The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  “Yes,” I said.

  Norbert looked disgusted. “The man writes filth,” he said.

  “Not that Roth,” I said.

  Another memory seemed to ripple across Norbert’s face followed by another look of disgust. “He wrote filth too.”

  Which Roth was he thinking of? Henry? Philip? “No,” I said, trying to sound as polite as possible, “not that one either. Jed Roth.”

  Norbert’s eyes fluttered briefly as if he was trying to place Jed Roth’s name but couldn’t. His eyes turned dull again. “Wot you said?” he demanded, but before I could speak, he hit me with the gun again, and I collapsed into the shelves. Books scattered around and on top of me. The cat scampered out of the room as I felt my eyelids flutter.

  When I awoke again, I no longer felt individual aches as much as a general sense of woe. My entire body had become one giant bruise. Now I was sitting on a wooden chair across the table from Iola while Norbert stood, aiming his canino at me. In front of me were a full glass of water and a bag of stale pretzels. I would have chosen anything to eat before pretzels; their dust dried my throat even more and the salt burned my lips, but I ate fistfuls anyway.

  Norbert interrogated me while Iola scanned my face as if it were a book that held a secret she could divine.

  “Just tell us where the book is,” Norbert said. “How’s that soun’ like a good idea?”

  “Beneath a golden cross in a desolate field,” I said, slowly, so that Norbert would understand each word.

  Norbert looked at Iola, seeking permission to strike me again, I assumed, but she shook her head.

  “Tell us where the desolate field is,” Norbert said. “How’s ’at soun’ li’ a goo’ idea?”

  “Outside Manhattan.”

  “Maw details,” said Norbert.

  “It’s all made up anyway,” I said.

  “Tell us where.”

  Listening to Norbert repeat his question was nearly as torturous as his slaps, punches, and kicks. “I’m telling you the truth,” I said, desperate now. “I’ve told you everything I know. Come on, don’t you think if I were lying, I’d at least have made up something a little better than just some random desolate field? Something more specific maybe? Some safe-deposit box? Some road marker? Some longitude or latitude?”

  Norbert raised his canino, but I held out my hands; a memory was returning to me. “Wait,” I shouted as my eyes pleaded with Norbert, then Iola, then Norbert again. He held the gun high, his face lined with the strain of unexpended energy. I could see a glint in his eyes; they betrayed a hint of life in that weary, tattooed mask of a face.

  “Wait!” My mind swirled back to Roth’s apartment, back when I was editing the book, lishing adjectives, metaphors, digressions, everything that got in the way of the story. Roth had told me to hang on to the original he had written, said that someday I would find that his worked better. Maybe he didn’t mean it worked better in the story; maybe he meant in real life. In Roth’s original, he had indicated the supposed location of the buried Genji, had given a longitude and latitude: –096.571, a number that corresponded to the Dewey decimal code for illustrated manuscripts; 039.183, a Dewey code that indicated where foreign reference works were shelved. I had always assumed it to be just another of Roth’s distracting and gratuitous details.

  “Check the original manuscript,” I said. “In my apartment.”

  “The original,” Iola repeated. The word had gotten her attention, as if the book she was reading had finally offered up its secret. She sprang up and started walking quickly to the door.

  SHALL I DIE, SHALL I FLY?

  My apartment was neater than the last time I saw it, back when Iola Jaffe was hurling my belongings to the floor, muttering and swearing as she searched for The Tale of Genji. In fact, it was probably neater and cleaner than it had been since I moved in. Maybe Iola had cleaned up after rummaging, I thought, but deep down, I knew that Joseph had done it. I felt sorry that I had misjudged him. If I did survive this, I vowed that I would hold true to my promise; if I ever published this story, I would dedicate it to him. And if I had a say in the movie, he could play any part he wanted in it.

  As the three of us entered, I looked longingly at my proust, at my desk, at the view from my windows. But Norbert was holding the canino and I didn’t want to get “pulped” or “remaindered” or whatever else Norbert might threaten me with, so I limped over to my file cabinets. I had misjudged him and Iola, too; I had thought they were fictional.

