The detective nodded, slightly pursing his lips as though he were considering the nature of their friendship with his mouth, as if the idea had a taste. “He faces a charge of trespassing—which of you did I tell this to?” Kristin lifted her hand. “The man he came in with, Deniz, he faces the same charge. Did you know Deniz is also his friend?” The detective’s mouth ticked upward, forming a nearly imperceptible smirk, which accompanied the sly insinuation that Peter’s arrest alongside Deniz had revealed some illicit sexual preference that neither of these women knew.
Kristin was well aware of the vagaries surrounding Deniz’s sexual proclivities, but she doubted the inference the detective made about Peter and, even if it were true, she didn’t care. Kristin glanced at Catherine, whose focus was on the confusion of papers strewn across the detective’s desk. Her passport lay next to his computer, alongside Peter’s. From a side table, a fan rotated on its axis. It generated a gentle breeze. Each time it passed over the detective’s desk it was as if an invisible hand flipped through the passport’s mostly unstamped pages. Kristin possessed a reasonable understanding of what the authorities could and could not glean from the records connected to a passport, but she wondered if Catherine understood the same.
“I introduced Peter to Deniz,” Catherine offered.
The detective nodded. “And … ?”
“And what?” said Catherine.
“Where did they meet? How do you know them? How long have they known one another?” The detective had been leaning casually against his desk, but he now circled behind it, sitting at his computer with his back straight and arms extended. His fingers began to work furiously at his keyboard while he floated a staccato of interrogatories in a flat, disassociated voice that became only more pointed as he gathered information from Catherine. If she hesitated in her responses, the detective would peer from behind his computer screen and ask her, “Anything else?” or “Are you sure you don’t remember?” and then resume typing for a few menacing seconds as he made some further entry.
Catherine unspooled her story. Much of it confirmed what Kristin had already learned from Murat. Kristin couldn’t say for certain that the detective knew who Catherine’s husband was, but he likely did, or at least knew the Yaşar family, and the insider’s look into that family which the detective now elicited took on a voyeuristic air. Many of the detective’s questions seemed designed to inform his own curiosities as opposed to Peter’s relation to Deniz and the current charge of trespassing.
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.