Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Kristin had known that she was pushing him with this comment, but she thought that it was fair game. Murat had brought up these issues when he arrived at the consulate ten days before, seeking help. For purposes of discretion Kristin had a nominal assignment within the Cultural Affairs Section, the same as her subordinate, the blond-haired, well-attired gentleman whom Murat would never see again. However, an essential component of her true work, which was within the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a group that took on similar, albeit more anodyne assignments than their colleagues in central intelligence, was understanding what, or who, was fair game. In graduate school, she had taken a class on international negotiation and elicitation techniques, and her professor—the one who later garnered her this “special government job,” as he’d put it—had spoken quite a bit about how once an interlocutor brought up a topic it was fair game, or on the table in any negotiation, though she wondered whether Murat knew that he had entered into a negotiation with her.

  They were sitting poolside at the Çırağan Palace Hotel, which fronted the Bosphorus. Many of the hotels in the city had the word palace in their names—the famous Pera Palace Hotel, the kitschy Sultan Palace Hotel—but the Çırağan, unlike the others, happened to have been a palace. Murat had ordered a Coke. Kristin had ordered a glass of rosé. A cascade of cool, pleasant wind came off the water, so they faced toward it and not toward each other.

  Murat’s mind resided elsewhere, not concentrating on Kristin’s comments about his wife, his adopted son and the chain of events that had brought him to the consulate. He was, in fact, daydreaming about the rooms in the Çırağan Palace Hotel. The canopy beds built so tall that you had to climb a footstool to get beneath the covers. The heated marble floors in every bathroom. The east-facing terraces that looked out on the strait and welcomed the sun. Terry-cloth bathrobes. A complimentary box of chocolates left on the bed each night. Fruit left on silver trays each morning. Folded laundry placed in a box. The cheapest room was 1,076 Turkish lira per night. Dark-suited security men with chest-holstered pistols lingered by reception. Membership to the hotel club required three letters of reference. Even the most affluent families booked weddings on the grounds two years in advance. Murat’s father had taught him to swim in the hotel’s pool.

  This is what he was thinking while Kristin continued to speak, her face turned away from his, her every fourth or fifth word lost to the wind. “The fact that your son was adopted in Turkey and registered with the Central Authority does pose certain impediments. However, I could facilitate a reprocessing of his N-400 naturalization form, but this would require a special letter of dispensation from the ambassador in Ankara. With that letter in hand I could …”

  Murat wondered if they still kept the pool open in the winter, as they had done when he was a boy. He recalled his footprints in the snow, and his father’s alongside his as they approached the steaming water. The pool was almost a hundred meters long. To seal it with a cover in the winter would have created a tremendous eyesore, so they left it open and partially heated to keep it from freezing. His father had owned a majority share of the hotel in those days, so he could order the groundskeeper to turn the heat up on the pool. Shoddy management had plagued the Çırağan Palace under his father’s tenure. The heating bill, the water bill, the salaries of the employees, all of it ran over budget. His father used to joke that no other guest in the hotel paid as high a room rate as he did.

  The pool along the Bosphorus in the winter under a shroud of steam—Murat could remember it, he could almost see it, and he could feel the anxiety, the pressure on his chest, the cottony dryness in his mouth, his father’s grip on his waist pulling him across the surface of the water trying to teach him to swim. “Kick your legs. Crawl with your arms. Keep your head up, boy.” Murat would flail and when let go of he would sink. His father would heave him up. Murat would gasp the cold air. His father would repeat the commands. “Kick your legs. Crawl with your arms. Keep your head up, boy.” Then his father would let go. Again Murat would sink, and on and on they went. This was how he had been taught to swim, by nearly drowning, over and over.

  “… a letter from the ambassador carries a great deal of weight, both with the authorities here and with our Immigration Services. As you can imagine, we can’t just hand out these letters to anyone. Such a letter is usually reserved for those who have aided our diplomatic mission in some essential way …”

  His father would eventually pull him out of the pool, he would wrap Murat in a towel, and then they would put their shoes on and cross back over the snow, into the warm confines of the hotel, where in the locker room they would change back into their clothes. If Murat hadn’t complained too much, if he had been sufficiently brave with his crawling and kicking and if he’d kept his head up, then his father would take him into the hotel’s restaurant. They would sit in the plush, silk-upholstered chairs among the guests, where his father would order a cup of strong black tea, served in an oblong glass on a porcelain saucer, the steam curling across its surface, while he would order his son a single glass of Coke on ice.

  Kristin flagged down the poolside waiter. She had finished her rosé and ordered one more. “Would you like another Coke?” she asked Murat.

  “One is enough,” he said, as he emptied the warmish Coke into his glass.

  The waiter nodded, cleared Murat’s bottle and Kristin’s glass and then disappeared through a service door that was discreetly built onto the north wing of the hotel. This entrance to the kitchen was used only in the summer. In the winter the kitchen staff kept it shut, as there was no poolside service.

