Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  She ignored his question about directions, taking it for the diversion that it was. “I didn’t know you were building a fourth development in Zeytinburnu.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t mention it.”

  “Why wouldn’t you mention it?” Kristin replied.

  “I haven’t asked for your help,” said Murat. “I financed the entire project.”

  “By taking on debt against properties that are already in debt,” she said. “You should have at least let me know.”

  “If I do some projects with you and some on my own, what business is it of yours?” Murat reached to the floor and continued to gather up the workers’ scattered hand tools, carefully placing them in a nearby chest. “You always said that we were partners.”

  “We are,” replied Kristin. “That’s why between us we can’t have any misunderstandings.” She picked this last word carefully. The word that had first come to mind was secrets, but she had chosen otherwise. She recognized Murat’s selection of this meeting place for what it was: a signal of his desire to become independent of her. This wasn’t the first time he had equivocated about their relationship. After she had helped him finance his purchase of the Çırağan Palace, he had collateralized his share to take out another loan and buy another hotel, which had failed. She had bailed him out of that loss and helped finance his initial developments in İstinye, where the consulate was, and in Kadıköy, on the Asian side of the city. These had both been modest successes, so too had the Zeytinburnu developments one through three. Now there was this fourth development. Murat needed to hint no further about his intentions to end his relationship with Kristin. That he’d financed this development on his own was indication enough.

  “How is William?” Kristin asked.

  “I haven’t seen much of him recently,” Murat confessed. He then finished straightening up the scattered workmen’s tools in the dark.

  “You should bring him to more of our meetings. We look more natural with him around. And he’s such a smart boy,” Kristin said wistfully. “But it sounds like your days have been busy.”

  “They have, and that’s what I wanted to discuss with you,” said Murat. “An opportunity has come up.” He explained how officials from the Ministry of Interior had approached him about putting in a bid for a new football stadium in Beşiktaş. “The government will be my partner in the financing,” he said. “It’s part of a much larger development initiative revitalizing the city. All of the political leadership—the Kemalists, the Gülenists, the Islamists—every one of them is profiting in their own way. It would be helpful for you to have inside information on all of this development, right?”

  Cautiously, Kristin nodded. “Yes,” she said, “that would be helpful.”

  Murat pursed his lips, as if he had tasted something bitter. “It’s always difficult to partner with a government, any government.” He had begun to stroke his chin. Kristin had long ago learned that when living a double life, the person who could be hurt the most by the truth was oneself and so Murat’s concern about working for a government seemed sincere, as if he had deluded himself to the point of believing that his work with Kristin, for her government, fell into some other category, that it wasn’t government work at all.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out how to navigate it,” she said.

  He nodded and continued to stroke his chin. “You and I will do a side deal,” said Murat, “and then I’ll let the ministry know that I plan to put in a bid for the stadium.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by side deal.”

  Murat elongated his neck, making a face like he was sniffing the air, and then he looked out over the city. In every direction new towers rose from similar construction sites. Enormous, T-shaped cranes bristling with lights picketed the horizon. The national flag—a red banner with a white crescent moon pinching a five-sided star—hung from the crossbeams of the crane arms. The wind rippled through them. There was a patriotic fervor to all of this construction, as if it wasn’t just buildings but an entire people that were sprinting skyward from the great, gaping concrete-lined holes in the ground. But like any sprint, it was unsustainable. Murat needed to draw a profit while he could. As he looked at the city, he didn’t see progress. He didn’t see the development as distance traveled forward. Rather, he saw this progress as the distance they would all travel backward when the inevitable happened: the collapse.

  “This Zeytinburnu Four project is on schedule but over budget.” Murat stared at the clutter of handsaws and screwdrivers littering the floor. He picked up a hammer. “Each wasted nail costs me a cent,” he complained. “These sloppy workmen have their hands in my pockets.”

  “So the side deal is we help you get the money to break even?” asked Kristin.

  Murat told her that he couldn’t afford to have this project fail. Such an embarrassment would be ruinous. He then approached a wooden joist braced against an internal wall. With pinched fingers he held the point of one of the nails against the bare side of the timber. “Do you know the secret to hammering a nail in with a single stroke?” he asked.

  “Hit the nail hard?” she said.

  He was taking long practice strokes with the hammer. One eye closed as he lined up his strike. He glanced back at her, dissatisfied by her answer. “Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than brute strength,” he said. “To get the nail all the way through on the first try you don’t need to hit it hard, what you need is to have perfect follow-through. You need a vision of the nail buried into the wood. If you can see it, then the nail will slide right in.”

  She stood quietly next to him.

  He took a couple of deep breaths, winding up and then decelerating the hammer just as it came close to striking. He then cocked his arm all the way back. His body was coiled, the entirety of its energy focused on the three-millimeter surface of the nail head. His hand darted forward. It moved with speed instead of strength, as if he were grasping a hot coal from a fire. The nail entered the wood not with a thud, but with a sharp pop. Murat dropped the hammer to the floor. He bent over at the waist, clutching his hand to his chest.

