The Thieves of Manhattan Page 5

  “And that’s what I did,” Roth told me. “I made up a story.”

  By now, I had finished my beer, and the 106 Bar was filling up. Couples were drinking pitchers, guys from the neighborhood were watching football on TV, hollering at the screen as they ate handfuls of wasabi peas from small wooden bowls, a jukebox played “People of the South Wind.” Roth had taken off his charcoal gray gatsby and hung it on the back of his chair. He was an especially good-looking man, I began to think, one who inspired confidence as much as he demonstrated it, who held within him the promise of success, the kind of man I wouldn’t have minded seeing myself become in fifteen years if I could figure out a way to clean myself up, keep myself fit, and make a pile of dough.

  “Why’re you telling me all this?” I asked.

  “Patience, Ian,” said Roth.

  I was feeling buzzed from the Guinness, and I was no longer in any rush to leave the bar. I had nowhere else to go but home, and no one was waiting for me there. Roth asked if I wanted to hear about the story he wrote, and when I told him I did, that I was a sucker for stories, he handed me another twenty and told me to buy us a second round.

  THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART IV

  Jed Roth started the novel A Thief in Manhattan as an original modern tale, but one that encompassed elements of classic adventures he loved—fights and chases, shoot-outs, a mysterious damsel in distress with a surprising secret. It began with a library much like the Blom, a hooligan librarian, a lovely, pale woman admiring The Tale of Genji, and a man at the next table wondering what it all might add up to.

  It didn’t seem like much to build a story on, Roth thought, but Genji was the book that had invented novels, so it didn’t seem like a bad place to start. Roth tried to imagine himself back at the Blom Library, then asked himself, “What if?”

  And maybe that was a good way to write a story, he thought—start with reality, take a vicious left turn, slam on the gas, never look back. Maybe all stories started with “What if?” What if the Girl in the Library’s interest in the Genji wasn’t some passing fancy but a long-held personal obsession; what if Roth’s interest in the Girl wasn’t an idle reverie but a deep passion, the sort of love at first sight he’d read about in novels but never truly experienced? What if the Hooligan wasn’t just a librarian but also a thief who was planning to steal The Tale of Genji? What if every time the Hooligan said a manuscript was out or “unavailable,” he had actually brought it to a crooked appraiser’s office and fenced it? What if Roth had seen the Hooligan Librarian pilfering valuable documents from the Blom, heard the man discussing the Genji, then decided he would steal that book for the Girl himself? What if he actually involved himself in the story?

  Roth imagined himself as the hero of a classic thriller, one in which a naïve young man stumbles upon a crime and soon finds himself in a situation beyond his control. He imagined hiding in the Blom Library until late in the evening, crouched in darkness among the stacks, inhaling the aroma of all those ancient volumes, breathing some of the same air and dust that had once been inhaled by Shakespeare, Chatterton, and Marlowe. He imagined watching the Hooligan Librarian insert some precious document into a metal case, lock it, then head out.

  And then, in his imagination and in the story he was beginning to scribble as fast as he could because now he was getting excited, he was following the Librarian, yes, tailing that hooligan, and here they went—now out of the musty library, now onto the rain-puddled sidewalk, now into the subway station, now onto the uptown 6 train, Excuse me, miss, excuse me, sir, hold that door. He imagined himself keeping an eye on the metal case as he squeezed his way through the crowds at Grand Central, then onto the Times Square shuttle, Pardon me, sorry, pardon me. He imagined emerging from another subway all the way down at Delancey Street, out into a windy, rain-soaked night, neon light now quivering in puddles, pedestrians clutching tightly to black poppinses, some of those poppinses blown inside out. He imagined keeping to the shadows; trying to stay warm and dry in his gogol; hiding in the doorway of a bodega. He imagined himself watching the Hooligan Librarian pounding the buzzer on a panel in a doorway across the street; the door clicking open; the Librarian disappearing inside the dilapidated six-story building.

  The faster Roth wrote, the more ideas kept coming. “What if?” he kept asking himself.

