The woman looked past her, offering not the slightest hint of recognition.
“It is you, isn’t it?” Cassie asked, pleading, and though she hadn’t shouted, she had the sense that if anyone were listening they would think she was hysterical.
“Pardon me? Have we met?” The tone was light and unflappable. Had Cassie heard it before? Maybe. Maybe not.
“You’re Miranda, aren’t you? You have to come with me to the police.”
“I’m sorry, but my name isn’t Miranda. Is there something I can do to help you?” she asked.
“Dubai! Room five-eleven at the Royal Phoenician!” Cassie insisted, her voice almost a wail.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” she replied. “I’ve never been to Dubai.”
So Cassie shook the woman, not because she still believed that it was Miranda but because she understood that it wasn’t. It wasn’t. Either she’d never actually seen Miranda or she’d gotten away, and Cassie feared in her heart that it was the former. In her despair, she was more violent with this stranger than she had intended—she was even about to reach for the brim of the woman’s hat and whip it aside, one last pathetic gesture, one last hope—when she saw someone else from the corner of her eye, another passenger, and this person was turning a small red tube of lipstick toward her. And even before Cassie could respond, she knew what was going to happen. What was happening already. She felt the spray on her face, the sting more excruciating than a sunburn, and though she had closed her eyes and brought her hands to her face, instantly her eyes were running and her nose was a melting glacier and every breath was a raspy, asthmatic wheeze or a cough. She collapsed to her knees, she used the kerchief around her neck to wipe her face. She tried to call out, to speak, to apologize. Instead she was aware of someone standing over her as if she were a vanquished pro wrestler, and sensed it was the Good Samaritan who had pepper-sprayed her. The passenger was calling out for help, and Cassie heard people running—the tile floor was vibrating beneath her—and then the woman with the pepper spray was pulled away from her.
“She was attacking that lady, I saw it,” she was explaining in English, her accent vaguely Boston. Cassie heard Italian, too, police officers, and then she felt hands on her shoulders and rubbing her back, and somewhere very far away she heard Makayla’s voice and Brandon the cabin service director’s voice, and they were saying something about bringing her to a bathroom right now and irrigating her eyes and finding the airport infirmary. But the police—no, they were actually soldiers—were going to have none of that. They had other plans for her.
“Please, tell her I’m sorry,” Cassie begged, “please,” but it was already too late. She opened her eyes, despite the pain, and the woman in the sunglasses and the sun hat was nowhere in sight. She’d vanished. And with a pang of despair Cassie realized that if the encounter had been caught on a security camera, it would look like a crazed flight attendant—the one who may have nearly decapitated a young American in Dubai—had attacked a traveler in sunglasses and an elegant straw hat as she emerged from passport control, and someone with a vial of pepper spray in a lipstick tube had come to the poor woman’s defense.
* * *
? ?
Makayla stayed with Cassie, but the rest of the crew went ahead and took the van into Rome. At one point when the dust had settled and Cassie was still kneeling on the floor of the baggage section, she had looked up and through watering, searing eyes seen three tall, trim men in camo fatigues and flak jackets, each with an assault rifle—Italian soldiers—standing like a phalanx around her, and she was reminded of the three-column sculpture outside the FBI building in lower Manhattan. The Sentinel. Then she had blinked shut her eyes and felt Makayla putting her arms around her and asking her if she was capable of walking. She said she was. Tenderly the other flight attendant helped her to her feet, her arms around Cassie’s waist.
Someone had already escorted the Boston woman somewhere else. They had thanked her and said now they needed to get a statement from her. She was, Cassie knew, going to tell the story of her remarkable heroism on her first day in Italy for the rest of her life to anyone who would listen. Cassie hated her.
Makayla and one of the soldiers brought Cassie first to an infirmary, where a nurse with rugged scruff along his cheeks and chin and breath that oozed peppermint numbed her eyes with anesthetic drops and then irrigated them until he believed that the worst of the spray was gone. He washed her face with a solution that he said was actually very much like watered-down dish detergent, and then gave her a skin cream to apply in the evening. One of the soldiers who had brought her there had remained, occasionally speaking to his superiors in Italian on his radio, at one point taking her passport and making a photocopy before returning it to her. When the nurse was done, the soldier escorted her and Makayla to a windowless conference room where they were met by a pair of men in crisp suits and brilliant white shirts. They worked for airport security and offered her water (which she accepted) and coffee (which she declined). If her throat weren’t so sore, she might have asked for anything alcoholic and strong. Then they asked Makayla to wait outside while they sat Cassie down in the middle of a long conference table. They both sat opposite her, and one had a laptop open beside him. She couldn’t recall their last names, but she remembered that the taller fellow with the meticulously shaved and tanned head—the one who was apparently in charge—was Marco. The other fellow, who seemed to be responsible for the laptop, might have been named Tommaso.
“Please, tell us exactly what happened,” Marco was saying. His English was excellent, though his accent was thick. “There were passengers in the area who feared that some sort of attack was in progress—a terrorist attack. One said she expected explosions and gunfire. Another Amsterdam. Another Istanbul.”
Cassie had felt the adrenaline draining like water from an unstoppered tub as the nurse had treated her for the pepper spray, and now she wanted nothing more than to go to the airline’s hotel and sleep. She had been awake roughly twenty-four hours and the result was the sort of bedlam that she wrought usually when she was drunk—not sober. But she was also anxious to talk to Ani and tell her what had happened. There were three points that she wanted to make: She had seen a woman with an uncanny resemblance to Miranda in passport control, and the woman had vanished before exiting into baggage. She had spotted a second woman with the same carry-on duffel near the luggage carousels, and she had also looked a bit like Miranda, but with different-colored hair. Then she had accosted that second woman by mistake—and wound up pepper-sprayed by a third.