The Thieves of Manhattan Read Online Free

AVAILABLE sign in the box office window, but Anya already had two wristbands in her shoulder bag, and by the time I had completely processed where we were and what I was about to endure, she had already affixed one around my wrist. As I looked at all the posters of Blade Markham, all the stacks of his books,all the people here to buy them for Blade to sign, I kept thinking of that scene in
Taxi Driver
, when Robert De Niro takes Cybill Shepherd on a date to a skin flick.
    “It
weel
be
fon,”
Anya said. “Let’s
seet.”
    But there was no place to
seet
. The chairs were filled with Blade fans—scruffy, denim or khaki-clad bankers and traders, all of whom looked like they wanted to be Blade; women in black who looked like they wanted to screw Blade, at least for a night before they’d return to their boyfriends or husbands, all of whom I assumed were employed by Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, or Goldman-Sachs. The talk was moderated by a host from the public radio station WNYC who sported a three-day growth of salt-and-pepper ginsberg. “Any advice for a writer just starting out, Blade?” the moderator asked. “Yeah, carry a gauge, a shiv, and a gat, and all you fellas, you stay away from those hoodrats, and make sure all y’all got a mad sexy shorty to roll with too, yo,” Blade replied. Applause and whoops of laughter from the crowd.
    I kept puzzling over why Anya had asked me to come here. She told me that she just found Blade
fonny
, but I wondered if maybe she really did want to get me to hate her so I would end our relationship, thus saving her the trouble of doing it herself. Looking back, I think she might just have wanted my company, but at the time I was sure there was something more to it, and when I saw Geoff Olden approaching us with two fitzgeralds in plastic cups, I figured I was right.
    “Bienvenida,”
he said, and this time, Anya didn’t roll her eyes or mouth his Spanish BS back to me when he wasn’t looking.
    Up on stage, Blade was discussing his craft. He told the moderator he approached writing as if he were a DJ—he didn’t “write words down on paper”; he “laid down mad beats.” As for the accusation from one spectator that Blade had plagiarized a prison conversion scene from
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, Blade said he didn’t believe plagiarism existed. “I just like to call it a remix, yo,” he said.
    Geoff Olden peered at Anya through his eckleburgs and his voice went lower as he said something to her about an email exchange the two had had on the subject of “representation.”
    “Comprendes?”
he whispered.
    I excused myself to go to the john, and then left it when I saw some beefy trader at one of the sinks with the words BLADE BY BLADE tattooed in script on his arm. When I returned to the auditorium, Olden was gone, and Blade was standing in front of a microphone, taking questions from the audience and answering them in his falsely humble mode (“That’s a righteous point yer makin’,
sistuh”;
“I truly appreciate you askin’ me that question,
brutha”)
. Anya was holding a slip of paper that she was tucking into a zippered pocket of her shoulder bag. The paper had an address on West Twenty-first Street scribbled on it.
    “Olden invite you to some after-party?” I asked.
    Anya smiled, a little embarrassed, it seemed, but she quickly recovered.
    “You
vant
we should
tekk kebb
or
sobway?”
she asked.
    I wanted to ask her “whatcha mean
we?”
then walk out and head home, tell her I’d meet her back at my place whenever she was done being wooed. But after I’d groused in the lobby for a moment or two, I lost heart. I couldn’t say no to her.
    “Kebb
or
sobway,”
she asked again.
    “Sobway,”
I said gloomily.

THE BASH AT OLDEN’S
    Anya said we’d stay at Geoff Olden’s apartment only for ten minutes, and after that we could do anything my
leetle
heart desired, but I wasn’t surprised when that ten minutes stretched past an hour. Actually, apartment