The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  “I’m just jazzed we got an audience; weather’s been so good lately. Plus, with the holidays and all,” she said.

  The word holidays didn’t register at first; then the menorah in the KGB window took on new significance, made me look again at the crowd of college kids. And before I could fully process the fact that it was the first night of Chanukah, which meant that half the publishing world was on vacation while the other half was lying low, knowing no serious business in publishing was ever conducted before the first of the year, Miri was telling me that she, too, would be on her way home soon to light candles with her nephews. She said she hoped she would be able to hear my story, but that depended on how long Hazel Chu wanted to read. Hazel taught at Columbia and she was giving her students extra credit for attending. Plus, her parents were in town, and they’d never heard her read in public before.

  My shakiness gave way to a sick empty feeling, as if I no longer had to anticipate the worst; it was already happening. I had been invited to read at what I thought was one of the most influential literary venues in New York, but on a night when it wouldn’t matter; I felt like Crash Davis in Bull Durham, breaking the record for home runs, but in the minor leagues, where nobody gave a damn.

  Still, I told myself, at least Miri had chosen my work, might even select one of my stories for inclusion in The Stimulator, might put my photograph on her “Stimulating Events” page. Searching for more hopeful signs amid my gathering sense of doom, I asked if Miri would mind if I read a new story tonight.

  No, Miri said, she trusted my judgment. And when I pointed out that I was glad she trusted me even though she had only just met me, Miri said, well, if she didn’t trust my judgment, she certainly trusted Anya’s.

  I flinched. “Which Anya?”

  “Petrescu,” Miri said. “When I told her we had an open slot, she suggested I call you.” Miri asked if I’d heard which publisher had won the auction for We Never Talked About Ceauşescu. And after I said I hadn’t, Miri said she’d love to chat more, but she wanted to start on time, so she could get home.

  I downed my drink in one gulp, and then Faye poured me another. “Thanks for the introduction,” she snapped. I considered apologizing but was too involved in my own thoughts. From that moment forward, I walked through the evening in a daze, half-deaf to the applause that crackled through the bar after Miri introduced Hazel Chu, who stepped to the podium and began to read.

  Several weeks and a dozen lifetimes ago, I would have come here with Anya and we would have mercilessly mocked Hazel Chu—her declamatory, pause-laden style peculiar to the literary reading form, all diction and no drama, her Roget’s vocabulary, describing clouds as “cruciferous” against an “oleaginous blue sky.” We would have giggled at her tortured metaphors, obviously flogged in some workshop; we would have kicked each other every time Hazel used the word sinuous.

  Tonight, I found no humor in Hazel’s reading. She may have read for an hour or just a few minutes; to me, it was all one endless stream of words and laughter, then applause. Hazel may have written something brilliant or dreadful—I had no idea. All I knew was that one moment, KGB was full and the crowd was alive and Faye and I were at the bar and Hazel was at the podium; the next moment, I was at the podium, and the bar was just about empty. Hazel had taken the audience with her, save for the few stragglers who didn’t seem to realize they were allowed to leave before both authors had read. Even Miri exited noisily while I was thanking her for her “generous” introduction: “Although I don’t know his work, I know people who do.”

  My recollection of standing at podiums in the glare of spotlights during open mikes was of being unable to see individual audience members, just blackness and glare. But tonight, I could see everything, as if I were appearing on a stage after a show was over and the houselights had been turned up. I could see Faye, and I could see the bartender; mostly, I saw empty chairs. One seat at the end of the bar was occupied by a man in a dark gogol and a broad-brimmed capote who didn’t even look up when I stepped to the microphone.

  I smiled in Faye’s direction as I prepared to read the dedication of “After Van Meegeren.” But before I got the words out, I heard a clattering. The bar’s door swung open, and I heard a loud, whispered saw-ree, saw-ree as Anya Petrescu made her way past the empty chairs. Her beautiful, ruthless eyes sparkled as she took a seat in the previously empty front row. She put her bag on the floor, then looked up at me, smiling. I smiled back at her, then looked over to Faye, who was regarding me with an increasingly contemptuous glare. I could almost see the warmth and trust she had begun to show me evaporating. Veronica had arrived; Betty was throwing back hooch.