  He cursed, and then jabbed his index finger and thumb into his mouth.

  “You all right?” Kristin asked.

  He winced, gazed up and then ran his uninjured fingers over the wood, which was completely flush from where his single stroke had pounded the nail all the way into the joist, splitting the grain. “See,” he said, his fingers still in his mouth. “One stroke.”

  She again asked if he was okay.

  He held out his hand. His thumb was bleeding from underneath the fingernail. “You have to envision the nail buried into the wood,” repeated Murat.

  “And keep your fingers out of the way,” added Kristin.

  “So what about our side deal?” he asked.

  “How am I supposed to justify helping you get that money?” replied Kristin. “You got involved in this fourth Zeytinburnu project without consulting us. Now you want us to underwrite the rest so that you can finish it without embarrassing yourself. That’s a lousy deal.”

  “If this project fails, maybe I lose the football stadium?” said Murat. “People are saying the government is overreaching with so much new construction. They are building in Eminönü, İstinye, Levent. I’ve even heard they’re going to dig up Gezi Park for a shopping mall. When this whole system collapses, when the construction boom is over, I’m going to be very helpful as you try to decipher what remains.”

  “What makes you so certain that it’s all going to collapse?”

  “Too many people in this country have gotten rich,” he said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Kristin.

  “Ministers, deputy ministers, party officials, their sons, their nephews, too many of the wrong people have gotten
rich. Everyone is taking a cut. Those cuts have already sliced off the head of this whole economy. It has been a gradual decapitation, so gradual that no one has noticed. And they won’t notice until we walk into a wall.”

  “How much do you need?” asked Kristin.

  He told her.

  She ran her finger over the joist where he’d pounded in the nail. “That’s a lot of money,” she said. “How did you get that deep into debt?”

  Murat didn’t answer her. The wind had died down. The thirteenth floor was very quiet now. He didn’t want to explain himself further. His pride wouldn’t allow it. He looked past Kristin, out to the jagged skyline and its many incomplete and hollow buildings. The flags affixed to the crane arms hung limp. The air no longer moved them. The collapse was coming, Murat thought. She could believe him or not.

  He picked up another nail and placed it against the joist.

  “What are you doing?” asked Kristin.

  He gripped the hammer and again began with his long, overarticulated practice swings. He sighted down the wooden handle, taking aim, breathing slowly. “This time I’m going to do it without my own hand getting in the way.”

  Kristin turned in the other direction. She couldn’t watch.

  One o’clock on that afternoon

  The three of them wander out of the restaurant and into the gleaming corridors of Akmerkez. Having slept no more than a few hours the night before, they stumble dazedly among the other shoppers. Catherine loops her arm through Peter’s. William walks on his own. To pass the time they stop and browse the occasional storefront. William asks for nothing, except to be left alone to look at whatever he pleases and to fiddle with Peter’s camera, which hangs heavily from his neck. Catherine and Peter linger behind him, speaking in hushed tones.

  “You can stay at my apartment as long as you need,” says Peter, choosing to focus on a problem he can solve as opposed to the crucial problem of the passports.

  Catherine nods.

  “Could someone from your family wire you a bit of money?” he asks. But Peter knows little about Catherine’s family, just what he’s learned from the occasional offhand remark, that she’s an only child and had gone to five different schools growing up, that her father had made and lost his fortune about the same number of times, and that her mother, a socialite and homemaker, had managed to weather these upheavals while running their household, raising Catherine and even remaining beautiful well into her later years, always suspecting that when her husband finally lost everything she’d be forced to fend for herself and that her looks alone would have to sustain her. The secret of those youthful looks, Catherine had once explained, was a daily ice bath, a practice she planned to take up herself. Where her parents are now, whether they are still in good health, she has never volunteered. The parts of Catherine’s life and of Peter’s which fell outside the scope of their affair had mostly gone unmentioned. Certain boundaries existed.

  In the confines of his apartment on those many afternoons in his bed, they had hardly spoken of such things. What had he learned of her? That as a girl she had once successfully auditioned for a summer program at the School of American Ballet, that as a young woman she had left home with Murat to escape her family, who were critical of her unfulfilled ambitions, even though leaving with Murat meant she turned her back on those very same ambitions. When she left, she hadn’t cut ties with her family, or at least she hadn’t wanted to. Her mother and father had visited only once, though it hadn’t really been a visit, rather an intervention, just before she married Murat. And after they married, her parents never returned. They had wanted to support her, money was no issue, but they would do so only on their terms, if she crafted a life acceptable to them. When she refused their support, she refused their vision of her life. Peter learned that she had continued to write them and that they had never responded, and that when she had written with news of William and they still didn’t respond, she wrote a final letter, and then stopped writing altogether.

  When Peter had asked what that letter said, she had waved her hand dismissively and mentioned something about Cortés burning his ships while she smiled, and when he looked into her eyes, they were wide as empty plates and endlessly sad so he couldn’t smile back. She had then kissed him, relieving him of the pressure to say something reassuring. Often they said very little, cocooning themselves in silence. During their lovemaking she fitted herself to him and afterward they would lie in his bed, reposed in whatever raw sunlight came through the windows, or they would end up in the living room, watching television, reruns mostly. Lately, they had developed an affinity for the reality show Survivor.

