Midnight Empire

MIDNIGHT
EMPIRE

Raised in Hobart and Albury-Wodonga, Andrew Croome now lives in Canberra. His first novel,
Document Z
, won the
Australian
/ Vogel's Literary Award and the UTS Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, as well as being short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. In 2010, Andrew was named a
Sydney Morning Herald
Young Novelist of the Year. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne and has worked as a computer programmer and writing teacher. When not writing fiction, he works as a freelance copywriter.

MIDNIGHT
EMPIRE

ANDREW CROOME

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either are the procuct of the author's imagination or are used ficticiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

First published in 2012

Copyright © Andrew Croome 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
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83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:  (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:      (61 2) 9906 2218
Email:   [email protected]
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
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ISBN 978 1 74331 112 7

Set in 12/16 pt Fairfield by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Molly

Contents

Prologue

Displacement

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Disconnection

Acknowledgements

Prologue

O
ne of the men Daniel met was Dmitri. Dmitri was twenty-eight and from the Sverdlovsk region to the east of Moscow. He was slender, but had a confident look. He was the son of a mechanic named Boris. Boris had drowned in 2002, swimming in a stream while drunk. Before becoming a mechanic, Boris had been a chess champion, spending his twenties in Moscow at a special academy. Dmitri's game of choice wasn't chess but StarCraft. He was a top-ten player in Russia, a specialist in the Protoss race. It was an impermanent achievement, an achievement that took practice, ten to sixteen hours a day, playing and strategising; a real investment of his time. Yet it didn't pay. When Boris drowned, Dmitri, his sister, Katerina, and their mother, Dasha, were forced to sell their house and move into an apartment in a block that was grey and cracking and had the feeling of nuclear poison.

For a while they did well enough. Dasha kept at her job, working as an electronic book keeper for an accountant, but it turned out that the accountant, Maxim Suvorov, had long had desires for Dasha, for her beautiful blue eyes, he told her. And now that Boris was out of the picture, he made these desires known, first in subtle ways, then more forcefully. But Dasha rejected him, saying it was too soon after Boris, and anyway, as potential lovers they were not suited (Maxim Suvorov, Dmitri heard Dasha explain to Katerina, was not only ‘potato faced' but a ‘bore'). And so Dasha was sacked, without ostensible reason, and without an income—Katerina was still in school, while Dmitri had his StarCraft—the family's finances quickly became desperate, so desperate that Dasha, watching bronze sunlight creep across the dusty carpet of the flat, considered exploiting Suvorov's affections to obtain a loan.

Instead, she gave her last fifteen hundred rubles to Dmitri. He had been chatting to another, small-time StarCraft player, Samani5, who idolised Dmitri and who had recently switched games, amassing what he would only tell Dmitri was a minor fortune playing online poker. Dmitri had heard of poker, but it hadn't occurred to him that he should play it. But of course he should play it, because Dmitri was of the opinion, as Boris and his academy instructors had been, that in intellectual games of any kind, the Russian was the superior race.

So Dmitri took his mother's money, and through an exchange service which charged three per cent commission, deposited forty-eight US dollars and fifty US cents into an online account.

Then he began to play. He had read a few articles on basic strategies and played a thousand hands alone using a deck of cards that the family had once used on holidays, yet after an hour's play online he was down to fifteen dollars. He forced himself to stop and regroup. He went for a walk around the building, rolled a cigarette and smoked, staring at the horizon.

Then he went back indoors and drove his balance up to ninety dollars without so much as thinking about it. Really, this should have worried him, as he hadn't changed his strategy or done anything in particular to deserve it. Instead, he chose to believe that he was already better than the other players. As in StarCraft, he was a master tactician, and by the day's end, when he was ready to stop, he was up five hundred and three dollars. He told Dasha, who was watching television in the apartment's cramped living room, that their money problems were over. He would play poker and make five hundred US dollars per day. Dasha kissed her son on the forehead and he felt real excitement in her body, a shake in her limbs. He showed her the balance on the screen. She got a drink for them both and they sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Boris was always very proud of you, Dmitri. He would never tell you but you can believe me. He would boast about StarCraft: “My boy is top ten in all Russia, and one day he will be the best.”'