  The afternoon he had learned to swim, Murat’s father had left him barefoot in the snow standing beneath that doorway. Murat had defied his father as they changed for the pool, telling him that he didn’t want to swim in the cold. His father had ignored him at first, pulling off the boy’s trousers and prodding his kicking legs into a pair of swim trunks. He had then wrapped Murat in a towel and lifted him up, carrying him outside, while repeating, “Now is the time to learn.”

  Murat cried. His body convulsed in his father’s arms. When he tried to speak, his voice stuttered with hyperventilation. Unable to express himself—to speak, to bellow, to wail—in a way that would catch his father’s attention, he instead wound up his arm and smacked him. The blow landed right on his father’s temple. He calmly set down the boy near the locked doorway to the kitchen and out of sight from anyone in the hotel. “Why do I bother with you?” his father said. He tried to lift Murat and carry him inside. But Murat refused. So his father stared at him one last time with the sharp blue eyes that his son had not inherited and abandoned him out in the cold.

  Watching the waiter depart with Kristin’s empty glass, Murat estimated that perhaps thirty meters separated the pool and the doorway where his father had once left him. However, in his memory, that distance was a yawning chasm. He had stood in his swim trunks, his bare feet melting prints into the layer of snow beneath them, while his father returned inside, changed back into his business suit and then sat in the restaurant, sipping his black tea, waiting for the sense to return to his obstinate son.

  Murat could remember the sensation of the melting snow gathering beneath his toes, his inability to act, the way his body betrayed him and froze as if he were again standing in snow, and the many times he had lain in bed with Catherine, feeling that same paralysis when a demand was placed on him to perform, the germ of which had appeared so long ago, perhaps not on this day he was now remembering, but through the many altercations with his father. He knew, as he remembered, that Kristin would soon make her demands of him. Murat would have to pay for the request he’d made for his son, and even if he wanted to refuse Kristin he felt that same chill of paralysis overtaking him as he sat next to her by the pool. He would do whatever she asked, not because he wanted to, but because he couldn’t refuse.

  After his fath
er had left him, Murat decided that he would learn on his own and, not understanding the dangers of teaching yourself to swim, he ran across the snow and leapt into the pool. He could remember that moment in the air, the instant of the leap, how he hung suspended above the water while his father watched him through the restaurant’s window. Then the water encased him. Murat clamped his eyes shut, not wanting to see. His body didn’t float. He settled a few feet down, on the bottom of the shallow end, which, nonetheless, rose well above his head. A burning sensation spread through his lungs. He thought perhaps he would drown, teach his father a lesson, but the burning became too much. He braced his feet on the bottom of the pool and pushed, shuttling himself upward until he breached the surface. His body rose out of the water, past his shoulders. He could see his father rushing toward him, sprinting down the steps and out into the snow. Once again the water enveloped Murat, but now he did as his father had instructed: he crawled and he kicked. His head was thrust back, his rhythmically gasping mouth sucking the air. He inhaled in the same hyperventilating cadence as when he had struck his father a few minutes before. However, this wasn’t a tantrum—this was the struggle for breath, to evolve: to learn without being taught. This was the path Murat had decided to take when he entered the water alone.

  His father leapt into the pool fully clothed while Murat flailed his arms, accidentally striking him across the temple, in the same place he had struck him before. His father continued to lunge after him, but he couldn’t get a firm grip on his son, who jumped at him with his fists. Then he observed that Murat was, in fact, swimming. The stroke Murat had chosen didn’t have a name or, perhaps, it could have been called panic. Nevertheless, he remained afloat. His father took a step back, the vent of his suit jacket billowing up in the water. With this little bit of distance, Murat now recognized that he clung to no one and to nothing, and that whatever he was doing it was that alone which kept him from sinking. He made it to the side of the pool. Exhausted, he rested his head by the drain and listened to his breath mix with the lapping sound of the water.

  As he sat next to Kristin, Murat could hear the same rhythmic ebb and flow of the water lapping at the drain while she spoke without interruption, “… the good news is that in your case the entire process of naturalization is extremely complicated.” Kristin’s second glass of rosé had arrived and she was well into it.

  Murat turned to face her. “I don’t understand. How is that good news?”

  “The more complex a bureaucratic matter is,” Kristin said, “the more room exists for finesse.”

  “Finesse?”

  “Favors that move things along,” said Kristin.

  Murat glanced at his Coke. The ice cubes had melted. He stirred them with his straw and took another sip. It had an unpleasant, watered-down taste. “Are you offering to do me a favor?” he asked.

  “You’re going to need one to get your son’s naturalization sorted out.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about taking a favor,” Murat said.

  “That’s understandable.” Kristin stood and took a few steps to the side of the pool, where she crouched, dipping her fingers in the water, making a swirling motion. “Perfect temperature,” she said, while flicking her wet fingers toward the ground. From the small bottle of Purell she kept in her bag, she squirted a drop of hand sanitizer into her palm and then dried her hand on the back of her gray slacks. She returned to her seat next to Murat. “Your family used to own a large share of this property, didn’t they?”

  Murat reluctantly nodded.

  “The consulate used to host receptions here,” Kristin said. “I once even stayed the night. The mattresses are so thick that they have these little footstools on either side of the bed so that you can climb into it. Did you know that?”

  Again, Murat nodded.

