The Thieves of Manhattan (27 page)

Growing up in small-town Indiana, I learned early on that hopping onto freight cars is much easier than jumping off them. Once you grab hold, the train practically lifts you all by itself. And tonight, when I saw the hand reach out toward me from the darkness inside the car, I knew I could get on board without even losing balance or breaking stride, just as the hero of
The Thieves of Manhattan
had done. So when I found myself lying on my back on the floor of the car with the metal case and the canino at my side instead of in my hands, I knew the person who had pulled me up had tripped me. I had hoped that Faye might be on board the train, but when a green light along the tracks shone into the car, it lit up the face of Jed Roth, who was wearing his black gogol and matching capote. He helped me to my feet, shook my hand, and smiled. But he was holding the canino now, and though he wasn’t pointing it at me, he didn’t look as though he was planning to return it.

“Dead, are they?” he asked, and when I didn’t say anything, he asked if I had checked Iola’s and Norbert’s pulses. As always, there was a rote expectancy to his questions, the unflappability and confidence that had always alternately charmed and annoyed me, as if he assumed I was still acting a part in his story. But there was a new bitterness to his demeanor. I brushed dust and dirt off my pants, then sat atop the metal case, while he sipped tea from a thermos cup.

The inside of the train car was dark, and so I could see Roth’s face only in flashes provided by white and amber highway
lights; by the pale half-moon when it emerged from behind the clouds; or by the pulsing reds of fire trucks rushing to Big Box Books. Roth looked even older and more severe than when I had last seen him. Once, he had looked like the man I hoped I might become; now like a man I hoped I would never turn into.

“Dead, are they?” he asked again. His voice was cold and authoritative, his eyes dark and fierce, as if he had stopped playing a game, or as if he was now revealing that he had never been playing a game at all. It seemed clear what he thought had happened—Iola and Norbert were dead, just as he had written in his original draft; I was still alive, so I must have managed to “wrest the gun away,” shoot them, bury them there in the frozen ground, and run for the train. Now Roth was pointing the canino at me, looking as blank and unsympathetic as a character in a story he had written.

The moon peeked out from behind a cloud, for a moment revealing the intensity in Roth’s eyes, the mad rage and hatred that he apparently felt no more need to conceal. But I met them with the same intensity with which they regarded me. I wouldn’t answer yes, because that would mean moving on to what I imagined would be the next part of Roth’s plot—me with a hammett in my guts, flying backward out of the train, rolling down into an empty field, while he would go off to find the girl. In Roth’s story, only one man was on board the highsmith heading away from that field outside Manhattan, and his name was Roth. I should have known not to trust him the minute I’d finished reading his manuscript for the first time; he was an amoral writer, cold and unfeeling, didn’t give a damn about his characters—all he cared about was getting on with the plot.

“You checked the pulses?”

“I didn’t,” I said, trying to speak in the same concise and self-assured manner that Roth had when he was pulling me into his story.

“What?” he asked.

Roth tried to maintain his characteristically confident look, but in the twirling orange light of a tow truck stalled at a crossing, I could see it fading. He asked his question again.

“Dead, are they?”

“No, they’re not, Jed.”

Roth was silent for a moment.

“What happened after they found out the case was empty?” he asked. “What did you do, Ian?”

I could now hear an unfamiliar tremor in his voice as our train passed beneath a highway. We had both emerged into uncertain territory; I could see that he had no idea that the case had not been empty, that it had contained my manuscript of
Zero Ninety-eight
. He had no idea that I had even written it. That had not been a part of our story. Jed hadn’t buried the manuscript beneath the golden cross, that was for sure; either Joseph or Faye had done it, and had helped to change the plot Jed thought he had planned so well.

“The case wasn’t empty, Jed.”

