The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,68

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.

NAKED CAME THE STRANGER

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