Midnight Empire Read online

  There was a man called Bill, whom they teased for wearing the same cap, always, a toothpick in his mouth.

  There was a woman called Sarah with Sunglasses, who raised twice the blind with ace-king, always this set amount with this hand, and people would announce ‘Ace-king’ when she did it; every time she would smile from behind her glasses and whenever she showed her hand it was.

  There was a player they couldn’t get to say anything, an Asian man—some said he was Cambodian and some said Vietnamese. He also wore sunglasses and they spoke to him directly but he was as silent as a mirror.

  There was Lance the Leak, a baseball player who’d been signed for two million but hadn’t been as good as his promise. He’d been sold a year into his contract to the Las Vegas 51s, minor league, and he was angry about it—he was an arsehole to everyone—and they all wanted to play him because he was slowly giving up the two million in five-dollar chips.

  There was an Arab whose name was bin Laden. He was a distant relative and was said to be in Vegas studying the architecture, something to do with shopping malls. They called him the Terrorist, and there was a deal among the players that when the Terrorist was facing a tough decision and his opponent wanted to be paid off, the opponent would signal and someone else would then tell the Terrorist that he was pot committed, just looking at it, and nine times out of ten this would cause the man to call.

  There was a woman they called the Russian Mail Order, a blonde about thirty years old who wore a fair amount of make-up and gold jewellery and who everyone presumed was staked by a rich American husband, even if the husband was never seen. One night she cashed in at the same time as Daniel was leaving, and she brushed against him while putting her chips on the counter and then proposed that they get a drink. She was a striking woman, tall and no-nonsense—she was intimidating and he didn’t dare say no.

  So they went to a bar in the Bellagio as far as possible from the poker room and she bought them drinks, a sweet-tasting gin. Her name, she said, was Ania and she wasn’t Russian but Polish, from Warsaw, and she mentioned nothing about money from any rich husband. In fact, she said she knew what they called her, some of the men; she thought it was unavoidable—they were pigs, but pigs who mostly folded to her bluffs because they didn’t go to war with attractive women, meaning she won money off them because they wanted to take her to bed. Really, though, the last thing she wanted to talk about was poker.

  ‘I have never been to Australia,’ she said. ‘I would like to go there. The beaches.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘In America the beaches are not beautiful.’

  ‘I’m sure they are.’

  ‘No. I have been living in Port Mallory on the east coast. You know it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was with a man there. A bit of a pig.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘If I wanted to tell you a long story it would be about the human uses of marriage for economic benefit.’

  ‘You married him?’

  ‘A fisherman. We lived on Fletcher Street in a big new house, which made no sense—it was a seaside town and he was a wealthy man but it didn’t even have a view of the ocean.’

  She took out a packet of cigarettes but Daniel declined. ‘He told people that we’d met in Bangkok,’ she said. ‘Of course, he was not all bad. He didn’t once take me on his boat but we did do a lot of trekking—there is some good country there. He was good when we were hiking but at home he was a shit.’

  She laughed and her face lit up. ‘This isn’t a long story but he saw prostitutes, girls who gave massages and pulled cocks in their shitty Port Mallory lounge rooms. I found out about it from his call history. He’d even gone to school with one of them.

  ‘Of course almost as soon as I had citizenship I was gone. That is the way. I rang from the airport in Miami while he was at sea and said I was leaving because of his affair with his high-school sweetheart. More or less that sent him up the wall. He was going to kill me. He told me to be at home when he made port or he would track me down and that would be that. And so I said, “I am leaving for New York in fifteen minutes and from there I have an international connection. I am a woman of the world and you don’t even have a passport. That in itself is a week’s head start. Do you really think you can catch me?”’

  She laughed again and touched Daniel’s shoulder. ‘Now you tell me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything. I don’t mind. Any story you have.’

  He thought she was a beautiful and impressive woman. Her eyes were hard blue and they were soulful. His urge was to tell her something of himself that would put him in her league.

  ‘I work at an air force base in the desert,’ he told her.

  ‘You do?’ she said.

  ‘We fly aircraft there that fly over the Middle East. I work in codes. I’m an engineer in codes.’

  ‘What do the planes do?’

  ‘They hunt people.’

  ‘You kill them?’

  ‘Not personally.’

  ‘But that is the mission.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Sometimes we save coalition troops. Spotting explosives.’

  ‘No, what else about you.’

  He didn’t know what to tell her. There didn’t seem to be anything about himself that wouldn’t be mundane compared to escaping what he thought must have been terrible poverty or a dire situation in Poland, coming to the United States to marry a man she did not like—a thing that you read about in books and saw in movies and in real life didn’t believe.

  ‘A few weeks ago I was mugged at knife point,’ he said eventually.

  ‘What did he take?’

  ‘Nothing. I wrestled him for the knife and I think maybe I broke his knee.’

