The Thieves of Manhattan (22 page)

I stepped closer to the photo and to the plain wooden folding chair in front of it. On the chair was a paperback copy of
The Tale of Genji
and a little red artist’s sketchbook. In the photo was a couple—a man who looked a little like me; he wore nice franzens and a light-colored linen gatsby. He had his arm around a red-haired woman wearing a Kansas concert jersey and a black baseball cap: Jed and Faye. The photo was wrinkled and faded, as if it had been taken some time ago, maybe ten years, maybe just one—I probably looked a lot younger one year
ago too. In my mind, I replayed the past year in fast-forward, from the moment Faye had pointed Jed Roth out to me—“Too bad his taste in clothes doesn’t match his taste in books”—to the moment tonight before she walked out the door: “Going to your boyfriend’s?” “Something like that.” So she was in on this plot too. Once when we were dating, I asked her why she never invited me over to her apartment—“I need my space, Sailor,” she’d said. I remembered the night that Jed wouldn’t let me into his place. Had Faye been there? How long had Faye known Jed? How long had the two of them been planning this, how long had they been setting me up? And setting me up for what?

I looked down at the red notebook. In
The Thieves of Manhattan
, the Girl in the Library had a red notebook too. I opened it and saw sketches from
The Tale of Genji
—page after page of Genji’s life, his loves, his adventures, his exile, his return; page after page of Japanese characters, kimonos, parasols.

I kept turning pages, and saw sketches that looked more familiar to me—a copy of a Rembrandt, a Kandinsky, a Magritte, a prairie landscape that looked like the fake Wyeth in my apartment, the one that Faye had titled
No Place Like Home
. There was the country house, the vast meadow, the tiny graveyard, and a car on a distant road. I turned more pages. In medieval script, one word had been drawn:
FAKERY
.

On the next page, that word was split apart:
FA KERY
.

And, on the following page:
FAY KERY;
then,
FAYE KERY; FAYE KHOURI;
and finally,
FAYE CURRY
.

I turned a page and saw the sketch for the exhibition flyer at the Van Meegeren Gallery with the dates of Faye’s show, which had opened almost exactly a year ago.
Faye Curry: Forged in Ink
.

I was still flipping through the red notebook when I heard the downstairs door open, then heavy footsteps on the stairs.

My heart racing, I ran to the window and ripped off the opaque plastic. Staples scattered to the ground. It was still night outside, snow was coming down hard, and, as I pulled the duct tape off the window locks, then threw open the window, I could feel that snow slap my face. Through the window, I could see two figures approaching—Norbert Piels in his black Rusty James jacket and tam-o’-shanter; Iola Jaffe in a frumpy tweed gogol and a gray felt Jane Marple hat. If they were outside, whose footsteps were those on the stairs?

“Faye?” I called out as I ran back to the front door. “Faye?”

A man’s voice answered wearily: “No, it’s not, Ian.”

I shoved open the door as hard as I could, hoping it would slam whoever was there. When I heard the man’s voice cry out, “Aww, goddamn,” I didn’t even look to see who it was. Not until I had scrambled halfway down the stairs and the voice said, “Aww, goddamn, Ian,” did I look back up; Joseph was crumpled in a heap, holding his hands in front of his face.

“I’m here to help you, man,” he said. “You gotta come with me.”

I had never trusted or particularly cared for Joseph. He’d always made jokes at my expense but couldn’t stand when anyone said anything about him. But lately, I hadn’t gotten very far with the people I had been trusting, myself most of all. In Faye’s bitter-cold
stairwell, as Joseph grabbed hold of the banister and stumbled to his feet, the voice inside me told me to keep running, to get away from Joseph. But I couldn’t trust that voice anymore, and so I decided I’d go with him.

Joseph drove an old black bathtub of a Citroën; he said it was one of the only cars he’d been able to find with enough head- and legroom for him. Once we were safely in the car, I asked him why he had come here to help me when he’d never really seemed to care for me. He told me that I was right, he had never liked writers much in general and me in particular. He didn’t know what Faye had ever seen in me, couldn’t understand what I had but he didn’t; he thought I was probably the most clueless employee he’d ever had. But still, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play the hero, a role in which no one had ever seen fit to cast him. And besides, no matter what he might have thought of me personally, I didn’t deserve the fate Faye and her friend seemed to have in mind. As we putt-putted and skidded up Avenue A through the fog and snow, Joseph told me that he knew most of what Faye and Jed had been up to, though he didn’t know where they were now.

