The Thieves of Manhattan (19 page)

I watched the leaves flutter in the breeze, I watched boats sailing along the Hudson. I listened to children and dogs, to joggers passing. Roth stood up and took his empty tea container to the trash can. I could still hear his voice even though he wasn’t speaking to me now.

“Just as it was written,” I heard him say. I reminded myself to be patient and calm. I continued looking out at the river and the trees, trying to reassure myself that I was still in control.

I spent the better part of a week debating whether I should call Anya. She still exerted a pull on me, still made me want to try to right every wrong in her life. True, that was Blade’s job now, but I owed him a phone call too; we had planned to get together after that “crazy week” with the TV box, yo. But when I finally convinced myself that a simple phone call wouldn’t hurt, I couldn’t get either Blade or Anya on the line. Every time I called their number, I got a busy signal or a voice mail message that said the mailbox was full. The next week when I called, a recorded voice said the number was no longer in service. So I just gave up.

The autumn passed with a passel of stories about a seemingly never-ending series of literary hoaxes—a drug addict and ruffian had exaggerated his criminal past; a purported gang-banger from South Central LA turned out to be a prep school girl from the San Fernando Valley; a memoir of an abusive household was apparently a libelous childhood fantasy; a teenage boy hustler and lot lizard was really an actress in a wig
and sunglasses; a Holocaust survivor wasn’t raised by wolves; another survivor hadn’t met his wife on the other side of a concentration camp fence; the supposed witness to a Jordanian honor killing was a con artist from the south side of Chicago; a Romanian writer hailed from the mean streets of Maplewood, New Jersey.

In the press, these hoaxes were viewed mostly as symptoms of a declining industry struggling for relevance and attention and a society of declining morals. The writers in question and their publishers were savaged as betrayers of the public trust. At one time, I might have found them despicable too, but now that I was one of them, and had dated another, I saw them as All-American rogues. Who hadn’t fudged their taxes, embellished a résumé, or invented a tale to impress a date?

As Roth taught me, the idea of a true memoir was absurd anyway. How reliable was anybody’s memory? Even if you could remember absolutely everything that ever happened to you, wouldn’t you have to cut out 99 percent to create a story that someone would want to read? Wouldn’t you have to lish all that eating and sleeping and Web surfing and staring into space? And wouldn’t all that editing be a little like lying?

And besides, no one had been injured by the lies that these authors had told; theirs weren’t tales of a president lying to a grand jury under oath, of falsifying information about weapons of mass destruction before the United Nations. This was just publishing; no actual laws were being broken.

As for Anya, her editor and publisher appeared on radio and TV to apologize for misleading their readers. They promised to issue refunds to any readers who had bought the book and felt they had been cheated. But when
Ceauşescu
stayed
on the bestseller list and went into its third printing, no further talk was heard about that. By the time winter rolled around, Geoff Olden had sold
Jersey Girl
, a memoir that Anya would write about her ordeal, and the screenplay of
Ceauşescu
, which had been in turnaround, was put on the fast track at Paramount. Apparently, Americans could more easily relate to the story of a liar from Maplewood than a beleaguered orphan from Bucharest. As far as Blade was concerned, his story remained unquestioned, his reputation unsullied. Maybe he was just waiting for the right time to reveal the truth to drum up more interest in his next book.

I hadn’t seen Jed Roth in months when the first galleys of
The Thieves of Manhattan
arrived at my door, six of them in a manila envelope messengered with a congratulatory note from Jim Merrill, Jr., on Merrill Books stationery. I had been updating Roth by phone about the book’s progress—the Big Box Book Club selection, the “Breath of Fresh Writers” nomination, the stellar prepublication reviews, the foreign rights sales, Merrill’s positive feedback on the stories I had revised for
Myself When I Am Real
(“Great opener!” “Nice wrap-up!”). Though Roth never seemed impressed or surprised by any of it, the arrival of the galleys seemed like cause for celebration. When I called to invite him out for a drink, I told him that I would treat, and that I wanted to meet at the 106 Bar, where our adventure began.

