The Thieves of Manhattan Read online

  ALSO BY ADAM LANGER

  My Father’s Bonus March

  Ellington Boulevard

  The Washington Story

  Crossing California

  This book is dedicated to J.

  (for reasons that should become somewhat

  clearer sometime after Chapter 48).

  And also to Nora and Solveig

  (for reasons that precede Chapter 1).

  Contents

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I - Fact

  Chapter 1 - The Confident Man

  Chapter 2 - The Romanian

  Chapter 3 - Return of the Confident Man

  Chapter 4 - Blade by Blade

  Chapter 5 - The Bash at Olden’s

  Chapter 6 - The Great Crack-Up

  Chapter 7 - The Confident Man Strikes Again

  Chapter 8 - Meeting the Confident Man

  Chapter 9 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part I

  Chapter 10 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part II

  Chapter 11 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part III

  Chapter 12 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part IV

  Chapter 13 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part V

  Chapter 14 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part VI

  Chapter 15 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part VII

  Chapter 16 - The Confident Man’s Story, Part VIII

  Chapter 17 - A Thief in Manhattan

  Chapter 18 - A Modest Proposal

  Chapter 19 - Effective Medicine

  Chapter 20 - In Search of Myself

  Chapter 21 - How Ian Minot Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life

  Chapter 22 - A Tragycal Interlude

  Part II - Fiction

  Chapter 23 - My Life as a Fake

  Chapter 24 - My Counterlife

  Chapter 25 - The Happy Couple

  Chapter 26 - An Agent

  Chapter 27 - Getting Geoff Olden

  Chapter 28 - An Unexpected Guest

  Chapter 29 - Meeting at Michael’s

  Chapter 30 - Revising the Draft

  Chapter 31 - The Art of Puffing

  Chapter 32 - Burning Down My Master’s House

  Chapter 33 - The Fabulist

  Chapter 34 - The Honored Society

  Chapter 35 - My Friend Jed

  Chapter 36 - My Own Sweet Time

  Chapter 37 - Honor Lost

  Chapter 38 - Outside Roth’s

  Part III - Memoir

  Chapter 39 - Bright, Shiny Morning

  Chapter 40 - A Million Little Pieces

  Chapter 41 - The Darkening Ecliptic

  Chapter 42 - Fragments

  Chapter 43 - Awful Disclosures

  Chapter 44 - I Tell You These Things are True

  Chapter 45 - Forbidden Love

  Chapter 46 - Naked Came the Stranger

  Chapter 47 - The Heart is Deceitful, Above All Things

  Chapter 48 - The Night Visitor

  Chapter 49 - Like a Giant Refreshed

  Chapter 50 - Zero Ninety-Eight

  Chapter 51 - A Rock and a Hard Place

  Chapter 52 - The Blood Runs Through the River, Like My Dreams

  Chapter 53 - Shall I Die, Shall I Fly?

  Chapter 54 - Position Unknown

  Chapter 55 - A Desolate Field

  Chapter 56 - Illumination

  Chapter 57 - On a Darkling Plain

  Chapter 58 - My Sweet Lord

  Chapter 59 - The Treasure of the Genji

  Chapter 60 - The Hand that Signed the Paper

  Chapter 61 - Love and Consequences

  Chapter 62 - Famous All Over Town

  Chapter 63 - Girl, You Know It’s True

  Glossary of Selected Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Circular Ruins”

  I

  fact

  Girl, you know it’s true.…

  MILLI VANILLI

  THE CONFIDENT MAN

  To tell you the truth, I’d have noticed the guy even if Faye hadn’t pointed him out to me. He was slicker than the usual Morningside Coffee crowd—off-white linen suit, black silk shirt buttoned to the throat, Jonathan Franzen–style designer glasses—but what made me stop wiping tables and look just a bit longer was the fact that he was reading a copy of Blade by Blade. That autumn, it seemed as though Blade Markham’s book was everywhere—every subway station corridor had posters with that canary yellow book cover on them; every bookstore window displayed a cardboard cutout of a glowering Blade sporting a nine o’clock shadow; half the suckers who sat next to me on the bus were reading that so-called memoir.

  Faye, strands of red hair dangling past her olive green eyes from under her Morningside Coffee visor, was humming “Dust in the Wind” and absentmindedly drawing a sketch of the guy on her notepad. She’d written “Confident Man” underneath it. That’s how the name stuck with me. Meanwhile, bitter, gossipy Joseph, all 315 pounds of him, hunched over the counter, going over lines for an audition, vainly hoping that some casting director wanted a guy his size with white-boy dreadlocks, flip-flops, and a goatee. It had been another slow night, and now the Confident Man was the only customer left in the shop.

  “Too bad his taste in books doesn’t match his taste in clothes,” Faye said to me. She smiled and returned to her sketch.

