The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  I was fast asleep, my head against the fogged-up window of the Citroën, when Joseph shoved me. “We’re here,” he said, and when I looked out the window I could see that dawn was upon us, and once again, I was in front of Morningside Coffee. The sign on the door read CLOSED.

  LIKE A GIANT REFRESHED

  The last time I slept in the basement of the coffee shop, the cement floor had been my proust and bags of coffee beans had served as my pillows. But this time, Joseph had already prepared for my stay. There was a tall lamp, a desk, and a cot with space heaters on either side of it. In the refrigerator were day-old pastries and cartons of juice—take as much as you want, Joseph said. No one would think to look for me here; the only person who might consider it was Faye, but she was already gone, and he said that she would probably never imagine that he would go out of his way to help me.

  I still vowed that I would not trust Joseph, but moments after he galumphed up the steps—to fix me a cup of coffee, he said—the cot and pillow looked so inviting that I thought I’d just rest my head for a minute. The next thing I knew, half a day must have passed because I could hear the coffee shop in full swing—the steamer, footsteps, cash register, front door opening, closing. I considered getting up but closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, it seemed like evening—Joseph, wearily gossiping with customers, less rush to their voices. I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, I heard dishes being washed, Joseph singing along with the radio, locking the front door; he must have been closing for the night. When I awoke again, Joseph was coming downstairs, carrying fresh towels, soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste.

  “Trust me yet?” he asked.

  Trusting Joseph went directly counter to my lousy instincts, which was why I tried to keep doing it. I gave him tasks—asked him to stop by my apartment, bring me clothes and my mail, and when he’d done that, I asked him to bring my laptop and printer. When he had done that, too—in a pissy, world-weary mood perhaps, but when he had done it nonetheless—I developed a plan: stay here in Joseph’s basement and write down everything that had happened to me. I sensed that writing the truth could protect me. Stay as long as you want, Joseph said; he liked having a person down here—maybe I would keep away the mice.

  The mail Joseph brought to me offered hints of the life I could have been enjoying if I hadn’t been here at Morningside Coffee with Joseph playing Man Friday to my Robinson Crusoe. There was a check from Geoff Olden’s office, a pair of letters from editors at other publishing houses, asking if I’d consider providing a blurb for this or that debut memoir. There was a copy of Poets and Writers magazine with my picture on the cover, and a final expiration notice from Writer’s Digest, a publication I felt I no longer needed to read.

  Still, I stayed in the basement eating café food—wraps, smoothies, old pastries; I drank coffee, tea, and steamed milk. Before the café opened, I would tumble out of my makeshift proust, wash up in the industrial sink, settle down at my laptop, and type everything I could remember, starting from the time that Faye had pointed the Confident Man out to me. And when I was done, I would eat my spinach-and-feta croissant or my tuna wrap, glug my caramel apple cider, print out what I had written, then read it to make sure that everything was accurate and true.

  After closing for the night, Joseph would come down and bitch about the day he’d had—the pastry deliverers had been late again; college kids spending their parents’ money still didn’t tip; the new employee he had hired to replace Faye was already giving him guff. Joseph described him as “an arrogant writer type,” some “sullen dumb-ass with hipster glasses,” who was always late and was rude to customers. In fact, Joseph said, the guy reminded him of me, though Jens was already a published author.

  “Von Bretzel?” I asked.

  “That’s him.” Apparently, Joseph said, Von Bretzel’s debut novel, The Counter Life, hadn’t sold well, his editor had been laid off, and now his agent was having trouble getting a decent frazier for his follow-up, which he was calling Java Man. Von Bretzel needed a job to tide him over—he’d been fired by the Williamsburg Starbucks that he’d written about in his first book. I felt a little bad for Von Bretzel—if I hadn’t stopped writing quiet, small stories about café life, I’d be in just about the same position as the one in which he found himself now.

  While I worked in the Morningside Coffee basement, I never turned on my phone, didn’t return any emails from Geoff Olden or anybody else. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was, and I figured anyway that a bit of mystery never hurt an author’s reputation.

