Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  As an official from the diplomatic corps, Kristin could have intervened on Catherine’s behalf, curtailing this extraneous line of inquiry. Yet she didn’t. The detective had embarked on an interrogation of Catherine that filled holes in Kristin’s understanding as well. Most fundamentally, she witnessed the lengths Catherine would go to in order to protect Peter.

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  Catherine went silent.

  The detective again peered around the side of his computer screen. Soft furrows took shape across his forehead. He asked her once more, but with a gentler voice, coaxing her.

  “He told me.”

  “So you’ve been to his apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  Catherine glanced at Kristin with pleading eyes, as if not understanding why she wouldn’t help her. Kristin stared away. If Catherine had any inclination to lie, claiming someone else had been with her and Peter, Kristin’s apathy must have convinced her that the truth would do no harm. “Yes, alone,” Catherine said.

  The detective resumed typing at his computer.

  “How do you know Peter’s friend Deniz?” the detective asked.

  “Deniz is my friend,” answered Catherine. “I introduced him to Peter.”

  The booking officer wandered back into the office. He carried a tray of tea and a plate of sugar cookies. The detective offered them each a glass, which they took. They had been speaking for some time and it was well past breakfast.

  “I apologize,” said the detective, his mouth now filled with a cookie. He took a sip of tea and swallowed. “How do you know Deniz?”

  “We work together.”

  “Where?”

  “At an art museum.”

  “Which art museum?”

  Catherine reached for the plate of cookies, placing one into her mouth. She chewed slowly, buying herself a few seconds. “Is that relevant?” she asked.

  The detective didn’t answer. Instead he dipped behind his computer screen. He registered a few strokes on the keyboard and clicked at his mouse. Reading from his screen, he announced, “The Istanbul Modern.”

  Catherine glanced over her shoulder at Kristin, who leaned closer and speaking in a whisper advised, “Don’t assume they’re asking you because they don’t know.” Kristin then settled back into her chair.

  Catherine sat up a little straighter. “Yes, the Istanbul Modern,” she said to the detective, who nodded with a false appreciation.

  “You mentioned that you work there as well?” asked the detective.

  “I do.”

  “I have no record of that.”

  “I am a trustee of the museum.”

  “There’s no record of you working for the museum,” he repeated.

  “To what record are you referring?” asked Catherine. Impatiently, she stood from her seat and leaned over his desk, trying to glimpse his computer screen. On reflex, the detective angled the screen away and asked her to sit down, which she did but only after Kristin instructed her to as well.

  “I am looking at the payroll for the Istanbul Modern,” explained the detective. “You aren’t on it. So how is it that you work there?”

  “Trustee isn’t a paid position,” answered Catherine.

  She then guided the detective to the Istanbul Modern’s website, where a few tabs deep into its interface a page lurked with the photographs and biographies of the dozen or so trustees. “So you don’t work there,” answered the detective, after inspecting the website.

  “The work isn’t paid,” said Catherine, “but I work there.”

  An irreconcilable gulf existed between Catherine and the detective. Kristin thought to insert herself into the exchange, to attempt to explain to the detective Catherine’s role at the Istanbul Modern as a patron of the arts, but she decided against it, feeling certain that trying to convince the detective to decouple pay from work was a fool’s errand, one she would surely fail at because she wasn’t certain that she could make the leap herself.

  “When did you first meet Deniz?” asked the detective. He stared at his screen, the answer clearly before him.

  “If you already know,” said Catherine, “then why are you asking me?”

  The detective asked again.

  Kristin interjected, “I’m going to instruct her not to answer unless you can explain to me why this is relevant.” The detective leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. “This man, Deniz, is a person of interest to us, a troublemaker who has incited riots against his government.” Then the detective pointed an accusatory finger at Catherine. “She is deeply connected to him.”

  “They work together, that’s it,” said Kristin. “This questioning is uncalled for.”

  The detective motioned for Kristin to step behind his desk. Two documents split the computer screen. The first was the payroll from the Istanbul Modern, which listed Deniz’s steadily increasing salary dating from late 2006, when he had presumably begun work there. The second document was a scanned form from the Central Authority dated only a few weeks prior to the first salary entry. It was William’s birth certificate. Aside from William’s name there were only two others on it.

  Kristin read over the document, glancing at Catherine, who had now clasped her hands together and pulled them between her knees, hunching into herself. Outside the glass office Deniz tended to Peter, who stubbornly tried to open his eyes, but without success. “Is it illegal for an American to adopt a child in this country?” asked Kristin, but her voice was heavy, tinged with defeat.

  The detective ignored her, resuming his line of questioning with Catherine. “Your husband is Murat Yaşar?”

  Catherine nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “This boy William is his adopted son?”

  “What difference does that make?” asked Kristin, but the detective continued.

  “Who else knows who the boy’s father is?”