  Faye Curry was probably already trying to flirt with me then, but I had a girl, Anya Petrescu. Just about everything Faye said tended to go right past me anyway. Artsy and bookish guys always lurked at the counter and chatted her up because she had a droll wit and liked to be distracted when she was working, but she was way too subtle for me. She had the looks and smarts I tended to notice only after the fact, usually after the woman in question had gotten engaged to someone else or had already left town or had decided she was done with men. Back then, with her torn jeans, baseball caps, vintage concert shirts, and paint-spattered boots, I wasn’t sure if she was into guys anyway. So that night I wasn’t focusing on the fact that she was grinning at me instead of scowling, that she was wearing perfume or maybe using new shampoo. That night, I was more interested in the book the Confident Man was reading.

  “Bogus pile of crap,” I muttered. I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud. But Joseph shot me a glance and Faye smiled at me again as if both of them had heard. I looked back down and went on wiping the tables, putting the chairs up, trying to stop thinking about that book and Blade Markham.

  Just the night before, during yet another bout of writer’s block and insomnia, I’d been flipping channels when I stumbled on Markham blowing hard on a rebroadcast of Pam Layne’s daytime talk show. There the guy was, hawking his memoir on the biggest book show going, yammering about his heroin addiction and the time he spent with the Crips and the month he went AWOL during the first Gulf War and his conversion to Buddhism and whatever else he’d made up and sold to Merrill Books—a half million bucks for the North American rights alone. I didn’t believe a word of it, but Layne’s studio audience couldn’t get enough, gasping and clapping and laughing as Markham spouted one lie after another. All the while, Pam Layne kept up her credulous questions, using street slang that must have been written on cue cards by whichever one of her assistants had actually read the book:

  “Don’t you worry that some of these men you mention in your book, some of these hustlas, might try to
put a cap in yo’ ass?” she asked Blade. “That they might try to take yo’ ass out?”

  “Naw, that ain’t too likely,” Blade told Pam. “You know, sistuh, the punks I wrote about in my book, they all dead, yo.”

  Up there on that TV talk show set, Blade was acting like some old-school hip-hopper, throwing his arms out, crossing them over his chest, flashing made-up gang signs, ending all his sentences with “yo,” even though he was probably just some rich boy from Maplewood, New Jersey, whose real name was Blaine Markowitz—that’s what Anya and I used to joke anyway. Everything about Blade Markham seemed like some kind of lie—his words, his shabby outfit that he’d probably planned out a week in advance, even the cross he wore around his neck.

  “It ain’t a cross for Christ; it’s a T for Truth, yo,” he told Pam Layne. That’s when I flipped off the TV, went back to bed in my clothes, and tried in vain to think of a story to write, tried in vain to get some sleep.

  Now here in the coffee shop was the Confident Man, one more Blade Markham fan than I could stand. So when I went over to his table and told him we were closing and that he had to scram, I might have sounded harsher than I intended. Faye bust out laughing, and Joseph, who seemed always to be looking for just the right time to can me, flashed a “one more outburst and you’re gone” glare.

  The Confident Man dog-eared a page of his book, put on his black cashmere gogol, belted it, went over to the tip jar, and stuffed in a twenty-dollar bill, which just about doubled our tips for the night. He walked out onto Broadway without saying a word.

  “Think that guy craves you,” Faye said, raising one eyebrow. Joseph snickered—jokes at my expense always cracked him up. I finished cleaning, collected my share of the tips from Joseph, said sayonara to Faye, and headed down to the KGB Bar to meet Anya. By the time I got there, I was still stewing about Blade by Blade, but I had all but forgotten the Confident Man.

  THE ROMANIAN

  In every bar, in every city, in every country, on every continent since the beginning of time, there has always been and will always be some sullen mope who walks in with a beautiful, charming woman on his arm, and everyone in the place stops and looks and wonders how that woman wound up with that mope. For a time, I was that mope. And Anya Petrescu was that woman.

  Anya had the kind of beauty that was not subject to debate—it was just a fact. She had a devilish laugh, eyes so blue that people assumed she wore tinted contacts, and then there was that charming Eastern European accent.

  But even when Anya was telling me how much she luffed me, even when we were kissing in subway cars or making mad, passionate chinaski on my lumpy pull-out couch, or skinny-dipping at dawn beneath the Morningside Park waterfall, even when she was discussing how much she weeshed she could tekk me home to Bucharest to meet her femmilee but that was eemposseebull now, spending time with her had begun to depress me. I knew that our relationship would never last, that one day, her infatuation with me—something I often attributed to a cultural misunderstanding—would end. And then I would be alone and miserable, just the way I had felt before I had seen her scribbling away in Morningside Coffee, sat down at her table, asked what she was writing, then babbled for an hour about my naïve and undoubtedly ridiculous theories of honest writing and narrative authenticity and whatever else I thought I believed back then. Anya never pointed out that she was a better storyteller than I would ever be. Later, she would often say that she fell in love with me because deep down I was just an “old-feshioned, romenteek Meedwestern boy” who fell in love with her stories; looking back, I guess that was true.

