Paula’s drunken eyes went wide and her jaw actually went slack in disbelief. She said nothing more, nothing at all. She just handed the phone back to Cassie, as Suzanne released her arms.
Cassie looked at the screen and saw the connection was gone.
“He’s…um…” her friend began, but then stopped.
Cassie waited. Suzanne pushed Paula hard on her upper arm, literally prodding her to continue. “What?” Suzanne asked, still smiling at the hilarity of all of this. “What?”
“He’s dead,” Paula murmured.
“He’s what?” Suzanne asked.
“He’s dead,” Paula repeated. “Someone at the house—not his mom or dad, I’m pretty sure—got really pissed and hung up. So, I don’t know any more than that.”
“That’s so weird and so sad,” Suzanne said, her voice softened by the absolute buzzkill of Paula’s news. But she was stunned only briefly. “Let’s Google how he died,” she said. “Maybe there’s an obituary.”
Cassie took back her phone. It felt radioactive in her hand. Would it ring again soon? Would Alex’s mother or father call her back? Probably not. Instead she would probably get a call from Frank Hammond or someone in authority somewhere, telling her not to harass the family. But maybe not. Oh, the family certainly would tell the police she had called. They’d tell the FBI.
And eventually it would get back to Ani.
But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered whether this stupid little stunt would be anything other than one more black mark in her file somewhere.
She sighed. She hoped when Ani called her next, it wouldn’t be to say that she’d had enough of her and was dropping the case.
“Don’t waste your time Googling it, Suzanne,” she said. “I can tell you exactly how he died.”
Paula sat up a little straighter on her stool. “Wait, what? You knew he was dead and allowed me to call his parents? Are you crazy?”
“I tried to stop you.”
“She did,” Suzanne agreed. “She did.”
“Not hard enough!”
“He was killed in Dubai at some point after I left his hotel room,” Cassie told them. “If you want to read all about it, just go to the New York Post. You can even see me. Sort of. His real name was Alex Sokolov. Not Ilyich. Sokolov.”
She had been planning to order another margarita and stared a little longingly at the squat, lovely bottle of triple sec behind the bar. But as she glimpsed the faces of her friends as they held their phones before them and read about the death of an American trader in Dubai and the woman of interest in the security cam photos, she had a change of heart. She had a twenty-dollar bill and two ones in her wallet, which wouldn’t cover what she probably owed, but she handed it to Paula and said she was sorry—sorry, in truth, about so many things, of which not paying her share of the bar tab was pretty damn inconsequential—and said good night.
* * *
? ?
The next morning, Sunday, she wasn’t sure which surprised her more: the fact she slept through the night or the fact she still hadn’t been arrested. Her attorney hadn’t called to fire her for phoning Alex Sokolov’s family in Virginia.
Of course, the day was young. A lot could still happen.
She got up and went to the animal shelter, as if it were just another Sunday in August. It was a fifteen-minute walk if she strolled, considerably less if she was in a hurry. But as she was passing a supermarket on the avenue, once more she had the distinct sense that she was being followed. She told herself, as she had the other day, that she was being delusional. But she knew also that the FBI had reason to put her under surveillance. And there certainly were other people out there, including whoever had killed Alex, who might want to know more about the woman in the Royal Phoenician photos.
The idea that whoever that was knew who she was caused her to feel a chill, despite the stifling summer heat. She paused and flipped open her compact to look behind her, almost hoping to see Frank Hammond or someone else who just exuded FBI, because she knew she would have preferred that to the faceless man in shades and a black ball cap.