Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  He hung up, having only spoken two words the entire conversation: “Yes, sir.”

  “Who was that?” asked Xana.

  He replied, “I need you to wait here,” and subsequently opened his office door and stomped out to the noisy squad room.

  “All eyes on me, people! This is not a drill!”

  Xana took a deep breath. Whatever Dundee was about to share with his people was going to be bad, bad news—and she had a feeling that his suggestion to her, that she wait in his office, had been a bad, bad suggestion.

  “Effective immediately, this airport is in lockdown. All outgoing flights have been grounded and all incoming flights have been rerouted to secondary destinations. A unit of the Georgia National Guard is expected to arrive on campus at oh nine fifteen. We are expected to, and we will, assist them in securing this airport. I will have your individual assignments shortly.”

  Xana’s instincts had been dead-on. It was time to become scarce and skedaddle. She used the sudden buildup of activity in the squad room to sneak over to Hayley, who was still on her bench by the interview room.

  “Come on,” said Xana, clasping the girl’s hand, “we’re leaving.”

  Hayley was pulled up by Xana’s momentum and had little choice but to tug her oxygen tank and follow her toward the front door. All the while, Xana cast hesitant glances over her shoulder to see if Dundee had spotted them.

  Not yet.

  They passed Officer Chiles’s workstation. The good officer wasn’t there, but Lieutenant Dundee’s Swiss Army knife still was from when he had left it post-apple. Xana was tempted to snatch it. Even self-righteous chauvinists—especially self-righteous chauvinists—deserved to be cured of at least one of their disgusting habits.

  But no. She left the knife.

  “I don’t understand,” Hayley said. “Why are we running away?”

  They passed through the doors and headed for the elevator. The stairwell would have been faster, but Xana had serious doubts about this girl’s lung capacity to bolt down three flights of stairs. And so the button-push and the impatient wait and the repeated hesitant glances back toward the substation.

  “What are you afraid of? Oh God, did they arrest you for shoving that policeman? Are we fugitives?”

  “What? No. Well, not for that. Listen, wouldn’t you rather be on the other side of anywhere before the National Guard declares martial law and locks us down? That said, unless you’d rather spend the rest of your day stuck in the food court…”

  The elevator doors opened. Xana hopped inside.

  Hayley joined her.

  “So what did the Chechen say to you?”

  “Do you speak Chechen?”

  “No…”

  “Then you probably wouldn’t understand it if I repeated what he said, would you?”

  Having been delivered to the ground floor, Xana and Hayley casually hustled out through the terminal’s automatic doors and into the hot morning air—and was it Xana’s imagination or did she hear, in the distance, the thunder-rumbling of an army convoy on approach?

  Hayley stopped mid-gait and took out her phone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “The office,” the girl replied, and while waiting for someone to pick up, she mended her taxed pulmonary system with an adjustment on her oxygen tank.

  “Well, can we walk while you call them?”

  “Sure.”

  Up the walkway now, into the parking garage, and Hayley’s sticker-new compact car was within sprinting distance. If only Hayley could sprint…

  “Hi,” she said. “This is Hayley O’Leary. Ms. Marx finished her interview with the…you know…the guy…and now we’re on our way to…”

  She looked to Xana to fill in the blank.

  “Just tell him we’re going to the Russian consulate.”

  “Are we going to the Russian consulate?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Hayley hesitated, then finished her voice message as instructed. They reached the compact. Xana tugged on the passenger handle. Hayley fumbled for her key fob, found it, and unlocked the car.

  They traveled all of fifty yards before they had to pay for their time in the garage. Hayley passed the clerk a fiver. He took his time making change.

  Xana nibbled on her lower lip. She definitely could hear the convoy now. They might already be erecting roadblocks.

  The security arm rose up.

  Hayley didn’t move forward.

  “What—what the hell are you doing?” asked Xana.

  “I just remembered. Atlanta doesn’t have a Russian consulate.”

  “What are you—Little Miss Almanac? What teenage girl knows that?”

