The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,1

kind of lie—his words, his shabby outfit that he’d probably planned out a week in advance, even the cross he wore around his neck.

“It ain’t a cross for Christ; it’s a T for Truth, yo,” he told Pam Layne. That’s when I flipped off the TV, went back to bed in my clothes, and tried in vain to think of a story to write, tried in vain to get some sleep.

Now here in the coffee shop was the Confident Man, one more Blade Markham fan than I could stand. So when I went over to his table and told him we were closing and that he had to scram, I might have sounded harsher than I intended. Faye bust out laughing, and Joseph, who seemed always to be looking for just the right time to can me, flashed a “one more outburst and you’re gone” glare.

The Confident Man dog-eared a page of his book, put on his black cashmere gogol, belted it, went over to the tip jar, and stuffed in a twenty-dollar bill, which just about doubled our tips for the night. He walked out onto Broadway without saying a word.

“Think that guy craves you,” Faye said, raising one eyebrow. Joseph snickered—jokes at my expense always cracked him up. I finished cleaning, collected my share of the tips from Joseph, said sayonara to Faye, and headed down to the KGB Bar to meet Anya. By the time I got there, I was still stewing about Blade by Blade, but I had all but forgotten the Confident Man.

THE ROMANIAN

In every bar, in every city, in every country, on every continent since the beginning of time, there has always been and will always be some sullen mope who walks in with a beautiful, charming woman on his arm, and everyone in the place stops and looks and wonders how that woman wound up with that mope. For a time, I was that mope. And Anya Petrescu was that woman.

Anya had the kind of beauty that was not subject to debate—it was just a fact. She had a devilish laugh, eyes so blue that people assumed she wore tinted contacts, and then there was that charming Eastern European accent.

But even when Anya was telling me how much she luffed me, even when we were kissing in subway cars or making mad, passionate chinaski on my lumpy pull-out couch, or skinny-dipping at dawn beneath the Morningside Park waterfall, even when she was discussing how much she weeshed she could tekk me home to Bucharest to meet her femmilee but that was eemposseebull now, spending time with her had begun to depress me. I knew that our relationship would never last, that one day, her infatuation with me—something I often attributed to a cultural misunderstanding—would end. And then I would be alone and miserable, just the way I had felt before I had seen her scribbling away in Morningside Coffee, sat down at her table, asked what she was writing, then babbled for an hour about my naïve and undoubtedly ridiculous theories of honest writing and narrative authenticity and whatever else I thought I believed back then. Anya never pointed out that she was a better storyteller than I would ever be. Later, she would often say that she fell in love with me because deep down I was just an “old-feshioned, romenteek Meedwestern boy” who fell in love with her stories; looking back, I guess that was true.

That night, I was meeting Anya at KGB’s “Literal Stimulation,” a weekly showcase of emerging writers curated by Miri Lippman, editor and publisher of The Stimulator, a bimonthly literary review that wielded an influence far beyond its 2,500 paid subscribers, largely because Lippman had impeccable taste and a knack for identifying young scribes with “stimulating potential.” Just about every up-and-coming author published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, every first-time novelist with a two-book deal at Random House or Scribner, had appeared on Miri’s program. Four out of the last five authors that Pam Layne had chosen for her TV book club had read at Lit-Stim. The only one who hadn’t was Blade Markham, and even though I hated the way Miri Lippman looked through me every time she saw me, resented the fact that I was introduced to her for the first time on six separate occasions, I had to respect her for snubbing Blade.

As always, KGB on Lit-Stim night was filled with a posse of authors, most of whom had published stories in