by Adam Langer
The gypsy cabdriver screeched around corners, peeled out, made U-turns, weaved through traffic on the Henry Hudson, slid across four lanes of traffic to exit. He seemed to be having the time of his life.
“How you like that one, Boris? How you like that one?” he kept asking, calling me by a name he must have heard in some movie, laughing the whole while, until he turned onto my block, where he gunned the accelerator to seventy then slammed on the brakes. I felt as if I should give him a round of applause; instead, I gave him fifty bucks and told him to keep it.
“Anytime, Boris.”
It felt good to be home—I couldn’t wait to lock my door, sit down, monitor the video security system on my TV, see who was coming and going, remind myself of who I was. I would throw my clothes, a toothbrush, and a comb into an overnight bag, then take a cab to LaGuardia or JFK, get the next plane out, and salinger myself for a good long while. I wondered if this was what celebrity would be like, whether this was how I would have to live after The Thieves of Manhattan was published, with no place to hide anymore. What did I know about how authors really lived? In my lobby, I glanced at myself in the wall mirror. The wound at the side of my head was blacker than I had imagined, bigger too. My cheeks were streaked dark red, but my skin looked pale underneath.
I took the stairs slowly. My legs felt heavy now; they quivered with each step. I walked out of the stairwell, but as I approached my door, I froze. It was ajar, and light was streaming out. I peered through the crack and saw that my belongings were strewn over the floor: books, clothes, sheets, pillowcases, mattress. Someone was rustling through everything, and a voice, deep but unmistakably a woman’s, muttered as my stuff kept falling to the floor.
What was she looking for? Where was it, the tattooed man had asked. But what did Ian Minot have except for clothes and money? The man hadn’t wanted money. “No wallet,” he had said. My mind was halfway to putting together the story when my cellphone rang. I reached into my pocket to mute it, but the woman rifling through my apartment must have heard the sound. She darted to the door, and I could see her now: silver-gray, every-which-way hair parted down the middle; sparkling, piercing, knowing eyes—and when those eyes met mine, I started running again, down the stairs. I looked at the number on my cellphone display to see who was calling—Simian Gold again. Simian Gold, was that even a real name? Did U.S. News employ a books editor named Simian Gold? Did U.S. News even employ a books editor? Every magazine seemed to be cutting its pages; some didn’t even run book reviews anymore. Simian Gold? I waited to hear if the woman was following me; I didn’t hear footsteps, and she had looked old, like someone I could outrun, but I didn’t want to run anymore. I ran into the lobby anyway. The tattooed man was at the front door of my building, pressing buzzer buttons. He held his cellphone in one hand, and the phone in my pocket was still ringing.
I slipped out the emergency exit, and crept to the green dumpsters beside my building. Already there was a thin layer of ice and wet snow upon them. I crouched down and waited, wondering, should I run, no, wait, maybe now, no, wait. How long would it take the man to get buzzed in, climb the stairs, and find I wasn’t there? Count to ten. I counted to ten, then sprang up from behind the dumpsters and ran toward 147th Street.
AWFUL DISCLOSURES
“Jed,” I muttered breathlessly into my phone from the back of a taxi heading south on Broadway. “Come on, man,” I was saying. “Come on, pick up.” My taxi driver, an unkempt Eastern European with a week’s growth of ginsberg, was moving slowly, hitting every light, and I turned around to check if anybody was following. Every car looked suspicious.
I heard a recorded voice on the other end of the phone line—“The cellular customer you are trying to reach is out of range.” I tried again. “The cellular customer you are trying to reach …” Call 911, I thought. But then my mind started racing: What if the police asked too many questions? What if they wanted to know what I did for a living, what kind of books I wrote, what happened in them, whether they were true or not, whether I had committed the crimes I had written about?
I got out of the cab in front of Jed’s building; the front door was open, and as I dashed into the lobby, I could hear Jed’s voice ringing in my ears—“Oh, and Ian? Next time we’re not scheduled to work together and you have something you want to discuss: call first.” I dialed his number once more, but when I heard the recorded message again, I raced for the elevator, and when I saw it was in use, I ran for the stairs. Up to the fourth floor I went, my wet shoes slip-sliding along the marble floor.
