by Adam Langer
To our right was a shuttered Best Buy; across a service road, a dark Potbelly Deli Sandwich Works; and before us was the entrance to 3B: Big Box Books. The company had gone into receivership, and the two other big chains were vying to take it over; this particular 3B was going or had already gone out of business. In front of the locked doors were shelves of remaindered hardcovers—travel guides, children’s story collections, an atlas of the moon. Anyone could have taken the books, but no one else was here. Snow had flecked onto the frozen book spines.
The doors were locked, but Norbert jimmied them open with the sharp blade of the jackknife he took out of a pants pocket. A sign in the vestibule read NO SMOKING, but Norbert lit another vonnegut anyway, and threw down his match. The red light on the security camera above wasn’t flashing; no alarm sounded when we entered the store.
Flashlight in one hand, I pointed out a path over the speckled gray carpet and down the main aisle as I limped along with the shovel. The store was indistinguishable from every other 3B in which I’d attended author readings then departed halfway through in a dark, envious mood, flipped through magazines and books without ever considering buying them, or wandered about, grousing that my work was still unpublished while this joker’s was on sale for $24.95. The café and magazines were up front; the music section was in back; the nonfiction books were up and to the left, the fiction up and to the right. An information kiosk at the back of the main aisle had a computer monitor flashing the 3B logo.
As we walked, I swept the flashlight over the front sale tables, picking out books: stacks of Blade Markham paperbacks—“Soon to be a major motion picture.” On the bestseller table was We Never Talked About Ceauşescu; Jens Von Bretzel’s Counter Life was on the BUY TWO GET ONE FREE grab table. I wondered where The Thieves of Manhattan would wind up, then decided it wouldn’t matter much; Norbert could tell me where all this store’s merchandise was headed—out of circulation, then off to the pulping mill.
I began approaching the aisles on the right when Iola said, “Give me that damn torch,” then snatched the flashlight from me. She pointed it directly in front of her as she stepped purposefully to the fiction shelves, passing the beam of light over one row of books and then the next, muttering with what sounded like anticipation.
From what I could see in the illumination provided by her flashlight, she was continuing to seek out books with crosses in their titles, poems with references to bleak or desolate fields. She found the complete works of G. K. Chesterton, which included the short story “A Golden Cross,” and a collection of poetry containing William Carlos Williams’s “A Desolate Field,” but nothing seemed unusual about those books. She kept looking.
Norbert grabbed hold of a sleeve of my gogol and led me away from Iola, pulling me across the aisle to Nonfiction. “This wigh,” he said, for an idea seemed to have occurred to him.
“Wot useta be your name was again?” he asked.
“Ian Minot,” I said.
Not the answer he was looking for; he shoved his canino against my chest. “Wot useta be the name of the man you said you wasn’t?”
“The man who I told you wrote the book?” I asked. “Roth. Jed Roth.”
Norbert shuddered, then shook off his disgust and nodded. He led me onward fast, a fierce and purposeful expression on his face. When we got to the nonfiction shelves, he pressed his canino against my back; with his other hand, he dragged on a vonnegut. Then he put the vonnegut between his lips and struck a match to light up the books on the shelves in front of us. I wanted to ask what he could possibly be looking for, but the more attention he paid to the books, the less he paid to me, and the better chance I might have to run.
Across the main aisle, Iola was walking back and forth, holding the flashlight steady, as if painting a long wall with it. She muttered aloud names of authors and titles of books that she apparently could see in the beam of light. It sounded as if she were casting some spell: “Ambler, Borges, Calvino”; “Chandler, Christie, Conan Doyle.” Every time she said an author’s name, Norbert’s eyes flickered in recognition, but I could sense Iola’s frustration growing—all this time, all these years; still she had nothing—all these clues for a mystery that she still couldn’t solve.
When Norbert and I reached the reference section, I began muttering aloud book titles and author names too. I pulled down books and pretended to study them as if they might hold some secret, but Norbert seemed to understand I was faking it and knocked down whatever book I was holding with the nose of his gun. Maybe he’d take his eyes off me, I thought; if I could run away fast enough, he’d have a hard time finding me in the store. I started looking for a particularly heavy and thick book, one I could bring down hard on Norbert’s skull.