  Despite the fact that Joseph had always acted as if I owed him something, he never asked for money—he flashed me dirty looks the few times I mentioned it. But the more time we spent in late-night conversation, the more he opened up. I began writing about Joseph, too, and as I did, I began to sympathize with him more. I felt angry with all the casting directors who’d overlooked him; why couldn’t a morbidly obese café manager play a hero?

  Before I went to sleep, I put my pages in plain view for Joseph to read. I was happy to let him snoop through my life, learn my secrets, just as he’d learned about Faye’s. I wanted him to know that I thought he was worth writing about. And I always made sure to end the day’s writing on a suspenseful scheherazade so that he’d have something to look forward to reading the next night.

  ZERO NINETY-EIGHT

  I kept writing. I had a story to tell, and I wanted to get all of it down. I typed so hard and fast that I wore out letters on my keyboard. I couldn’t see the E, the T, or the DELETE keys anymore, and half my punctuation marks stopped working altogether, which didn’t really matter because the story was woolfing out of me in one long, unpunctuated stream. Some nights I fell asleep with my head on the keyboard, which repeated whatever letter my nose or ear rested upon. I could measure how long I had slept by the number of letters or symbols on my screen. My fingers hurt, my wrists ached, my eyes could barely focus, and I felt dazed, but I kept typing as if somehow my life depended on it. I felt certain that it did.

  And then I was done.

  Never had I written anything so quickly or intensely. I had no idea what to call the story I had written, I knew only where it would be shelved in a library according to the Dewey decimal system, so I called it Zero Ninety-eight. I fell asleep to the sound of the printer spitting out pages, and when I woke up, Joseph was sitting at the desk beside my proust, reading the last page.

  “I started a diet,” Joseph said when I opened my eyes. “Can you change my weight in the next draft?”

  I said I’d try.

  “And can you give me more lines?” he asked. “I don’t say all that much.”

  I said I would do my best, then asked if he would do one final favor for me. I had printed two copies of the manuscript. I asked Joseph to take a copy to Geoff Olden with a note I had written, telling Geoff to sell the book if he learned that anything bad had happened to me. I told Joseph to keep the original for himself, and I kept my own copy on my thumb drive.

  I then asked if Joseph would drive me to JFK Airport tonight after the café closed. I didn’t yet know where I was going, but didn’t really care as long as it was far away. If he helped me with all that, I would dedicate the book to him. Joseph agreed, and when I reached in my wallet for cash, he shook his head; the dedication would be better than money, he said, and maybe if someone made a movie out of my story, he could play himself—though he’d have to lose some weight for the role.

  I packed my clothes in two big empty burlap coffee bags, shut down my computer and put it back in its case, then lay back on the cot, too awake to even close my eyes. While I waited for the day to pass, I started to read the paperback Tale of Genji, which I had grabbed from Faye’s apartment, the epic story of the life of the titular son of an emperor. Though I could relate to Genji’s uncertain status, to the way he drifted between the realms of the nobility and the commoner yet never felt that he was really a part of either, I liked the book less than I had anticipated
. There wasn’t enough plot, there was too much aimless dialogue, and I couldn’t get a strong sense of any of the characters. Genji was too much of a reactor, I thought, not enough of an actor. Two hundred and fifty pages was plenty for a book, I thought, and by the time I’d read that much, I put down the book and conked out.

  I had been sleeping for some time when I heard the front door open and close, then Joseph’s voice calling my name. I rose to my feet, picked up my bags and my laptop, shut off the bedside lamp, and called back up, but no one answered. I heard footsteps, then something landing hard against the counter.

  “Joseph?”

  I mounted the steps toward the dark café. I had barely seen the outside world since I had begun writing Zero Ninety-eight; Joseph had always advised me to keep out of sight.

  “Joseph?” I called again.

  No response.

