The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,4

first game, gets everyone to put their money on the table, then runs every ball.

Once Anya was done reading and applause thundered through the bar, her endearing neuroses returned. She laughed too loudly, apologized too much, clunked the microphone when she returned it to its holder, tripped over its cord as she walked back to take her place beside me at the bar. But it didn’t matter anymore. For a second, I looked down into my drink to see if anything was left; by the time I looked up again, Geoff Olden was there.

“Suntory?” he asked, jutting his chin toward Anya’s glass.

That night, Geoff Olden wouldn’t be the only agent who would swoop down upon Anya, offer to buy her drinks, then hand her business cards. But he was the first, and for me, his was the presence that rankled most. Yes, he was Blade Markham’s agent, but Olden was also the man whose literary agency had sent me the most perfunctory, condescending, and offensive rejection letter I had ever received.

“Good luck placing this and all your future submissions elsewhere,” the letter’s author wrote, thus shutting the mailbox door on any story I might ever write in my life.

“Señor?”

Olden was holding a twenty in one hand as he rapped his fingers against the bar—who knew why he was speaking Spanish to the poor bartender, who was no more Spanish than Geoff Olden was. But everything about Olden seemed calculated to draw distinction between himself and whomever he happened to be speaking with—the round yellow frames of his eckleburgs, his white turtleneck, his cuffed blue jeans, his black velvet jacket, the watches he wore, one on each wrist. Olden’s brushed-back hair had the fullness and the shade of premature silver-gray that I recall only ever seeing in Park Avenue apartments when I’d worked for a caterer during my first summer in New York.

But Geoff Olden wasn’t merely a confident man; no, he was imperious, unctuous, and snide—even when he laughed his loud, self-possessed, metrosexual cackle, you were always aware of whom he was laughing with and whom he was laughing at. And when he held up two fingers and bought a round of fitzgeralds for Anya and me—“Dos, por favor”—I was thoroughly aware of the category in which Olden had placed me. The moment after he handed me my fitzgerald, I became invisible. Drinking too fast and thinking about how I might wreak revenge upon Olden, if only I had the opportunity, helped to pass some time before I was once again staring at random points in space and contemplating stories I might try to write, before deciding that Jens Von Bretzel had probably already written them.

“Exquisite work, truly. Mucho mucho bueno.” Geoff handed Anya two of his business cards. He said he always gave two—“keep the other in case you meet someone else with a great story to tell.”

The evening proceeded with more compliments from editors, publishers, and agents; more of Anya’s inscrutable smiles; more fitzgeralds—lots more fitzgeralds. Before Anya had read her story, I was her boyfriend; afterward, I became her roadie. The only thing that prevented me from bolting for the door was the fact that Anya kept making fun of all the people who approached her. She rolled her eyes at me, made yakkety-yak gestures with her hands, mouthed the sycophantic words she was enduring.

“What a bonch of kripps,” Anya said when we finally emerged from the KGB and started walking quickly along Fourth Street. She was taking the business cards she had received, ripping them into quarters and eighths, flinging the scraps of paper behind her.

“You know who that guy represents?” I asked Anya when I saw her starting to rip Geoff Olden’s business card, but she kept ripping it.

“Who he represent? A bonch of kripps,” Anya said. She started running south toward the subway station, laughing all the way as I tried to keep up.

Some of the happiest memories of my time with Anya come from those brief hours just after we started running to the subway but before we fell asleep—even now, I still recall those hours as one unbroken journey of laughter and giddiness and love. But after I’d been sleeping for some time, I dreamed that someone I knew was walled up in a prison, trying to claw and scratch her way out. The more I listened to the scratching, though, the more I realized that I wasn’t dreaming those sounds. When I opened my eyes, I saw Anya beside me, writing