In the light of one of Norbert’s matches, I could see a copy of Books in Print on a low shelf—that book looked like it could inflict some serious harm, I thought. But before I could reach for it, Norbert grabbed the book and grinned. “There’s the bloke,” he said. He tossed down his vonnegut, then dragged me toward the information kiosk, where he began roughly flipping through the book in the glow of the 3B computer monitor.
When he got to the R’s, Norbert stopped flipping. And then his eyes lit up again, even more so than they did when he had filled in the last word of a puzzle, when Iola mentioned the name of an author he seemed to recall, or when he was beating me with his gun. He shoved me toward the literary anthologies section, where Iola was already standing, passing her flashlight over book spines. Norbert reached down and grabbed a slender volume, a collection of contemporary adventure stories. The title was printed in white type on a black background: Unknown Tales. I remembered that title; it was one of the few anthologies to which Jed Roth had contributed before he had given up writing.
Norbert handed the book to Iola and looked at her, seeking approval. And when Iola turned to the table of contents, her lips formed a small, craggy cheshire. She thrust the flashlight into my hands, then turned to a story near the back of the book: “‘A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross,’ a short story by Jed Roth.” There was a biography of the author at the bottom of the first page: “Jed Roth is an editorial assistant in Manhattan, where he is also working on his first novel, A Thief in Manhattan.”
I was just beginning to try to figure out how this book had gotten here, when Iola shouted “Eureka!” A slip of paper had been folded into quarters and inserted between the pages of Roth’s story. Iola removed the folded sheet, then handed me the book, which I stuffed into a pocket of my gogol.
“Wot that is?” Norbert asked, squinting at the paper Iola was holding.
Iola patted Norbert on the shoulder. “The stuff dreams are fucking made of, Norbert,” she said. “A treasure map.”
ON A DARKLING PLAIN
Jed Roth told me he had always liked treasure maps; he put one in just about every story he wrote, said that all good adventures should have at least one, preferably yellowed and blackened with burn marks, with generous use of the word ye, and evocative place-names, such as Dead Man’s Cove, the Sea of Serenity, or Smuggler’s Lair. He liked terrifying warnings marked with skulls and crossbones—Here Be Dragons.
The map that had been hidden “outside Manhattan” in “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross” looked like an antique—brittle, yellow paper; charred edges—but the writing on it suggested it was a recent work: “Ye Olde Potbelly Sandwich Works,” “Lair of the Circuit City,” “Target’s Cove.” The Game Zone and Hot Topic stores were labeled with shaky capital letters—“Here Be Mall Rats!” Clearly, this was Faye’s work; she was leading us onward.
Iola held the flashlight with one hand while she traced the route on the map with a slender finger and nimbly made her way to 3B’s main corridor between Fiction and Nonfiction. Beneath the NO SMOKING sign at the front of the store, Norbert paused to light another vonnegut before we stepped out into the white-bright parking lot underneath the cold black Kansas sky.
Past Old Navy Reef we walked, out o
f the mall, farther and farther away from Ye Olde Route 177. Wind howled, leaves crackled as Iola counted off the paces indicated on the map. I trudged behind her. We approached another expanse of frozen field, even darker than the one we had traversed before; by now, the moon had disappeared behind a low, purple-gray cloud that was speeding through the sky.
As the mall receded behind us, there was no sign of any town, none of any civilization save for the mall itself, which seemed as if it had been built in the hopes that a population might grow around it. But the mall had come and gone, and the town had never arrived. The air smelled clean but with a hint of smoke—I turned around to see Norbert drag on his cigarette as the air grew foggier.
“Straight ahead, ay,” Norbert said. His voice sounded gentler now—he had discovered something that met with Iola’s approval, and now he, too, was succumbing to the excitement.
As for me, I knew that I was running out of time. Whose fault would it be when they learned that no Tale of Genji was here, that everything I had told them before was true? Upon whom would they take out their frustrations and their disappointment? In Roth’s manuscript, his hero shot Iola and Norbert dead, then buried them in the desolate field. But I had cut that scene, and anyway, I wasn’t the one with the canino. In the book, I managed to “wrest the gun away” from Norbert, but exactly how was that supposed to work? I might have put up a good fight against some of the men I’d met when my dad took me along to librarians’ conferences, but Norbert was no typical librarian. The directions on the map were leading us farther into darkness, and the fog was growing thicker.
