Writing sample

Here's chapter one for your enjoyment:
Shortly after boarding the plane, a glass of single-malt whiskey on its way to her hand, Marta had been disturbed to discover the seat next to her was about to be occupied by a nervous—shaking actually—and extremely elderly gentleman. “I was upgraded,” he said, waving his boarding pass in Marta’s direction. “My first time on an airplane, and I get first class.”
“That’s nice,” she murmured, turning to look out the window while he stored his bag and jacket in the overhead compartment. Marta watched her own reflection in the glass, eyes falling in and out of focus, gazing sometimes at the scurrying airport personnel below and sometimes at herself, a woman who did not look her age at thirty-six. She had thick dark hair and slightly oriental, almond-shaped green eyes that were fringed with dark lashes under the curve of well-turned eyebrows and bracketed by sharp cheekbones covered with taut, unwrinkled skin. She flew weekly, sometimes more than once or even twice a week, some trips lasting less than a day. Always flying first class, she was a longtime member of the million-mile club—and the mile-high club, for that matter. She raised her eyebrow slightly when Denise, one of her favorites on the European circuit, leaned in to refresh her drink.
“Sorry, we’re booked solid today. You won’t be able to spread out this trip.”
Marta frowned and sipped her drink. It was bad enough that she was bound for Istanbul, a place she’d left a lifetime ago. Now she was forced to share her trip with an elderly seatmate who insisted on referring to it as Constantinople, despite almost a hundred years of being known in the world with the Turkish rather than Greek designation on maps. Although she’d vowed never to set foot in that country again, a series of mishaps had landed her in this seat on a first-class rocket to the past to discuss none other than the international trade in pasta.
“Pasta?” asked the constant Constantinopler.
“Precisely,” she replied, snapping open her laptop to circumvent further discussion of the topic at hand. After one partner contracted malaria (in New York City, no less, so who knew where that malady came from?), another had a skiing accident (this mishap taking place on the slopes in Vermont, but in early May, making it also suspect to Marta), and then the third and fourth were taken off the case to assist with the defense of an illegal nanny and gardener discovered working sans papers in the household of the firm’s managing partner, well, it seemed that the planets had finally aligned themselves in such a way to compel Marta’s return to Turkey.
“Short and sweet,” she told the travel agent. “I want to get in there, do the deal, and get the hell out as soon as possible.”
Marta was particularly rattled—and she never became rattled, particularly or not—by the prospect of returning to her homeland, a place she’d not seen since she left in 1985, at the tender age of twenty-one. Her colleagues were always vague about where Marta came from, although if pressed, the senior partners knew that she had arrived in their offices with a passport from Turkey, the ink barely dry on her Turkish law degree and the master’s from Columbia Law School. After a while, in typical New York fashion, no one cared where she came from, including her.
New York was the perfect place to get lost, to reinvent oneself, to make a new history. This was precisely what Marta had done. And now, all because of a stupid legal tangle over pasta that was verging on an international incident, Marta was going back there.
“Book me in the newest hotel you can find,” she told her secretary. “Schedule all the meetings there and make these guys come to me.”
Marta was notorious for her liaisons with young associates, something that made her male partners uncomfortable and alienated her from the female staff. Marta viewed sex in the same way she followed a regular schedule of exercise—it was something necessary to keep her body functioning at its optimal level. Over the years, as she remade herself into the stereotypical tough New York lawyer, Marta had limited her emotional contacts until the only true devotion she allowed was to her physical trainer. She’d previously almost considered her hairdresser a friend, until the woman moved upstate without a word of warning. So much for friends.
While her intention for the trip was good—staying in a new hotel that would have no associations with the past—Marta would end up conducting the pasta negotiations in a spectacular, curved edifice overlooking the Bosporus, smack in the middle of the park in which she played as a child with a view not only of the legendary seaway but also the crowded slums of her youth. Oh progress, that decided to make a tourist destination from a decrepit villa and its bramble-ridden grounds! Oh fate, how it conspired to return Marta to a room with such a view, with only a pane of glass to insulate her from the smells and sounds of her past!
Mr. Vasilli Vassilios was not willing to recognize that Marta had no intention of engaging him in conversation for the duration of the nine-hour plane trip. When the plane reached its cruising altitude and people started to move around, Vasilli decided to try again.
“I need an attorney when I arrive,” he said. “Can you give me the name of someone?”
Marta’s hands stilled over the keyboard. “I don’t know anyone in Istanbul,” she said. “I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to find one.”
He looked pointedly at the legal papers entrapped in her briefcase.
Not being prone to feelings of embarrassment, even when caught in such an obvious falsehood, Marta smoothly continued, “The people my office deals with are all corporate lawyers. Believe me, they would know less than I do about handling a personal matter,” she said.
