Midnight Empire (10 page)

The poker room at the MGM was large—fifty or more tables in an open space with a bar on a mezzanine above. If anything it felt corporate, modern and bland, a place designed by the invisible hand of private equity in which everything was aimed at the masses and in which themes, because they aged, were shunned.

He watched for a while from the bar, and then he figured that he might as well play. If he sat snug and folded almost everything, there wasn't much difference between the two anyway.

He played for an hour. The following night he came back and played for an hour again. That became his rule. It was a good rule and he discovered that if he had a Budweiser halfway through then back at the loft he found immediate sleep. And so he played to relax. He didn't try to steal pots, to bluff or make fancy moves. He only played the cards as they fell, and he didn't worry about being up or down: he was only playing for an hour, for thirty-five hands at most, and whether you were a bad player or a good one, there was no way to judge from a sample like that.

Because he folded so much, he spent a lot of time watching the other players. They were mostly quiet people who took themselves seriously, silent abstractions of whatever they were wearing, brash sunglasses or trucking caps or casual shirts. Only occasionally was there banter and what passed for personality; often it had gone sour by the time Daniel arrived and the mood at the table would be indecipherably tense and somebody would be sitting on his final warning.

Daniel would raise with pocket aces, fold with jacks to a re-raise and a call.

He would fold small pairs under the gun, flat call with kings in the cut-off.

Not everyone would be thinking hard. Often their hands were easy reads; they'd made the flush they'd bet at or they were pushing with an over-pair; or if they were pushing and you couldn't figure it out they had trips.

It was rational poker and it was by the book; it was how Daniel played as well. They all played the same but thought they could beat each other doing it. And they also hoped to capitalise on the money-givers: the beginners who overvalued everything; the European tourists spending their last cheque; the men, usually Asian, proving to themselves their bad luck. Each of these were more myth than fact, fabled animals believed to roam the hills.

But it worked for Daniel. He got home and got to sleep, and he kept his bankroll in a wall safe to keep track of it, to not mix it with his regular cash. And it shrank and grew, thinning and swelling, but that wasn't really the point.

•

After a time he began to play elsewhere. At Treasure Island, at Circus Circus, at Mandalay Bay. At Caesars Palace the poker room was literally a room. At the Bellagio, it was a zone near the sports betting with a series of low mezzanines. He went back to Bally's. Went across the street to the Flamingo. These were places of slight and unremarkable difference—worlds of shifted furniture, variations on livery and trim.

One night at the Bellagio he went up in stakes to five dollars/ ten dollars. The players in this game tended to speak to one another, to not be so serious. They were mostly regulars, he discovered. They chatted during the hands and knew each other's names and sometimes the details of their former lives. He met some of them. Oskar, a Swede who lived in the casino three months a year in a room provided by the management. Gil, a retired Israeli civil engineer who was supposed to be travelling America in a Winnebago, meeting his son in New York, but was yet to leave Vegas. A WSOP bracelet–winner named Luis Otero, a big, smiling poker pro who'd once crossed from Havana to Florida by improvised raft, and who seemed genuinely pleased if you took a pot from him, happy to congratulate you.

Nobody seemed to play the same at these stakes and it was a much better, much more open game, with lots of raising, and nobody seemed too sad if they lost. This encouraged Daniel to make some crazy plays. He had to table his entire bankroll just to sit down, but he found himself check-raising all-in with pocket fives on an ace-high board. This was against big Luis Otero, and when Daniel said those words, all in, it was as if someone else, a killer, had said them, had made a decision that Daniel knew was the right decision but one that he would never make, not for a stack of one thousand and twenty dollars. And it was only after Otero had nodded and thrown away his cards that the blood in Daniel's body grew heavy, entered a second, stranger state of pulsing weight and for a moment it was a small mystery, the question of who he was.

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 strawberries,' 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?'