Dmitri went to bed feeling warm and loved, and the next day he lost two hands with flushes to higher flushes and his balance dropped to zero. He could hardly believe it. It was a moment of despair and he sat for a long time.

The first resolution he made was to tell nobody; his second was to get the money back.

He opened a chat connection with Samani5 and asked to borrow five hundred dollars. Samani5 explained that that was more than he held in his account.

What do you have?
typed Dmitri.

$231.

Give it to me
, typed Dmitri.
I am a better player than you. I will return it to you five-fold
.

There was a long pause. Samani5 wrote,
OK
.

Dmitri didn't play straight away. Rather, he sat for two days with pen and paper and a deck of cards. He found his father's chess books packed away in a box and read them, looking for anything he could use. One he had never noticed before was inscribed by the grandmaster Anatoly Karpov.
Stay ruthless
, it said,
Karpov 1978
. Dmitri thought about how to apply Karpov's advice to two hole cards, five on the board, and a system of points. He considered various chess theories, opening moves, gambits and counter-gambits, forms of defence. Everything pointed towards merciless attack: bet, raise and re-raise, depending on the skill level of the opponent, on what mettle they had to call you down. But he could also see that this was a game of deep mathematics, itself unyielding. He thought that what was needed was a middle ground, the ability to fold the opponent's behaviour into the maths, to find the optimal play and to execute it without sympathy. Dmitri soon realised that what he knew was nothing. That it would take effort to master this game. But that would all be in the future. He could still win right now, as long as his opponents were worse players than himself.

Thankfully, they were. He took Samani5's two hundred and thirty-one dollars and in two days calmly played it up to more than a thousand. At this point, he withdrew five hundred dollars to give to Dasha. Then he kept going. By the week's end, he'd collected over three thousand dollars, and he paid Samani5 one thousand, one hundred and fifty-five dollars as promised, by transfer and without comment, staying off the messaging system and ignoring the man's emails.

Then Dmitri really went to work, seriously and using straight profit, money for which he didn't have to fear. He played in short two-hour bursts, four tables at once, and he paid for software that tracked his opponents' moves, showing how often they played, raised and won. Dasha brought him his meals, pelmeni and bowls of stew, and it was while eating that he reviewed his strategies, revising and interpreting and trying to see beyond, to visualise the game's landscape as would God, to take each play—the win and lose—to its limit. He began to play eight tables at once, then twelve and finally sixteen. On his monitor the cards shrank in size but he was multiplying what he felt was his growing edge.

After a month, he had won more than ten thousand dollars. He shut down his computer and stretched his shoulders and announced this to his mother. In the grim dusk they drank vodka and she asked quietly what he felt. ‘Contentment,' he said. ‘There is no excitement and there is no thrill. It feels simply as if the world has been made right.' She nodded and said that his father had been the same, all the way up to the academy where, when he finally encountered players he couldn't beat, he held them in a reverential awe, as if he himself were an amateur. Yes, despite whatever failings these few men had—and some were bastards who kicked their dogs, hit their wives and molested their daughters—Boris thought they could do no wrong; they had so transcended the ordinary world.

Six months later, Dmitri, Dasha and Katerina moved from the flat into a house. Word had spread through the StarCraft community of Dmitri's successes and he was contacted by a casino in Moscow that wanted to fly him west to participate in games there.

‘It is mostly rich businesspeople,' the manager explained. ‘They are not experts but betting small amounts is not thrilling for them. No limit. Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar blinds.' Dmitri considered it. To sit at that table he would need twenty-five thousand dollars, an insane amount to risk all at once. To date, he had won just over one hundred thousand dollars, only fifty thousand of which was in free cash. But if the game was with businesspeople, he might easily come home with that much again. He watched from his window Katerina lying on a plastic recliner in the front yard studying a biology textbook, her face the very picture of dogged concentration, of ferocious Russian aptitude, and he wanted so much to help her, to get her to university.