Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  “You can stay as long as you’d like, but if I find you with a drink, you’re dead to me and the curb will be your pillow.”

  Actually, if she was found with a drink, Xana would be sent to prison. The judge had been more than clear about that. Still, after what she had done to end up before him, Xana had little choice but to be grateful, accept the six-month sentence at a rehabilitation clinic called Tomorrows, and then at least thirty days at Evelyn Ward’s grimy halfway house in South Atlanta.

  “Oh,” said Alice, “that’s not good.”

  Voices crackled over the scanner. All units near the airport were being requested to converge at the international terminal.

  Xana caught her own reflection in the Pop-Tart’s foil wrapping. The flimsy bends in the wrapping distorted her face into a blur, though for the same effect she could have downed a fifth of tequila and gazed at a barroom mirror.

  More voices. A suspect was in custody.

  A foreign national.

  Possibly Middle Eastern.

  “Alice,” Xana asked, “do you have a car?”

  “Evelyn has a car but it’s in the shop.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Staci has a car.”

  “Who?”

  Alice thumbed toward the door. “Moonbeam.”

  Of course.

  Moonbeam was right where Xana left her, propped up on the cracked front steps. She had her head craned back and her bare arms stretched out. By all appearances, she was photosynthesizing.

  “I need a favor,” said Xana.

  “Are you kidding? You made me choke on a cigarette.”

  “You almost choked. You spat it out.”

  “Out of the kindness of your heart. What do you need?”

  So many answers, so few of them legal. Xana shaded her eyes from the morning sun and replied, “I hear you have a car.”

  “You can’t borrow it. I’m sorry.”

  “Can I steal it?”

  Moonbeam opened an eye. “You’d need to find the key and then you’d need to find the car.”

  “Then that’s what I’d need to do.”

  Moonbeam opened her other eye. “Where do you need me to drive you?”

  “Work.”

  “On a Saturday morning? On the Fourth of July?”

  “I sell fireworks.”

  “Really?”

  Xana shrugged. “No, but if you really want, I’m sure I can get my hands on one.”

  A pause. Fifteen seconds.

  Then Moonbeam used the front doorknob to lever herself to her feet and proceeded across the grimy lawn to the sidewalk. Out of gratitude Xana forced upon herself a vow of silence and quietly followed. Moonbeam’s car turned out to be a Frankenstein’s monster of a pickup truck. Neither of its doors matched in color and neither of those colors matched that of the flatbed. One headlight was small and square and the other fitted and round.

  “I’m doing this favor,” she said, “because I’m curious what kind of foolish organization would hire a person like you.”

  “Oh, the most foolish, I assure you.”

  The cloth seat in the front cab looked like it had been shredded by a bear. Seven different cardboard air fresheners dangled from the rearview mirror and not even they were enough to diminish the ghost-stench of once-spilled vodka.

  Xana offered directions and away they went. They each ate a Pop-Tart. Before long, they hit traffic. So bad was Atlanta traffic that even on the weekend, even on a federal holiday, there were traffic jams. The cause of this jam soon became clear. Rubberneckers were ogling the massive gathering of police cruisers blocking four out of five of the southbound lanes on the highway.

  “Fascists one and all,” said Moonbeam.

  “One too many pot busts on your record?”

  “Don’t tell me you think the storm troopers have your best interests at heart.”

  To which Xana replied, “We’re alcoholics. We don’t have our best interests at heart.”

  Once they broke free from traffic, the rest of the trip didn’t take long at all, and soon they were navigating the middle-class suburb of Brookhaven, where the average age of the buildings was prepubescent.

  “I am curious,” said Moonbeam at a stoplight. “Where did you learn to speak the language of India?”

  “India. How about you?”

  Moonbeam paused before mumbling her response: “Cleveland.”

  “Ah, Cleveland. The Mumbai of Ohio.”

  “So you speak Spanish and Hindi?”

  “And Mandarin. And German. And Russian. And, let’s see, Urdu, Armenian, Greek. Japanese. Korean. Karamanli Turkish. Cypriot Turkish. Tatar, Dagur, Mongolian—”

  “Why?”

  “Why Mongolian?”

  “Why any of it?”

  “Well, let me put it this way: My father didn’t name me after the Olivia Newton-John song.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “ ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure dome decree…’ ”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “OK.”

  Silence—then Moonbeam probed some more:

  “So you still haven’t told me what were you doing in India.”

  “Well, let’s see. The last time I was there, I had a wild affair with a Kannada director named Parvati.”

  “Oh really?” asked Moonbeam. “What was his name?”

  “Parvati.”

  “That is a girl’s name.”

  “Yes, it is,” Xana agreed.

  Soon, as per Xana’s directions, they were approaching a nondescript glass-and-steel office building—but Moonbeam idled a good thirty feet away, refusing to come any closer.

  “That’s the federal building,” she muttered. “Big Brother’s home base in the ATL. Be careful what you say or you’ll end up in Guantánamo Bay.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll be OK,” said Xana, unlocking her door. “They know me.”

  “What are you, a terrorist?”

  “Close.” She held out her hand. “Special Agent Xana Marx. Thanks for the ride.”

