The Thieves of Manhattan (21 page)

Still, all this seemed like a whole lot of trouble for Roth to go through no matter how much the
Genji
might have been worth, and I was getting dizzy trying to pull out the strands to determine which might be true. The Girl in the Library looked and talked like Faye in my version of the story, but who was she really? Roth had said he wanted to exact revenge on the publishing industry that had supposedly betrayed him, and he did seem to know that industry well enough, but did he really hate it so much? Why all the fuss about agents and publishers when my name would appear on the manuscript without them, when I had already signed my confession, agreed to take the fall? I
needed someone to discuss this with, but who? Olden? Merrill? Admit to my lies and sabotage my career before it began? The police? With my name on the autobiography of a thief? I felt glad that I had insisted we at least cut out the scene in which the hero shot Iola and Norbert dead; now if the police ever caught up to me, they wouldn’t think I was a murderer. I needed time to figure everything out, but I didn’t have that either. Not with Iola Jaffe at my apartment; not with the Hooligan Librarian on my trail; not with Roth already gone. I had felt safer when Norbert was chasing me and I could outrun him. Now he could be anywhere, and so I didn’t know whether to walk fast or slow, turn back, go forward, or stand still. Behind me was Roth’s block and the river, so I walked forward.

Morningside Coffee had just closed. I was standing in the bus shelter across the street, and, through the falling snow, I could see Joseph zeroing out the register, could see Faye actually mopping, doing some work for once in her life, and for probably the first time in my life, I longed to be back in there, back in time. How I wished I could walk into that coffee shop so that Joseph could ask me if I had sold any books and I could honestly tell him, “Hell, no.”

Inside the café, the lights flickered, Joseph flipped the sign on the door from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
, and then he and Faye stepped outside and said good night. Joseph was twice Faye’s size, yet he was the one bundled up—scarf, mittens, moon boots. He shuffled
toward his Citroën, gave me an up-and-down glance, sighed, shook his head, and kept walking while Faye headed uptown, wearing her usual denim and baseball cap. By the time she reached the Columbia University gates, I was right behind her.

“Faye?”

She didn’t seem to hear me the first time, but when I said her name again, she turned around. So much was different for me since the last time I saw her, when I’d tried to act so cocky. Just by looking into her eyes, I could see exactly how much had changed.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.

“I’m in trouble, Faye,” I told her. I hadn’t known how frightened I was until I heard my voice quiver, felt my hands and knees shake even as I tried to stand still. “Can you take me home?”

Faye inhaled sharply—I knew I was asking too much, but I persisted. “I just need somewhere to stay, Faye,” I said. “Just a couple days. Somewhere no one knows me. I just need to figure some things out.”

She said nothing, but when I told her that I truly had no one else, that she was the last person I could think of, that I was in real danger, like maybe even life-and-death danger, and that all I needed was a place to rest my head, and that she would never hear from me again afterward if she didn’t want to, I thought I could see her weakening. I told her that I knew she had cared for me once, and I knew she didn’t anymore; I knew that she thought I was a liar and a heel and I knew that she was right. But if she retained any of her prior affection, maybe she could find it in her heart to help me.

Faye took a long look at me. “You’re sure you have nowhere else you can go?” she asked.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow and gave the hint of a smile. “All right, Sailor,” she said.

We walked together down to the subway platform and got on a southbound highsmith. Never had I felt so glad to have someone I could sit beside.

I closed my eyes and put my head on Faye’s shoulder as the subway doors closed and the train headed downtown. It all could have turned out so differently, I thought, had I always known how safe I would feel next to Faye in the subway car.

I still felt too paranoid to tell Faye about everything that had happened, too obsessed with looking around to see if anyone was following, until we exited the Second Avenue subway station. By then, I finally felt confident that we were alone, so I let it all flow out. I told her that this was really all her fault; she was the one who had directed my attention to the Confident Man.