This was a hell of a place for an adventure to end, I thought, on some futile march through this dark and cold. As we walked, I cursed everyone who had brought me here—my mother, who had given birth to me and died before I knew her; my father, who had given me faith in stories and dreams, but left me too soon to know where that faith would lead; I cursed the Confident Man and I cursed Faye for pointing him out to me; I cursed Anya and Anna Petrescu, and I cursed Blade Markham; I cursed Geoff Olden, and I cursed Jim Merrill, Jr. I cursed Norbert Piels, and I cursed Iola Jaffe; most of all, I cursed myself: I cursed the author of The Thieves of Manhattan, who had led me to this fate, and I cursed Ian Minot, who had been too stupid and naïve to anticipate it.
And then, when Iola stopped walking, I cursed the crosses that I saw before us in the middle of a little Kansas family plot, in which every headstone displayed the name Blom. I cursed Faye’s painting that was still hanging in my apartment with its country house, its gleaming white car, its meadow, its graveyard, and its title, No Place Like Home. I cursed the freshly turned grave that had no headstone and was marked only by a golden cross. I cursed the man whose eyes ignited as he said, “That’s it, is it?” I cursed the woman who took a deep breath, then said, “At long fucking last.” I cursed the thick, smoky air as I pulled out the cross. It wasn’t a cross for Christ; it was a T for Truth, I told myself, and now that truth—either an empty grave or a forged manuscript—would finally be revealed. I tossed the cross onto the earth, then began to dig.
MY SWEET LORD
Two feet down, mounds of black earth atop the snow on either side of me, there was still no sign of any book, but Norbert urged me to keep at it, ay, while Iola anxiously muttered Shakespeare soliloquies and swearwords. My hands were cold; they ached as they clutched the shovel handle, and I could feel pain in my shoulders and back with each plunge into the earth. But I kept digging; at least, the deeper I stood in the ditch, the less I could feel the snow and wind.
When the hole was waist-deep, I could feel the dirt in my nostrils, taste it on my tongue. Another foot of earth, another mound; the ground was getting rockier, harder to dig. I was growing woozy and delirious, and the wearier I felt, the more I considered just surrendering. I could lie down, hands across my chest; the grave was ready-made. I sank the shovel into the earth one more time. And then I heard a clang as it hit something hard and metal.
“Wha’s tha’?” Norbert asked.
Five feet above me, Iola sprang to attention, and now so did I. Norbert threw down his vonnegut and lit another. I dug once more, heard a louder clang.
“Wha’sat?”
I stopped digging and cleared away the dirt. Iola pointed her flashlight into the hole, and I could see what appeared to be a metal case with a dull red handle. Iola’s hands shook, her eyes sparkled; she looked ten years younger. Norbert panted as he bent his knees, desperate to learn what I’d found.
I pulled the case out of the earth. Something inside seemed to shift. It felt like a manuscript, maybe a book. I remembered how Roth and I had described The Tale of Genji, and now I could picture it: the shimmering gold Japanese characters on the black leather cover, the lovely, intricate illustrations.
“Don’t you dare jiggle it,” said Iola.
I laid the case on the ground above me, then climbed out of the grave. Iola crouched over the case. From her pocketbook, she removed a pair of thin white cotton gloves, and put them on. She flicked aside the few remaining particles of dirt. Norbert was watching me closely, but I could see him beginning to shift his weight, lick his lips, bob his head. I held on tightly to my shovel, my pulse accelerating.
Iola put her ear to the combination; she twirled one dial, then another, and a third. There was a click, a clunk, then another click, and I couldn’t tell whether that click was the hammer of Norbert’s gun or the cylinders of the lock engaging. I couldn’t run now, even if I wanted to—not until I learned what was inside.
Iola opened the case. “Jesus,” she said as she eyed its contents. “Jee-hee-zus.”
THE TREASURE OF THE GENJI
I didn’t know whether “Jesus” meant good or bad. I wasn’t looking at Iola or at the case yet; I just kept looking at Norbert.
“Jesus,” Iola said again, and when she said it one more time, Norbert took his eyes off me. He looked over to Iola, then down to the case. His eyes opened wide as he mouthed the words, “Wot that is?” And in that moment, I raised the shovel high and brought its blade down hard on his hand, right on one of his tattoos. Norbert yelled, his hand opened, and his gun fell onto the snow. When he reached for it, I thrust the shovel handle hard into his guts. He doubled over. I lunged for the gun, and grabbed it.
