The Thieves of Manhattan (26 page)

The map that had been hidden “outside Manhattan” in “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross” looked like an antique—brittle, yellow paper; charred edges—but the writing on it suggested it was a recent work: “Ye Olde Potbelly Sandwich Works,” “Lair of the Circuit City,” “Target’s Cove.” The Game Zone and Hot Topic stores were labeled with shaky capital letters—“Here Be Mall Rats!” Clearly, this was Faye’s work; she was leading us onward.

Iola held the flashlight with one hand while she traced the route on the map with a slender finger and nimbly made her way to 3B’s main corridor between Fiction and Nonfiction. Beneath the
NO SMOKING
sign at the front of the store, Norbert paused to light another vonnegut before we stepped out into the white-bright parking lot underneath the cold black Kansas sky.

Past Old Navy Reef we walked, out of the mall, farther and farther away from Ye Olde Route 177. Wind howled, leaves crackled as Iola counted off the paces indicated on the map. I trudged behind her. We approached another expanse of frozen field, even darker than the one we had traversed before; by now, the moon had disappeared behind a low, purple-gray cloud that was speeding through the sky.

As the mall receded behind us, there was no sign of any town, none of any civilization save for the mall itself, which seemed as if it had been built in the hopes that a population might grow around it. But the mall had come and gone, and the
town had never arrived. The air smelled clean but with a hint of smoke—I turned around to see Norbert drag on his cigarette as the air grew foggier.

“Straight ahead, ay,” Norbert said. His voice sounded gentler now—he had discovered something that met with Iola’s approval, and now he, too, was succumbing to the excitement.

As for me, I knew that I was running out of time. Whose fault would it be when they learned that no
Tale of Genji
was here, that everything I had told them before was true? Upon whom would they take out their frustrations and their disappointment? In Roth’s manuscript, his hero shot Iola and Norbert dead, then buried them in the desolate field. But I had cut that scene, and anyway, I wasn’t the one with the canino. In the book, I managed to “wrest the gun away” from Norbert, but exactly how was that supposed to work? I might have put up a good fight against some of the men I’d met when my dad took me along to librarians’ conferences, but Norbert was no typical librarian. The directions on the map were leading us farther into darkness, and the fog was growing thicker.

This was a hell of a place for an adventure to end, I thought, on some futile march through this dark and cold. As we walked, I cursed everyone who had brought me here—my mother, who had given birth to me and died before I knew her; my father, who had given me faith in stories and dreams, but left me too soon to know where that faith would lead; I cursed the Confident Man and I cursed Faye for pointing him out to me; I cursed Anya and Anna Petrescu, and I cursed Blade Markham; I cursed Geoff Olden, and I cursed Jim Merrill, Jr. I cursed Norbert Piels, and I cursed Iola Jaffe; most of all, I cursed myself: I cursed the author of
The Thieves of Manhattan
, who had led me
to this fate, and I cursed Ian Minot, who had been too stupid and naïve to anticipate it.

And then, when Iola stopped walking, I cursed the crosses that I saw before us in the middle of a little Kansas family plot, in which every headstone displayed the name Blom. I cursed Faye’s painting that was still hanging in my apartment with its country house, its gleaming white car, its meadow, its graveyard, and its title,
No Place Like Home
. I cursed the freshly turned grave that had no headstone and was marked only by a golden cross. I cursed the man whose eyes ignited as he said, “That’s it, is it?” I cursed the woman who took a deep breath, then said, “At long fucking last.” I cursed the thick, smoky air as I pulled out the cross. It wasn’t a cross for Christ; it was a T for Truth, I told myself, and now that truth—either an empty grave or a forged manuscript—would finally be revealed. I tossed the cross onto the earth, then began to dig.

Two feet down, mounds of black earth atop the snow on either side of me, there was still no sign of any book, but Norbert urged me to
keep at it, ay
, while Iola anxiously muttered Shakespeare soliloquies and swearwords. My hands were cold; they ached as they clutched the shovel handle, and I could feel pain in my shoulders and back with each plunge into the earth. But I kept digging; at least, the deeper I stood in the ditch, the less I could feel the snow and wind.