“What happened?” Roth asked, for apparently he couldn’t come up with his own answer—he had forgotten what it was like to have to wonder
What if
. I now thought of what Roth had told me when we were discussing strategies for getting our book published—the smarter and more powerful a person is, the easier it is to trick him; find the cockiest man you can—taking him down is as easy as swatting a fly. It’s the inexperienced guy you have to watch out for. I opened the metal case and took out the
manuscript of
Zero Ninety-eight
. I thrust the pages at him, and as the train slowed in a pale yellow caution light’s glow, I instructed him to read.

“Why should I?” asked Roth.

“Read it and I’ll tell you.”

“What for?”

“Read it and you’ll know.”

Warily, Roth took the pages from me and put the gun down at his side. The manuscript wasn’t long; even a slow reader could have made his way through it in an evening. But Roth could only steal glimpses through the lights we passed, and so I closed my eyes and slept soundly for the first time in weeks, confident that, even though he still had the canino, even though I was sure that he still wanted to use it on me, he wouldn’t do anything to me before he had finished the book.

By the time Roth reached the last page of
Zero Ninety-eight
, dawn had broken, casting his face and my manuscript in a deep blue glow. I had been awake for about half an hour. I discovered that the
Unknown Tales
anthology was still in my gogol pocket, and I spent a few minutes reading Roth’s story, “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross.” It was a diverting little sketch, one that had formed the basis for the shootout scene in
A Thief in Manhattan
. But since the characters were thin, the violence seemed gratuitous, and the story felt trivial and recycled. I could have helped Roth develop his characters, make them more sympathetic
and their dialogue more believable, but as it stood, the story would have been a whole lot more compelling had any of it been true.

I was admiring the glacial and conical shapes that ice and snow had made atop the rusted cars in the junkyards we passed when Roth finished reading
Zero Ninety-eight
. He could have pretended that he didn’t care I had written everything I had learned about him and the plan he and Faye had hatched, but the hand that held my manuscript was quivering, and when he had read the last page, his face had gone pale. He put down the manuscript, took a breath, and looked up. He didn’t have to ask what had happened or what might happen next—I knew that’s what he wanted to know. And because Roth had taught me that the best lies are always intertwined with facts, I began by telling him I had made copies of the book he had just finished reading. And then I told him I had sent one copy to Geoff Olden with clear instructions about what he should do with it if anything happened to me, conveniently leaving out the fact that Iola and Norbert had gotten to Morningside Coffee and knocked out Joseph, and that as far as I knew, Joseph hadn’t been able to deliver
Zero Ninety-eight
to Geoff.

I told Roth that if he left me alone, I would continue to act out the whole scenario just as we had discussed. He could sell
The Tale of Genji
as he and Faye had planned, and when I felt the moment was right, I would do exactly as Roth and I had agreed, reveal that
The Thieves of Manhattan
was a lie so that he could have his revenge. As for
Zero Ninety-eight
, I would promise never to publish it unless anything happened to me, in which case the whole story would be revealed.

I put out my hand for Roth to shake.

Roth regarded the manuscript on the floor beside him, then my hand; he searched my eyes as if wondering whether I might prove more trustworthy than he had ever been. It was a rotten bet for him to make, considering all he’d taught me, but it really was the only one he had. Kill me, and he risked blowing the whole plot; let me live, he might still get away with it. Slowly, he reached out to grasp my hand, even though I could see that it was just about the last thing he wanted to do.

“Now, the canino,” I said.

Roth’s facial expression was becoming one I no longer recognized—part admiration, part envy, part nostalgia, as if I were now something he had only dreamed of, as if he were a Geppetto whose Pinocchio had slipped his strings and become real. There was something he didn’t understand about people in books and in real life—they didn’t always do what you wanted or expected them to or what you thought your plot required; sometimes, they took on lives of their own.

Roth handed the gun to me; I took it, then threw it out the open door. I didn’t need it anymore; I had
Zero Ninety-eight
on my thumb drive and that was enough protection for me. A gun might not wound Jed. He could even wrest it away from me, but the knowledge contained in
Zero Ninety-eight
could derail his plot. I picked up the copy of the manuscript that Roth had read, skimmed it, glanced at the last page, then tossed it out of the train, one page after another, as if to symbolize to Roth that I meant to keep the promise I had made to him. I sat back down upon the empty case and asked Jed where the forged
Genji
was really hidden.