  “How is that relevant?” asked Kristin, cutting off the line of questioning.

  The detective planted his elbows on his desk and wove his fingers together. “You’re right,” he said. “It isn’t relevant to this arrest. We just thought you and your colleagues at the consulate would like to know what we know about Murat Yaşar.”

  “All right then,” said Kristin. “Now we know.”

  “Good,” said the detective. “And so do we.” Kristin stepped out from behind the desk. She took Catherine by the arm, guiding her to her feet. “She is married to an important man,” the detective continued. “I don’t think he’d like this information about his wife and son out in public.”

  “Are you going to let Peter and Deniz go?” Catherine interjected.

  The detective shuffled through his desk drawer, producing two notarized forms replete with stamps and official seals. “These are copies of their release orders. We’ll have them out of here this afternoon.” He offered up the documents to Kristin, who folded them in half and tucked them into her coat pocket. Kristin then led Catherine toward the door, where they passed unnoticed by Peter, who still struggled to see, and by Deniz, who attended to him.

  It was late morning and outside the precinct the day was clear and bright and a steady wind was coming from the east and it smelled like the sea. Catherine and Kristin said awkward goodbyes as they approached their cars. Catherine offered to let Kristin pull out first. Kristin then fumbled through her purse. A general anxiety—only heightened by the protests—had caused her increasingly to misplace her keys, though she soon found them. Reversing into the street, however, Kristin noticed Catherine as she approached the passenger side of her black Mercedes. Catherine crouched down, discerning something, and then she ran her fingers over the door, on the exact spot Kristin had dented a few hours prior. Cather
ine glanced out into the street, clearly recognizing the damage Kristin had done before she’d sped away.

  Normally, Kristin would have stopped and taken responsibility, but she was in a rush. She was holding a single piece of information in her memory. Before she forgot the details, she needed to pull over and jot down a name and address she had glimpsed on the birth certificate the detective had shown her. It was the information on file for William’s mother.

  Three-thirty on that afternoon

  The terrier begins to bark, its black and nimble mouth forming the piercing yips, which echo off the four cramped corners of the parking attendant’s booth. Catherine lifts the dog into her lap, kneading at its white fur, trying to soothe it. When this doesn’t work, the attendant opens a roll of crackers from his bag and offers a few to the terrier, who turns his nose away. “Maybe he’s cold,” says William, and the boy removes his sweatshirt and wraps it around the dog so that only the terrier’s head sticks out. This does nothing to silence the barking. And now William sits in front of the television in only his T-shirt, so Catherine removes her blazer and drapes it around the boy’s shoulders. The parking attendant then offers Catherine his coat, but she refuses, not wanting to wear his clothes. She tries to suppress a chill, but once again begins to shiver.

  The dog continues to bark. William chooses to ignore it. He returns his attention to the television. The attendant wipes the fog from the window, searching outside. Perhaps the dog is trying to warn them of something, but through the curtains of rain the attendant can at best see only a few feet ahead. Catherine glances down at her phone. She has tried Peter more than a half dozen times. None of her calls have gone through. Her anxious mind projects a series of worst-case scenarios: perhaps Murat has intimidated Peter into abandoning their rendezvous, or perhaps Peter has confessed her location to Murat and her husband is on his way to the park at this moment, or, and worst of all, perhaps nobody is coming for her and William, not Murat, and not Peter. She imagines that maybe both her husband and her lover have determined she is no longer worth the trouble.

  She can’t figure out what to do next. She can’t hear herself think in competition with the television and the dog, which are both her son’s, and so she can’t hear herself think in competition with him. She continues to shiver, while in a similar nonvoluntary response, tremors of resentment spread from her center toward her limbs, directed at William, as if she might reach over and strike him in desperation. Instead, she snatches the dog from his lap.

  “Give him back!” William leaps up from his stool.

  “He’s too loud,” says Catherine. “He’s going outside for a minute.” She peels the sweatshirt off the terrier and makes for the door, so that her back faces William, who then lunges after her, reaching for his dog, who, strangely, has fallen silent in the struggle over his fate.

  “He’s not too loud for me,” says the attendant.

  Catherine turns to look over her shoulder and her stare darts back at the attendant. When their eyes meet, he immediately falls silent and casts his gaze toward his feet. With the terrier cradled under her arm, Catherine opens the front door and sets the dog down on all fours. The terrier sniffs the earth. He doesn’t protest, or try to run back inside. He simply holds his nose to the ground for a moment. Then he raises his head and wanders out into the storm.

  Catherine stands with her back to the door and her hands palms down against the frame, as if someone much larger than she threatens to enter. Her son broods by the television, his attention absorbed by the screen, avoiding hers. She focuses on his eyes, to see if he is crying, telling herself that he can’t be too upset if he isn’t crying. From beneath her arm, she offers William his bundled sweatshirt. He ignores her, so she sets the sweatshirt on the small shelf where the television is perched. She then takes back her blazer and removes her phone from its pocket, leaving William’s birdlike frame covered by nothing more than his T-shirt.