When the hole was waist-deep, I could feel the dirt in my
nostrils, taste it on my tongue. Another foot of earth, another mound; the ground was getting rockier, harder to dig. I was growing woozy and delirious, and the wearier I felt, the more I considered just surrendering. I could lie down, hands across my chest; the grave was ready-made. I sank the shovel into the earth one more time. And then I heard a clang as it hit something hard and metal.

“Wha’s tha’?” Norbert asked.

Five feet above me, Iola sprang to attention, and now so did I. Norbert threw down his vonnegut and lit another. I dug once more, heard a louder clang.

“Wha’sat?”

I stopped digging and cleared away the dirt. Iola pointed her flashlight into the hole, and I could see what appeared to be a metal case with a dull red handle. Iola’s hands shook, her eyes sparkled; she looked ten years younger. Norbert panted as he bent his knees, desperate to learn what I’d found.

I pulled the case out of the earth. Something inside seemed to shift. It felt like a manuscript, maybe a book. I remembered how Roth and I had described
The Tale of Genji
, and now I could picture it: the shimmering gold Japanese characters on the black leather cover, the lovely, intricate illustrations.

“Don’t you dare jiggle it,” said Iola.

I laid the case on the ground above me, then climbed out of the grave. Iola crouched over the case. From her pocketbook, she removed a pair of thin white cotton gloves, and put them on. She flicked aside the few remaining particles of dirt. Norbert was watching me closely, but I could see him beginning to shift his weight, lick his lips, bob his head. I held on tightly to my shovel, my pulse accelerating.

Iola put her ear to the combination; she twirled one dial, then another, and a third. There was a click, a clunk, then another click, and I couldn’t tell whether that click was the hammer of Norbert’s gun or the cylinders of the lock engaging. I couldn’t run now, even if I wanted to—not until I learned what was inside.

Iola opened the case. “Jesus,” she said as she eyed its contents.
“Jee-hee-zus.”

I didn’t know whether “Jesus” meant good or bad. I wasn’t looking at Iola or at the case yet; I just kept looking at Norbert.

“Jesus,” Iola said again, and when she said it one more time, Norbert took his eyes off me. He looked over to Iola, then down to the case. His eyes opened wide as he mouthed the words,
“Wot that is?”
And in that moment, I raised the shovel high and brought its blade down hard on his hand, right on one of his tattoos. Norbert yelled, his hand opened, and his gun fell onto the snow. When he reached for it, I thrust the shovel handle hard into his guts. He doubled over. I lunged for the gun, and grabbed it.

I pointed the canino at Iola and Norbert, no longer feeling any pain. Norbert made as if to speak. “Quiet,” I said and pulled back the hammer. I told both of them to stay still, and how did that sound like a good idea?

Norbert shuddered, clearly expecting me to show no mercy. He put his hands over his head, stepped backward toward the
edge of the hole I had dug, and quietly asked me to put the gun down,
put it down, ay
. I told him to keep his mouth shut. Iola was still staring at the case, inside of which was not
The Tale of Genji
, but a 250-page manuscript; on the title page—
Zero Ninety-eight, A Memoir by Ian Minot
. Someone had brought my book here, buried it right in time for me to save myself, the same person who had put Faye’s map in 3B’s copy of
Unknown Tales
. Maybe Joseph, I thought, maybe Roth, but I was hoping that Faye had done it, that she had stopped at Morningside Coffee, found Joseph, and gotten the manuscript from him.

Iola’s voice trembled as if she was finally feeling the chill of the winter air. She picked up
Zero Ninety-eight
and somberly paged through it
—what the hell was this shit
, she asked; this couldn’t have been what she had spent so many years searching for.

I kept my index finger on the gun’s trigger as Norbert teetered at the grave’s precipice. Now all it would take would be two squeezes of the trigger, and down both Iola and Norbert would fall, just as in Roth’s original draft, in which his hero shot the pair of them without even a hint of remorse, an act that took him little more than a sentence to describe. Iola and Norbert had thought I was digging to find
The Tale of Genji
, but now it must have appeared to them as if I had been digging their grave. The buried manuscript of
Zero Ninety-eight
was a nice touch, a little turn of the screw, as Jed would have said, enough to distract Iola and Norbert and give me time to make my move.

