Cost of Life by Joshua Corin

the only way she could ever win…
    “I’m glad to see you’re back on your own two feet,” continued Angelo. “I am. But now you need to move on and find something new.”
    “I’m forty-six years old.”
    “Yeah…in your job interviews, you may not want to open with that…”
    He tried to smile. He couldn’t quite pull it off. He diverted his gaze back to Xana’s paperwork.
    “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
    And the window once again became a mirror.
    In the reflection, her eyes were red with tears but her cheeks were still dry. Little victories, right? She chided herself over her ridiculous expectations. Not only had she burned this bridge to the ground but she had doused the flame with Ketel One. Coming here, thinking all would return to normal—how foolishly deluded she’d been!
    Except her circumstances were even funnier than that! Because she had had another job offer and she had tossed it back in Madeline’s face!
    And so Xana was laughing uproariously when the one-way glass once again became a two-way window, laughing so hard that the tears in her eyes were finally soaking the hills of her cheeks. Her shoulders bobbed with every bark of laughter. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to lose her balance and fall off the chair—but wouldn’t that be perfect!
    “Xana,” said Angelo.
    Xana held up a finger. She needed a minute…to catch…her breath…
    Ahh.
    “Sorry,” she replied, her mouth still wobbling ear-to-ear. “I’m sorry. But Aristotle was wrong. Dramatic irony is hilarious.”
    Angelo held a digital recorder up to the partition and pressed PLAY. A man’s voice bleated from its speaker a series of sentences in a language that was very much not English. He pressed STOP.
    “Do you understand what he was saying?” asked Angelo.
    “Who the hell was that?”
    “Answer my question first. Do you understand what he was saying?”
    “Yes. But who the hell was that?”
    “Translate it.”
    “Answer my question first.”
    Angelo nodded. “The foreign national under arrest, the one who is ‘possibly Middle Eastern’—that’s him. None of the translators at the airport has a clue what language he’s speaking.”
    “Well, that’s not surprising,” she answered. “The number of people in the state of Rhode Island outnumber the number of people worldwide who speak Chechen.”
    “Chechen? You’re sure?”
    “Yes. Wait. That’s the guy you have in custody?”
    “The
police
have him in custody. What is he saying on the tape?”
    Xana paused a beat before giving her translation:
    “ ‘Happy Independence Day. You’re all going to die.’ ”

Chapter 9
    Two decisions were swiftly made:
    1. Xana was—in her capacity as a private citizen—to rendezvous with the lead detectives at the airport police substation and provide linguistic support while they interrogated the suspect.
    2. Xana was to be chaperoned to and from the substation.
    “Seriously?” she asked Angelo.
    He replied with a shrug; it didn’t take an expert translator to interpret his body language thusly:
It is what it is.
    And so Xana had to be content with what she had. It was what it was. She stewed in a leather chair in the civilian anteroom and waited for her chaperone to arrive. This anteroom was yet another space with which she was unfamiliar. She had briefly passed through here on her way to the interview room. A metal detector identical to the one in the building lobby guarded a pair of bulletproof-glass doors. Another pane of bulletproof glass served as window to the reception area, where Lizzie Dreyfus, visibly pregnant, sat typing away at her PC.
    The room’s other accoutrements tended toward nostalgia. On the wall to the left of the reception window rested a plaque detailing the FBI core values. To the right of the reception window rested a tower-case of federal tchotchkes: official FBI-labeled mugs, official FBI-labeled ashtrays, et cetera. The rest of the wall space in the