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.
* * *
His ambition, the same ambition that had allowed him to agree to Kristin’s proposal at the Çırağan Palace seven years before, had caused him to neglect his family, to set into place the conditions that would cause him to lose them. He had, in all that time, never once taken William swimming.