by Adam Langer
And so instead of shooting Iola and Norbert, I lowered the canino and told them the whole story, everything that had really happened as far as I knew, from the time I met Jed Roth to the way we ended up here. I told them that it was all written in the manuscript I’d unearthed. And when I was through, Norbert quietly and resignedly asked what I would do with them; he still seemed to expect that I would shoot them dead like all good villains do after they’ve told their stories to their victims. But I was feeling better than I had in weeks—alive, in control, and even a bit giddy. I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and took out a business card from the Olden Literary Agency—“in case you meet someone else with a great story to tell,” Geoff liked to say. I suggested that Norbert and Iola go back to New York, lie low, write their story, and when they were done, find Geoff; he’d know what to do with it—after everything Jed and I had written about them, allowing them the chance to tell their side of the story seemed only fair. I told Norbert and Iola to get moving fast before I changed my mind.
When I heard the chugging of an approaching highsmith, I tossed down the shovel, picked up my manuscript, put it in the metal case, closed it, and started running with the case and the gun. I had no phone or watch to tell me what time it was, but I had a pretty good feeling that it was the same number as the combination for the metal case: 8-1-3.
As I ran for a black freight car with a wide-open door, I could glimpse Iola and Norbert. They were running through the graveyard back toward the highway and the deserted mall. Iola was holding the flashlight; Norbert was holding the most valuable item he’d been able to find: the golden cross. In some strange way, I wished them well. But now the air behind me was getting even thicker, the clouds in front of the moon were moving faster, and as I made out the tiny glint of Norbert’s cigarette tip fading into the night, I could see that smoke was coming from the mall: Big Box Books was on fire.
THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER
Growing up in small-town Indiana, I learned early on that hopping onto freight cars is much easier than jumping off them. Once you grab hold, the train practically lifts you all by itself. And tonight, when I saw the hand reach out toward me from the darkness inside the car, I knew I could get on board without even losing balance or breaking stride, just as the hero of The Thieves of Manhattan had done. So when I found myself lying on my back on the floor of the car with the metal case and the canino at my side instead of in my hands, I knew the person who had pulled me up had tripped me. I had hoped that Faye might be on board the train, but when a green light along the tracks shone into the car, it lit up the face of Jed Roth, who was wearing his black gogol and matching capote. He helped me to my feet, shook my hand, and smiled. But he was holding the canino now, and though he wasn’t pointing it at me, he didn’t look as though he was planning to return it.
“Dead, are they?” he asked, and when I didn’t say anything, he asked if I had checked Iola’s and Norbert’s pulses. As always, there was a rote expectancy to his questions, the unflappability and confidence that had always alternately charmed and annoyed me, as if he assumed I was still acting a part in his story. But there was a new bitterness to his demeanor. I brushed dust and dirt off my pants, then sat atop the metal case, while he sipped tea from a thermos cup.
The inside of the train car was dark, and so I could see Roth’s face only in flashes provided by white and amber highway lights; by the pale half-moon when it emerged from behind the clouds; or by the pulsing reds of fire trucks rushing to Big Box Books. Roth looked even older and more severe than when I had last seen him. Once, he had looked like the man I hoped I might become; now like a man I hoped I would never turn into.
“Dead, are they?” he asked again. His voice was cold and authoritative, his eyes dark and fierce, as if he had stopped playing a game, or as if he was now revealing that he had never been playing a game at all. It seemed clear what he thought had happened—Iola and Norbert were dead, just as he had written in his original draft; I was still alive, so I must have managed to “wrest the gun away,” shoot them, bury them there in the frozen ground, and run for the train. Now Roth was pointing the canino at me, looking as blank and unsympathetic as a character in a story he had written.
The moon peeked out from behind a cloud, for a moment revealing the intensity in Roth’s eyes, the mad rage and hatred that he apparently felt no more need to conceal. But I met them with the same intensity with which they regarded me. I wouldn’t answer yes, because that would mean moving on to what I imagined would be the next part of Roth’s plot—me with a hammett in my guts, flying backward out of the train, rolling down into an empty field, while he would go off to find the girl. In Roth’s story, only one man was on board the highsmith heading away from that field outside Manhattan, and his name was Roth. I should have known not to trust him the minute I’d finished reading his manuscript for the first time; he was an amoral writer, cold and unfeeling, didn’t give a damn about his characters—all he cared about was getting on with the plot.
“You checked the pulses?”
“I didn’t,” I said, trying to speak in the same concise and self-assured manner that Roth had when he was pulling me into his story.
“What?” he asked.
Roth tried to maintain his characteristically confident look, but in the twirling orange light of a tow truck stalled at a crossing, I could see it fading. He asked his question again.
“Dead, are they?”
“No, they’re not, Jed.”
Roth was silent for a moment.
“What happened after they found out the case was empty?” he asked. “What did you do, Ian?”
