The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,65
with no place to hide anymore. What did I know about how authors really lived? In my lobby, I glanced at myself in the wall mirror. The wound at the side of my head was blacker than I had imagined, bigger too. My cheeks were streaked dark red, but my skin looked pale underneath.
I took the stairs slowly. My legs felt heavy now; they quivered with each step. I walked out of the stairwell, but as I approached my door, I froze. It was ajar, and light was streaming out. I peered through the crack and saw that my belongings were strewn over the floor: books, clothes, sheets, pillowcases, mattress. Someone was rustling through everything, and a voice, deep but unmistakably a woman’s, muttered as my stuff kept falling to the floor.
What was she looking for? Where was it, the tattooed man had asked. But what did Ian Minot have except for clothes and money? The man hadn’t wanted money. “No wallet,” he had said. My mind was halfway to putting together the story when my cellphone rang. I reached into my pocket to mute it, but the woman rifling through my apartment must have heard the sound. She darted to the door, and I could see her now: silver-gray, every-which-way hair parted down the middle; sparkling, piercing, knowing eyes—and when those eyes met mine, I started running again, down the stairs. I looked at the number on my cellphone display to see who was calling—Simian Gold again. Simian Gold, was that even a real name? Did U.S. News employ a books editor named Simian Gold? Did U.S. News even employ a books editor? Every magazine seemed to be cutting its pages; some didn’t even run book reviews anymore. Simian Gold? I waited to hear if the woman was following me; I didn’t hear footsteps, and she had looked old, like someone I could outrun, but I didn’t want to run anymore. I ran into the lobby anyway. The tattooed man was at the front door of my building, pressing buzzer buttons. He held his cellphone in one hand, and the phone in my pocket was still ringing.
I slipped out the emergency exit, and crept to the green dumpsters beside my building. Already there was a thin layer of ice and wet snow upon them. I crouched down and waited, wondering, should I run, no, wait, maybe now, no, wait. How long would it take the man to get buzzed in, climb the stairs, and find I wasn’t there? Count to ten. I counted to ten, then sprang up from behind the dumpsters and ran toward 147th Street.
AWFUL DISCLOSURES
“Jed,” I muttered breathlessly into my phone from the back of a taxi heading south on Broadway. “Come on, man,” I was saying. “Come on, pick up.” My taxi driver, an unkempt Eastern European with a week’s growth of ginsberg, was moving slowly, hitting every light, and I turned around to check if anybody was following. Every car looked suspicious.
I heard a recorded voice on the other end of the phone line—“The cellular customer you are trying to reach is out of range.” I tried again. “The cellular customer you are trying to reach …” Call 911, I thought. But then my mind started racing: What if the police asked too many questions? What if they wanted to know what I did for a living, what kind of books I wrote, what happened in them, whether they were true or not, whether I had committed the crimes I had written about?
I got out of the cab in front of Jed’s building; the front door was open, and as I dashed into the lobby, I could hear Jed’s voice ringing in my ears—“Oh, and Ian? Next time we’re not scheduled to work together and you have something you want to discuss: call first.” I dialed his number once more, but when I heard the recorded message again, I raced for the elevator, and when I saw it was in use, I ran for the stairs. Up to the fourth floor I went, my wet shoes slip-sliding along the marble floor.
“Jed!”
I knocked on his door.
“Jed!”
I stopped knocking, started slapping.
One more slap and the door swung open fast; it had been unlocked the whole time.
“Jed?”
But Jed was gone, and so were his books, his furniture, the paintings on his walls. I flicked a switch and the wooden floors gleamed in the glare of the lightbulbs overhead. All that remained was the view—Riverside Park, the black