The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,58

must have been joking, but then I saw the shell-shocked expression emerging on Anya’s face. I felt my own heart beginning to beat just a bit more strongly as I saw Anya’s hands start to shake. The camera cut to a close-up of Pam Layne.

“We’ll be right back,” she said.

My mind began to reel, my stomach started churning, I dropped my chopsticks and didn’t pick them up—I didn’t feel like eating anymore. I stood and paced my floor, then, after the break, sat back down as Pam Layne spoke directly to the camera. This woman sitting beside her was a fraud, she said; everything Anya Petrescu had said before the break was a lie.

Anya’s skin was pale. Upon her face was an expression I didn’t recognize—shame, perhaps embarrassment. She looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but on the set of the show.

“Now, tell us the truth, Anya,” Pam Layne said.

Anya seemed to be fighting back tears. Another unfamiliar expression—when she felt like crying, the Anya I knew always let those tears flow down her cheeks, let them stay right where they were until I wiped them away.

“Are you from Bucharest, Anya?” asked Layne.

I shoved my plate of food out of my line of vision; even the sight of it was making me ill.

Anya bit her lip. And then she shook her head, mouthing a word yet not giving voice to it.

“Anya, are you from Bucharest?” Layne asked again, and this time I could hear Anya’s voice, which sounded more foreign to me than it ever had.

“I’m not,” said Anya.

Members of the studio audience shook their heads in disbelief. My entire body felt dizzy. In the audience, Blade Markham was holding one hand over his truth cross, the other over his mouth.

“Where are you from, Anya?” Pam asked.

I couldn’t hear Anya at first, and Pam couldn’t either, but the second time Pam asked, I heard Anya’s voice loud and clear.

“Maplewood, New Jersey,” she said.

Another gasp from the audience, another gasp from me, another from Blade Markham.

“And is your name really Anya?” asked Pam.

Another no from Anya; her accent was gone, along with it the voice that had called me Ee-yen and told me how much she luffed me. She looked fragile and small, and I had the sensation that I often had when I was with her, that I wanted to fix whatever was wrong, to give her the happiness to compensate for all the misery she had felt growing up in Bucharest.

“No, it’s Anna,” she said.

Pam Layne looked piercingly at Anna Petrescu. “And why pretend your name was Anya and you were from Hungary?”

“Romania,” said Anya.

“Why, Anna?”

Anna took a breath. “Because I thought no one would read my stories if I was just some rich kid from Maplewood, New Jersey,” she said.

Pam Layne held Anya’s book up to the camera, then slammed it down on the table. The camera closed in on Pam, who said she had half a mind to take Anya’s book and throw it into her fireplace. She spoke to the camera about truth and trust and inviolable covenants between authors and readers. But I couldn’t watch anymore. I felt mixed up and afraid, as if I only now understood the gravity of what I myself had done, what I was still doing, and all that I had left to do. I shut off the TV and called Jed Roth. And when he didn’t answer, I jogged as fast as I could to his place.

OUTSIDE ROTH’S

“So explain to me exactly what some counterfeit Eastern European has to do with you?” Roth asked. I had caught up to him in front of his building right when he was about to enter with a cup of takeaway tea.

What did it have to do with me? I asked. I was still out of breath; I was speaking faster than I was thinking, and my thoughts had been racing along at a pretty good clip. It had everything to do with me, I said, everything to do with both of us.

“Then explain to me exactly what you think will happen,” Roth said. “Tell me the cause and effect.”

I thought it was obvious, but I told him anyway, nervously running my words together: Anya was represented by Geoff Olden. She had appeared on Pam Layne’s show, and everything she’d said about herself to me and, more important, to everyone else had been revealed to be a lie because she hadn’t thought people would buy her books if she admitted who