The Thieves of Manhattan Read Free Page A

business cards. He said he always gave two—“keep the other in case you meet someone else with a great story to tell.”
    The evening proceeded with more compliments from editors, publishers, and agents; more of Anya’s inscrutable smiles; more fitzgeralds—lots more fitzgeralds. Before Anya had readher story, I was her boyfriend; afterward, I became her roadie. The only thing that prevented me from bolting for the door was the fact that Anya kept making fun of all the people who approached her. She rolled her eyes at me, made yakkety-yak gestures with her hands, mouthed the sycophantic words she was enduring.
    “What a
bonch
of
kripps,”
Anya said when we finally emerged from the KGB and started walking quickly along Fourth Street. She was taking the business cards she had received, ripping them into quarters and eighths, flinging the scraps of paper behind her.
    “You know who that guy represents?” I asked Anya when I saw her starting to rip Geoff Olden’s business card, but she kept ripping it.
    “Who he represent? A
bonch
of
kripps,”
Anya said. She started running south toward the subway station, laughing all the way as I tried to keep up.
    Some of the happiest memories of my time with Anya come from those brief hours just after we started running to the subway but before we fell asleep—even now, I still recall those hours as one unbroken journey of laughter and giddiness and love. But after I’d been sleeping for some time, I dreamed that someone I knew was walled up in a prison, trying to claw and scratch her way out. The more I listened to the scratching, though, the more I realized that I wasn’t dreaming those sounds. When I opened my eyes, I saw Anya beside me, writing furiously in a journal, her pen clawing and scratching the paper. As I watched her, I wished I could have her sense of purpose, her drive, that feeling that everything was at stake. And as I opened my eyes just a bit wider, I wished too that I hadn’t seenthe second business card that Geoff Olden had given Anya marking a page in her book.

RETURN OF THE CONFIDENT MAN
    I was getting ready to finish my shift and head out to meet Anya in front of Morningside Coffee when the Confident Man walked into the café, slipped off his cashmere gogol, and hung it on the rack by the door.
    “Your buddy’s here again,” Faye said with a wink, but this time I didn’t make much of the guy’s presence until he approached the counter, where he ordered his usual hot tea. I had become pretty good about not paying him any mind when he came in with his copy of
Blade by Blade
—after all, he was the biggest tipper we had. I tried to ignore the book just as I usually did, but this time, Faye wouldn’t let me.
    “Good read?” Faye asked the man, then flashed me a grin—she and I had been discussing the book, and I’d told her what I thought of it, but she was in one of her wise-ass moods tonight. She liked needling people, seeing what it took to make them burst. Usually, she left me alone and concentrated on Joseph. They kept up an ongoing repartee—“Sold any paintings?” he’d ask. “Hell, no,” she would reply; had Joseph been cast in any shows? “Hell, no,” Joseph would say. When I first started working at the café, they included me in their game (“Sell any stories, Minot?”), but since my answer was “hell, no” every single time, while for Joseph and Faye it was only 90 percent, they stopped. Tonight, though, Joseph had just gotten a call from his agent,who said she was dumping him as a client unless he lost weight. Whenever he got bad news, he ate more, so he was in a foul mood; he had already told Faye that he didn’t want to hear any of her jokes tonight, so I became the beneficiary of Faye’s wit.
    “Have you in fact read the book?” the Confident Man asked Faye. It was the first time I’d heard him speak a full sentence, and his voice was as smooth and deep as that of a late-night DJ.
    “Twice,” she said. “Ooh,