  Jed Roth’s first draft was in a drawer labeled MANUSCRIPTS. There were only two file folders in there—one marked Thieves, another marked Myself When I Am Real. My only copy of Zero Ninety-eight was on my key chain’s thumb drive, but apparently I wasn’t done writing that book yet—unfortunately, I had to live it first.

  The passage in the manuscript of Jed Roth’s A Thief in Manhattan was easy to find—I had struck a red line through it, but the latitude and longitude numbers were visible. I still felt certain that it was all some kind of joke. Sure, I could now believe that Faye had forged a Tale of Genji that she and Jed would try to pass off as real, but no way would they have buried it anywhere. Nevertheless, Iola vigorously copied down the numbers in a little notebook and I could see her muttering those numbers to herself, trying to figure out what they might mean.

  We stepped out of my apartment and into the hallway, Iola walking briskly in front of me, Norbert behind with his gun. I suggested hopefully that they could leave me alone since they had found what they wanted, knew where the manuscript was and how to track me down if something went wrong. But Iola just walked ahead, while Norbert urged me onward.

  Iola’s olive green Opel Manta was parked outside my building. She popped open the trunk; a shovel was lying atop piles of old reference books. Norbert reached in, pulled out a dusty and creased book of maps bound in black leather, and handed it to Iola, who nodded, then slammed shut the trunk. She carried the book to the hood of the car, where she began thumbing through it.

  When she reached the middle of the book, she began to turn pages more slowly until she found the map she was looking for. She smoothed out the page with her palms, using a handle of her glasses to follow the lines demarking latitude and longitude, then stopped on what appeared to be an empty field. The field was in the state of Kansas, north of Climax, near Lake Eureka, outside a town called Manhattan.

  “Book people don’t know much about the lives real people live. They think the only Manhattan is the one they live in,” Roth had told me.

  “‘Carry on my wayward son,’” Faye had said to me, quoting a Kansas lyric. She had always liked to listen to that band’s song “Dust in the Wind.”

  Manhattan, Kansas.

  Iola snapped the book shut, carried it under an arm, then walked around to the driver’s side door, and opened it. Norbert told me to get in.

  POSITION UNKNOWN

  Iola told me that I would be the driver. So I sat at the wheel of the Opel and started the engine as Iola mapped our route out of New York across the George Washington Bridge, then onto I-80 heading west—destination: Kansas.

  The car was as cluttered and musty as Iola’s manuscript appraisal office. There was barely enough room for Norbert to sit with all the old books piled in the back. They were on the passenger-side floor, too, piled atop the parking brake, wedged between my seat and Iola’s. With the exception of the galley of The Thieves of Manhattan that Iola had placed on the dashboard, they were mostly reference books or literary anthologies. There must have been more than a hundred, plus all the ones I could hear shifting around in the trunk.

  I couldn’t see any order to the arrangement of books in the Opel, but whenever Iola would call out the title of one, say, a thesaurus or a poetry collection, Norbert would locate the book in an instant and either point to it or flip to a key passage and hand it forward with an expectant expression, seeking approval; in his own way, he was still talented at his job, still seemed to be able to remember any book, no matt
er how obscure.

  Iola would snatch the volume from Norbert and start whipping through it, moving her lips as quickly as she shifted her eyes back and forth across the pages, muttering the words that described the supposed location of The Tale of Genji: “Outside Manhattan in a desolate field beneath a golden cross.” I gradually came to understand that she seemed to think those words contained some code. She searched religious texts with crosses in their titles, books of quotations that she scoured for references to desolate fields, antique atlases with maps of Manhattan, Kansas. She and Norbert may have been criminals, but she was still a scholar and he was still a librarian; both thought that they could find the solution to any mystery by discovering the right page in a book. As Iola searched for clues, Norbert awaited Iola’s next instructions, occupying himself by savagely attacking books of crossword puzzles. I’d never seen anyone work crosswords so fast.

