Aristide had grown accustomed to success, as he had to luxury.

There had been a time when he could hardly afford to eat, but he had left that far behind in favor of bespoke suits, silk lingerie, and a weekly manicure. All of it was, of course, unnecessary for survival, but on occasions when he had been suddenly deprived of it he felt as if the earth had turned to quicksand underneath his feet.

This swift disillusionment felt discomfitingly similar.

They had heard the blast, faintly, even this far across town: a crack that echoed into juddering ripples. The window of their shared parlor looked south, and so they had a decent view of the smoke rising into the painful brightness of the winter sky. Smoke coming from the docks, near the train yards.

Aristide already knew what had happened, fifteen minutes before the special bulletin interrupted Margaret Tse’s Melody Hour midway through an advertisement for Snyder’s Straights.

“I told you,” said Daoud, as they sat listening to another iteration of Aristide’s failure on the wireless. “I said it would go badly.”

“Please,” said Aristide, drunk and irritated. Half a martini sat on the glass-topped table at his elbow; he’d lost count of how many he’d had. “You didn’t. You couldn’t even have known.”

“It was a stupid idea.” Daoud stood from the sofa and stalked to the desk, littered with papers. He picked one up by its corner and frowned at it as though it were a slimy thing pulled from a gutter. “You have lost a heap of money and any leverage you might have had.” With that, he sunk into the chair behind the desk. It squealed beneath his negligible weight, which meant he must have fallen with some force. He had grown older in the last five years, but not much stouter.

“I followed you into Oyoti,” said Daoud, putting a beleaguered hand to his head. “Into Niallo Benggi. I picked chiggers out of your feet. And all I have ever earned is scorn. What is it about this man? Why does he make you act this way?”

Aristide’s laughter turned into a wet cough, which made him breathless and dizzier than the alcohol would have done alone. At the end of it, he swallowed phlegm and finished his martini. Fishing inelegantly for the lemon twist at the bottom of his empty glass, he asked, “Jealous, are we?”

“I would be insane.” It wasn’t cruel or vindictive. If anything, Daoud sounded surprised Aristide would suggest such a thing. “I am only trying to understand. All my life I have worked hard, done well, given others everything they asked from me. And I get nowhere. I get nothing. Cyril DePaul has betrayed, failed … he has floundered through his life. You were famous, and wealthy, and you threw away everything for him.”