Iola’s face was ashen and Norbert was now a fearful, faceless creature, preparing to tumble into the abyss that awaited. He knew all too well what happened to men in his situation—they got shelved, remaindered, pulped. I could see his pulse beating
against the tattoos upon his temples, making them dance. And it would be so easy, I felt now, just like in a book—
click
and
bang
. They would fall, I would shovel the dirt over them, then run back for the Opel and drive east—on to the next chapter. I was sure I could get away with it too. Interviewers would ask the same question they asked of Blade Markham: Wouldn’t I feel afraid that the people I wrote about would try to
take me out?
“Nah,” I’d say, “those punks I wrote about, they all dead, yo.” Yes, I could almost do it now. For a moment, I didn’t give a damn about Iola or Norbert or anyone else. How much mercy had they shown me, after all?

I studied Norbert’s face, and for the first time I began to look closely at the swirls and crisscrosses of his tattoos. The raised lines still seemed to have no clear pattern; they now reminded me of bursts of lightning, or cuts on a shattered mirror. Or, more probably, I thought as I stepped closer to him, bruises from an accident and scars left by fire—like scars left after running through a burning library, still looking in vain for a book that was already gone.

In those tattoos—those scars and bruises—and in the creases on Iola’s face, I could imagine all that this pair had been through to find
The Tale of Genji
, the most valuable document that either thought they had ever seen. I considered the chases, the struggles, the fire, finally the glimmer of hope, but now, at last, the defeat. In their faces, I could see how what they had experienced could drive them to want to kill. I understood that feeling, had the canino in my hand and my finger on its trigger to prove it. But that old fault of mine was emerging big-time—loathing at a distance; sympathizing up close. Empathy might be a good quality for a writer, but it’s not very useful to a man
holding a gun. Looking at Iola and Norbert, I thought about the lives Roth and I had written for them, the ones I thought we had invented but now I understood were true, the ones that Roth had left out of his draft, which made killing the pair of them seem easy. I imagined Iola whiling away thankless hours in dim libraries and classrooms, working on a book she would never finish, articles she would never publish, losing her job at the university where she taught, and growing more bitter with each passing year. I imagined who Norbert had been before the accidents and the fire—the promising scholar, the best research assistant Iola had ever had, the one who could instantly recall nearly everything he had ever read. I imagined the
Genji
, how much it would have been worth to Iola and Norbert had it been real—not only the money it could bring, but the notoriety and perhaps even a chance at redemption. And all they had gotten for their troubles was the shame of learning that they had been fools to believe they would ever find it. I knew all too well what it felt like to be taken for a fool. I played out Roth’s ending over and over in my mind—Norbert first, down he’d go, then Iola. Shovel the dirt, grab the manuscript, run. Life can be cheap in a novel; but in a memoir, it’s harder to kill.

And so instead of shooting Iola and Norbert, I lowered the canino and told them the whole story, everything that had really happened as far as I knew, from the time I met Jed Roth to the way we ended up here. I told them that it was all written in the manuscript I’d unearthed. And when I was through, Norbert quietly and resignedly asked what I would do with them; he still seemed to expect that I would shoot them dead like all good villains do after they’ve told their stories to their victims. But I was
feeling better than I had in weeks—alive, in control, and even a bit giddy. I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and took out a business card from the Olden Literary Agency—“in case you meet someone else with a great story to tell,” Geoff liked to say. I suggested that Norbert and Iola go back to New York, lie low, write their story, and when they were done, find Geoff; he’d know what to do with it—after everything Jed and I had written about them, allowing them the chance to tell their side of the story seemed only fair. I told Norbert and Iola to get moving fast before I changed my mind.

When I heard the chugging of an approaching highsmith, I tossed down the shovel, picked up my manuscript, put it in the metal case, closed it, and started running with the case and the gun. I had no phone or watch to tell me what time it was, but I had a pretty good feeling that it was the same number as the combination for the metal case: 8-1-3.

As I ran for a black freight car with a wide-open door, I could glimpse Iola and Norbert. They were running through the graveyard back toward the highway and the deserted mall. Iola was holding the flashlight; Norbert was holding the most valuable item he’d been able to find: the golden cross. In some strange way, I wished them well. But now the air behind me was getting even thicker, the clouds in front of the moon were moving faster, and as I made out the tiny glint of Norbert’s cigarette tip fading into the night, I could see that smoke was coming from the mall: Big Box Books was on fire.