I could now hear an unfamiliar tremor in his voice as our train passed beneath a highway. We had both emerged into uncertain territory; I could see that he had no idea that the case had not been empty, that it had contained my manuscript of Zero Ninety-eight. He had no idea that I had even written it. That had not been a part of our story. Jed hadn’t buried the manuscript beneath the golden cross, that was for sure; either Joseph or Faye had done it, and had helped to change the plot Jed thought he had planned so well.
“The case wasn’t empty, Jed.”
“What happened?” Roth asked, for apparently he couldn’t come up with his own answer—he had forgotten what it was like to have to wonder What if. I now thought of what Roth had told me when we were discussing strategies for getting our book published—the smarter and more powerful a person is, the easier it is to trick him; find the cockiest man you can—taking him down is as easy as swatting a fly. It’s the inexperienced guy you have to watch out for. I opened the metal case and took out the manuscript of Zero Ninety-eight. I thrust the pages at him, and as the train slowed in a pale yellow caution light’s glow, I instructed him to read.
“Why should I?” asked Roth.
“Read it and I’ll tell you.”
“What for?”
“Read it and you’ll know.”
Warily, Roth took the pages from me and put the gun down at his side. The manuscript wasn’t long; even a slow reader could have made his way through it in an evening. But Roth could only steal glimpses through the lights we passed, and so I closed my eyes and slept soundly for the first time in weeks, confident that, even though he still had the canino, even though I was sure that he still wanted to use it on me, he wouldn’t do anything to me before he had finished the book.
LOVE AND CONSEQUENCES
By the time Roth reached the last page of Zero Ninety-eight, dawn had broken, casting his face and my manuscript in a deep blue glow. I had been awake for about half an hour. I discovered that the Unknown Tales anthology was still in my gogol pocket, and I spent a few minutes reading Roth’s story, “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross.” It was a diverting little sketch, one that had formed the basis for the shootout scene in A Thief in Manhattan. But since the characters were thin, the violence seemed gratuitous, and the story felt trivial and recycled. I could have helped Roth develop his characters,
make them more sympathetic and their dialogue more believable, but as it stood, the story would have been a whole lot more compelling had any of it been true.
I was admiring the glacial and conical shapes that ice and snow had made atop the rusted cars in the junkyards we passed when Roth finished reading Zero Ninety-eight. He could have pretended that he didn’t care I had written everything I had learned about him and the plan he and Faye had hatched, but the hand that held my manuscript was quivering, and when he had read the last page, his face had gone pale. He put down the manuscript, took a breath, and looked up. He didn’t have to ask what had happened or what might happen next—I knew that’s what he wanted to know. And because Roth had taught me that the best lies are always intertwined with facts, I began by telling him I had made copies of the book he had just finished reading. And then I told him I had sent one copy to Geoff Olden with clear instructions about what he should do with it if anything happened to me, conveniently leaving out the fact that Iola and Norbert had gotten to Morningside Coffee and knocked out Joseph, and that as far as I knew, Joseph hadn’t been able to deliver Zero Ninety-eight to Geoff.
I told Roth that if he left me alone, I would continue to act out the whole scenario just as we had discussed. He could sell The Tale of Genji as he and Faye had planned, and when I felt the moment was right, I would do exactly as Roth and I had agreed, reveal that The Thieves of Manhattan was a lie so that he could have his revenge. As for Zero Ninety-eight, I would promise never to publish it unless anything happened to me, in which case the whole story would be revealed.
I put out my hand for Roth to shake.
Roth regarded the manuscript on the floor beside him, then my hand; he searched my eyes as if wondering whether I might prove more trustworthy than he had ever been. It was a rotten bet for him to make, considering all he’d taught me, but it really was the only one he had. Kill me, and he risked blowing the whole plot; let me live, he might still get away with it. Slowly, he reached out to grasp my hand, even though I could see that it was just about the last thing he wanted to do.
“Now, the canino,” I said.
Roth’s facial expression was becoming one I no longer recognized—part admiration, part envy, part nostalgia, as if I were now something he had only dreamed of, as if he were a Geppetto whose Pinocchio had slipped his strings and become real. There was something he didn’t understand about people in books and in real life—they didn’t always do what you wanted or expected them to or what you thought your plot required; sometimes, they took on lives of their own.
Roth handed the gun to me; I took it, then threw it out the open door. I didn’t need it anymore; I had Zero Ninety-eight on my thumb drive and that was enough protection for me. A gun might not wound Jed. He could even wrest it away from me, but the knowledge contained in Zero Ninety-eight could derail his plot. I picked up the copy of the manuscript that Roth had read, skimmed it, glanced at the last page, then tossed it out of the train, one page after another, as if to symbolize to Roth that I meant to keep the promise I had made to him. I sat back down upon the empty case and asked Jed where the forged Genji was really hidden.
“In a safe-deposit box,” Roth said. For once, his voice sounded almost humble.
We sat in the train, me on the metal case, him on the floor, watching the fleeting American landscape—flatlands giving way to hills; empty fields becoming housing tracts, malls being built or going out of business. For a long time, Roth said nothing, but I could see him thinking, wondering, trying to figure out how the tables had turned so quickly. He liked stories that ended well, ones in which heroes got what they wanted. But now I knew he couldn’t say for sure which of us was the hero.