  Ania looked at him. She made a face like are-you-serious. Then she said, ‘This I would not have picked,’ and he didn’t know if she meant that she wouldn’t have picked him for doing something like that or that she wouldn’t have picked him tonight had she known. That made him think about the other men that she’d probably done this with—selected—and about how they were men while he still felt like a boy, and how inferior he was going to be, how terrifically hopeless, in a few moments when they went upstairs.

  But then he drank the gin—she had her fingers on his now—and he decided that he shouldn’t care if he embarrassed himself, having never been with anyone but Hannah. And besides, there did seem to be something forgiving about Ania.

  The gin was very good. He asked her what it was. ‘It is just gin,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we take it to my room.’

  He began to see Ania regularly. If he came to the Bellagio she was often there. But he also bought a pre-paid phone so that they could exchange numbers and she would message him to meet, usually at a bar but occasionally at her room.

  She had soft skin, pearly, and the blue of her veins was visible in places. She had ears that seemed too small and breasts that were flat like plates. She had yellow teeth from smoking.

  Their partnering wasn’t as terrible as he’d predicted. (And it was Ania, after all, who mostly messaged him, so how awful could it have been?) Both of them knew they weren’t serious. Ania said that they were comfortable, and Daniel thought that was a good enough way to describe it.

  Her room faced north, a view of the Caesars towers. They lay in the dark and talked about many things, politics, Las Vegas, America’s good manners, its small insanities and larger ones. They spoke about Warsaw, finally, and it turned out that the reason Ania had left Poland was her father.

  Sometimes they met at Bill’s Burgers, sometimes at a piano bar called Beethoven’s and sometimes at Tom’s Irish Pub. Sometimes, if Ania had won a lot at the tables while he’d been at Creech, they ordered champagne to the room.

  When she was in the shower (she always washed after the game) he carefully checked her passport, and it was true, she was an American.

  ‘Let’s eat strawb
erries,’ she said. ‘I want to eat strawberries and cream with you.’

  If his history was nothing, hers was everything: her great-grandfather had fought against the Red Army at the battle of Warsaw; her grandfather was a founder of the Polish Communist Party but had later become a right-wing nationalist, fighting at first the Nazi occupation then the Soviet one; her great-uncle had created an underground university called the Intellectual Hand-Grenade of the Resistance, before he was gunned down in the street by a sixteen-year-old boy.

  Ania never came to the Nexus. Didn’t want to. When they lay in bed, she liked to lock her fingers in his, to do this tightly and not let go. She said they shouldn’t get too involved. ‘This town doesn’t allow for feelings,’ she said. ‘It’s the shallowest place on earth.’

  On this theme, she said that her favourite book was Madame Bovary. ‘Look for a book about Las Vegas,’ she dared him. ‘You won’t even find a bookstore here. I have tried!’

  It seemed he was always asleep before her. In the mornings he was able to wake and dress himself without disturbing her.

  They never talked about poker. She kept her bankroll with the Bellagio’s cashier, accessed via a swipe card and PIN. He didn’t ask how much she had won but a good session was a thousand dollars or more.

  ‘We haven’t talked about the future,’ he observed after they’d known each other for a few weeks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, don’t you have plans?’ he asked. ‘Things you want to do?’

  She thought about this. ‘Maybe I want to return to Poland, do you mean? Maybe I want to live in Paris or in New York or Istanbul?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, how long are you here for?’

  ‘I don’t think I have decided,’ she said.

  They were in a piano bar. The pianist was playing a soft American-sounding song they didn’t know.

  ‘What will make you decide?’ he asked.

  Ania took a while to respond. ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘When I have enough money, I suppose.’

  ‘Enough for what?’

  ‘For the plan I don’t yet have, wise guy.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s alright. It’s a good question that you are going to ask. You should ask it.’

  He said, ‘Alright. What are you doing with your life?’

  ‘I am playing cards,’ she said. ‘I am a card player.’

  ‘A professional.’

  ‘This I don’t know about. I would just say that I win.’

  ‘You are winning at cards.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A lot of money?’ He knew this was breaking the rules.

  She sipped at her drink, thinking. ‘Maybe for other people it would be a lot of money,’ she said. ‘But I am playing cards.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Let me explain,’ she said. ‘When I stop playing, which I will one day, then what I have accumulated, that will be a lot of money. It will be my money, in a bank. But until I stop playing I am not playing with money. What I mean is that I cannot afford to think that I am. Do you see? If you begin thinking about the value of the money you are betting and what you might do with it, by considering your future for example, then you will be scared. You will be at a disadvantage. The other players, who do not care about the value of money, they will run right over you. They will figure out what you are saying to yourself in your head and they will kill you dead. So the moment you have a plan for the future, that will be the moment the game turns and you begin to lose. In other words, for a card player, what you and I are doing, this is a dangerous conversation to have.’

  He understood, or thought he did. The waitress came over and Ania ordered another round. ‘What about you?’ she said then. ‘I do not see a professional player, therefore you must have plans?’