“In a safe-deposit box,” Roth said. For once, his voice sounded almost humble.

We sat in the train, me on the metal case, him on the floor, watching the fleeting American landscape—flatlands giving way to hills; empty fields becoming housing tracts, malls being built or going out of business. For a long time, Roth said nothing, but I could see him thinking, wondering, trying to figure out how the tables had turned so quickly. He liked stories that ended well, ones in which heroes got what they wanted. But now I knew he couldn’t say for sure which of us was the hero.

Roth sighed. In some adventure novels, he said as he gazed out the door, this might be the time to tie up loose ends, to tell me more about Faye’s childhood as heir to the Blom family, about what he and Faye had in common. He would describe the old Blom family home, which had been leveled to make way for a shopping mall; then he’d make wistful observations about old worlds that were disappearing. But he said he always skimmed long speeches in books, and he never cared for the surprise revelations that tended to pop up toward the end of mysteries. All I really needed to know was that once, he had seen a girl in a strange, doomed library, and had risked his life to bring her something he thought she wanted. In return, she had given him an idea for a story he hadn’t known how to finish. And now, even though he understood that their story wasn’t over, and that it might not turn out the way he had written it, he knew that the only choice he had was to still trust it. He had to have faith that she would be waiting for him, just as the story promised she would, and that they would escape together.

But I wasn’t so sure about that. For I had recognized Faye’s handwriting at the bottom of the last page of
Zero Ninety-eight
, the page Roth had been reading when his face went white. And the words she had written there had convinced me that she was
in charge of this story now, that she was helping to create it even as Jed and I spoke, that she had managed to get
Zero Ninety-eight
from Joseph, then bury it in the empty field, knowing that I could use it to save myself. She was doing the same thing she did in her art—taking a story she knew, and making it her own. She had written the same basic message that Jed had left for me in his apartment: “Maybe I’ll see you after the last page.” I felt pretty sure now that Faye intended that message for me.

I asked Roth what he would do with the money from the sale of the
Genji
. He paused a moment and considered.

“We’ll build another library,” he said. “We’ll fill it full of fakes. We’ll write another story. And then another. Fool as many people as we can.”

But I wasn’t sure about that either. Faye had told me she didn’t like sequels, and I figured she probably didn’t much care for the sorts of stories Jed invented—too violent, too many people getting hurt. Maybe that was one of the reasons why she might have hidden my manuscript in the desolate field—not only to let me show Iola and Norbert that I’d been telling the truth, and Roth that I knew all about his plot, but also to show me that she understood the difference between the sorts of stories that each of us wrote. I knew that she preferred my stories, ones that may have been quiet and uneventful, but everything in them felt true. The question that neither Roth nor I could answer was whether she preferred me or him.

“Do you even love her?” I asked Roth.

“There is an inseparable bond between her and me,” he began. But I recognized that quote—it came from
The Tale of Genji
. It had been borrowed just like the plots of Jed’s stories. Faye wasn’t real to him—he didn’t love her for her art or for
who she was, only for what she could do for him. We were both just characters in a book to Roth, useful devices who could help get him his money and his revenge.

When I finally saw her, she was leaning against the hood of a gleaming white car stalled at a railroad crossing. She was wearing a sky blue Kansas concert jersey, and her red hair was flying out from beneath a black corduroy baseball cap.

Roth stood in the doorway of our train car. He shook my hand once more, took a breath, then leaped from the train. He leaped as if he understood the speed of railroad cars and knew how quickly the ground would come up to meet him, for that’s the way it had happened in a book; as he touched the grass, he didn’t even break his stride. He held one hand atop his capote, and the tails of his black gogol seemed to fly as he ran through the snow toward Faye, but she was smiling at me as my highsmith sped east toward Manhattan, New York, and the rising sun.