Lately, no matter what the weather, I jogged or walked almost everywhere I went, but the evening Roth and I were to meet, I took the subway, so I could study my galley for the whole ride. I still couldn’t quite believe that everything was falling into place. The book’s cover was based on my idea, a riff on Faye’s
artworks. At first glance, it appeared to be rather plain—“The Thieves of Manhattan” in an elegant white font on a black background—but the corners had been charred and pulled away to reveal fires blazing underneath. On the back was a sampling of quotes from the prepub reviews, a picture of me in my linen gatsby, and a glowing blurb from Blade Markham, who had come through as promised.

I arrived at the 106 Bar, and Roth was sitting in the same window seat where we had drunk our pints of Guinness just over a year earlier. He was talking on his cellphone, but when he saw me, he smiled, then put the phone away. He was still a handsome-enough bloke, but he looked a little more disheveled than I remembered him being on our first night together. His gatsby appeared just a bit shabbier too. I couldn’t tell if he really looked worse, or if I was seeing him differently now that I felt myself to be the suavest, most confident guy in the whole bar, someone who recognized that though the suit Roth wore was no doubt expensive, it was really more appropriate for warmer weather.

Roth embraced me when I entered the bar, and when I handed him his copy of
Thieves
, he smiled and nodded with the satisfaction I expected. But I couldn’t help noticing some undercurrent of regret or resentment, as if perhaps what he had always wanted was coming true but far too late and not in the way he had intended. I couldn’t shake the sensation that part of him was miffed about something, perhaps that my name was on the cover. Once, he had been a young man who would have given anything to see “A Novel by Jed Roth” on that book instead of “A Memoir by Ian Minot.” Certainly, some of that ambitious young man remained; not all of him had succumbed to cynicism
and age. Even as I sat there in a sharper gatsby than Roth’s, and gleaming black shoes, part of me was still the old Ian Minot who had just arrived in Manhattan vowing that he wouldn’t leave until he had succeeded.

Roth and I had little left to discuss—whatever I could say about
Thieves
sounded like either a boast or something he already knew. He gave me advice I had heard before, catchphrases I had memorized. I imagined how writers must feel when they return to their hometowns to see the teachers who inspired them. I imagined my own little Indiana town, my father’s library, our house, his bedroom. Homey, comfortable, and yet so small.

Midway through our second round, Jed and I ran out of conversation and I was thankful when my cellphone rang. On the other end was Simian Gold, books editor of
U.S. News & World Report
, who said he wanted to set up a time to interview me about
Thieves
. I asked Roth to excuse me, told Gold to hold on, then stepped outside the bar to have the conversation on Amsterdam Avenue, where I stood under the canopy of the Chinese takeout joint next door and watched the light rain that was beginning to fall.

Gold sounded British, and, in staccato tones that at first made me wonder then dismiss the notion of whether he might have been wise to Roth’s and my act, he asked when I might have time to meet and discuss the book. The connection was lousy, and I had trouble making out everything he was saying, but I did hear him tell me that his schedule was
woide
open and his deadline was
wikes
away. Still, since I was looking for a way to gracefully conclude my evening with Roth, I told the man that my schedule was clear too, and if he wanted to meet
tonight, I could. He paused before agreeing, then suggested that we meet at the Hungarian Pastry Shop and Café up by Columbia University in about
fo’y-foive
minutes, and how did that sound like a good idea? I said yes, that sounded like a good idea indeed.

Roth was smiling when I returned to tell him the news, and it bugged me that, even now, I couldn’t hide anything from him.

“Time, Newsweek
, or
U.S. News?”
he asked.

I laughed, then added that Simian Gold was on deadline and we would have to meet tonight. I couldn’t tell whether Roth knew I was lying so that I could bring our evening to an early end or whether I had gotten a whole lot better at making things up. Either way, Roth seemed relieved.