As it turned out, I was right that Joseph had been untrustworthy; Faye had been wrong to trust him. She shouldn’t have spent so much time at Morningside Coffee detailing her and Jed’s plan on her computer, shouldn’t have spent so much time gabbing with her Confident Man when he came in for his tea, shouldn’t have kept from Joseph the fact that she was planning to leave tonight with Roth, and that Joseph would have to find someone to replace her after all the slack he’d cut her over the years—not even two weeks’ notice.

Joseph had read the diaries and notes Faye had kept on
her computer, and he had eavesdropped on conversations she had had with Jed. As Joseph drove uptown, he told me all he had learned:
The Thieves of Manhattan
was, if not a completely honest memoir, pretty close to the truth, albeit with some key details left out.

Jed Roth had indeed once been a young writer looking for a story when he’d stumbled upon the Blom Library and saw Faye in the reading room, admiring
The Tale of Genji
in its locked glass case. She was taking notes in her red book, and asking the librarian Norbert Piels about manuscripts, all of which he told her were unavailable. Faye’s last name wasn’t Curry then; it was Blom, and she was the sole surviving heir to the library’s contents; she had just arrived in New York to begin her career as an artist and to inspect the books that her great-grandfather Chester Blom had collected on his travels and that Norbert Piels had been sneaking out one by one to his fence, Iola Jaffe.

The most intriguing volumes in the reading room—the personal letters and manuscripts of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, the original Emily Dickinson poems—seemed to have little in common, save for one key detail: they were fakes. Through his journeys, Chester Blom had amassed a history of literary forgeries and hoaxes of one kind or another that he had scattered throughout his reading room. There were the memoirs of Li-Hung Chang, which had really been written by an American army vet while serving time in a Hawaiian prison. Shakespeare’s letters were the work of the eighteenth-century teenage forger William Henry Ireland. There were books written by fictional authors: Cleone Knox, whose eighteenth-century diary of a “lady of fashion” was penned by Magdalen King-Hall, who wrote the book in the 1920s at the age of nineteen;
Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish, phony poets who had pioneered a form of poetry called Spectrism; Ern Malley, the genius bard of Australia whose life was supposedly cut short at the age of twenty-five, but whose work was the brainchild of a pair of practical jokers who wrote all of Malley’s poems in less than a day; Mario Benedetti, an Italian futurist who had briefly passed himself off as a time traveler from the twenty-first century in
The Golden State;
and there were volumes by Thomas Rowley, whose “medieval poems” had been written by Thomas Chatterton, who took his own life in 1770 at the age of seventeen.

Jed Roth had no idea that
The Tale of Genji
displayed under glass in the Blom reading room was a fake when he broke its case with the intention of stealing the book for his “Girl.” But when he cautiously opened the book in a taxi speeding away from the library, he discovered that all but the first pages of the book were blank—the most prized item in the Blom collection was a phony too. Roth wondered what the
Genji
would be worth if it were real, and showed the cover and the first pages of the book to Iola Jaffe. When she told him how much it might fetch and asked to see the rest of it, he wished he could devise some way to make the book real, so much so that he risked his life escaping with the
Genji
after Jaffe pulled a gun on him and asked him to hand over the book.