  Her screen lists the many incomplete calls to Peter. None of them have connected and she has no reason to believe that another will, but she doesn’t know what else to do. He had said that he would meet her in the park. It is now well into the afternoon and it will be dark soon. She needs somewhere to go, so she dials Peter’s number yet again. As she raises the phone to her ear, William stands, presenting himself in front of her.

  In a single, nearly reflexive movement, William swats the phone from her grasp. “You ruin everything,” he says; his voice is measured and calculated, speaking with hardly a hint of emotion, although he is shivering, just as she had been moments before.

  The phone careens across the floor, landing at the feet of the attendant. William sulks in front of the television. The attendant slowly bends down and hands Catherine the phone, which now has a hairline crack across its dark, lifeless screen. She tries to power it back on, but with no luck.

  The attendant reaches into his pocket, removing a single bill. “This is enough for a taxi,” he says, offering the bit of money.

  “Please, put that away,” she says.

  “I don’t think your friend is coming, so take it.”

  She glances down at what he offers, which should be enough to get her across the city. Before she can refuse more stridently, the attendant politely, yet firmly, explains. “I have my own troubles and can’t have you fighting here. I am asking you to leave, so again, please, take this.”

  “My problems are as serious as yours,” says Catherine.

  “I’m not questioning that they are, but if you sat across from anyone and both laid your troubles on the table, you would choose yours every time. So now it is that time; please, take your problems with you and leave me with mine.” The attendant continues to hold the money out for Catherine. She knifes the bill into her coat pocket. Glancing at her broken phone, the attendant asks whether there is someone he could contact on her behalf. Catherine considers asking if he would try Peter just once more, but thinks better of it, knowing that he won’t answer. She thanks the attendant but declines his offer.

  Catherine wanders into the rain with her son. Staring across the park, she can see the crawling traffic on the road and the hesitant red brake lights of the cars flashing as the drivers struggle to navigate through the storm. She spots an approaching taxi. To flag it down, she and William will need to run. When she snatches his hand in hers, William pulls away. He is searching desperately for his dog. “We have to go,” says Catherine.

  “But where is he?” William asks.

  Catherine tells him that she doesn’t know, but that the terrier will be fine.

  “How do you know he’ll be fine?”

  Catherine ignores her son’s question, rushing the two of them toward the road instead as she flails her arm above her head, hoping that the taxi will see her before it passes. William follows, walking clumsily, stumbling across the undulating ground as he keeps his gaze fixed over his shoulder and into the park behind him, where he continues to search for his dog.

  The taxi pulls over. Catherine opens the door and lifts her son into the backseat, then slides in beside him. Before she can offer the driver a destination, William asks where they are going. “To see Deniz,” answers Catherine.

  William returns a blank stare. “Who?”

  “My friend that you met last night,” says Catherine, feeling the guilt of an answer which is far from complete when describing Deniz’s relationship to her son. William glances out the window, back toward the park. He asks his mother how she can know that the terrier will be fine.

  “Because he left,” answers Catherine. “If he needed us he would’ve waited, even in the rain. But he knew that he would be fine without us, so he left.”

  * * *

  “You must have known she wasn’t William’s real mother,” says Murat.

  He and Peter sit across from one another on the sofa, their backs to the living room window, which pours in a sodd
en, gray light, devoid of the late-afternoon brilliance that accompanies the end of clearer days. It would be dark soon. And the truth was Peter hadn’t known. He is reluctant to admit this to Murat. He doesn’t want to seem like a fool. The signs had been there, of course, the greatest of which wasn’t that William looked nothing like his mother, or his father, but that Catherine was so reckless. Emotional connection, physical attention, even love, all of those elements were present between him and Catherine, but the overarching impulse that had brought them together was recklessness. And even now, when confronting all Catherine had withheld from him about William, the greatest challenge facing Peter is how to contend with the scope of her recklessness.

  “I suppose it makes no difference that you didn’t know,” adds Murat.

  “No difference to what?”

  “To what happens now.” Murat fishes around in the pocket of his charcoal gray suit jacket and removes a pack of cigarettes. He lights one without asking Peter’s permission and then reclines deep into the corner of the sofa, his arms rising behind him, his legs extending without aim. A ribbon of idling smoke trickles toward the ceiling. Murat glances back at Peter. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Would you like one?”

  “No,” says Peter. “I don’t smoke in the apartment.”

  Murat nods, as if agreeing that this is a good policy. “Were you surprised when my wife showed up this morning?” He gazes at the ceiling, where the smoke from his cigarette hovers like a cloud of flash powder.

  “I wasn’t,” answers Peter.

  “You weren’t?”

  He shakes his head. “No, I was surprised when she showed up last night.”

  “At your exhibit?”