Midnight Empire by Andrew Croome

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I work at an air force base in the desert,’ he told her.
    â€˜You do?’ she said.
    â€˜We fly aircraft there that fly over the Middle East. I work in codes. I’m an engineer in codes.’
    â€˜What do the planes do?’
    â€˜They hunt people.’
    â€˜You kill them?’
    â€˜Not personally.’
    â€˜But that is the mission.’
    â€˜Sometimes.’
    â€˜What else?’
    â€˜Sometimes we save coalition troops. Spotting explosives.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜A few weeks ago I was mugged at knife point,’ he said eventually.
    â€˜What did he take?’
    â€˜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