Our final hug lasted longer than our hugs usually tended to, as if both of us figured this might be the last time we would see each other for a long while. I shook his hand and wished him luck before I walked out the door, turned up my collar, and stepped into the cold, hard rain.

I was looking forward to getting to the café early and warming up with a spot of tea and a slice of strudel while I prepared my remarks for the interview when I noticed a man about my height but a good deal bulkier step out of the shadows at 108th Street. Just as I registered the fact that something in his hand was glinting in the amber streetlight above, he was swinging the hand fast toward my head.
Bam!
I felt a sharp pain in my temple,
and warm blood beginning to mix with the freezing rain sliding down my right cheek.

“Where is it?” the man demanded as my knees hit concrete.

He was bald under a dark tam-o’-shanter, wore a beat-up black leather Rusty James jacket and steel-toed boots. He pulled me up from the ground and back into the shadows of 108th Street from which he had emerged, then threw me hard against a brick wall. His eyes were small, black, and empty, and he had a swirling, dull red tattoo on one side of his face, and tattoos on his hands—strange tattoos, no obvious pattern to them, like maps of intersecting roads leading nowhere. In one hand, he held a gun.

“Where the
fook
is it?” he asked. The man raised the gun over his head as if to clock me with it once more. I raised my hands high and waved them.

“What the hell?” I asked, still waving. The bitter air had turned colder. The rain was now sleet. I was shivering, wet.

He cocked the gun, held the nose of it just millimeters away from my face. I tried to back up farther, but there was no place for me to go but into the wall. “Easy, easy, easy,” I said. The sharp pain in my temple had already resolved into a dull but pulsating ache, and the blood and melting ice kept flowing down my face; all the while he kept asking, “Where is it, Ian?”

“What are you talking about? Where is what?” I tried to push the gun away, ease it down, but he kept it pointed at me; with his other hand, he grabbed me by my lapel. I put my hands back above my head and told him to just put down the gun; I wasn’t going anywhere. Where could I go? But he kept it aimed right at me.

“Bring it to me
now
, and no one gets pulped,” he said. “How’s that soun’ like a good idea?”

I reached for my wallet, proffered it to him.
Here, take it, take the whole thing
. He just smacked it away with the gun.

“No wallet,” he said.

“You can have everything in it,” I said, but he still wasn’t budging, so I tried to yell something that would confuse or distract him—“Would you just put down the goddamn canino?”

For a moment, he looked surprised, like his cheeks would flush if they had more pigment in them. A thought seemed to ripple across his face as if he were remembering something.

“Wot
you said?” he asked, and for just a second, no more than that, he dropped his gun hand a touch, maybe an inch. I shoved him hard against the building. I heard him yell something. Maybe a curse, I couldn’t say for sure—I couldn’t make out the sound over that of my beating heart. All I knew was that I was running fast against the light, across 109th Street, across 110th, running toward the café, wondering should I stop there, should I look around, see if Simian Gold was there and could help me? But no, the man was gaining on me as the sleet came down harder, pelting my face so that I no longer knew what was blood and what was water. I had no idea whether the pain I was feeling was from the pellets bolting down from the dark skies or from the place where the man had hit me with his gun.

I kept running, looking back, running, looking back. For a big guy, he sure was fast, and my shoes were too slippery and new for this kind of chase. I could hear the splashes his boots made behind me, but soon I couldn’t tell whether those steps were mine or his or both.

I ran through the sleet toward home—112th, 113th, 114th. When I was back in Indiana, I used to hear that this sort of thing went down in Manhattan all the time, but it had never happened
to me, not in all my years of living in the city. What were the odds of that, living way uptown as long as I had—surely my number was finally up?

“Ian!” He kept calling as if my name had only one syllable,
“Een!”

For the first time it registered that he knew my name. Maybe I was getting a reputation, maybe everyone in the city was starting to recognize me, dressing too fancy, acting too slick. Before everything happened, before I met Roth, what would have been the point of robbing me?—I never looked like I had any daisies in my wallet, while now I must have oozed money. Look at me, I was just asking to get rolled.