The Thieves of Manhattan Read Free

away from the tiny Indiana town in which I’d grown up, Anya’s tale resonated with me, reminding me of the late nights I’d spent at my father’s bedside, reading him stories, helping him to bring his teacup to his lips, turning out his light when he had finally fallen asleep. I couldn’t help but feel jealous that the raptors and poseurs at the KGB were being invited to experience these moments that had felt so personal when Anya had first read the story to me, that night when I had told her it was perfect, and she had called me a liar and told me to
shot
my
trepp
.
    But what was most amazing and moving about the story as I heard it tonight was how Anya read it. In a mere ten minutes, she transformed from a nervous beginner to a confident professional, much like the heroine of her own story. At first, Anya leaned in too close to the microphone, giggled when she realizedher pages were in the wrong order. Her hands shook while she read her opening sentence (“When I was
leetle, eff’ryone
who
shoult heff luffed
me left me”); after she finished page one, they were still.
    “Luff
is
nussink
but a lie,” she read. “In my house, we
neffer
talked about
eet.”
Two people in the audience gasped. Anya was like the pool shark who muffs her first game, gets everyone to put their money on the table, then runs every ball.
    Once Anya was done reading and applause thundered through the bar, her endearing neuroses returned. She laughed too loudly, apologized too much, clunked the microphone when she returned it to its holder, tripped over its cord as she walked back to take her place beside me at the bar. But it didn’t matter anymore. For a second, I looked down into my drink to see if anything was left; by the time I looked up again, Geoff Olden was there.
    “Suntory?” he asked, jutting his chin toward Anya’s glass.
    That night, Geoff Olden wouldn’t be the only agent who would swoop down upon Anya, offer to buy her drinks, then hand her business cards. But he was the first, and for me, his was the presence that rankled most. Yes, he was Blade Markham’s agent, but Olden was also the man whose literary agency had sent me the most perfunctory, condescending, and offensive rejection letter I had ever received.
    “Good luck placing this and all your future submissions elsewhere,” the letter’s author wrote, thus shutting the mailbox door on any story I might ever write in my life.
    “Señor?”
    Olden was holding a twenty in one hand as he rapped his fingers against the bar—who knew why he was speaking Spanishto the poor bartender, who was no more Spanish than Geoff Olden was. But everything about Olden seemed calculated to draw distinction between himself and whomever he happened to be speaking with—the round yellow frames of his eckleburgs, his white turtleneck, his cuffed blue jeans, his black velvet jacket, the watches he wore, one on each wrist. Olden’s brushed-back hair had the fullness and the shade of premature silver-gray that I recall only ever seeing in Park Avenue apartments when I’d worked for a caterer during my first summer in New York.
    But Geoff Olden wasn’t merely a confident man; no, he was imperious, unctuous, and snide—even when he laughed his loud, self-possessed, metrosexual cackle, you were always aware of whom he was laughing with and whom he was laughing at. And when he held up two fingers and bought a round of fitzgeralds for Anya and me—
“Dos, por favor”
—I was thoroughly aware of the category in which Olden had placed me. The moment after he handed me my fitzgerald, I became invisible. Drinking too fast and thinking about how I might wreak revenge upon Olden, if only I had the opportunity, helped to pass some time before I was once again staring at random points in space and contemplating stories I might try to write, before deciding that Jens Von Bretzel had probably already written them.
    “Exquisite work, truly.
Mucho mucho bueno.”
Geoff handed Anya two of his