The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,87

get away with it too. Interviewers would ask the same question they asked of Blade Markham: Wouldn’t I feel afraid that the people I wrote about would try to take me out? “Nah,” I’d say, “those punks I wrote about, they all dead, yo.” Yes, I could almost do it now. For a moment, I didn’t give a damn about Iola or Norbert or anyone else. How much mercy had they shown me, after all?

I studied Norbert’s face, and for the first time I began to look closely at the swirls and crisscrosses of his tattoos. The raised lines still seemed to have no clear pattern; they now reminded me of bursts of lightning, or cuts on a shattered mirror. Or, more probably, I thought as I stepped closer to him, bruises from an accident and scars left by fire—like scars left after running through a burning library, still looking in vain for a book that was already gone.

In those tattoos—those scars and bruises—and in the creases on Iola’s face, I could imagine all that this pair had been through to find The Tale of Genji, the most valuable document that either thought they had ever seen. I considered the chases, the struggles, the fire, finally the glimmer of hope, but now, at last, the defeat. In their faces, I could see how what they had experienced could drive them to want to kill. I understood that feeling, had the canino in my hand and my finger on its trigger to prove it. But that old fault of mine was emerging big-time—loathing at a distance; sympathizing up close. Empathy might be a good quality for a writer, but it’s not very useful to a man holding a gun. Looking at Iola and Norbert, I thought about the lives Roth and I had written for them, the ones I thought we had invented but now I understood were true, the ones that Roth had left out of his draft, which made killing the pair of them seem easy. I imagined Iola whiling away thankless hours in dim libraries and classrooms, working on a book she would never finish, articles she would never publish, losing her job at the university where she taught, and growing more bitter with each passing year. I imagined who Norbert had been before the accidents and the fire—the promising scholar, the best research assistant Iola had ever had, the one who could instantly recall nearly everything he had ever read. I imagined the Genji, how much it would have been worth to Iola and Norbert had it been real—not only the money it could bring, but the notoriety and perhaps even a chance at redemption. And all they had gotten for their troubles was the shame of learning that they had been fools to believe they would ever find it. I knew all too well what it felt like to be taken for a fool. I played out Roth’s ending over and over in my mind—Norbert first, down he’d go, then Iola. Shovel the dirt, grab the manuscript, run. Life can be cheap in a novel; but in a memoir, it’s harder to kill.

And so instead of shooting Iola and Norbert, I lowered the canino and told them the whole story, everything that had really happened as far as I knew, from the time I met Jed Roth to the way we ended up here. I told them that it was all written in the manuscript I’d unearthed. And when I was through, Norbert quietly and resignedly asked what I would do with them; he still seemed to expect that I would shoot them dead like all good villains do after they’ve told their stories to their victims. But I was feeling better than I had in weeks—alive, in control, and even a bit giddy. I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and took out a business card from the Olden Literary Agency—“in case you meet someone else with a great story to tell,” Geoff liked to say. I suggested that Norbert and Iola go back to New York, lie low, write their story, and when they were done, find Geoff; he’d know what to do with it—after everything Jed and I had written about them, allowing them the chance to tell their side of the story seemed only fair. I told Norbert and Iola to get moving fast before I changed my mind.

When I heard the chugging of an approaching highsmith, I tossed down