  I skipped the dedication.

  I read my story more quickly than I had rehearsed it, skipped over parts I now saw were repetitive, glanced at Anya, then at Faye, before returning to the manuscript, where I struggled to find my place. The story was less polished than I remembered, its insights less profound, and I took solace only in the fact that neither Miri Lippman nor anyone with apparent influence in the literary world was here. As I read, I found myself feeling both hatred and affection for Anya, wondering if her recommendation to Miri was a peace offering, an invitation to start over, a farewell gift, or just a reminder that I would never be her equal. I wondered too about Faye, whether she would be flattered, amused, or revolted by the fact that I had written a story that was, in a way, about us. I wondered also whether she could guess that Anya’s entrance caused me to omit my dedication.

  The final sentence of “After Van Meegeren” was meant to be a laugh line—outside a man’s apartment, a woman says she doesn’t have sex on first dates, but when the man reminds her that this hasn’t even been a date, she smiles and says, “Oh, right, then it’s no problem.” But I rushed the line, so much so that no one in the audience realized the story was over, and not until I mumbled “Thank you” did Anya begin to applaud, and then the rest of the half-dozen or so spectators followed suit. Faye clapped too, though she didn’t put down her whiskey to do it.

  And then the bartender stepped out from behind his bar, unplugged the mike, and began shoving the podium into a corner, and someone turned up the music on the sound system. The candles in the menorah had already burned down to their wicks—the evening was over before I had even decided whether I would speak first to Anya or to Faye, hoping against hope some editor or agent would step between us.

  I began walking toward Faye, but Anya intercepted me—oh, how byootiful my story had been, Ee-yen, she said, how luffly, how gledd she was to see I was writing again. And as she hugged me and I felt her body against mine, as I saw the sparkle in her eyes, I thought of how much I missed her effusive compliments, how much I missed our relationship’s drama, how much I wanted to grab her hand, run for the john, and lock the door behind us, just like old times. Faye was always so honest and direct, never offered a compliment I didn’t deserve, and something was still so narcotic about Anya’s presence. Even if her enthusiasm was phony, I needed it now.

  “Heard you sold your book,” I said, but Anya said she didn’t want to talk about that. She was nothing more than a “fekk,” a “one-heet wonder.” The true joy was to be found in writing, she said; everything else was deestrection.

  I asked if she’d sold her story collection to Merrill Books, and she responded quickly, as she always did when she was relating ostensibly unimportant information. No, those chip besterds hadn’t offered enough mah-nee; she’d sold it to Dotton. And, though I didn’t ask how much Dotton had paid, she allowed that the mah-nee was complittly rideekyouluss and, don’t tell ennybody, but she would have taken heff of what they ultimately wound up payink. But all that sort of talk was so borink, what she really wanted to talk about was me, how goot I looked, how healthy, had I poot on some wett? Was I seeink ennybody?

  I looked over to Faye, wondered whether she could hear us, assumed she couldn’t. I looked at the few people still in the KGB, the man in the capote at the end of the bar, a few of Hazel C
hu’s students, still drinking beers, probably under twenty-one and amazed they hadn’t gotten carded. Anya had come alone, seemed to be in no rush. I needed affection, reassurance, and she was flirting with me the way she used to on our first dates. Was I seeink ennybody?

  “Not seriously,” I mumbled to Anya, adding that I still thought about her a lot. What about her?

  “But of course I’m seeink someone,” Anya said with a sigh, she couldn’t stend to be alone. She joked that she was mono-phobeek, but her new relationship wouldn’t lest long eezer; her new luffer was too eentense.

  At the bar, Faye hopped off her seat and slung her red vinyl bag over a shoulder as if she’d heard exactly what I had said to Anya about my relationship with her not being serious and she now knew I was a phony and a jackass. She took one long look toward the end of the bar, pulled a baseball cap out of her bag, put it on, then started walking fast to the exit without looking back. When I called her name, she didn’t turn around.

