The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,43

and she had a hand on his waist. I couldn’t understand any of the words either was saying, but I immediately recognized her Eastern European inflections and his affected street patter. They were moving in perfect synchrony, the sure sign of a couple that has been having chinaski for some time.

In her black golightly and tights with her backpack over both shoulders, Anya was lovely as ever; in his baggy, hip-hop jeans and steel-toed boots, Blade was still a joke. But what struck me most about them was how small they appeared in comparison to how I had remembered them. He was no taller than I was, and she was a good deal shorter than that.

Ee-yen!

I had been intending to let the two of them go about their business, but Anya spotted me, gave a little yelp of delight, clapped her hands, then dragged Blade over to meet me. As she spoke, she seemed to be attempting to appear more confident than I remembered her, which had the effect of making her seem less so. She used to tell me how goot I looked, how moskyoolar and mennly, but this time, when I was dressed in an off-white linen gatsby, new jeans, boots, and franzens, she didn’t comment about my appearance. Instead, she talked about herself as if she could see that I had become the person who needed to be impressed. If Blade remembered who I was or that he had almost thrown me out of Geoff Olden’s window, he didn’t show it. He was soft-spoken, deferential, called me blood, bro-ham, and compadre; apparently, I looked like someone worth knowing.

Anya took off her backpack, put it on a bed that she and Blade had been eyeing, and pulled out a galley copy of We Never Talked About Ceauşescu; it would be published in the fall. She was so nerf-ous about the book, Ee-yen, she said as Blade rubbed her back with husbandly concern; she was sure that eff’ryone would hett eet, that refyooers would reep eet to shreds and call her a tellentliss leetle fekk. She handed the galley to me, said I could tekk it as long as I promeesed to come to her book party and to buy a feenished one when eet vas pobleeshed.

I took the book, flipped through it, stifling a laugh when I got to the back cover and read each laudatory blurb; they had all been written by Geoff Olden’s clients. The one in the biggest type was Blade Markham’s (“Man, this is some righteous shit, yo!”). But I kept a straight face—a blurb from Blade would look good on A Thief in Manhattan too.

This time, unlike our last meeting at KGB, I was the one who cut it short. I pecked Anya on the cheek, shook hands firmly with Blade, then bought the proust that the two of them had been looking at, before I headed home to rest up for my next week with Roth. On the uptown highsmith, I cracked open my galley of We Never Talked About Ceauşescu. I spent the afternoon and half of the evening reading it over cups of tea. And when I was done, I was pleased to note that I hadn’t been wrong about Anya—her stories were beautiful, timeless, profound; her writing, if this was possible, was even lovelier than she was; each character was deeply human, each hemingway was exquisite, each metaphor resonant. I closed the book thinking I had lived an entire life in Romania with a wonderfully talented, creative, and generous spirit.

At the same time, I thought that night as I turned out my bedside lamp, Anya’s stories seemed quiet and small. And I couldn’t imagine them selling all that well.

AN AGENT

“So what’s the next step?” I asked Roth.

Little green shoots had appeared on the branches of the trees outside his living room windows; the early morning joggers on the paths below were still exhaling steam, but they were wearing only sweatshirts or light jackets. I could make out silhouettes of boats chugging down the Hudson River. Roth and I had stayed up all night; now dawn was fading, and we were sipping from flutes of champagne, two copies of the final draft of A Thief in Manhattan on the glass table in front of us.

It was done—300 pages of heart-stopping adventure and utter hokum in which I, Ian Minot, stole The Tale of Genji, escaped my adversaries, and got the girl. There they were—two thick stacks of paper with my