  “I’m not moving unless you tell me the truth.”

  “Fine.” Xana rolled down her window. Screw courtesy. She needed a smoke. “What do you know about Ivan the Terrible?”

  Chapter 19

  They found a parking spot in one of downtown Atlanta’s sketchy prix fixe lots, where a slope-gaited, raggedy fellow collected a small sum—cash only—and in return promised to keep their car from getting stripped for parts—although any adult with decent upper-body strength could have boosted Hayley’s tiny auto.

  Xana and Hayley strolled the sidewalk, passing a soul-food restaurant and, beside it, a Pan-African clothing boutique from which the dance-protest beats of Fela Kuti boogied out and mixed with the hot summer breath of the midmorning air.

  Hayley set her oxygen cart to keep it from tipping over and said, “I’ve never aided and abetted a known fugitive before.”

  “I’m not a fugitive. Dundee is just acting out the part of a cliché.”

  “Like you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, I mean, you know…the ‘alcoholic genius investigator.’ ”

  “Oh good. I’m a cliché.”

  “But there’s still something I don’t understand. It’s just…I don’t mean to insult you or anything…”

  “Calling me a cliché wasn’t an insult? Hey, if you think I won’t judo-flip a girl just because she’s dying, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  Hayley smiled. “Well…I mean…with your skill set and everything…why did you join the FBI? Why not the CIA? Atlanta doesn’t even have a Chinatown.”

  “Who says I didn’t apply to the CIA?”

  “Did you?”

  A patrol car passed by. Xana looked the other way. She found herself staring at the unlit storefront of a bar labeled in rusted letters: HI-JINKS. She smelled booze. There must have been a few cracked empties lying in the slender alleyway between the bar and its neighbor, a twenty-four-hour Laundromat. The Laundromat emitted a yellow, radioactive glow. Xana was more interested in the shadows of the alleyway.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it…”

  “No,” replied Xana. “I don’t mind.”

  They stopped at the corner and waited for the light.

  “So you applied to the CIA and didn’t get in?”

  “No, I got in. I made it all the way to the Point.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The CO kicked me out.”

  “Why?”

  Xana let out a nostalgic sigh. “He found me sleeping with his daughter.”

  “So you’ve always been reckless.”

  “I’ve always been ambitious.”

  “You can have one without the other,” said Hayley.

  “Maybe. But where’s the fun in that?”

  “Sure, but that’s how people get hurt.”

  Xana glanced down at her. “Not intentionally.”

  “Does it matter? I mean, once the damage is done…”

  “You think intentions don’t matter?”

  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

  “So is, I would guess, the road to heaven. Otherwise, how would anyone get there?”

  “I’ll let you know in a few months.”

  The sign flashed WALK and walk they did—crossing the street. If Xana remem
bered correctly, Yuri’s pawnshop would be on the next block. On this block was a trio of businesses shuttered up with plywood that was spray-painted with gang tags. Lines bifurcating circles intersecting circles, with a recognizable number or two here and a discernible letter or two there just to make things interesting.

  Xana stopped and stared at the graffiti. “Now here’s a language I can’t even begin to crack.”

  “It’s, like, code, isn’t it?”

  “All language is code.”

  “It looks like a trigonometry problem.”

  “So translate it with a calculator.”

  “Just because something looks like it can be solved,” Hayley replied, “that doesn’t mean it can be solved. Sometimes we need to accept that.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “What? No. It’s something Dr. Gideon has been trying to tell my parents. They keep chasing after miracle treatments—as if we could afford them anyway.”

  “Don’t be so hard on them. Acceptance can be a real bitch. I used to wonder if I drank because I was reckless or if I was reckless because I drank.”

  “You drank because you are an alcoholic.”

  “See, that explains the third glass and the thirty-third glass but it doesn’t explain the first glass.”

  “Then why did you first start drinking?”

  “Probably for the same reason your parents first started chasing miracles.”