  That night, I was meeting Anya at KGB’s “Literal Stimulation,” a weekly showcase of emerging writers curated by Miri Lippman, editor and publisher of The Stimulator, a bimonthly literary review that wielded an influence far beyond its 2,500 paid subscribers, largely because Lippman had impeccable taste and a knack for identifying young scribes with “stimulating potential.” Just about every up-and-coming author published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, every first-time novelist with a two-book deal at Random House or Scribner, had appeared on Miri’s program. Four out of the last five authors that Pam Layne had chosen for her TV book club had read at Lit-Stim. The only one who hadn’t was Blade Markham, and even though I hated the way Miri Lippman looked through me every time she saw me, resented the fact that I was introduced to her for the first time on six separate occasions, I had to respect her for snubbing Blade.

  As always, KGB on Lit-Stim night was filled with a posse of authors, most of whom had published stories in magazines and journals that were still sending me form-letter rejections; agents, all of whom had sent my story manuscripts back to me in the self-addressed stamped envelopes I had provided; editors and publishers, all looking for the new Zadie Smith or Nick Hornby, all completely uninterested in Ian Minot. I couldn’t blame them; at that point, I was pretty bored with myself too.

  After my dad finally died of the cancer that had been slowly gnawing away at him, and I moved from Indiana to New York with my pitifully small inheritance, I went to Lit-Stim every Monday night. Now, a little over five years later, with my bank balance sinking into the mid four figures, I never did. The only reason I was here instead of back in my West Harlem garret, staring at a blank computer monitor or lying on my lumpy proust, watching TV, was that it was Anya’s turn to appear at Miri’s podium. Three other writers were on the bill, and Anya was the only one without a book contract; I figured that would change before the week was out. When Anya had treated me to dinner at Londell’s to celebrate our six-month anniversary and told me that Miri had chosen her for Lit-Stim, I could already feel her slipping away from me, could feel myself becoming the “old boyfriend” she’d soon discuss with her rich, talented new beau—yes, but I vas yunk and fooleesh den, end eeven though he hedd no tellent, he vass allvays switt, she would tell Malcolm Gladwell or Gary Shteyngart or whichever writer would next succumb to her charms.

  “You are lett again as always, but I forgeef you, Ee-yen,” Anya said as she patted the barstool she had saved for me—even now, I still love the way she used to say my name.

  I took the stool beside her, guiltily eyeing the Manhattan that she had already ordered for me. I could barely afford to buy the next round, but I knew that Anya would never expect me to buy her anything, not even a beer. Strangely, money never seemed to be an issue for this twenty-six-year-old woman who had left Romania with barely a leu to her name; Anya usually had cash and a nice, furnished place to stay—someone was always loaning her the keys to his or her apartment or summerhouse, hiring her for odd secretarial jobs with flexible hours, inviting her to this or that swanky party. When we first met, I obsessed about what she might be doing to win so many favors, but after a while I stopped worrying—Anya was the kind of woman you wanted to help without even considering what you might get in return.

  At the bar, I sipped my Manhattan, hoping to make it last, while I pointed out to Anya all the agents in the crowd—Eric Simonoff and Bill Clegg of the William Morris Agency sipping club sodas; Faye Bender and Christy Fletcher talking shop; Joe Regal of Regal Literary handing out a business card; Geoff Olden from the Olden Literary Agency nursing a cocktail. I recognized all of them from writing seminars I’d attended or from when I had served them drinks at private parties in Sonny Mehta’s or Nan Talese’s apartments, back in my naïve days when I thought that getting close to publishers would bring me closer to getting my stories published.

  Sitting beside Anya, I caught only snatches of their conversations, but every phrase filled me with envy—exclusive contract with Vanity Fair; boxed review in PW; a “significant” six-figure deal; optioned by Scott Rudin; adapted by Ron Bass; profiled by Chip McGrath; interviewed by Terry Gross; selected by Pam Layne; short-listed for the Booker; headlining at the 92nd Street Y; bidding war for the paperback rights; got a free box lunch at Yaddo. I kept suggesting to Anya that she get up and introduce herself to somebody, but she said she thought everyone there was a fekk. She didn�
�t want to meet anyone, just to sit with me and make fun of them—I was the only person with whom she could ever really be herself.

  “Good evening everybody, and welcome to another stimulating event,” Miri Lippman said from the podium, her monotone reverberating like a tuning fork held too close to my ear as she introduced the evening’s writers.

  Anya would be last to read. The second round of Manhattans, which I bought for Anya and myself with the night’s tips from Morningside Coffee, helped get me through the first three readers, but only barely. If I hadn’t been waiting for Anya to take her turn, all the Manhattans in Manhattan wouldn’t have kept me at the bar. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to tolerate listening to Avi Kamner, a weedy Jewish memoirist who read an essay from Cold Cuts, an anthology of purportedly humorous circumcision stories he had edited; or to Rupa Ganguly, author of Immigrant Song, a collection of contemporary fiction about South Asians struggling to survive in America, loosely based on the struggles of her own brave parents, she said. Very loosely based—her grandparents had immigrated to the States in the 1950s, and her Connecticut-born mother and father were respectively chairs of the radiology and orthopedic surgery departments at Mount Sinai.