The Thieves of Manhattan (24 page)

“Where did you get that galley?” I asked. I tried to gesture
toward the copy of
The Thieves of Manhattan
on Iola’s desk, but, with my hands tied, all I could do was point my chin at it.

“Someone was thoughtful enough to deliver it here,” Iola said. Roth, I thought. He had planned this, even the outfit and glasses I was wearing now, the ones that made me look like him.

“I’m not who you think I am,” I told Iola.

“None of us is,” she said, adding that she didn’t care for the way she was described in my book, but she supposed the descriptions were accurate given how well the author described both the Girl in the Library and Norbert, even though Norbert did bristle at the word
hooligan
. That was a dirty crack, she said; it wasn’t his fault he had turned out this way. The real problem, though, was not what my book adequately described but what it didn’t—namely, the site of the “buried
Genji.”
Was she really expected to believe what I had written? That I had buried the manuscript outside Manhattan in “some desolate fucking field?”

“I didn’t write the book,” I said. “Please untie me and I’ll explain.”

They both looked at me, unyielding and expectant.

“Could you please just untie me?” I asked again.

Piels shook his head. I tried to squirm free, but the ropes cut into my ankles and wrists. I felt my panic rising, my heartbeat accelerating, tears in my eyes. “Please tell him to untie me,” I repeated, my voice cracking. Then I began to yell. “Would you tell that hooligan to untie me?” But Iola was right, the librarian didn’t like being called a hooligan. As my eyes burned with frustration and fear, he asked menacingly if I knew what happened to writers who called him that. I shuddered and said no. “They get remaindered,” he said, then raised his canino and hit
me across the face. This time, even losing consciousness couldn’t free me of the pain.

The room was darker when I awoke—maybe it was night, maybe my eyes just couldn’t open all the way. I was no longer on the chair but on the warped, dusty floor in a corner of the room, up against bookshelves that dug into my back. One of Iola’s cats stood before me, arching its back and hissing. My hands and ankles were still bound, my temples throbbed, my thighs and knees ached, and I could still taste blood. When he saw I was awake, Norbert pulled up a metal folding chair and stared straight down at me, flicking ashes of his vonnegut onto the floor. I tried to make out the pattern in the tattoos on his face and hands, but my eyes couldn’t focus well enough to do it.

“
Wot
useta be your name is?” he asked.

“Ian Minot,” I said. “My name is Ian Minot. I’m just a writer. I’m not a thief. I’ve never stolen a thing in my life. Until very recently, I worked in Morningside Coffee. While I was working there, I met a man you used to know, the man you think I am, the man whose story this is. He’s a writer too; his name is Roth.”

“Roth?” Norbert asked. A distant memory seemed to flicker behind his eyes.

“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.

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.

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 matter 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.