  Chapter 7

  The lobby had two entrances. One offered an unobstructed walk to the bank of elevators. This entrance connected to and from the employees’ parking garage, which itself was only accessible through a monitored gate. Xana had used this entrance for years and so felt very much on the other side of the looking glass when she passed through the revolving door to the civilian side of the lobby and approached a dreadnought of a security desk, with a dreadnought of a security officer whom she did not recognize seated behind it. To the left of the desk was a state-of-the-art metal detector, all smooth edges and soft plastic plating.

  “May I help you?” asked the security officer. His voice made Barry White sound like a soprano. In front of him were an array of CCTVs. Undoubtedly he had been watching Xana since Moonbeam had dropped her off.

  “Hi. Yes. Special Agent Xanadu Marx for SAC Jim Christie.”

  SAC stood for “special-agent-in-charge.” Jim Christie ran the show at the Atlanta field office. He also had been one of only two people to visit Xana in rehab. He had visited her the first week. He had assured her that, when she was ready to come back, her job would be waiting for her. True, he wasn’t looking her in the eye when he said it, but she wasn’t looking him in the eye either; during his visit, she was mostly bent over, unable to keep her DTs from encouraging the contents of her stomach from introducing themselves to the bottom of a small pail. Another symptom of her DTs had been mad hallucinations—a sort of phantasmagorical regurgitation—and in the darkest days of her rehabilitation, Xana had wondered whether Jim Christie’s optimistic words—whether his entire visit—had been nothing more than a conjuration of her chemical-sick brain.

  Now she would find out.

  The security officer, whose name tag labeled him as MIKKELSON, checked a sheet in front of him and then, predictably, unfortunately, asked Xana for her ID.

  “Yeah, see, funny thing about that…” she said.
<
br />   In no way did Mikkelson seem like the type of man who would find anything funny.

  “Call up to the office. Tell him I’m here. He’ll want to see me. Special Agent Xanadu Marx.”

  He did not budge.

  “I used to work here. You can check the rolls, can’t you?”

  “I can’t allow you up without an ID.”

  “Right. That’s the thing. I don’t currently have my ID.”

  “Were you mugged?”

  Xana cocked her head. Did this meathead have a sense of humor after all? If so, Mikkelson had the straightest delivery of any comedian since Socrates. “I have a debit card if that will help.”

  “Is your picture on it?”

  “It’s a temporary.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Vacation?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What’s a sort of vacation?”

  “Rehab.”

  Mikkelson dragon-breathed out of his nostrils.

  “Look, please, just call Jim Christie. Call anyone—well, anyone who was here at least seven months ago. I know there’s got to be a full complement upstairs. Federal holidays always carry heightened alert, all men on deck. Hey, listen, if Jim Christie finds out Xana Marx was here and you didn’t let her up to see him…”

  “I don’t work for him,” Mikkelson replied.

  “Yeah, well, I do, so come on. Be a human being and pick up the phone. You are a human being…aren’t you?”

  Mikkelson picked up the phone, dialed a number, and waited. Xana smiled. Mikkelson did not. Xana’s smile diminished.

  “Yeah, hi, Lizzie, it’s Gunther—listen, do you know someone named Xanadu Marx…yeah, she’s in the lobby…oh, I don’t know, five foot ten, blue eyes, black hair, trim, mid-forties…bit of an attitude? Yeah, you could say that. But she’s got no ID except for a temporary bank card…OK. Will do.”

  Mikkelson hung up.

  “Well?” asked Xana.

  “Someone will be on their way down.”

  “So you think I’m trim, eh?”

  “We could all lose a few pounds.”

  Xana shrugged. “The person you spoke with on the phone—was that Lizzie Dreyfus?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “You really are.”

  “Someone will be on their way down.”

  Xana took the hint and stepped aside. She considered stepping even farther aside—and outside—to light up another Camel, but no. Whoever came down to see her, be it Lizzie Dreyfus or Jim Christie or even that obsequious toad Del Purrich, didn’t need to perceive her as an addict. No, she was going to stand still and be patient and quietly wait here in the lobby like a healthy, well-adjusted, trim adult.

  Trim. She certainly hadn’t been trim when her other visitor had stopped by. As with many patients, one of the substitutions her subconscious had selected to replace alcohol had been junk food, and when Madeline came to see her, sometime in the third month, Xana had acquired a pendulous arc to her chin and an unavoidably textured expansiveness to her hips and thighs. When Madeline came to see her, Xana had been sitting in the garden, teasing at the flimsy sprouts she had planted and wishing them into the buxom tomatoes that had appeared on the seed package.

  When Madeline came to see her, the sky was gray, but Madeline always had brought gray skies wherever she went. She and Xana had met at Quantico, trained together, served together in DC, dated in DC, and broke up in DC. Xana was the one who requested the transfer to Atlanta, only to find out a few years later that Madeline had left the Bureau for a private security job in Baltimore that paid six figures. They hadn’t spoken in twenty years, not until the day Madeline—spike-haired, sun-kissed Madeline, Madeline of the lickable dimples—came to see her in the garden.