  What if?

  Up five flights of rickety stairs where the Librarian was headed, there was a seedy fencing operation masquerading as a manuscript appraisal service. Stacks of dusty manuscripts were piled on lopsided shelves, and jewelers’ loupes and magnifying glasses were scattered on a long desk. Behind the desk, Roth imagined, there was a woman about seventy. She wore thick Joan Didion glasses and her silver hair was parted down the middle and gathered in a tight bun. She was straitlaced in appearance, but she swore like a sailor; every other word out of her mouth seemed to start with an F. Roth decided that the fence would be Iola Jaffe, sole proprietor of Iola Jaffe, Rare Manuscripts and Appraisal Services.

  Roth felt himself immersed in the story now, could imagine his characters’ physical appearances, their names. Once Norbert Piels—yes, Piels would be the name of the Hooligan Librarian—once Norbert Piels had finished cutting some deal with Iola Jaffe, he would exit the apartment, step out into the rainstorm with his case, hail a cab. And Roth, or whoever the hero was—he hadn’t come up with that name yet but Roth was as good a name as any—would catch a taxi too. And then, zhooooom, a game of Follow That Cab, detective stuff, noir thriller, 1940s, a lady cabdriver: “You keep a good tail on that taxi, there’ll be a twenty in it for you, sugar.” Across Delancey they ride, up the West Side Highway, exit at Ninety-sixth Street, windows foggy, wipers going, north to Tiemann Place, where two taxis stop: “Keep it.” “Thanks for the change, mister—say, you know, I get off work at twelve.” “Some other time, precious.” The two men emerge from their taxis; one heads for a droopy prewar midrise, the other follows at a distance. Roth stands under a streetlamp, watches Norbert Piels enter his building, waits for a light to go on, look, there’s one, fourth floor.

  In Roth’s story, he stands there all night, watching. Waiting for morning. Then, early the next day, the skies clear, and Norbert Piels lumbers out of the apartment building, heading for the 125th Street elevated train platform. Our hero follows him down the street, up the escalator, onto the platform. The southbound number 1 train arrives, doors open, people jostle to get on. Piels, too big and bulky for the gatsby he’s wearing, tries to shove his way past, but our hero shoves him back: ’Scuse me, pardon me, bugger off, how’s that soun’ like a good idea? In the confusion, Roth reaches into the Librarian’s pocket, grabs his keys, pockets them, and the train doors close. Roth doesn’t board the train but Piels does, and it starts rumbling south. Roth or whatever his name is runs for the train station stairs, down to the street, and catches a cab: Blom Library, Thirty-third and Lex, and make it fast. When he gets to the library, he tries Norbert’s keys, then opens the door. He enters the reading room, waits for his eyes to get accustomed to the dark. And then he sees it under glass: The Tale of Genji. The “Shining Lord.” The illustration on display is so lovely, the shimmering cover magnificent. But there is only a moment to admire, because the Librarian is approaching the door, the door is opening, and bam! Roth brings his fist down on the glass. It shatters, the alarm sounds, and our hero grabs The Tale of Genji and runs for the back door, down the stairs, out to the street.

  Taxi!

  Back to Delancey Street, back to Iola Jaffe and her rare and most probably stolen manuscripts, up the stairs to the sixth floor—What is this? Roth wants to know. What is it worth? Iola Jaffe, a grim-visaged figure all in black, lips pursed as if she just tasted something foul, hisses: How much is this Genji worth?

  Iola Jaffe sighs, contemplating. “No one ever has any questions about literary merit,” she says. “No one asks about provenance or cultural relevance. Just ‘how much?’ World full of Philistines! How much? Twenty years ago, the
price at auction for one like this was six point six million. That’s how motherfucking much.”

  “And today,” Roth asks, pressing her, “how much would this one be worth today?”

  “Today?” she asks.

  Iola Jaffe steps into another room. There are sounds of clattering, the mewing of cats—she’s the sort of woman who would keep cats. When she returns, she’s holding a loaded .38-caliber canino.