  Anya sauntered alongside me, unaware of my predicament. I was trying to walk with her and catch up to Faye at the same time, but when Faye shouldered open the back door and started heading downstairs, I quickly whispered goodbye to Anya, kissed her cheek, then scampered out the door and down the stairs, yelling, “Faye! Faye, wait a second! Faye, would you hold on?” I practically slammed into Blade Markham, who was entering the building.

  “Easy there, compadre,” Blade said with a laugh, either not remembering who I was or not caring anymore.

  As Faye walked outside onto Fourth Street, on which a light rain had begun to fall, I froze on the stairs. Blade walked past me, taking two steps at a time, boots clacking, truth cross beating against his chest. I turned to see him look up at Anya and greet her with a smile, a peace sign, and a gruff “What up, dawg?”

  Anya laughed. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing with or at Blade, until I saw the two of them making out on the stairs. Over Blade’s shoulder, Anya smiled at me, rolled her eyes, just as she had after Geoff Olden had introduced himself to her at the KGB and given her a pair of business cards. But I took no comfort; Olden was now her edgint, Blade was her luffer, and I was complittly alone. I could hear Blade tell Anya that their “peeps was waitin’, yo” as I ran out into the rain.

  Faye was already waiting at a bus stop, and once I caught up to her there, the M15 was approaching. Faye’s facial expression was sullen, more tired than angry, and it didn’t change when her eyes met mine.

  “What’s the matter, Arch?” she asked. “Veronica split town?”

  I smiled, but Faye didn’t smile back.

  I desperately tried to explain, to apologize, to say that the night hadn’t gone as I had anticipated and what I really wanted to do was forget about it and start over. I said I knew I was a heel, but Faye wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of acting angry. She just seemed disappointed, as if she now knew that I was no different from all the liars and cheaters she must have known before me. She’d dated guys like me, she said, guys who said they cared more about her than about getting famous, more about their art than about making money, but I was lying, maybe even to myself.

  No, I told her, she had me figured all wrong. I did care about her, was still looking forward to seeing more of her art. I was searching for the one thing I could say that would break through to her, make her believe me, but in her eyes I could see that she had already boarded the bus, its doors had closed, and it was pulling away fast.

  “Faye,” I said, looking at her pleadingly.

  “Jigoku ni icchimae!” she said, then called me usotsuki. But when the M15’s doors opened, she didn’t deem it worth the trouble to speak to me in any language, not even English. She just slipped her MetroCard into the reader and walked to the back of the bus. When it began to move again, I could see her red hair and her baseball cap framed in a window. For a moment, it looked as though she might have been crying, but I figured it must have been the rain.

  I could say that I felt as if I had just lost everything, but that wouldn’t be quite right, for it would imply I had something to lose. Instead, I now understood that I had had nothing in the first place—the stories I had been writing weren’t worth a damn. If someone on the street had come up to me and asked who I was and what I did, I wouldn’t have known what to say. There was a person I wanted to be, and a person I had been, but in between those two, I felt as if I were nobody at all.

  The rain was beginning to fall harder. As I walked slowly back to Fourth Street, I took out my cellphone, removed a card from my wallet, and dialed the number that was printed on it. A recorded message informed me that my jury duty assignment for the following day had been canceled. No, not even the Appellate Court of New York County could distract me from my plight.

  On the front steps of the KGB, the man I’d seen at the bar wearing a capote was skimming some pages and sipping a scotch. When he looked up and revealed himself to be Jed Roth, I can’t say I was surprised. I sat down on the steps next to Roth as if this was where I belonged, the place I always knew I would end up. Roth was skimming the manuscript of “After Van Meegeren,” which I hadn’t bothered to take with me after I had finished reading.

  “It’s another good story, Ian,” Roth said. “But it’s just too quiet, too small. A quiet little story about people living quiet little lives. Tough to get anyone interested in it when the author doesn’t already have a name.”