Roth sighed. In some adventure novels, he said as he gazed out the door, this might be the time to tie up loose ends, to tell me more about Faye’s childhood as heir to the Blom family, about what he and Faye had in common. He would describe the old Blom family home, which had been leveled to make way for a shopping mall; then he’d make wistful observations about old worlds that were disappearing. But he said he always skimmed long speeches in books, and he never cared for the surprise revelations that tended to pop up toward the end of mysteries. All I really needed to know was that once, he had seen a girl in a strange, doomed library, and had risked his life to bring her something he thought she wanted. In return, she had given him an idea for a story he hadn’t known how to finish. And now, even though he understood that their story wasn’t over, and that it might not turn out the way he had written it, he knew that the only choice he had was to still trust it. He had to have faith that she would be waiting for him, just as the story promised she would, and that they would escape together.
But I wasn’t so sure about that. For I had recognized Faye’s handwriting at the bottom of the last page of Zero Ninety-eight, the page Roth had been reading when his face went white. And the words she had written there had convinced me that she was in charge of this story now, that she was helping to create it even as Jed and I spoke, that she had managed to get Zero Ninety-eight from Joseph, then bury it in the empty field, knowing that I could use it to save myself. She was doing the same thing she did in her art—taking a story she knew, and making it her own. She had written the same basic message that Jed had left for me in his apartment: “Maybe I’ll see you after the last page.” I felt pretty sure now that Faye intended that message for me.
I asked Roth what he would do with the money from the sale of the Genji. He paused a moment and considered.
“We’ll build another library,” he said. “We’ll fill it full of fakes. We’ll write another story. And then another. Fool as many people as we can.”
But I wasn’t sure about that either. Faye had told me she didn’t like sequels, and I figured she probably didn’t much care for the sorts of stories Jed invented—too violent, too many people getting hurt. Maybe that was one of the reasons why she might have hidden my manuscript in the desolate field—not only to let me show Iola and Norbert that I’d been telling the truth, and Roth that I knew all about his plot, but also to show me that she understood the difference between the sorts of stories that each of us wrote. I knew that she preferred my stories, ones that may have been quiet and uneventful, but everything in them felt true. The question that neither Roth nor I could answer was whether she preferred me or him.
“Do you even love her?” I asked Roth.
“There is an inseparable bond between her and me,” he began. But I recognized that quote—it came from The Tale of Genji. It had been borrowed just like the plots of Jed’s stories. Faye wasn’t real to him—he didn’t love her for her art or for who she was, only for what she could do for him. We were both just characters in a book to Roth, useful devices who could help get him his money and his revenge.
When I finally saw her, she was leaning against the hood of a gleaming white car stalled at a railroad crossing. She was wearing a sky blue Kansas concert jersey, and her red hair was flying out from beneath a black corduroy baseball cap.
Roth stood in the doorway of our train car. He shook my hand once more, took a breath, then leaped from the train. He leaped as if he understood the speed of railroad cars and knew how quickly the ground would come up to meet him, for that’s the way it had happened in a book; as he touched the grass, he didn’t even break his stride. He held one hand atop his capote, and the tails of his black gogol seemed to fly as he ran through the snow toward Faye, but she was smiling at me as my highsmith sped east toward Manhattan, New York, and the rising sun.
FAMOUS ALL OVER TOWN
The Thieves of Manhattan had been out for nearly three weeks. I had completed the first leg of my author tour with a standing-room-only gig in Coral Gables, Florida, and had just gotten back to New York for the celebration at Geoff Olden’s. Everything was going according to the original plan. Though the booksellers I’d been meeting around the country had told me horror stories—publishers consolidating; regional sales reps losing their jobs; independent bo
okstores shutting down; publicists canceling author tours; Miri Lippman turning The Stimulator into an online-only journal—none of this seemed to be affecting Thieves.
My schedule was booked solid, the film was in production, Myself When I Am Real was being hurried into the Merrill pipeline. There was a global recession on, and it was apparently the perfect time for a story of riches, thievery, and a rogue who was willing to risk his life to give a girl he loved something precious and rare. I was even featured in U.S. News & World Report, interviewed by the real Simian Gold. Best of all, neither Gold, nor any other reporter or feature writer who interviewed me, ever asked whether my story was true. No journalist had been enterprising or curious enough to try to track down Iola and Norbert to learn what had happened to them. I didn’t breathe a word about the provenance of The Tale of Genji or about Zero Ninety-eight. As for my readers, when they asked how I’d managed to lead such an eventful life and I smiled and told them I had made everything up, they seemed to think I was joking or acting modest. When they asked if I had any tips for writing memoirs, I told them to steal someone else’s. What Roth had told me was right—truth can be the best kind of lie; what makes it false is why you’re telling it—say, for instance, telling the story of your father’s illness or your mother’s tragic death to gain a reader’s sympathy and trust.