On the day Jed returned to the Blom Library, it was gone. Shortly after Faye had fired Norbert for stealing books from the reading room, the man had sneaked back inside, taken all he could carry, then set the place ablaze. Faye was standing in the smoldering wreckage when Roth saw her and introduced himself. Despite the fact that Roth was more than ten years older than Faye and spoke in a far more elegant manner, they had a
great deal in common—an illustrious family history, a fascination with art and fakes. They grew to be friends, then lovers. With his charm and intelligence, Jed had seduced her, much as he had seduced me; much as I had been seduced by Anya’s stories and by Faye’s art. After they woke up from their first night together, Jed asked if Faye would tell the police what had happened or press charges against the man who had apparently burned down the library. She said no; in fact, Norbert Piels had done her a favor. Now that the contents had been destroyed, no one could challenge their validity or worth. In burning the library, Norbert had allowed her to pursue a dream that had always consumed her—take something false and make it so real that no one could question its authenticity. She would create an entire eleventh-century illustrated manuscript of
The Tale of Genji
, a thousand pages of text and images; she would do the job so well that everyone would believe her when she presented her finished product and said that it had been rescued from the fire. She wasn’t sure how she would be able to pull it off, but Roth was—he would write the story of the fire and the search for the
Genji;
the book he would write would attract so much attention that it would make Faye’s
Tale of Genji
worth a fortune.

Jed and Faye spent nearly a decade on their respective projects. He wrote
A Thief in Manhattan;
Faye painstakingly forged the
Genji
, while they both managed to keep out of sight of Norbert Piels and Iola Jaffe. As Jed and Faye worked, their differences in manner and appearance proved useful—Roth knew that the best con-artist teams were made up of mismatched pairs, and people would find it hard to believe that this suave man and funky artist were actually working together. They found honest jobs—Faye pursued her art and worked in cafés;
Jed climbed the ladder in publishing, all the while looking for some poor sap to take the fall. I was the perfect mark—so desperate, I’d take any job that came along, so gullible I couldn’t even recognize my girlfriend’s phony Romanian accent. For a time, Faye felt conflicted about involving me in the plan, truly came to care for me, but after she witnessed my inconsiderate and self-involved behavior at the KGB Bar, she got out of Roth’s way so that he could make me his partner and the plan could go forward. After Roth and I were finally done writing and editing our book, Roth made an anonymous call to Iola Jaffe, telling her where she and Norbert might find me. As for what I might say if I survived after those two got hold of me, the police wouldn’t believe anything I told them; I’d already written a 250-page confession.

“If I hadn’t shown up, you might already be one dead barista,” Joseph said.

“Jesus,” I said to Joseph as a chill shot up my spine. “All I wanted was to write a book and have some people read it, maybe sell enough copies so that I could convince someone to publish another. I didn’t want to die for that.”

Terrified as I may have felt, gullible as I have always been, I still wasn’t willing to accept everything Joseph had told me. I believed what he said about Roth—I’d spent enough time listening to the man’s bitter diatribes and reading his original
Thief
draft to believe that he didn’t care much for his fellow human beings. I was sure he’d have little compunction about setting me up. I was less certain about Faye, though—had she really turned against me so drastically? When I had asked her why she had dated me when she had been dating someone else, whom I now knew was Roth, she said she had liked my stories better than his.
It was hard for me to believe that she had changed her mind about that. And why had she laid out her notebook, her picture, and the paperback
Tale of Genji
in her apartment as if on exhibit for me? Maybe she was leaving clues, I hoped, assuring me that somehow she would be watching out for me. Maybe she’d been leaving clues for Joseph, too, giving him his chance to play the hero, knowing that he’d come to my aid. Hadn’t she been the one to tell me that Joseph wasn’t such a bad guy and that if anyone ever gave him the chance, he’d come through? Or maybe all this was just wishful thinking on my part. For the time being, I knew I had to stop imputing motives to people I had so obviously misjudged. The wind was howling outside, the snow coming down hard, I was so tired and cold and Joseph’s car was so warm.

I was fast asleep, my head against the fogged-up window of the Citroën, when Joseph shoved me. “We’re here,” he said, and when I looked out the window I could see that dawn was upon us, and once again, I was in front of Morningside Coffee. The sign on the door read
CLOSED
.

The last time I slept in the basement of the coffee shop, the cement floor had been my proust and bags of coffee beans had served as my pillows. But this time, Joseph had already prepared for my stay. There was a tall lamp, a desk, and a cot with space heaters on either side of it. In the refrigerator were day-old pastries and cartons of juice—take as much as you want, Joseph
said. No one would think to look for me here; the only person who might consider it was Faye, but she was already gone, and he said that she would probably never imagine that he would go out of his way to help me.