  Their destination was the corner store on the next block. In the window, behind the OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign, hung an American flag. It took Xana a moment to realize the flag was missing a stripe. She opened the door—but let her bite-sized chaperone enter first. A trio of hollow wooden balls above the jamb bounced against one another. They sounded like someone hammering down the lid of a coffin.

  “The Russian consulate, huh?” said Hayley with a smirk in her voice.

  Seven ceiling fans spun overhead like a flock of helicopters but did little to dissipate the reek of industrial glue and wave away the dust mites from the tall, cluttered wooden shelves that snaked in crooked rows across the store’s dimly lit floor-space. Far be it from the proprietor to let the customers get a clear look at the junk they were purchasing.

  As to the proprietor—Yuri—he was sitting in an armchair on a dais behind a glass counter. The armchair, all spirals and solid dark-red wood, must have once been a thing of beauty, but time had faded its veneer and chipped its smooth flesh into coarse and craggy bark. So too the man on the chair, thick white hair curling kudzu-like around his potato chip bones and corkscrewing down his temples from the flimsy thatches still left on either side of his blotchy skull. Once he may have been handsome; now he was decaying to atoms.

  Over his chest and thighs he wore a black apron and over the black apron he held the base of a model Soyuz rocket in one hand and a short-haired brush in the other hand. He dipped the brush into a mason jar of glue. He didn’t look up at his customers.

  On the wall behind him hung an assortment of handguns, many of them made up of various parts, like a menagerie of .45-caliber Frankenstein monsters. In the glass case in front of him were arrayed a couple dozen pocket watches, each set to the same exact time—or perhaps allowed to stop ticking at the same exact moment. Tempus moritur: Time dies. In the space beside him on the dais rested a mini fridge as shockingly clean and white as the rest of the store was dirt-smeared and dark.

  He must have really loved that mini fridge.

  “Hello, Yuri,” said Xana.

  Yuri briefly peered up from his model rocket and muttered, “My name is not Yuri.”

  “Oh, Yuri, you’re so funny.”

  “Ms. FBI is here, so I am to think her recidivism is over?”

  “Rehabilitation,” Xana corrected him.

  Behind her, lost somewhere in the stacks, Hayley called out: “This place is neat!” She held aloft an Eastern Orthodox icon of St. Nick painted in earth-tones on a block of marble and waved it for Xana to see.

  “Yes. Very nice. Now put it down. You don’t know where that’s been.”

  “Sure I do. It’s been here on the shelf.”

  “All the more reason to put it down.”

  Reluctantly, Hayley obeyed and then quietly joined them at the counter. Yuri, expressionless, doused his tiny brush with a dab of brown-yellow glue from the mason jar.

  “I need a favor,” said Xana.

  “Favors are for friends. Ms. FBI make offer and I name price.”

  “I need to know if anyone has escaped or been released from The Oprichnina in the past twenty-five years.”

  He laid down his model, set his brush on his apron, nodded thoughtfully. Then he replied, “Now I name price.”

  Chapter 20

  But first, Yuri conjured two nickels out of thin air and handed one to each of the women.

  “Oh good,” said Hayley. “A nickel.”

  Xana motioned with her head for Hayley to follow her, and follow her she did through weaving walls of bric-a-brac to the far corner of the store where, beside a door marked DO NOT ENTER with a hangman drawn in chalk below the words, they came upon an antiquarian Coca-Cola machine with a coin slot sized especially for a nickel and a metal claw shaped especially for opening bottle-tops.

  Hayley lit up with enthusiasm and she fed her nickel into the red-and-white machine. The machine had already been giving off a low buzzing sound before they approached. Now it added various whirs and bangs as it sorted through its innards and produced for Hayley’s edification the curvaceous glass bottle of sweetened soda water she’d just purchased. She picked it up and almost dropped it immediately—the condensation on the glass made the bottle very slippery.

  Then she went to twist open the cap. Instead, the cap chewed a scape of flesh into her palm. She winced and shook out her hand and stared at the bottle as if it were a math problem.

