When they had texted to arrange this meeting, Kristin had at first been confused. She sat at her desk, staring at the coded message Murat had sent: YZ4-3-13 0200. YZ, she knew that: Yaşar Zeytinburnu. They had met at this series of developments before, although not for several months. The digit 4, this was what didn’t make sense to her. Usually this was the development number. Kristin wasn’t aware of the fourth Yaşar Zeytinburnu project. To her recollection only three had been built. The next three digits she did recognize: third building in the development, thirteenth floor of that building.
The two of them met as infrequently as possible, which over the years had averaged approximately once every three months, or quarterly as Kristin referred to it, keeping their encounters to a schedule that Murat never entirely understood. Early on, they had met in restaurants, cafés or perhaps a museum, including the Istanbul Modern when Murat was considering the size and scope of the donation he would later endow and had wanted Kristin’s opinion. Soon, however, Kristin moved their meetings to more discreet and less scenic locations: an anonymous studio apartment, the back of a car, once in an alley off Taksim Square when Murat had lifted a handwritten ledger of payouts to government officials from a visiting foreign developer’s hotel suite, a document of such sensitivity that he’d had to pay off a maid in order to get it returned unnoticed within an hour. When Kristin realized the risks he’d taken to do this, she’d scolded him, explaining that he was more important than any one bit of information. She often encouraged Murat to bring William to their meetings, the logic being that a child would reduce suspicion. Murat relented and brought the boy, but he noticed they got virtually no work done as Kristin doted endlessly on William. She had later sheepishly explained to Murat that she’d always wanted a son.
Murat had expressed the occasional frustration to Kristin that no results ever seemed to come from the information he provided. “What results are you looking for?” she would ask. He realized that he didn’t know. “You can quit whenever you want,” she would also say, though he never believed her. Although he had been naïve enough to start working with Kristin, he wasn’t naïve enough to think that he could divest himself of her.
It was one minute after two a.m. Murat stood on the thirteenth floor of the skeletal Yaşar Zeytinburnu 4 building, his lazy eyes browsing the city, a terrain of lit and darkened diagrams. Kristin had instructed him early on about the four-minute window for their meetings. You could be two minutes early or two minutes late. Never arrive any earlier. Never stay any later waiting. Glancing at the clock on his cellphone, Murat thought that perhaps tonight she would miss her window, an unsettling first for Kristin.
A chill, steady breeze whistled through the building. The workmen had yet to install the fourteen-foot-high panes of glass that would encase each floor. The night air played through the open, cavernous spaces and it howled like wind blown through an enormous hollow instrument. Murat had always enjoyed touring an unfinished building. It was an exercise in vision. His father had taken him on construction sites as a boy, pointing out various corners of a project: of a concrete shaft he would say, “Twin glass elevators will go here”; of an empty floor he would offer, “Four separate suites.” Murat could still hear his father’s voice in the sound of the wind passing through empty spaces.
A pair of headlights twisted up the dirt road where the excavators had been parked. Halogen bulbs peppered the job site, though most of them were switched off. The project was currently ahead of schedule and would likely reach completion without relying on night shifts or overtime. The workers would then receive a bonus. Murat came a step closer to the edge of the building, inching his way forward so that he stood between two load-bearing pillars. He recalled the first time he’d brought his wife to one of his construction sites—though she never came anymore—and what she’d said about heights, that vertigo was caused not by one’s fear of falling, but rather by one’s desire to jump.
He allowed himself to take a step closer, but as he did, the hem of his trousers caught on the teeth of a handsaw, which had been carelessly abandoned on the floor. The work crews knew better than to leave their tools out. Perhaps they were taking shortcuts in order to finish ahead of schedule. “Inspect what you expect on the job site,” his father had taught him. Murat had in recent days caught himself saying the same to his son.
Murat tidied up the mess left by the workmen as if his father were watching, or as if Kristin might comment on the general disarray. He heard the elevator gate slam shut on the ground floor. He checked the time: 0205. He should have left three minutes before. He stepped even closer to the edge. Glancing down the thirteen stories, he felt his stomach turn and a slight spell of dizziness. Yes, vertigo, he thought.
The elevator door opened behind him. Before he could see Kristin, he heard her hurried steps echo across the open floor plan. “I’m five minutes late,” she announced. Murat stood with his back to the expanse of skyline. His silhouette was all that she could see, but she could have recognized him from behind at a hundred paces in a crowd: the way he slumped forward with his hands in his pockets, the width of his shoulders, the length of his arms. He turned toward her as she glanced down at her triathlete’s watch and pressed the function button on its side. An emerald luminescence confirmed the time. “You waited for me,” she added, “when you should have left.”
“You shouldn’t have shown up,” he said.
They had both breached a protocol that each had assured the other they would always keep. When Murat was a boy, his father once pulled him out of school with a fake doctor’s appointment so that he could join him at a groundbreaking ceremony one afternoon. “What if one of my friends sees me?” Murat had asked. “Then you’ll see him,” his father had answered.
Kristin stepped alongside Murat, who remained perched near the edge of the thirteenth floor of Yaşar Zeytinburnu 4, just where he’d said he would be. She apologized for being late, admitting that she’d misplaced her car keys, which was a first for her. Then she popped up the collar of her rain jacket and tugged it tight around her neck. “It’s freezing up here,” she complained.
A snatch of wind carried off her voice.
She spoke louder. “I had a hard time finding this place.”
Murat pointed out to the city, to the headlights which threaded an east-west-running highway. “Probably fastest to come in on the O-3 and then drive south,” he said. “Did you pass the seaside road on the way here?”
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.