  At first, it felt good to drive; for the first hour or so, I could almost forget about the man with the gun and the puzzles in the backseat, the woman speed-reading reference works in front, the bruises on my body. But then the fatigue set in at almost the same time as the bad weather. I hadn’t driven a car in years, not since I’d gotten to New York. Even with the wipers going and the defrost on full blast, I could barely see the road in front of me, and I’d forgotten the faith that driving sometimes requires, the faith that there will be more straight highway beyond that hill before you, that the pickup truck ahead won’t lead you over a cliff. Jed Roth had told me that writing was like stepping on the gas and never looking back; the way I used to write before teaming up with Roth had a lot in common with the way I was driving now. Whenever I could finally see clearly through the windshield, some truck would pass, horn blaring, and splatter our car with filthy water. I’d have to slam on the brakes and wait for my heart to slow down before I could speed back up.

  Interstate 80 was treacherous, icy, shrouded in fog, and I hardly ever exceeded forty miles per hour on it. I sputtered in and out of black-and-white winter landscapes, stretches of asphalt bordered by snow-covered fields. The country never seems as big as it does when you’re driving through whiteout weather with a gun pointed at your skull. Along our way, Iola would occasionally look up from her books and point out road signs that indicated the routes to writers’ birthplaces—Norman Mailer’s Newark; John Updike’s slice of Pennsylvania; Zane Grey’s Ohio. Whenever she’d utter a writer’s name, I could see a glint of memory flicker across Norbert’s face, then extinguish itself. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of his mind, he still remembered.

  When my sharp pains resolved themselves into nagging aches and the roads became more passable, I began plotting escapes. I felt that I would soon be able to run again. Still, every time I began to reach for the door handle, Norbert looked up from his puzzles. Whenever I considered jerking the steering wheel, driving off the road or into oncoming traffic, I lost nerve. Upon entering the Hoosier State, where I and, Iola informed me, Kurt Vonnegut had been born, I thought Norbert had finally fallen asleep. I quietly turned on my cellphone, but Norbert’s eyes popped open; he asked if I knew what happened to writers who disobeyed him, and when I said I didn’t, he snarled, “They get taken out of circulation.” He reached forward, grabbed the phone, and flung it out the window.

  A lifetime ago, I could have used that phone to call someone who lived nearby and who might have helped me—my dad or some of his colleagues at the university, my high school buddies from our little writing club, our next-door neighbors, who watched our house whenever I had to stay overnight at the hospital with my dad. But tonight, my home state was every bit as strange and desolate as the others through which we had already passed.

  As a teenager in Indiana, I had read and reread On the Road, The Subterraneans, and The Dharma Bums and fantasized about kerouacking my way across America, getting onto the highway and seeking the promise of the undiscovered country. But now my life had become the opposite of a road novel—the end of my odyssey loomed before me not as a promise but as a threat.

  Along our route, I paid for everything with my credit cards, hoping to create some trail. Maybe if this ordeal lasted a month, American Express or MasterCard would send some bounty hunter after me. I bought gas for Iola’s Opel at Texacos, meals at McDonald’s and Ponderosa—my companions never offered to pay and never let me out of their sight. Iola pumped the gas, Norbert always stood behind me on line for food, took the urinal next to mine in the john. And when I was too bleary to drive anymore and I turned off I-70 and paid for a night in a Red Roof Inn, Iola and Norbert insisted that we share a room, a smoker’s double with a radiator that exhaled heat that smelled like a locker room. There, Iola slept on a proust in front of the door, Norbert on one against the locked windows, while I took the floor between them, wondering when someone might find me and how, wondering if I would ever be able to sleep at all, then waking up to find that the night had passed far too quickly, and that it was time to get back in the car.

  Across the Missouri-Kansas border, I began driving slower and made more frequent stops. I kept hoping Iola and Norbert would falter, let me out of their sight, make the mistake of trusting me. Just one slip, and I could run. By now, I had regained more of my strength, but I also found myself again succumbing to one of my worst tendencies—distrusting people at a distance while sympathizing with them up close. Even with a canino pointed at me, even with my shoulders still aching and my palms sweating as I gripped the steering wheel, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Iola and Norbert, hoodwinked by a con to which I was already wise.

