The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,79

editing the book, lishing adjectives, metaphors, digressions, everything that got in the way of the story. Roth had told me to hang on to the original he had written, said that someday I would find that his worked better. Maybe he didn’t mean it worked better in the story; maybe he meant in real life. In Roth’s original, he had indicated the supposed location of the buried Genji, had given a longitude and latitude: –096.571, a number that corresponded to the Dewey decimal code for illustrated manuscripts; 039.183, a Dewey code that indicated where foreign reference works were shelved. I had always assumed it to be just another of Roth’s distracting and gratuitous details.

“Check the original manuscript,” I said. “In my apartment.”

“The original,” Iola repeated. The word had gotten her attention, as if the book she was reading had finally offered up its secret. She sprang up and started walking quickly to the door.

SHALL I DIE, SHALL I FLY?

My apartment was neater than the last time I saw it, back when Iola Jaffe was hurling my belongings to the floor, muttering and swearing as she searched for The Tale of Genji. In fact, it was probably neater and cleaner than it had been since I moved in. Maybe Iola had cleaned up after rummaging, I thought, but deep down, I knew that Joseph had done it. I felt sorry that I had misjudged him. If I did survive this, I vowed that I would hold true to my promise; if I ever published this story, I would dedicate it to him. And if I had a say in the movie, he could play any part he wanted in it.

As the three of us entered, I looked longingly at my proust, at my desk, at the view from my windows. But Norbert was holding the canino and I didn’t want to get “pulped” or “remaindered” or whatever else Norbert might threaten me with, so I limped over to my file cabinets. I had misjudged him and Iola, too; I had thought they were fictional.

Jed Roth’s first draft was in a drawer labeled MANUSCRIPTS. There were only two file folders in there—one marked Thieves, another marked Myself When I Am Real. My only copy of Zero Ninety-eight was on my key chain’s thumb drive, but apparently I wasn’t done writing that book yet—unfortunately, I had to live it first.

The passage in the manuscript of Jed Roth’s A Thief in Manhattan was easy to find—I had struck a red line through it, but the latitude and longitude numbers were visible. I still felt certain that it was all some kind of joke. Sure, I could now believe that Faye had forged a Tale of Genji that she and Jed would try to pass off as real, but no way would they have buried it anywhere. Nevertheless, Iola vigorously copied down the numbers in a little notebook and I could see her muttering those numbers to herself, trying to figure out what they might mean.

We stepped out of my apartment and into the hallway, Iola walking briskly in front of me, Norbert behind with his gun. I suggested hopefully that they could leave me alone since they had found what they wanted, knew where the manuscript was and how to track me down if something went wrong. But Iola just walked ahead, while Norbert urged me onward.

Iola’s olive green Opel Manta was parked outside my building. She popped open the trunk; a shovel was lying atop piles of old reference books. Norbert reached in, pulled out a dusty and creased book of maps bound in black leather, and handed it to Iola, who nodded, then slammed shut the trunk. She carried the book to the hood of the car, where she began thumbing through it.

When she reached the middle of the book, she began to turn pages more slowly until she found the map she was looking for. She smoothed out the page with her palms, using a handle of her glasses to follow the lines demarking latitude and longitude, then stopped on what appeared to be an empty field. The field was in the state of Kansas, north of Climax, near Lake Eureka, outside a town called Manhattan.

“Book people don’t know much about the lives real people live. They think the only Manhattan is the one they live in,” Roth had told me.

“‘Carry on my wayward son,’” Faye had said to me, quoting a Kansas lyric. She had always liked to listen to