The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,80

that band’s song “Dust in the Wind.”

Manhattan, Kansas.

Iola snapped the book shut, carried it under an arm, then walked around to the driver’s side door, and opened it. Norbert told me to get in.

POSITION UNKNOWN

Iola told me that I would be the driver. So I sat at the wheel of the Opel and started the engine as Iola mapped our route out of New York across the George Washington Bridge, then onto I-80 heading west—destination: Kansas.

The car was as cluttered and musty as Iola’s manuscript appraisal office. There was barely enough room for Norbert to sit with all the old books piled in the back. They were on the passenger-side floor, too, piled atop the parking brake, wedged between my seat and Iola’s. With the exception of the galley of The Thieves of Manhattan that Iola had placed on the dashboard, they were mostly reference books or literary anthologies. There must have been more than a hundred, plus all the ones I could hear shifting around in the trunk.

I couldn’t see any order to the arrangement of books in the Opel, but whenever Iola would call out the title of one, say, a thesaurus or a poetry collection, Norbert would locate the book in an instant and either point to it or flip to a key passage and hand it forward with an expectant expression, seeking approval; in his own way, he was still talented at his job, still seemed to be able to remember any book, no matter how obscure.

Iola would snatch the volume from Norbert and start whipping through it, moving her lips as quickly as she shifted her eyes back and forth across the pages, muttering the words that described the supposed location of The Tale of Genji: “Outside Manhattan in a desolate field beneath a golden cross.” I gradually came to understand that she seemed to think those words contained some code. She searched religious texts with crosses in their titles, books of quotations that she scoured for references to desolate fields, antique atlases with maps of Manhattan, Kansas. She and Norbert may have been criminals, but she was still a scholar and he was still a librarian; both thought that they could find the solution to any mystery by discovering the right page in a book. As Iola searched for clues, Norbert awaited Iola’s next instructions, occupying himself by savagely attacking books of crossword puzzles. I’d never seen anyone work crosswords so fast.

At first, it felt good to drive; for the first hour or so, I could almost forget about the man with the gun and the puzzles in the backseat, the woman speed-reading reference works in front, the bruises on my body. But then the fatigue set in at almost the same time as the bad weather. I hadn’t driven a car in years, not since I’d gotten to New York. Even with the wipers going and the defrost on full blast, I could barely see the road in front of me, and I’d forgotten the faith that driving sometimes requires, the faith that there will be more straight highway beyond that hill before you, that the pickup truck ahead won’t lead you over a cliff. Jed Roth had told me that writing was like stepping on the gas and never looking back; the way I used to write before teaming up with Roth had a lot in common with the way I was driving now. Whenever I could finally see clearly through the windshield, some truck would pass, horn blaring, and splatter our car with filthy water. I’d have to slam on the brakes and wait for my heart to slow down before I could speed back up.

Interstate 80 was treacherous, icy, shrouded in fog, and I hardly ever exceeded forty miles per hour on it. I sputtered in and out of black-and-white winter landscapes, stretches of asphalt bordered by snow-covered fields. The country never seems as big as it does when you’re driving through whiteout weather with a gun pointed at your skull. Along our way, Iola would occasionally look up from her books and point out road signs that indicated the routes to writers’ birthplaces—Norman Mailer’s Newark; John Updike’s slice of Pennsylvania; Zane Grey’s Ohio. Whenever she’d utter a writer’s name, I could see a glint of memory flicker across Norbert’s face, then extinguish itself. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of his mind, he still remembered.

When my sharp pains resolved themselves into nagging aches and the roads became more passable, I