The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,93

wasn’t wearing one of her usual slim, elegant golightlys, just a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots. I didn’t mind the new look; what I truly missed was the way she used to say my name.

“Is that how you really talk?” I asked.

She kept smiling but looked as though she might burst into tears. She said she didn’t know; she had spent so much time being Anya, she had forgotten who Anna was. Everything she used to be and wear seemed fake to her now. Anya Petrescu’s life, one she had invented from stories she had heard from her friends and relatives, and even from stories I had told her about my parents, seemed too ridiculous to be true, while Anna’s seemed too dull to commit to print. Her memoir was going poorly, she added; she hadn’t written a word in months.

As I kept listening to Anya, I noticed that she was no longer wearing the engagement ring Blade had given her. When she saw me looking at her left hand, she rubbed the spot where the ring had been.

“He dumped me,” she said.

Blade had ended the relationship in the greenroom backstage at The Pam Layne Show, just minutes after he learned that she was a fraud, Anna said. He was crushed, couldn’t stop crying, kept saying that he couldn’t understand why anyone would make up a life she never had, said he would’ve paid a whole pile of dough to have had an ordinary life like hers. Anya told him she didn’t understand why he was so upset; hadn’t he invented some parts of his life? Changed some things around? Wasn’t that what writers did, what he had done in Blade by Blade? Blade had stared at her in disbelief. How could she even think that, he asked. And then he lost it, called her a “low-ass hoodrat,” said it was bad enough that she had made up her own life, but what kind of lying buster did she think he was?

That was the last time Anna had seen Blade, she said. Now Anna stepped closer to me and confided that she had never felt as real as she had when she had been with me—being Anya had freed her, made her feel less inhibited, more like who she really was. She sighed and took a breath, reminded me of what she’d said on our last night together: that we should have met earlier, when both of us were different pipples.

I felt a pang in my heart as Anna took me by the hand and led me to the back deck, where she told me that she was single and hadn’t dated anyone since Blade. For a moment, I thought about pulling her to me, then asking her to sneak upstairs. But I knew that I couldn’t trust Jersey Anna any more than I could trust Bucharest Anya, and besides, I didn’t want Faye to have been right when she said that my Ukrainian and I deserved each other. So before I went back inside to find Joseph, I just kissed Anna on the cheek, and for the first time in my life, I wished her goot lock; I figured that now she could probably use some.

GIRL, YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE

I had promised Jed Roth that I would never publish Zero Ninety-eight. I didn’t think I would have any trouble keeping my word. I didn’t need the money—The Thieves of Manhattan was still on the Times and IndieBound hardcover bestseller lists; the paperback hadn’t even been released yet. Myself When I Am Real, my collection of stories, probably wouldn’t do as well, but breaking my promise to Jed to bolster my book sales seemed too mercenary, particularly since Geoff Olden had assured me that I could choose just about any topic for my third book and get a whopping frazier for it.

But I still hadn’t seen any trace of Faye, no matter how many notes I left at Morningside Coffee with Joseph, who always told me he hadn’t seen her, no matter how many letters I sent to the London auction house that had sold The Tale of Genji to an anonymous collector for $8.13 million. And the more I thought about it, the more I figured that Faye had meant it when she said I wouldn’t see her until “after the last page,” until after I’d written the rest of Zero Ninety-eight and recounted everything that had happened to me after Norbert and Iola had caught up to me