  I stood on the top step and looked into the café, then up at the counter. In the white-and-red glow of the exit sign, I could see Joseph’s body slumped over a stool, his arms outstretched. One of his hands was clutching the copies of Zero Ninety-eight. His head was on the counter, his eyes were closed. Two figures were standing above him. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could make out the bald, tattooed man with the black Rusty James jacket clutching a .38-caliber canino and the woman in the tweed overcoat, dull brown shoes, and gray felt marple. She was holding a copy of the Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s complete works. And then the stool slipped out from under Joseph, and his body hit the floor. I heard him give out a low gasp.

  I crouched at the top of the stairs, my heart pounding. I prayed they would leave without noticing me, but then the Hooligan Librarian began lumbering toward me, and Iola Jaffe followed right behind him. I tried to dash for the door, but Norbert Piels grabbed me and brought his gun down fast against my skull.

  “I’ve always wanted readers to feel the full impact of Shakespeare,” I heard Iola Jaffe say as she raised her book, then hit me hard across the face.

  A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

  I awoke slowly in an initially unfamiliar place, with an oddly acute awareness of my elbows; they seemed to be the only part of my body that wasn’t feeling either a sharp pain or a persistent ache. My face burned, and I felt bruises on my knees. My wrists were bound together with ropes and my ankles were tied to the chair’s legs. My palms and fingertips had already felt tingly and weary from typing before Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels arrived at Morningside Coffee, knocked Joseph out, then did the same to me before apparently lugging me into their car and bringing me here. Now when I inhaled, I smelled the musty, airless, vaguely fetid office in which I was sitting, a room whose windows seemed as if they had never been opened; when I tried to breathe through my mouth, I felt something stabbing my ribs. I was nauseated yet famished, tired yet well beyond the point of sleep; I felt so thirsty and parched that I could detect each crack in my lips. When I tried to swallow, I tasted sawdust and blood.

  I opened my eyes onto the room. Atop a long, unfinished wooden table were jewelers’ loupes, magnifying glasses, oversized leather-bound books that looked like ledgers. On the walls on either side of me were long, warped shelves sagging under the weight of stacks of reference books. I didn’t need to look any closer at the table to recognize the woman seated at it, paging through a galley of The Thieves of Manhattan. “A diminutive, silver-haired, beak-nosed woman with her lips pursed as if she had just tasted something foul” was how Roth had described Iola. So this had to be 129 Delancey Street, Iola Jaffe, Rare Manuscripts and Appraisal Services, “a musty, unrenovated office four flights up from an infested bodega.” I didn’t need to look up from the scuffed, steel-toed boots tapping in front of me to know that Norbert Piels was here too, that he was holding a canino, and that this time, I couldn’t knock it away.

  “’E’s wikin’ oop,” Norbert Piels said.

  Skinny cats lurked about, skulking in and out of the office as Iola Jaffe’s eyes scanned Thieves, searching for information. She read fast, slapped at pages, angrily cursing to herself as she did so, seemingly unable to find what she was looking for. I knew what she was after, but no matter how clever a reader she was, she would never find The Tale of Genji by reading the book Roth and I had written.

  “I say ’e’s wikin’ oop,” Piels said. His eyes seemed as dull as Iola’s were intense as he smoked a vonnegut down to its butt. I tried to speak, but my throat was so dry that all I could do was let out a small, pathetic rattle.

  “Where’s Joseph?” I finally gasped.

  “’E’ll be all right,” Piels said. “More than I can say for you.”

  I tried again to swallow, still couldn’t do it.

  “Water,” I said meekly. Piels looked to Iola Jaffe, who nodded tightly. Piels fetched me a jam jar half full of gray water. I drank it down fast, then held the jar out toward him.

  “More?” I asked. Piels took the jar and shook his head. I looked to Iola, but she didn’t return my glance. “Can you please fill it up?” I asked. Piels took the jar to the sink and left it there.

  What did they want from me, I finally said. Why didn’t they just ask? I wasn’t a tough guy; I’d tell them whatever they wanted—they didn’t need to subject me to this medieval torture.

  “Medieval?” Iola snapped shut The Thieves of Manhattan. “Me-die-val?” She lingered on each syllable, then rose to her feet and stood beside her desk, hands folded in front of her like some child’s nightmare vision of a seventeenth-century Pilgrim schoolteacher ready to rap knuckles with a yardstick.