  ‘Well,’ he began, but he couldn’t immediately think of anything, so he said, ‘I suppose I’m just here for now, like you.’ But he wasn’t sure whether that was true.

  ‘Fighting a war,’ she said.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Tell me why you wanted to do that. Why did you volunteer?’

  ‘I didn’t volunteer.’

  ‘You did not? Were you conscripted?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘It is simply that I have a job. I am doing my job.’

  ‘You are at war because of your job?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She seemed to find this amusing. ‘But that is not romantic,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to believe that you are my hero, if it is your job?’

  ‘I . . .’ he began.

  But Ania was still thinking. ‘Will that be your epitaph,’ she joked, ‘when you are killed? “Doing his job.”’

  This annoyed him. ‘To begin with, I won’t be killed,’ he said.

  ‘You are fighting a war, but you won’t be killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. If what you are fighting is a war, then you must surely be in danger of dying. Otherwise, what you are fighting is not a war. It is something else.’

  ‘We drop bombs on people,’ he said. ‘They are trying to harm people and we blow them up. I don’t know what else you’d call it.’

  She thought about this as the song finished. ‘Then you must be wrong,’ she said. ‘And somebody out there is hoping to kill you.’

  6

  The city of rooftops and the maroon Toyota Crown. They spotted it parked in the Pakistani dawn, two blocks from the safe house near the police station. The early light gave its hood a serene glaze. This was north of the Old City—an alleyway off a main road.

  Raul rang Dupont. The agent’s voice was flat calm. It was agreed that Dupont would send someone, one of the paramilitaries, a boy who’d check the bumper for a specific dent—the car’s plates were often changed.

  From this height you could see the city getting started, the streets beginning to fill, the bazaars setting up. In the control station they sat in silence but you could imagine the becoming rumble, the trade of voices and the traffic and a million domestic sounds, the hammer of small industry. The light grew more golden before it turned white. They climbed and then circled as high as they could, the city below and the mountains in the west.

  Raul was at Daniel’s shoulder, checking the encryption. Then they were all watching the screens, the Toyota at the apex of their vision, a building stream of people flowing past it on their morning way; you could actually see some of them brushing their teeth.

  The car was the car: Dupont rang to say his boy had confirmed it. For a while they looked for the boy in their vision, but even knowing he was there they could not tell who or where he was. Raul plucked one of the images of Abu Yamin from the wall, taken from height, from a Predator, and stuck it above the command console. Then they watched the flow of people, their view of the alley rotating slowly with the circle of the drone.

  Dupont rang. What was the plan? Leave the car with the boy and check the other houses?

  ‘We’ll stay with the car,’ said Raul.

  That was at 8 a.m., drone time, and at midday they sent Daniel for food. He stepped out of the control station into the cool night of the desert and went to the mess. He got four subs: a ham and cheese; a cheese steak; a chicken and mayonnaise; roast turkey. He got four bottles of Zasp and four of Friar’s Cola. They packed it all into a paper bag for him, and then he walked back to the station, his feet crunching on the gravel.

  They watched the car while they ate, the drone on autopilot but it wasn’t a system fully trusted. Ellis didn’t leave his seat.

  To fill time, Moore told the story of the enormous shadow, a great darkness which had once stretched across the landscape towards his drone. It came from the horizon and at first he had thought it was a fault with the camera. He’d adjusted the drone’s attack but there was no technical problem, everything shifted with him—the blackness was a thing of the landscape, real. For a moment,
he’d thought to seize the controls and change direction, but the thing, the impossible and mysterious force, was moving too fast, deleting all before it, and so he just gave in, held the drone steady; it was as if he was surfing and a tsunami had suddenly appeared as big as a house, sure death, what could you do but dive under, so he said.

  When the blackness hit the drone, everything visual vanished. The instruments showed nothing out of the ordinary but the night vision started to work. He flew like this for seven minutes, afraid to touch the controls. Nothing but darkness until, on the horizon, white light again, sweeping towards him. And he realised before that light met him above the desert that he’d just flown through a solar eclipse. The fact of it was remarkable—the moon and the sun, that abstract solar world, suddenly present and tangible with its impossible mass, speed and gravity; it was sublime wonder and terror, a reminder of the absurdity of man. He felt like some kind of New World explorer; he knew what had happened but that didn’t explain it and the natives were going apeshit and maybe he wanted to go apeshit too. But instead he flew on. He completed the mission, and on the debriefing form, under non-critical notes, he wrote, Solar Eclipse. Drone reaction nil. And nobody read it. Or if they did, nobody cared.

  Daniel’s father sent him a book, Europe’s Skies, the story of the development of armed planes. He sat in the Starbucks at the Fashion Show Mall and read about trench warfare and bomblets, about the war planes of Austro-Hungary, England and France. He read about the genius of the interrupted gear that enabled guns to fire through the arc of the spinning propeller. He read about the Fokker and the Sopwith, the Nieuport and the Bristol Scout; about warring pilots trying to drop objects on each other, bricks and shoe irons, and in one case a feral cat.