“Jed!”
I knocked on his door.
“Jed!”
I stopped knocking, started slapping.
One more slap and the door swung open fast; it had been unlocked the whole time.
“Jed?”
But Jed was gone, and so were his books, his furniture, the paintings on his walls. I flicked a switch and the wooden floors gleamed in the glare of the lightbulbs overhead. All that remained was the view—Riverside Park, the black Hudson River, buses cruising north and south, and the snow falling upon cars, sidewalks, and trees. I flicked every light switch in the bedroom, the office, the kitchen, the bathroom—everything was gone. No flutes in the cabinets, no champagne in the fridge, no manuscripts or books, not even a sheet of paper.
By now I was pretty sure what was happening, what Roth had done. I took my phone out, called information, and asked for a number on Delancey Street—“Iola Jaffe Rare Manuscripts and Appraisal Services, please.”
“Connecting your call, sir.” I heard two rings, then a recorded voice.
“This is Iola Jaffe; I’m not here to take your damn call …”
I hung up the phone.
It was all becoming real.
A scrap of yellow paper was taped to Jed’s bedroom door. On it were these words: “Ian, trust the story. Perhaps we’ll meet again after the last page. Jed.” The words echoed those in the last line of The Thieves of Manhattan, the words the Girl in the Library had spoken—“Why shouldn’t our story continue after the last page has been written?”
I balled up the note, threw it right into the middle of Roth’s empty living room, then hurried out and ran for the stairs.
I TELL YOU THESE THINGS ARE TRUE
I trudged east on 112th Street through the gathering snow, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. I felt like a fool. I had thought that The Thieves of Manhattan was a novel—that the real deception would lie in the word memoir on the book jacket. But Jed Roth had switched names and was somehow setting me up to make it seem as if I had written a memoir after all. “Everything will fall out just as it has been planned. It will all happen as it was written, Ian,” I remembered Roth telling me. I hadn’t understood what he had been saying. Now I feared that I had a pretty good idea; everything that had happened in the book was starting to happen to me.
But how true could the book really be? The tattooed thug in the Rusty James jacket didn’t look like any librarian I’d ever met, but he sure looked like a hooligan. And he spoke exactly the way Roth had written him: Ay? Ay? Wot you said? How’s that soun’ like a good idea? Which had come first, I wondered, the actual hooligan or the one on the page? Was the woman in my apartment Iola Jaffe, the foul-mouthed septuagenarian manuscript appraiser? On the voice mail I had called, that sure sounded like the way I had imagined her speaking. Was there really a Tale of Genji buried somewhere in a desolate field beneath a golden cross? Iola Jaffe and that hooligan were certainly looking for something, and it wasn’t money.
Maybe the book really did still exist, I thought. Maybe Roth had stolen it and hidden it somewhere, not beneath a golden cross, of course, but somewhere out of sight, like in the safe-deposit box I’d suggested. Maybe he’d kept it there until he’d found some poor sap to put his name to the book, add his story and make it his own, while he’d sell the “Shining Lord” for all it was worth.
Roth and I had spent so much time refining The Thieves of Manhattan—
developing characters, establishing their motivations—but the basic story had always remained the same: A man walks into the Blom Library and sees a girl admiring a rare and valuable Tale of Genji. When he realizes that the Blom’s librarian has been stealing manuscripts, he sees an opportunity to steal the Genji for the girl. He steals it, but when he returns to look for the girl at the library, he finds it has been destroyed by the Hooligan Librarian, who flew into a rage when he learned the Genji was gone. He buries the manuscript, then spends the novel evading his pursuers while searching for, and ultimately finding, the girl, bringing her the Genji, and winning her heart. Only in my version, the thief wasn’t a suave customer named Roth, but a down-on-his-luck writer and barista named Ian Minot, son of a university librarian, with a Romanian girlfriend and a job at Morningside Coffee working alongside a sexy, baseball-capped artist and an obese thespian with dreadlocks and a goatee. I had thought that each of the details I had added made the story more believable. Probably they had. But they had also taken suspicion off Roth and placed it squarely on me, and I was starting to understand that just about all of my relationship with Jed, every “editorial session” we had ever had, was just part of one great big setup.