  Kristin finished off her rosé, and before she had a chance to set the glass down, a waiter appeared to offer her another, which she refused, asking for a bottle of mineral water instead. “I read an old news clipping about the hotel’s sale to a Japanese company, in the nineties, when the Japanese were buying everything up. Who owns the property now?”

  “A group of Saudi investors,” said Murat, but as soon as he spoke he regretted having answered, which only offered Kristin a framework to continue this thread of conversation.

  “Don’t you think it should be held by a Turkish family?” she continued.

  Murat pointed to the pool. “That’s where I learned to swim.”

  Kristin lowered her sunglasses, raising a palm to shield her eyes from the glare that came off the tract of water. “It’s a beautiful place to learn to swim,” she said.

  Murat thought that perhaps he would tell her about the snow, about the day he’d jumped into the pool alone and how he’d struck his father, and about how his father had left him in the cold only to then leap into the water after him, and about how once they’d stepped from the pool the two of them sat in the locker room, Murat with a dry change of clothes and his father without one, his business suit ruined, and about how the hotel staff had brought his father a robe and slippers to wear home and the way his father had cradled his wet clothes in a dripping bundle as he crossed the lobby toward the bellman, who had a taxi waiting.

  “If you’d like your son to swim here,” she said, “I could help.”

  “I learned to swim here in winter,” said Murat. “Do you know why?”

  Kristin turned away from the pool and faced Murat, sensing, perhaps, that she had made some miscalculation about the significance of this place in his memory. If she had made such a miscalculation, the outcome was the same: he had a visceral attachment to the property, one which she could leverage.

  “My father already knew that he would have to sell his share in the hotel,” Murat explained. “He had only the one winter left to teach me how to swim and, instead of not teaching me at all, he chose to do it in the cold. I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. But, to your question, yes, I would like to teach my son to swim in this pool. And I would prefer to teach him in the summer.”

  Murat’s stare was fixed on Kristin as he spoke and her mouth was tense with the grin she endeavored to suppress. Whatever concession she sought from him, she now had. She began to explain that the U.S. diplomatic mission struggled to understand the real estate market, where many of the country’s elites allocated their wealth. It was a market, that, to use her words, required a great deal of finesse. “There is no Turkey,” Kristin explained. “There are only Turkish elites. To understand this country’s economy and politics, our embassy always needs deeper insights into their decisions, especially their investment decisions. If you could provide us with discreet, nonpublic information, we would be more than willing to assure some of your own deals, not as business partners, of course, but rather as a favor.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Murat.

  “Meaning I could provide you access to a network of accounts with, all told, a value approaching three hundred million lira, not to draw funds from, but rather accounts you could reference to the banks as proof of collateral. This would allow you to take out greater loans than they would ever approve in the normal course.”

  Murat hesitated, and Kristin wasn’t certain whether he was processing her proposal or whether he was about to reject it outright. Instead of offering more specifics, she asked Murat a few questions, ones she knew he had no answers for. “If you wanted to buy this hotel, how would you finance the purchase? Who would secure you the loan? How would you keep the local authorities from demanding kickbacks? Where would the operating cash come from? If you want your son to swim in this pool—when it’s warm, not freezing as you experienced—you need answers to these questions. But that’s just for starters. You also need answers to questions you haven’t even anticipated. I can help with that, too.”

  Murat finished the mix of melted ice and Coke in his glass.

 
“Are you sure I can’t get you another?” asked Kristin.

  He shook his head no.

  “I’d be concerned if you didn’t want to think about it,” she said, and then raised her hand in the air, making a motion like she was scribbling out a check on her palm. The waiter brought her the bill. “But I’d also be concerned if you didn’t see the wisdom in this. I’d be concerned if you didn’t say yes.”

  Murat detected the slightest threat in her last remark but left it alone.

  They crossed through the lobby, and for the first time Murat became aware of everyone who saw them together, how each of those strangers could implicate him in the relationship he might enter into with Kristin, as if suddenly the rules of his life—of who he could and could not be seen with and what those relationships meant—had shifted from the moment he had entered the Çırağan Palace Hotel to when he now left it. He had felt the same way that day many years ago, when he and his father traveled through the lobby together, the relationship between them also changing faster than Murat could understand.

  Finesse, thought Murat. It was a good word. Like the way you turn a key to a lock that doesn’t work properly: you finesse it. His business required these discreet manipulations. Had his father engaged in manipulations similar to those Kristin suggested? Murat couldn’t say. The dwindling family holdings that Murat had inherited did, however, prove that his father had possessed little finesse.

  Kristin allowed Murat to climb into the first taxi. She tipped the bellman for him as he settled into the backseat. He gave the driver directions to his office. His mind again turned to the day he had learned to swim and his father. On the drive home neither of them had spoken and his father had sat next to him with his wet clothes heaped in his lap, fishing out his wallet, keys and other valuables from his suit’s pockets. His father had also removed his watch, the Patek Philippe. He wound and rewound its mechanism, holding it to his ear, listening for the tick, tick, tick of its internal gears working tirelessly against one another. But it was a sound that in his lifetime would never return.