  “Oh,” she realized, and butted the top of the Coke bottle against the Coke machine’s metal claw. It took her three tries, but with a hiss, the cap popped off, and she was free to enjoy her ice-cold beverage—which she did, gulping a third of it down in one blow.

  Hayley smacked her lips together and stared again at the bottle. “It tastes different.”

  “It’s the sugar. Now move aside. You aren’t the only one who’s thirsty.”

  Once Xana had her drink in hand, she and Hayley clinked bottles and upended them in silent swallows. Then, slowly, they made their way back to the counter.

  Yuri sat behind it like a famine-frail buddha. He wasn’t tinkering with his model rocket. He was waiting for them. His eyes dilated with anticipation.

  “You enjoy?” he asked Hayley.

  Hayley nodded. “Thank you. So how do you two know each other?”

  Before Yuri could respond, Xana lobbed back:

  “It’s complicated.”

  Hayley got the hint and shrank away, sipping her Coke.

  “The Oprichnina is a bad place,” Yuri said to Xana. “Solzhenitsyn would not have survive. But I can do this thing you ask. I have friends.”

  “Everybody likes Yuri.”

  To which he grunted, picked up the rotary phone from its place at the end of the counter, and dialed many, many numbers. Xana, meanwhile, picked up Yuri’s model rocket and examined it. Even though the model was incomplete, enough of its parts were in place that she could recognize the famous R-7 Semyorka, with its long blouse of booster rockets—four in total—and its even-more-famous top, nicknamed Satellite-1 or, in the original Russian, Sputnik.

  “Be carefully with that,” warned Yuri, but then apparently someone picked up on the other line because his broken English suddenly morphed into a spout of—well, not Russian exactly, because every so often she recognized a word she knew was Japanese and soon after that would be a phrase from Mandarin. Ah-ha. Knowing he was in the presence of a master linguist, Yuri had decided to speak in a polyglottal code. Xana couldn’t help but be flattered—though she really wanted to know what he was saying, and to whom he
was saying it.

  But soon the telephone conversation was over and Yuri planted the receiver back on its cradle and said to her in his broken English, “Soon my friend will call back.”

  “Everybody likes Yuri.”

  He shrugged apathetically and reached for the model rocket.

  The three wooden balls above the shop door clacked together and a muscular, whistling gent in a sleeveless T-shirt and bicycle shorts strode in. For a heartbeat, Xana wondered if Yuri had called in some kind of enforcer, but then the whistling bodybuilder beelined for the Coke machine.

  Hayley must have noticed him too because she put down the ceramic pot she was admiring and ever-casually sauntered toward the farthest aisle, which coincidentally was also the one nearest the aforementioned Coke machine.

  She smiled at the wide man’s back.

  The man turned around.

  She looked away.

  He placed his fresh bottle of Coke on the floor and tightened the laces on his sneakers.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Hayley admired the way his light hair fell just below his ears. Her fingertips busied themselves with the outer edge of the wooden shelf.

  Yuri and Xana watched it all on a tiny CCTV monitor the shopkeeper had installed behind his counter. He had nine cameras hidden along the ceiling and with the flick of a switch he could pop from one shot to the next.

  “Get a lot of shoplifters in here, do you?” Xana teased him.

  “One man’s trash is other man’s treasure.”

  “Well, sure, but first the other man has to find the place.”

  “You should not bring her here.”

  “She brought me.”

  As he shook his head in disapproval, his phone chimed. He answered it on the second ring and once again his verbiage twisted itself into that complex code. On the monitor, Hayley appeared to be chatting up the musclebound bicycler.

  The bicycler laughed. Had Hayley told a joke?

  He waved good-bye to her and headed out the door.

  Hayley remained alone on the screen. Her alabaster cheeks had become roses. Xana smiled and glanced over at Yuri, who was busy scribbling a phalanx of numbers onto the back of an envelope. Whatever those numbers signified, she was confident they didn’t signify numbers.