Still, all this seemed like a whole lot of trouble for Roth to go through no matter how much the Genji might have been worth, and I was getting dizzy trying to pull out the strands to determine which might be true. The Girl in the Library looked and talked like Faye in my version of the story, but who was she really? Roth had said he wanted to exact revenge on the publishing industry that had supposedly betrayed him, and he did seem to know that industry well enough, but did he really hate it so much? Why all the fuss about agents and publishers when my name would appear on the manuscript without them, when I had already signed my confession, agreed to take the fall? I needed someone to discuss this with, but who? Olden? Merrill? Admit to my lies and sabotage my career before it began? The police? With my name on the autobiography of a thief? I felt glad that I had insisted we at least cut out the scene in which the hero shot Iola and Norbert dead; now if the police ever caught up to me, they wouldn’t think I was a murderer. I needed time to figure everything out, but I didn’t have that either. Not with Iola Jaffe at my apartment; not with the Hooligan Librarian on my trail; not with Roth already gone. I had felt safer when Norbert was chasing me and I could outrun him. Now he could be anywhere, and so I didn’t know whether to walk fast or slow, turn back, go forward, or stand still. Behind me was Roth’s block and the river, so I walked forward.
FORBIDDEN LOVE
Morningside Coffee had just closed. I was standing in the bus shelter across the street, and, through the falling snow, I could see Joseph zeroing out the register, could see Faye actually mopping, doing some work for once in her life, and for probably the first time in my life, I longed to be back in there, back in time. How I wished I could walk into that coffee shop so that Joseph could ask me if I had sold any books and I could honestly tell him, “Hell, no.”
Inside the café, the lights flickered, Joseph flipped the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED, and then he and Faye stepped outside and said good night. Joseph was twice Faye’s size, yet he was the one bundled up—scarf, mittens, moon boots. He shuffled toward his Citroën, gave me an up-and-down glance, sighed, shook his head, and kept walking while Faye headed uptown, wearing her usual denim and baseball cap. By the time she reached the Columbia University gates, I was right behind her.
“Faye?”
She didn’t seem to hear me the first time, but when I said her name again, she turned around. So much was different for me since the last time I saw her, when I’d tried to act so cocky. Just by looking into her eyes, I could see exactly how much had changed.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.
“I’m in trouble, Faye,” I told her. I hadn’t known how frightened I was until I heard my voice quiver, felt my hands and knees shake even as I tried to stand still. “Can you take me home?”
Faye inhaled sharply—I knew I was asking too much, but I persisted. “I just need somewhere to stay, Faye,” I said. “Just a couple days. Somewhere no one knows me. I just need to figure some things out.”
She said nothing, but when I told her that I truly had no one else, that she was the last person I could think of, that I was in real danger, like maybe even life-and-death danger, and that all I needed was a place to rest my head, and that she would never hear from me again afterward if she didn’t want to, I thought I could see her weakening. I told her that I knew she had cared for me once, and I knew she didn’t anymore; I knew that she thought I was a liar and a heel and I knew that she was right. But if she retained any of her prior affection, maybe she could find it in her heart to help me.
Faye took a long look at me. “You’re sure you have nowhere else you can go?” she asked.
“If I did, I wouldn’t be here,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow and gave the hint of a smile. “All right, Sailor,” she said.
We walked together down to the subway platform and got on a southbound highsmith. Never had I felt so glad to have someone I could sit beside.
I closed my eyes and put my head on Faye’s shoulder as the subway doors closed and the train headed downtown. It all could have turned out so differently, I thought, had I always known how safe I would feel next to Faye in the subway car.
NAKED CAME THE STRANGER
I still felt too paranoid to tell Faye about everything that had happened, too obsessed with looking around to see if anyone was following, until we exited the Second Avenue subway station. By then, I finally felt confident that we were alone, so I let it all flow out. I told her that this was really all her fault; she was the one who had directed my attention to the Confident Man.
