The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,7

words down on paper”; he “laid down mad beats.” As for the accusation from one spectator that Blade had plagiarized a prison conversion scene from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Blade said he didn’t believe plagiarism existed. “I just like to call it a remix, yo,” he said.

Geoff Olden peered at Anya through his eckleburgs and his voice went lower as he said something to her about an email exchange the two had had on the subject of “representation.”

“Comprendes?” he whispered.

I excused myself to go to the john, and then left it when I saw some beefy trader at one of the sinks with the words BLADE BY BLADE tattooed in script on his arm. When I returned to the auditorium, Olden was gone, and Blade was standing in front of a microphone, taking questions from the audience and answering them in his falsely humble mode (“That’s a righteous point yer makin’, sistuh”; “I truly appreciate you askin’ me that question, brutha”). Anya was holding a slip of paper that she was tucking into a zippered pocket of her shoulder bag. The paper had an address on West Twenty-first Street scribbled on it.

“Olden invite you to some after-party?” I asked.

Anya smiled, a little embarrassed, it seemed, but she quickly recovered.

“You vant we should tekk kebb or sobway?” she asked.

I wanted to ask her “whatcha mean we?” then walk out and head home, tell her I’d meet her back at my place whenever she was done being wooed. But after I’d groused in the lobby for a moment or two, I lost heart. I couldn’t say no to her.

“Kebb or sobway,” she asked again.

“Sobway,” I said gloomily.

THE BASH AT OLDEN’S

Anya said we’d stay at Geoff Olden’s apartment only for ten minutes, and after that we could do anything my leetle heart desired, but I wasn’t surprised when that ten minutes stretched past an hour. Actually, apartment isn’t the right word to describe the Chelsea townhouse where Geoff Olden hosted his Blade by Blade bash. His was the sort of New York dwelling I only ever saw in movies. On screen, it would have served as an embassy, a ballroom for some costume drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis, or maybe as Woody Allen’s apartment. There was a spiral staircase, an enormous, built-in library with books alphabetized and organized by subject, a kitchen that was bigger than my apartment, three bathrooms, a billiard table, a back deck with a hot tub. That was only the first floor, and Olden owned all three. Mind you, none of this had been purchased with the money he made as a literary agent; that career paid for the summer home in Rhinebeck, the wardrobe, and the eckleburgs. This Chelsea place had been in the Olden family since 1909, when Henry Olden made his first million in textiles. I liked to think that Geoff was sole heir to a jockstrap fortune, but I have no idea what was manufactured in the Olden Textile Mills, only that whatever it was must have generated lots of dough.

Save for the waiters, the bartenders, the coat checkers, and me, the Blade Markham party was an anybody-who’s-anybody sort of affair—there was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., toting a walking stick and wearing a tuxedo, having just returned from The Rake’s Progress at the Met. There was a trio of drunk writers, all named Jonathan, each of whom was complaining that the Times critic Michiko Kakutani had written that she’d liked their earlier books better. The publisher James Merrill, Jr., was popping a grape into his mouth; Pam Layne was in a corner with one of her assistants, Mabel Foy, both trying far too hard to keep a low profile; the writer Francine Prose smiled at me and waved, then frowned when she realized that she had me confused with someone else.

Anya stuck to my side during our first half hour at the party, when she said she didn’t recognize anybody, and spent all that time joking with me, squeezing my ass, and pushing me to the dining room to score appetizers that she claimed she was too shy to snag for herself. We had fun laughing at the whole scene. It was like a swingers’ party for celibates, I said—everyone checking one another out, leading one another into private rooms, whipping out their contracts and client lists to measure whose was bigger.

But after Olden showed up with Blade Markham and his posse of droogs and cornered Anya, I barely saw her at all. Instead, I