When I began telling Faye the story, she didn’t seem all that interested, but once I got to the part about the Hooligan Librarian’s strange tattoos, I thought I could see her getting hooked just as she always had when I told her stories about Blade or my “Lithuanian girl.” I realized how much I missed talking to her, the way she listened without judging, laughed without
mocking—even though now she didn’t seem to care about me, she still seemed to think my story was worth hearing.

I was so thankful that Faye and I were together again, I almost didn’t mind that she seemed to find my plight comic, as if my escape from Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels was no more consequential than any of the stories I had told her before. She cracked up at the note Jed had left for me—“Perhaps we’ll meet again after the last page”—for the corny line it was. As we walked, I reminded Faye of the conversation we had had at her gallery when I had asked if she would compromise her integrity for the sake of her art and she had asked if anyone would get hurt or killed in the process. How prophetic that conversation had been, I said; here I was, running for my life, just for the sake of some stories I had wanted to publish. Now all I wanted was to be back where I had been—no agent, no publisher, no prospects.

“But you wouldn’t have the story,” Faye said.

I told her I didn’t want it, but she raised an eyebrow—I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

Faye’s apartment was an illegal conversion, a loft she had designed and wired herself atop an abandoned mechanic’s garage behind a junkyard on Avenue D. I followed her through an obstacle course of hubcaps, stone statues, fountains, and vintage road signs, all of it covered by a thick layer of snow, until we reached her building’s warped black front door. She opened the door with a jiggle of a key and a hard kick from one of her boots. Well, I thought, at least no one would ever find me here.

Inside, the wooden steps, dark blue and spattered with paint like a pair of Faye’s jeans, creaked as we curved upward to the second floor, passing rusty shelves of random junk she must
have been collecting for art projects—old model cars made of metal; dented cans of paint; dusty jars of brushes; hardcover books with big water stains on them. As we climbed, we could see our breath. Another turn of a key in a lock, another swift kick with the heel of a boot, and we were inside the apartment.

The place suited her. A long corridor, her workspace, led to closed doors, which led presumably to a bathroom I desperately needed to use, and her bedroom, which was sadly beside the point. In the narrow workspace, the windows were covered with sheets of opaque plastic held in place by lengths of duct tape to keep the heat in. The walls were strung with Christmas lights, and strewn about was a pleasing mishmash of vintage furniture—a lumpy maroon couch with its insides poking out of a rip in the middle cushion; red, green, and black barstools; a lopsided antique chest of drawers. Faye’s approach to interior decoration seemed to be the opposite of mine, which was to take spaces as they were, then put the nicest stuff I could afford in them—she had reconfigured the whole space: dropped the ceilings, installed recessed lighting, fans to circulate the heat. What truly caught my eye, though, were Faye’s paintings on the walls—seemingly perfect facsimiles of old master works but ripped apart, burned to cinders, revealing her whimsical line drawings and cartoons underneath. Real and fake, all mixed together.

“You make your bed, Sailor,” Faye said as she nodded toward the couch. She opened a closet door, reached to a top shelf, and pulled down an old army sleeping bag and a mushy pillow sans pillowcase, and tossed them in my direction.

I tried finishing the story I had been trying to tell her, but she seemed too busy to listen now. She took out her cellphone to make a call, then turned up her thermostat; a little blue flame
flickered on in the radiator as she walked briskly to the industrial metal sink in her kitchen. She poured herself a mug of water, drank it, poured herself another. I asked for the bathroom; she thumbed to a door.

In the bathroom was another window covered by a plastic sheet, held in place by duct tape. There was a wheezy toilet, a rusty sink, a sunken tub, and a dirt-speckled mirror. I looked in that mirror and saw the reflection of a weather-beaten man—shadows under my eyes, creases where I hadn’t remembered seeing them before. I felt as though I were playing a game I used to play with myself when I was a kid—rubbing shaving cream in my hair, folding my cheeks, seeing what I would look like when I was old. I turned on the tap, looked in the cabinet for soap, couldn’t find any, washed off the blood and dirt with brown water. I looked in vain for a towel, wiped my face with my shirttail, then exited the bathroom, face and hands still wet.