When I began telling Faye the story, she didn’t seem all that interested, but once I got to the part about the Hooligan Librarian’s strange tattoos, I thought I could see her getting hooked just as she always had when I told her stories about Blade or my “Lithuanian girl.” I realized how much I missed talking to her, the way she listened without judging, laughed without mocking—even though now she didn’t seem to care about me, she still seemed to think my story was worth hearing.
I was so thankful that Faye and I were together again, I almost didn’t mind that she seemed to find my plight comic, as if my escape from Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels was no more consequential than any of the stories I had told her before. She cracked up at the note Jed had left for me—“Perhaps we’ll meet again after the last page”—for the corny line it was. As we walked, I reminded Faye of the conversation we had had at her gallery when I had asked if she would compromise her integrity for the sake of her art and she had asked if anyone would get hurt or killed in the process. How prophetic that conversation had been, I said; here I was, running for my life, just for the sake of some stories I had wanted to publish. Now all I wanted was to be back where I had been—no agent, no publisher, no prospects.
“But you wouldn’t have the story,” Faye said.
I told her I didn’t want it, but she raised an eyebrow—I could tell that she didn’t believe me.
Faye’s apartment was an illegal conversion, a loft she had designed and wired herself atop an abandoned mechanic’s garage behind a junkyard on Avenue D. I followed her through an obstacle course of hubcaps, stone statues, fountains, and vintage road signs, all of it covered by a thick layer of snow, until we reached her building’s warped black front door. She opened the door with a jiggle of a key and a hard kick from one of her boots. Well, I thought, at least no one would ever find me here.
Inside, the wooden steps, dark blue and spattered with paint like a pair of Faye’s jeans, creaked as we curved upward to the second floor, passing rusty shelves of random junk she must have been collecting for art projects—old model cars made of metal; dented cans of paint; dusty jars of brushes; hardcover books with big water stains on them. As we climbed, we could see our breath. Another turn of
a key in a lock, another swift kick with the heel of a boot, and we were inside the apartment.
The place suited her. A long corridor, her workspace, led to closed doors, which led presumably to a bathroom I desperately needed to use, and her bedroom, which was sadly beside the point. In the narrow workspace, the windows were covered with sheets of opaque plastic held in place by lengths of duct tape to keep the heat in. The walls were strung with Christmas lights, and strewn about was a pleasing mishmash of vintage furniture—a lumpy maroon couch with its insides poking out of a rip in the middle cushion; red, green, and black barstools; a lopsided antique chest of drawers. Faye’s approach to interior decoration seemed to be the opposite of mine, which was to take spaces as they were, then put the nicest stuff I could afford in them—she had reconfigured the whole space: dropped the ceilings, installed recessed lighting, fans to circulate the heat. What truly caught my eye, though, were Faye’s paintings on the walls—seemingly perfect facsimiles of old master works but ripped apart, burned to cinders, revealing her whimsical line drawings and cartoons underneath. Real and fake, all mixed together.
“You make your bed, Sailor,” Faye said as she nodded toward the couch. She opened a closet door, reached to a top shelf, and pulled down an old army sleeping bag and a mushy pillow sans pillowcase, and tossed them in my direction.
I tried finishing the story I had been trying to tell her, but she seemed too busy to listen now. She took out her cellphone to make a call, then turned up her thermostat; a little blue flame flickered on in the radiator as she walked briskly to the industrial metal sink in her kitchen. She poured herself a mug of water, drank it, poured herself another. I asked for the bathroom; she thumbed to a door.
In the bathroom was another window covered by a plastic sheet, held in place by duct tape. There was a wheezy toilet, a rusty sink, a sunken tub, and a dirt-speckled mirror. I looked in that mirror and saw the reflection of a weather-beaten man—shadows under my eyes, creases where I hadn’t remembered seeing them before. I felt as though I were playing a game I used to play with myself when I was a kid—rubbing shaving cream in my hair, folding my cheeks, seeing what I would look like when I was old. I turned on the tap, looked in the cabinet for soap, couldn’t find any, washed off the blood and dirt with brown water. I looked in vain for a towel, wiped my face with my shirttail, then exited the bathroom, face and hands still wet.
