The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,9

he told me. “Y’all gotta pay some shit if y’all wanna read my shit, compadre.” On paper, his hip-hop patois might have seemed laughable; in person, it was scary as hell. I thought all Blade’s prison stories were made up, sure, but I didn’t doubt that he’d gotten into some scuffles in his life. I pushed my way past Blade and walked toward the main ballroom, not looking back to see if he was following.

Anya was in the same place where I had last seen her, standing with her back to the windows, hypnotizing Geoff and everyone around her with some sad story about the life she had left behind in Bucharest—“neffer confuse my life weeth my feection; feection is not nearly so tredjic.” The spell she was casting on all the junior agents and editors was a mirror image of the one Blade had cast on his audience at Symphony Space. Here, all the women seemed to want to be Anya; all the men seemed to want to screw her. Save for Geoff—he didn’t want to screw or be anyone else in his apartment, just to represent them and screw over everybody else.

“Anya?” I had to say it three times loudly before anyone noticed, and Geoff appeared to hear me before Anya did. He regarded me through his eckleburgs as if I were some stain on his tie that he wanted to rub out fast. I stepped between him and my girlfriend, who smiled and told me that she had been lookink for me all night—vhere had I bean? I leaned in to tell her I was going to spleet, but I was interrupted by a low, spiteful “Yo.”

Blade, still holding his martini, was walking fast toward me. But when he saw that I was standing beside his agent and our host, he relented, even flashed a cocky smile of surrender, like a movie cop who stops running when he sees a thief jump onto a train, realizing he can’t catch him this time. Blade looked past me, clapped Geoff on the shoulder, called him “Bruthafucka,” and when Geoff introduced him to Anya, Blade started acting even more polite, as if he were the son of some Sunday school preacher—“a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.” He offered to fetch Anya a drink, opining that “G-Dub’s martinis” were “off the hook.” I smirked, mouthed “off the hook” at Anya. She didn’t notice, but Blade did. And now when he looked at me, his unspoken, momentary offer of détente had apparently been nullified; his nostrils flared, his cheeks flushed.

“Hey,” he said, “don’t you need a plugger to get in here, bro?”

“A plugger?”

“An invite,” Blade explained. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you y’all need an invite to get into this bash?”

I could have kept my mouth shut, but now I hated this guy so much that I didn’t care whose apartment we were in, whose guest I was, or whose book deal I might be sabotaging.

“Yo,” I said, staring right back at Blade, “didn’t anyone ever tell you y’all need to try telling the truth and not making up a bunch of jive if y’all are gonna call your book a ‘memoir,’ bro?”

For a moment, Blade said nothing. And when he did speak, his voice, though fierce, was soft, clear, and composed.

“Then, I’ll ask you something, compadre,” Blade said. “Which window?”

My heartbeat was getting stronger, faster, but I didn’t move and I tried not to blink.

“Window?”

“Do you want me to throw you out of, bro?” And now Blade was done being quiet; he was throwing off his jacket, tugging twice at the bulge of his portnoy. His truth cross thumped against his chest as he backed me up against the windows, grabbed me by the shirt collar, then held my throat.

“Which window, dickweed?”

“Easy,” I said, struggling to get his hands off me.

“Which motherfucking window?” he demanded. “You wanna tussle? You wanna throw? ’Cause I’ll throw right now, you disrespectful motherfucker.”

I was looking for a friend, a way out, wondering should I throw the first punch, let him do it, where to throw it, face, chest, solar plexus?

“Disrespectin’ me?” Blade was shouting in my face, but the only people actually paying attention seemed to find my predicament extremely entertaining. For I was nobody and Blade was just being Blade; he probably did this at every party: Oh, there’s Blade again, throwin’ another chump out the window. Norman Mailer was gone; someone had to take his place, had to start fights at book parties; someone