The Thieves of Manhattan (20 page)

Up ahead, I could see the 116th Street subway station, so down I went, hurdling the turnstiles just like I’d seen schoolkids do when I was working at Morningside Coffee, onto the platform,
come on, train, come on, train, come on, number 1 train
, and there it was, pulling in. I could hear the man’s wet boots on the steps heading down to the platform just as the uptown highsmith stopped. I got on the first car, practically empty, too empty, no one to protect me now,
come on, doors, close, doors, come on, doors, close!
He ran toward the doors, but now the train was pulling out and I could see him running along the platform, trying to catch up. As we headed north, my heart felt as if it might erupt. The lights flickered in the train car, and I could see my reflection in a window, cheeks streaked with blood, rain, and sweat. Above me on a subway billboard advertisement was the image of a book cover, white type on a black background, and behind it, flames.
“THE THIEVES OF MANHATTAN:
COMING SOON FROM MERRILL BOOKS!”

I emerged from the subway at 168th, a mile north of my usual stop. I didn’t want to get off too near my apartment, in case the man had gotten on the train after all. During my uptown ride, the sleet had turned into snow. I walked in darkness along Audubon Avenue, keeping out of the streetlights’ spill, hands in my gogol pockets. I fished my phone out of my pocket and dialed the
U.S. News & World Report
number for Simian Gold.

Gold picked up, and when he did, I laughed. Gold would never believe what had happened, I said into the phone; it was like something out of my book. I told him I was running late, and I could either come by the café in a half hour, or we could arrange to meet another time.

“Where are ya, Ian?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone.

I was beginning to tell him where I was when he asked again.

“Where are ya,
ay?”

I turned around. The man in the black boots, Rusty James jacket, and tam-o’-shanter was stepping out of the subway station; he looked right, then looked left as he held a cellphone to one ear.

“Wot you said?”

I quietly closed my phone as the man’s voice came from up the street:
Wot you said?

I ran into the middle of the street, hoping I could flag down a cab. I would have been better off with the scuffed boots or tennis
shoes that Ian Minot used to wear instead of my slick dandy shoes. I kept nearly slipping then having to regain my balance as I ran over the whitening asphalt.

I thrust my right hand in the air, flailed it,
Taxi! Taxi!
Cars passed, honked their horns, swerved out of my way.
Taxi!
I held my phone in my right hand, tried to stop cars with my left. I wanted to call someone but couldn’t slow down to make the call, and what would I say anyway? Should I call Roth? What could he tell me? The only adventures he knew took place in books.
Taxi!

A gypsy cab skidded to a stop. I opened the rear door and got in. It was dry and warm and the driver was listening to a Haitian radio show.

“Where to, boss?”

“One Forty-first and Hamilton.” Through the back window, I could see that the tattooed man had spotted me and was chasing us through the snow.

“How much you pay?” asked the driver.

“Whatever,” I said, “just go.”

“How much?”

“Forty bucks, forty-five, just go.”

“For real?” The driver was grinning.

“For real,” I said. “Just go fast, but not too quick, and don’t go any usual way.” Did people talk like this? They talked that way in
The Thieves of Manhattan
, but not in any life I’d led before now. The driver stepped on the gas; looking back, I could see the man getting smaller. Cars swerved to avoid him as he angrily gestured for a cab and the snow fell down harder.

“Someone following you, Boris?” asked the driver.

“They are, now that you mention it.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

People did talk like this; now I knew.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s for real.”

The truth wasn’t that I had no idea why the man was following me. Now I had too many ideas—some surprisingly close to the truth, some just utter madness—but they were all jumbled together, and my mind was woolfing too fast to stop and settle on just one. I thought what was happening to me was random insanity and I thought it had all been planned; I thought the man had confused me with someone else and I thought he knew exactly who I was; I thought someone was playing a joke on me and I thought I was in mortal danger; I thought I was imagining everything and I thought I had never seen the world so vividly; I thought it was fiction and I thought all of it was real.

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.

“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 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.