  Iola’s body was framed by shelves of old books. Her flat brown shoes click-clacked as she paced before me. Exactly what did I know about the Middle Ages, she wanted to know, and when I said honestly not all that much, she said, well, that was the trouble with people these days, using words yet not having the slightest idea of their meaning. Medieval? Why, she’d written her graduate thesis about the Middle Ages, gotten her useless graduate degree on that very topic, spent years studying illuminated manuscripts, teaching them at university, the origins of the novel as exemplified by illustrated versions of the Chanson du Fucking Roland, if I really wanted to hear about it.

  In The Thieves of Manhattan, Iola had been a gifted scholar, but she had turned to crime when she’d failed to get tenure or publish her work. Norbert had been her finest research assistant, a brilliant ex-con with a photographic memory who could remember just about everything he’d ever read. But he’d lost a good deal of his mental faculties when he’d been injured during one of the many accidents that had befallen the Blom Library. I thought I had made all that up, but now I suspected that Jed Roth had led me to those stories too. I shuddered as I thought of the shootout that Roth had written at the end of the book but I had insisted we eliminate; I hoped that part wouldn’t turn out to be true as well.

  “Where did you get that galley?” I asked. I tried to gesture toward the copy of The Thieves of Manhattan on Iola’s desk, but, with my hands tied, all I could do was point my chin at it.

  “Someone was thoughtful enough to deliver it here,” Iola said. Roth, I thought. He had planned this, even the outfit and glasses I was wearing now, the ones that made me look like him.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” I told Iola.

  “None of us is,” she said, adding that she didn’t care for the way she was described in my book, but she supposed the descriptions were accurate given how well the author described both the Girl in the Library and Norbert, even though Norbert did bristle at the word hooligan. That was a dirty crack, she said; it wasn’t his fault he had turned out this way. The real problem, though, was not what my book adequately described but what it didn’t—namely, the site of the “buried Genji.” Was she really expected to believe what I had written? That I had buried the manuscript outside Manhattan in “some desolate fucking field?”

  “I didn’t write the book,” I said. “Please untie me and I’ll explain.”

  They both looked at me, unyielding and expectant.r />
  “Could you please just untie me?” I asked again.

  Piels shook his head. I tried to squirm free, but the ropes cut into my ankles and wrists. I felt my panic rising, my heartbeat accelerating, tears in my eyes. “Please tell him to untie me,” I repeated, my voice cracking. Then I began to yell. “Would you tell that hooligan to untie me?” But Iola was right, the librarian didn’t like being called a hooligan. As my eyes burned with frustration and fear, he asked menacingly if I knew what happened to writers who called him that. I shuddered and said no. “They get remaindered,” he said, then raised his canino and hit me across the face. This time, even losing consciousness couldn’t free me of the pain.

  THE BLOOD RUNS THROUGH THE RIVER, LIKE MY DREAMS

  The room was darker when I awoke—maybe it was night, maybe my eyes just couldn’t open all the way. I was no longer on the chair but on the warped, dusty floor in a corner of the room, up against bookshelves that dug into my back. One of Iola’s cats stood before me, arching its back and hissing. My hands and ankles were still bound, my temples throbbed, my thighs and knees ached, and I could still taste blood. When he saw I was awake, Norbert pulled up a metal folding chair and stared straight down at me, flicking ashes of his vonnegut onto the floor. I tried to make out the pattern in the tattoos on his face and hands, but my eyes couldn’t focus well enough to do it.

  “Wot useta be your name is?” he asked.

  “Ian Minot,” I said. “My name is Ian Minot. I’m just a writer. I’m not a thief. I’ve never stolen a thing in my life. Until very recently, I worked in Morningside Coffee. While I was working there, I met a man you used to know, the man you think I am, the man whose story this is. He’s a writer too; his name is Roth.”

  “Roth?” Norbert asked. A distant memory seemed to flicker behind his eyes.