  I turned to Roth.

  “So,” I said. “Tell me again how all this is supposed to work.”

  Roth put down his glass.

  “Right,” he said, “shall we begin?”

  II

  fiction

  “Yes, it’s very wicked to lie … But I forget it now and then.”

  PIPPI LONGSTOCKING

  MY LIFE AS A FAKE

  When we got back to his apartment, Roth acted differently than he had on our last night together—more focused, less patient; now that I seemed willing to follow him, he seemed to feel there was no need to turn on the charm. The apartment was brighter and less atmospheric than I remembered it. But the manuscript of A Thief in Manhattan was on his living room table, in the same spot where he had placed it after I’d flung it at him. A newly sharpened red pencil lay beside it.

  When I sat down on the couch, Roth offered only water; when I asked for something stronger, he pointed to the coffeemaker.

  “Just coffee or water? Those are my options?”

  “Tonight, we’re working, Ian,” he said.

  I took a glass of ice water.

  I still had huge misgivings about Roth’s plan, but I needed distraction and a paying gig fast. Just about anything would have beaten waiting tables, tending bar, or pouring coffee; plus, the money Roth was offering was better—a thousand daisies a week. I now figured that Roth was right about the stories I had been writing—they were too quiet, and if nothing else, working with an experienced editor like Roth might give me insight into bigger stories, where the stakes were higher. Probably Roth had also been right when he said that his plan really would draw attention to my work. Writers seemed to be getting rich plagiarizing stories or making them up; I’d spent the better part of a year saying the very same thing, boring Anya and Faye and whoever else would listen.

  Still, as Roth sat across his coffee table from me, I kept asking questions, which he answered in clipped tones, as if I were wasting time.

  “What if I change my mind about this?” I asked.

  “Then you change your mind about it,” he said.

  “So, the thing is, you won’t let me tell anybody,” I said.

  “You can tell anyone anything you please, Ian,” said Roth.

  “Anything?”

  “Like what? Like Jed Roth gave you his old novel and asked you to put your name on it and pass it off as your memoir?”

  “So that’s it,” I said. “You don’t think anyone would believe me.”

  Roth shrugged. I could see he didn’t care. I wondered if I could ever say anything that
would faze him, if I would ever ask him a question and he wouldn’t know the answer.

  “But what about my stories?” I asked.

  “We’ll get to that,” said Roth.

  “So that’s not really part of your plan.” I informed him that finding a good publisher for my stories was the only reason I was even considering working with him.

  But Roth said the plan remained the same, had always been and would always be the same. I would make Roth’s story my own, it would be published, and then I would declare it all to be a lie. And after the ensuing scandal, everyone would want to read the stories that were really mine. But that was step five, and what was the point of discussing step five when we hadn’t gotten through the first four?

  “So, what’s step one?” I asked.

  “Read it,” he said, tapping the manuscript of A Thief in Manhattan with the fingers of one hand.

  “We already did that one,” I said.

  “You remember it?”

  When I said I more or less did, he asked me to tell him the plot. I was bad with plots and it took only a minute for me to recount what I remembered—guy walks into a library filled with rare, valuable manuscripts; sees a girl admiring a famous old book, The Tale of Genji; observes some hooligan librarian stealing manuscripts; follows him to the office of a foul-mouthed manuscript appraiser who’s fencing the documents; realizes he might be able to steal a document himself without being suspected; sneaks into the library and rips off the Genji for the girl; returns to the library one final time. The girl isn’t there, and the place has burned down. Cat and mouse; cloak and dagger; chase, chase, chase, until the librarian and appraiser catch up to the guy outside Manhattan in the desolate field where the book has been buried beneath a golden cross. In the end, the guy shoots the librarian and appraiser, catches the 8:13 train, goes off to the site of the library, finds the girl. End of story.

  I thought I got the plot pretty much right and was actually feeling rather smug about it, but Roth regarded me with contempt, then pelted me with questions—well, did I remember the name of the library?