“I see,” he said. He nodded sadly and then put a gnarled hand over hers. “My brother just passed away, and I have been summoned to settle his estate.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss.” She counted to herself and focused on breathing. Why was she letting this old man interfere with her trip? “Mr. Vassilios,” she continued, “I really need to get some work done. If you’ll excuse me …”
“I haven’t seen my brother since we were children,” Vasilli said. “Now I’m the only one left. Can you believe it? All those years, children, maybe grandchildren even, and now, they call me. Look at me. I am an old man. But I guess I have to go back there.”
Marta closed her eyes again. Vasilli’s voice rambled, becoming soft and then, once or twice, guttural Greek sounds broke into the story like punctuation marks. It was hard not to be drawn into his tale, although at one point, she looked over at him. “What year did you say that was?” she asked.
“Around 1922, I guess,” he replied.
“Just how old are you?” Marta marveled, turning to look at him for the first time. Up close like this, his cheeks resembled a photo of the Grand Canyon or a close-up of an elephant hide with some bristling hairs scattered over deep crevasses. It was a face that carried scars of more than eighty years of hard living. Watery brown eyes peered into hers, shaded by short but thick eyelashes and brows like two caterpillars readying for battle. His hair still sported more pepper than salt, especially the crop erupting from his ears and the tip of his prominent nose.
“Older than dirt,” he replied. “Older than this republic, that’s for sure. I was born at the end of the first war, in 1918. The Ottomans had backed the losers, the Kaiser, and everything started to fall apart for them in the next few years.
“We left, me and my father; we boarded a ship for America. My brother and mother stayed behind, waiting for Baba to send for them. We didn’t have the money for everyone to make the trip. Yurgos stayed with Mama, since he was a bit older and could work … He must have been ten or so, since I was about five at that time. Yes, he was old enough to help out.
“That was the last time I saw them, on the docks. We were in the boat. It seemed like we sailed for a year, but I suppose it was not so long. Baba was very sad, and then he became ill, but we both made it to America. But things happened during the war, I guess. The Greek families were moved out—relocated, is what they say now—and after that, we could not find my mother. And there was no word from my brother until now, this notice I received, you see? How did they find me after so many years when we could not find them?
“The letters all came back, you see, and when we finally heard from the others, my aunts and uncles, they were in Greece, in Thessaloníki, and they did not know where Mama had gone … They said to Baba, ‘Oh, we thought she was with you,’ and he was so angry. That was the end, he said. No more family. It was just the two of us.”
Marta picked up the onionskin papers, authenticated with a single gold seal and obviously typed on a manual machine with a thin ribbon that wrinkled occasionally and spit out a word or two in red. There was an elaborate but unreadable scrawl on the bottom of the page, in a style that Marta recognized from her youth, when all the college students—especially the males—worked hard to create a signature to match the elaborate style of the Ottomans. Her own still contained elements of this fashion.
“How did they find you?” she asked, more to herself than to the old man blowing his nose loudly into a frayed white handkerchief embroidered in the corner with interlocking blue Vs.
She could still read the Turkish, but she checked it against the second page, a bad English translation. She thought the signer would be a place to start, but she did not say it out loud. No way was Marta getting pulled into this old man’s miniseries, his histrionics, his Greek tragedy. No way. If anyone’s past life qualified for coverage in Soap Opera Digest, it was hers—and she had long ago changed to the Law Review and the New Yorker. She had no desire to go rooting around in personal history—her own or anybody else’s.
“Is this all there was?” she asked. He nodded. “Where is the envelope?”
He pulled it silently from his breast pocket. There was no return address, and the postage mark was badly smeared. The stamps bore the familiar visage of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, and the address had been typed on the same machine as the letter, so that the “West” and both of the “Yorks” were red.
“Vasilli Vassilios. 384 West End Avenue, New York, New York. Hmm, good address,” she said. “What do you do for a living?”
“Retired,” he replied. And then, after a pause, he filled in the blanks. “Coffee shop, Seventy-second Street. Closed down last year when rents went up too high.
“I have no children, my wife is dead, and there is no one else, and now this. But I figured, what should I do? I can ignore it, or I can make one last trip. So I might find out what happened to my mother and my brother. And maybe there is more family there. Who knows? I can see.”
“Yes,” Marta agreed. “You can see.”
Vasilli looked at her. “And what about you? You are going to visit family, yes?”
“No,” she replied. “I don’t have any contact with them. I’m just going for business.” She absently fingered the locket hanging from a thin gold chain around her neck.
“Surely there is someone,” he persisted.
“No, there is no one I want to see.” She opened the computer. “I’ll try to help you when we get there, but I’m not promising anything.”
Vasilli nodded and closed his eyes, listening to the tapping of her keyboard until he slept.