  “Today, I’ll take it for free,” she says, and directs Roth to put the manuscript down. He backs away, raises his hands. But then he reaches forward and lunges for the gun. They wrestle and the gun flies to the floor. Iola goes for the canino, while Roth goes for the book. He grabs it, throws open the door, and runs out. Iola fires her weapon; hammetts whiz past Roth’s head as he races down the stairs, fourth floor, third floor, second, first. He pushes the door hard, shoving Norbert, who has just arrived, and knocking him to the ground. “Wot you done?” Norbert Piels asks, his eyes wide. Manuscript under an arm, our hero jumps into a taxi: Step on it, driver!

  THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART V

  The crowd at the 106 Bar was thinning out. The game on the bar’s TV was over; the sports fans were heading home. The bartender shouted, “Last call.” Roth and I were nearly done with our fourth beers, and he was winding up his story. He had, in fact, managed to put elements into it from just about every genre he loved. In the cat-and-mouse game between the narrator, the Hooligan Librarian, and Iola Jaffe, there were elements of espionage fiction; in the chase for the manuscript, he had found a sort of treasure hunt. In the hero’s seemingly futile search for the Girl in the Library, Roth modernized tales of knights. And in the climactic confrontation, which he borrowed from one of his own short stories, the one entitled “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross,” hero and villains fought it out for the Genji, which was buried outside Manhattan in the titular location. The scene was an updated and fairly brutal Western shoot-out in which the hero offs his foes before hopping a train to find his girl.

  A Thief in Manhattan didn’t sound like the kind of story I’d write or read, and certainly not the sort I’d mention when trying to impress anybody. Back then, I tended to define my tastes in opposition to whatever was deemed either brilliant or popular; the quality or success of a work was probably directly proportional to how much I envied it. But Roth was a talented storyteller, one confident his listener would follow him wherever he went. So I was surprised when he told me he had been unable to find anyone to publish his novel.

  Times were different in publishing fifteen years earlier, when he wrote his book, Roth said, and the smarmy, pretentious agents and publishers he approached felt A Thief in Manhattan wasn’t sufficiently literary. It was just a fun page-turner that didn’t aspire to be anything more. Roth told me that he supposed he could have tried to find some pulpy, less-esteemed publishing house, but after one literary agent’s particularly savage assessment, he just gave up.

  “Which agent?” I asked.

  “Geoffrey Olden,” said Roth.

  “What did he tell you?” I wondered if Olden had been as nasty with Roth as he had been with me.

  “Something characteristically imperious, unctuous, and snide,” said Roth.

  When Jed Roth began sending his manuscript around, the Olden Literary Agency was brand-new, Geoff Olden having just left the venerable Sterling Lord Literistic to form his own agency. Olden was not yet thirty and had only half a dozen clients but already had the attitude of someone who had been in the business for decades. Olden invited Roth to his Soho office, an invitation that Roth foolishly mistook to mean that Olden was interested in his work. Sitting behind his desk, Olden crossed his hands over Roth’s manuscript, studied Roth through his eckleburgs, and said that “no serious house in New York would ever consider publishing this in its current form,” and that there was only one way any publisher at all would consider doing so.

  Which way was that? Roth asked.

  “If every word of it was true,” said Olden. He smirked, then slid the manuscript across his desk back to Roth.

  “Jackass,” I said.

  Roth put the manuscript in a drawer, deciding that he had no future as a writer, that his ideas were too hackneyed and unliterary. He still loved books, but he would no longer fantasize about writing them. From time to time, he might think back to the Blom Library and those strange characters he had seen there, but when he did, he would no longer wonder What if? He’d leave that question to people with more talent and imagination.