  When Catherine doesn’t respond, Peter again asks if someone in her family might wire her a bit of money. She tells him that she wants nothing from them, that she will take nothing from them and that if she returns home she will refuse to see them, just as they have refused to see her since she’s left.

  “What about calling Kristin at the consulate?” Peter asks.

  “It takes two weeks to issue a new passport,” Catherine replies.

  William scrambles over to them from the pet store. He grasps Catherine by the wrist, leading her to a partition of stalls at the window, each filled with a litter of two or three puppies. Nestled in a bed of shredded newspapers and spilled food pellets is a terrier. The dog’s white coat is feathered with grime. Filth cakes around his black nose. His rheumy gray eyes focus on nothing in particular, not even William, who now shows Peter a couple of photographs that he has taken of the dog.

  The shop owner steps out from the store. He crouches to eye level with William and beckons him inside with a wave. William looks to his mother, who in turn looks to Peter. There is something very dangerous about allowing a boy to play with a dog that he can never have, thinks Peter.

  The insistent shop owner waves to them again.

  “Why not,” says Catherine, unable to say otherwise to her son.

  As they come through the door, the shop owner proudly hooks his thumbs beneath a set of suspenders that bow outward where his gut hangs heavily over his belt. A pair of spectacles balance on the bridge of his bulbous nose. When he peers over their rims at Peter, he grins, having successfully persuaded them inside. But there is something insidious in his jolly affectation, like that of a fairy-tale villain who lures children away from their homes.

  The store is a maze of chirping birds, gurgling aquariums and sacks of vitamin-enriched pet foods. The choking animal-scented air smells like too much creation in too small a place. William seems to notice none of this. He hands Peter back his camera and follows the shop owner toward the dogs. William can’t see over the partition, so Peter lifts him beneath the arms. The sound of the yipping dogs grows louder as William looks down at them and they vie for his attention. He points toward the terrier, his original pick, which he had seen through the window. Peter sets William back on the floor. The shop owner nods and then shouts after a young woman in hijab and jeans, who appears from a storeroom office. He points out the little terrier to the girl. She leans deeply over the partition to pick him up, a maneuver the owner can’t perform himself, inhibited as he is by his girth.

  She places the squirming white terrier in William’s cradled arms.

  The shop owner claps Peter on the shoulder. “You good, baba,” he says.

  The compliment rings hollow to Peter as he isn’t William’s father, and he has no intention of buying William the dog.

  The terrier gives William a quick sniff and then begins to lick his face, faster and faster, as if the more he tastes the greater appetite he has. With both of her hands resting on William’s shoulders, the girl in the hijab steers him to a sofa beneath a display of aquariums, where Catherine has installed herself among the cushions, continuing to scroll through airline flights on her phone. Clutching the puppy to his chest, William sits alongside his mother. Deep as the sofa is, his legs
extend straight out in front of him and his feet dangle above the floor. The terrier soon scrambles free from his grip, making a play for Catherine’s lap. William lunges after him but loses his balance. Both he and the little dog topple over, swallowed by the cushions.

  Catherine helps William up and places the dog back in his arms, but the terrier isn’t content to stay there and continues to lunge toward her lap, his front paws pedaling in that direction while William clutches the dog’s body. The shop owner then reaches into a brown paper bag beneath the cash register. He palms William a fistful of greasy dog treats. The terrier calms, content to eat from William’s cupped hand.

  The shop owner stands shoulder to shoulder with Peter in the center of the store. “Boy, dog, make good friend,” he says. Peter glances over at Catherine, who remains immersed in her phone, searching out a solution to the myriad problems presented to her on its screen.

  William kneads the terrier’s white coat. “Can he come home with us?” His eyes rebound between his mother and Peter as if he is uncertain who in this new situation possesses the authority of that home. Peter hesitates to speak, hoping that Catherine might refuse her son. But she says nothing, and instead only leans more deeply toward her screen.

  Peter gently explains to William that this isn’t the right time for him to have a dog. The terrier finishes the last treat, licks William’s palm and once again breaks away from the boy’s grip and makes for his mother’s lap. The shop owner waves over the girl in the hijab, who had returned to her office in the back room. He recites a paragraph to her in a clipped, barely audible mutter. Intermittently, his eyes fix on Peter. Each of these looks is like a punctuation mark as he speaks. Peter understands none of it.

  The shop owner finishes his speech. He lifts the dog from William’s lap and helps the boy from the sofa to his feet. He guides William to a display where they sell collars. Before Peter can protest further, the girl explains that William can take the terrier home on a trial basis and that if things don’t work out the dog can always be returned. “Keep him for two weeks,” she says. “If he’s too much trouble, bring him back.” But she must know the impracticality of this because she speaks with a sour, guilty look, as if her words are a piece of fruit she has bitten into only to discover it spoiled when it passes into her mouth.