I pointed the canino at Iola and Norbert, no longer feeling any pain. Norbert made as if to speak. “Quiet,” I said and pulled back the hammer. I told both of them to stay still, and how did that sound like a good idea?
Norbert shuddered, clearly expecting me to show no mercy. He put his hands over his head, stepped backward toward the edge of the hole I had dug, and quietly asked me to put the gun down, put it down, ay. I told him to keep his mouth shut. Iola was still staring at the case, inside of which was not The Tale of Genji, but a 250-page manuscript; on the title page—Zero Ninety-eight, A Memoir by Ian Minot. Someone had brought my book here, buried it right in time for me to save myself, the same person who had put Faye’s map in 3B’s copy of Unknown Tales. Maybe Joseph, I thought, maybe Roth, but I was hoping that Faye had done it, that she had stopped at Morningside Coffee, found Joseph, and gotten the manuscript from him.
Iola’s voice trembled as if she was finally feeling the chill of the winter air. She picked up Zero Ninety-eight and somberly paged through it—what the hell was this shit, she asked; this couldn’t have been what she had spent so many years searching for.
I kept my index finger on the gun’s trigger as Norbert teetered at the grave’s precipice. Now all it would take would be two squeezes of the trigger, and down both Iola and Norbert would fall, just as in Roth’s original draft, in which his hero shot the pair of them without even a hint of remorse, an act that took him little more than a sentence to describe. Iola and Norbert had thought I was digging to find The Tale of Genji, but now it must have appeared to them as if I had been digging their grave. The buried manuscript of Zero Ninety-eight was a nice touch, a little turn of the screw, as Jed would have said, enough to distract I
ola and Norbert and give me time to make my move.
Iola’s face was ashen and Norbert was now a fearful, faceless creature, preparing to tumble into the abyss that awaited. He knew all too well what happened to men in his situation—they got shelved, remaindered, pulped. I could see his pulse beating against the tattoos upon his temples, making them dance. And it would be so easy, I felt now, just like in a book—click and bang. They would fall, I would shovel the dirt over them, then run back for the Opel and drive east—on to the next chapter. I was sure I could get away with it too. Interviewers would ask the same question they asked of Blade Markham: Wouldn’t I feel afraid that the people I wrote about would try to take me out? “Nah,” I’d say, “those punks I wrote about, they all dead, yo.” Yes, I could almost do it now. For a moment, I didn’t give a damn about Iola or Norbert or anyone else. How much mercy had they shown me, after all?
I studied Norbert’s face, and for the first time I began to look closely at the swirls and crisscrosses of his tattoos. The raised lines still seemed to have no clear pattern; they now reminded me of bursts of lightning, or cuts on a shattered mirror. Or, more probably, I thought as I stepped closer to him, bruises from an accident and scars left by fire—like scars left after running through a burning library, still looking in vain for a book that was already gone.
In those tattoos—those scars and bruises—and in the creases on Iola’s face, I could imagine all that this pair had been through to find The Tale of Genji, the most valuable document that either thought they had ever seen. I considered the chases, the struggles, the fire, finally the glimmer of hope, but now, at last, the defeat. In their faces, I could see how what they had experienced could drive them to want to kill. I understood that feeling, had the canino in my hand and my finger on its trigger to prove it. But that old fault of mine was emerging big-time—loathing at a distance; sympathizing up close. Empathy might be a good quality for a writer, but it’s not very useful to a man holding a gun. Looking at Iola and Norbert, I thought about the lives Roth and I had written for them, the ones I thought we had invented but now I understood were true, the ones that Roth had left out of his draft, which made killing the pair of them seem easy. I imagined Iola whiling away thankless hours in dim libraries and classrooms, working on a book she would never finish, articles she would never publish, losing her job at the university where she taught, and growing more bitter with each passing year. I imagined who Norbert had been before the accidents and the fire—the promising scholar, the best research assistant Iola had ever had, the one who could instantly recall nearly everything he had ever read. I imagined the Genji, how much it would have been worth to Iola and Norbert had it been real—not only the money it could bring, but the notoriety and perhaps even a chance at redemption. And all they had gotten for their troubles was the shame of learning that they had been fools to believe they would ever find it. I knew all too well what it felt like to be taken for a fool. I played out Roth’s ending over and over in my mind—Norbert first, down he’d go, then Iola. Shovel the dirt, grab the manuscript, run. Life can be cheap in a novel; but in a memoir, it’s harder to kill.