  Past Topeka, the sun began to dip before us. I could now identify each of the parts of my body that did and did not feel pain. My back was still sore, my wrists and ankles, too. But my legs and arms felt stronger. We were driving along Route 177 when the sun finally disappeared beneath the horizon, and signs began to appear ahead for Lake Eureka, Climax, and Manhattan. Iola reached over, flicked the turn signal, tugged at the steering wheel, and pulled a hard right to exit the highway.

  A DESOLATE FIELD

  Iola Jaffe had scanned every reference volume and anthology that Norbert had handed to her in the Opel, but she still seemed no closer to finding The Tale of Genji. Now, as we stood outside the car, she held her book of maps. Norbert held his gun. In a back pocket, I carried a flashlight Iola had given me, and in my right hand, I held the shovel that had been lying in the trunk. The shovel had a rusted metal blade and a thick, dark green handle. Our car was parked at the side of the two-lane road, and we were now walking alongside it underneath the darkening skies. Our footsteps crunched frozen grass as we passed old silos and barns. Desolate soybean fields were easy to find; not so, a golden cross.

  I walked slowly, pretending to limp, and used the shovel as a cane even though I was fairly sure I could run now. But I couldn’t see anywhere to run to; there were no cars on the road, and only the occasional truck passing some distance away on Route 177. I knew that route number was the Dewey code assigned to books about social ethics, but if there was a joke or clue in there, I wasn’t getting it.

  Iola studied her map, then pivoted sharply to the right and began to walk away from the road and onto a vast, snowy field. The night was dark and blue; the half-moon and the halo around it were becoming more distinct. The winds were beginning to pick up. I kept one hand in my pocket, the other on my shovel-cane, my eyes focused on Iola Jaffe’s shoes. Norbert stopped to light a vonnegut, throw down a match, and take a drag, but he was still holding his gun and was far too close for me to consider running.

  Iola was no longer muttering or soliloquizing. She walked faster over the white field. Still no crosses in sight, golden or otherwise—only snow, dead crops, grass. Soon we were walking in single file—Iola in front, Norbert behind, me in between—moving almost in unison.

  With the flashlight, I kept sweeping the barren landscape in search of a road with a police car to flag down, a trucker to befriend, a charming old farmhouse where I could hide. Noth
ing. No sounds save for wind, footsteps, breaths, and, once, a lonely saramago dog howling far away.

  Venus and Jupiter had become visible overhead when I began to discern something white and glowing way off in the distance. And as we continued to walk, that bright whiteness began to resolve itself into individual balls and beams of light shining down upon something enormous, enough light for a stadium.

  The faster Norbert and I walked, trying to keep pace with Iola, who had seen the light and was now running toward it, the clearer the image became. The balls of light became blindingly bright bulbs illuminating low, boxy brick buildings and a parking lot. We seemed to be approaching a shopping mall or a highway rest stop, but I couldn’t say for sure because, when we finally stopped, we were standing behind whatever it was, and I could see only light brown bricks, slate-colored doors, and a half-dozen snow-covered stone steps that led down to black dumpsters. Iola was no longer consulting her map. Gesturing to the building, she gleefully exclaimed, “We’re going in there, lads!” Then she led the way around to the front.

  ILLUMINATION

  Probably some time in the past, this too had been an empty field, certainly when Iola Jaffe’s book of maps had been published, maybe even when Jed and Faye had hatched their plan. Maybe there had even been a golden cross here, whole fields of them. Tonight, though, this was a shopping mall.

  On our drive, we had passed scads of malls just like this one, each with their chain fast-food and sit-down restaurants, electronics and clothing stores, and cineplexes. The only difference was that this one was empty—no cars in the parking lot, not even a single security vehicle. The lot was awash in light, but the stores themselves looked dark inside. The numbers 1 through 12 were visible on the cineplex marquee, but there were blank spaces where titles ought to have been.