In the workspace, Faye was standing naked save for a pair of white briefs with Asian characters on them; her red hair was cascading down, and I could see the tattoo of the twilight flower on her right shoulder. I felt a pang of longing knife through my guts as I stood with my arms folded, body quivering. Faye acted as if she didn’t notice me or the cold. She spoke on the phone as she stepped out of her underwear, then walked barefoot over the cement floor to the closet, where she grabbed another pair of underwear, jeans, a T-shirt, on it, the name of some seventies band.

Faye sounded as though she were speaking on the phone to a boyfriend, someone she would be meeting later, someone with whom she would probably be staying for a while, as evidenced by the fact that she was shoving pants, caps, and underwear into a backpack. I had been hoping she would stay here tonight.

She finished dressing, ended her phone conversation, put on her denim jacket and her black corduroy cap, stepped back into her boots.

“Can I stay here two nights?” I asked, and when Faye shrugged, then nodded, I wished I had asked for three, wished I had asked for a month or a year. I wouldn’t even need the couch to help me fall asleep, I thought, the cement floor would serve me just fine.

Faye put her hand on her front doorknob.

“Back tonight?” I asked. She crinkled her nose.

“Going to your boyfriend’s?” I asked.

“Something like that,” said Faye.

“How long till you come back?”

“How long did you say you’d be here?”

“Three nights.”

“Then not until after that,” said Faye. When I called out to her and asked for a key, she only shrugged. “Nothing worth stealing in here, Sailor,” she said, then added with a smirk, “Maybe I’ll see you after the last page.”

The door reverberated like a prison gate as she clanged it shut. I listened to her boots on the steps, the front door opening and closing, until all I could hear was the wind fluttering the plastic sheets covering the windows, and Faye whistling the song “Point of Know Return.”

I thought I’d fall asleep the moment my head touched the pillow, but I couldn’t sleep at all. I rolled this way and that, scrunched my pillow, turned it to the cool side, fluffed it, scrunched it again, turned it some more. I was too warm and too cold. I couldn’t sleep with the lights on, or with them off. I tried dimming the chandelier, smushing my head into the pillow, but I kept hearing my pulse resounding in my skull.

I felt as though I couldn’t close my eyes all the way, as if they always remained open just a slit. I worried about who would find me while I was awake, about the dreams I might have if I fell asleep. I listened to the wind, fluttering plastic, distant traffic, the flame in the radiator erupting then diminishing, the heat knocking through the overhead pipes. Then, silence; the silence worst of all. I kept reaching instinctively for my phone, but I had no one to call; I had run out of people to trust. I pushed the off button, and the phone powered down.

I wasn’t wearing a watch, all the windows were covered, so I wasn’t sure what time it was when I finally gave up trying to sleep and turned the chandelier on all the way. I had to do something to calm myself. Maybe I could start writing down everything that had happened to me. If I got through all this, I would want to have the story on paper—who knew, there might be a book in it, another memoir, this time one that had actually happened to me. I started searching for paper and pen. On a
warped easel was a single sheet of paper, but it was smeared with black paint. A pen was on the floor, but it was out of ink.

I went to the kitchen and turned on the cold water in the sink. I looked for a cup or glass in the dish rack, couldn’t find one, didn’t see one on the shelves either, so I drank from the one Faye had left; the water tasted like dirt. I shut off the tap and walked to the closed door at the back of the apartment. I reached for the doorknob, turned it, pushed, peered inside, and felt my heart plummet.

What I had thought was the bedroom was almost completely empty—sawdust on the cement floor, a grate in the center, a single lightbulb overhead, another duct-taped window, the plastic over it straining against the wind. I flicked the light switch. Maybe Faye had lived here once, but not anymore. Maybe this had just been her studio; maybe she had never lived here at all. Now all there was in this room was a wooden chair with two books on it and a little framed photograph on the wall above it. The cold from outside now seemed to be seeping through my skin; I saw the fog of my breaths hover, then dissipate in the harsh overhead light as my pulse lurched forward.