  Xana didn’t get up. She didn’t even look up. She merely said, once Madeline was within earshot: “I’m not going to insult you and ask how you knew I was here.”

  Madeline sat cross-legged with an effortlessness that belied her age and replied, “So I heard you drove into a house.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Yeah. That’s always been you. The bad memories stick and the good memories slide away. No one has ever clung to their misery like you, except maybe Oedipus Rex.”

  “What can I say, Madeline? I’m a special girl. Want to make out?”

  “Sure. Then I can help you stab out your eyes with these shears.”

  “Tease,” said Xana, and finally looked her ex-girlfriend in the eye. “Christ, you haven’t changed at all.”

  “I’m a Republican. We hate change. But let me ask you something. When you get out of here…”

  “If I get out of here.”

  “I don’t even want to entertain any self-pity. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Why are you here, Madeline?”

  “Well, answer me this, Xana: Are you going to go back to the Bureau?”

  They were alone in the garden. Most everyone else had spotted the marbleheaded clouds and headed indoors. A thousand plants bent in a swelling gust. Xana cupped her hands over her delicate tomato sprouts to keep them from being plucked into the wind.

  “Look at you,” said Madeline. “So nurturing. Who knew you had it in you?”

  “I’m listening. Make your pitch.”

  “My pitch?”

  “If you recruit me to join your little private security firm, do you get a commission? Do you get a bonus? How much of a potential windfall did it take to induce you to fly down to see me after all these years? Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand?”

  “Bellum Vellum is hardly a ‘little private security firm.’ We provide on-the-ground private military support for a number of multinational corporations and nothing guarantees success better than fine intelligence and with sixty-two percent of our operations occurring in Central Asia, having someone as well versed in that part of the world as you are would be a godsend. And you mentioned money. Do you want to know what your starting salary would be?”

  “I already have a job.”

  “You drove into a house! You think that’s the kind of thing people forget? I’m offering you tabula rasa. Who else in your situation would get an opportunity like that?”

  Xana picked at the clump of sod around the sprouts. The sod darkened. The whole world darkened, drenched, as the rain came down upon it. Madeline got up, brushed herself off. Xana stayed in the sopping mud, and essentially roosted there for the next hour.

  But at least her tomatoes ripened.

  “Well, well,” nasal-noted a Georgia-accented male voice. “As I leave and breathe. If it isn’t Xana Marx.”

  Del Purrich was striding from the elevators, taking his time, that ever-present shit-eating grin spread across his thin lips, and he wore his Harris tweed jacket because even though this was Atlanta in July, he would remain Del Purrich twelve months out of the year, so help him Jesus Christ.

  As he signed for her on Mikkelson’s clipboard, he asked her: “They give you early release so you could celebrate the Fourth with us? Or have you completed your rehabilitation?”

  “It’s good to see you too, Del.”

  Mikkelson waved Xana toward the metal detector. She walked toward it.

  Del stood on the other side, obstructing her path.

  “Can I be honest with you, Xana? I’m surprised to see you. I am. You want to know why I’m surprised to see you?”

  “Because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

  “Ha! That’s amusing! No. I’m surprised because I would have thought you wouldn’t be allowed back on the road just yet. Now, you didn’t drive here illegally, did you, Xana?”

  “You want to know what I’m surprised by, Del? I’m surprised you have time to stand there and poke at me with your stick while a police officer lies in the morgue and the shit hits the fan at Hartsfield-Jackson, but we both know your prior
ities have always been a bit off. Now, if you’re going to interrogate me, Del, why don’t we do it upstairs?”

  Had Xana adequately shamed Del? She shot a glance at the mountainous security guard.

  “You signed for her,” Mikkelson grumbled. “Let her through.”

  Without further comment, Del stepped aside. Less than a minute later, he and Xana were exiting an elevator onto the fourth floor where they were greeted, on the wall in front them, by the flag-and-laurel seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Chapter 8

  On the fourth level of the building, tucked behind one of two unmarked wooden doors, civilians could be seated in an oblong room with three solid walls and one wall made of glass. The wall of glass was reflective. About four feet off the ground ran a meager horizontal ledge upon which civilians could, presumably, rest their elbows. A thin slit ran above the ledge for the passage of paperwork. All in all, this tucked-away room was the kind one expected to find at a maximum-security prison, the kind of tight quarters into which some woeful mother or father might be sequestered in order to have a timed conversation with their convict child.

  This was the FBI field office’s interview room, and Xana had never ever been on this side of the glass. She felt knocked a bit out of her skin. Her guts were squeezed with claustrophobia. The anxiety parched her mouth and throat. She was Pavlov’s alcoholic.

  Pacing did not help. Pacing only reminded her how constrictive the space was. But still Xana paced, hugging her arms to her chest like mail. In this room designed to addle a person with a clear conscience, a person burdened by sin could quickly go mad, and when for fuck’s sake would someone appear on the other side of the glass? Who would it be? How long had it been since Del had escorted her to this room? How long would they make her wait?

  Or were they there already, the lot of them, watching her stalk to and fro as if they were patrons at a zoo and she the—what? Chimpanzee? Hyena?

  Enough of this shit.

  She was going to have to do the instigating.

  As always.