  Instead, he became an editor, worked his way up the ladder at Merrill Books, a fixture of New York publishing since the early 1950s when James Merrill, Sr., founded it. James Jr., who was in charge when Jed Roth started working there had been an undergraduate at Yale during Merrill Books’s early days, when it was primarily an old boys’ operation, redolent of bourbon, cigars, and exclusive East Side clubs where men swam naked and discussed Great Ideas in steam rooms. Younger, energetic editors toiled for aristocratic elder statesmen and the occasional elder stateswoman. In the late 1970s, after Merrill Sr. stepped down and his son took over, the publisher maintained its prestige and also most of its previous editors. James Sr. kept an office where he penned his exceedingly honest and exceedingly uninteresting memoirs. The differences between Merrill Books, Sr., and Merrill Books, Jr., were predominantly ones of style. A somber, studious, and grubby downtown office became a slick midtown one located on a high floor of a steel-and-glass office building on Seventh Avenue.

  Roth started at Merrill Books by opening mail, making coffee, answering phones, and getting called “Young Man” or “Boy” by Merrill Jr., who seemed to think that being called by name was a privilege his employees had to earn. Roth was passed over for promotions in favor of younger assistants, those with family connections or those who happened to be sleeping with one of Merrill’s editors. Still, Roth persisted with a furious intensity and certainty of purpose, dutifully carrying out tasks that the other assistants considered themselves above. After senior editor Ellen Curl performed her annual ritual of firing her assistant, Roth applied for the position, and when he got it, did absolutely everything asked of him without complaint, working nights and weekends; went without sleep so he could read manuscript submissions; wrote detailed coverages; offered recommendations for or against publication that were remarkably canny. He lasted longer at this position than any assistant Ellen Curl ever had. Of all his talents, most useful was knowing the sorts of manuscripts Merrill Books wanted, not always the most entertaining books, not usually the ones Roth enjoyed reading, but ones that maintained the publisher’s reputation. Soon, he began to acquire his own books, and although few were great financial or literary successes, most made a modest amount of money, and Roth enjoyed the cachet that came with being a respected editor at a respectable publishing house.

  But after James Merrill, Sr., died, and other veteran editors including Ellen Curl began retiring, James Merrill, Jr., became more concerned with maintaining a financial legacy for his own children, fuckups the lot of them, than the literary prestige of the company his father had built. He severely reduced the number of books Merrill was publishing and formed a more commercial imprint, JMJ Publishers. Jed Roth had thought that the further he rose in the company and the longer he stayed, the more freedom he would have. The opposite turned out to be true. He found himself questioned at every turn, burdened with thankless assignments—diet books, ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies—as Merrill Jr. paid greater attention to the highly profitable JMJ Publishers.

  When a six-hundred-page memoir, written by a two-bit thug and music business hanger-on named Blade Markham, arrived at Merrill Books, Jed Roth had been working there for over ten years. He had a spacious office with a dramatic view, a list of about three dozen authors, and also a new assistant named Rowell Templen, who had been foisted upon him by James Merrill, Jr., who was either sleeping with Templen or owed Templen’s father a favor. Templen, an oily, sideburned twenty-four-year-old Pr
incetonian, fond of velour blazers worn over V-neck sweaters and ties, had an obsequious air that, to Roth, rendered him immediately untrustworthy. Templen’s accommodating manner and his way of meekly knocking before entering Roth’s office could not disguise his ruthless ambition any more than the bottles of Listerine he kept in his desk and in his sport-jacket pockets could disguise his penetrating halitosis.

  Jed was sitting at his desk, working through a gossipy Hollywood memoir as fast as he could, when Templen knocked twice, then entered with an intimidating tolstoy of pages.

  “Time to read today, Mr. Roth?” he asked.

  Roth said that he didn’t, but asked what Templen had in mind. Templen showed him the title page of Blade by Blade. He said he knew that Roth didn’t like to be bothered with submissions before they had been summarized, but he hoped Roth would make an exception. This book was brilliant, Templen said, so raw and so true; when he had read one of Blade Markham’s prison scenes, he practically palahniuked all over his desk. Roth told Templen to put Markham’s manuscript in his box and he’d look at it someday when he had the chance, but Templen said, No, Mr. Roth, there wasn’t any time to wait—three other publishing houses were already considering the book, and he was sure it would sell by the end of the week.