The Thieves of Manhattan Read online

  Roth didn’t know whether to feel angered or amused by Templen’s presumption—in all his years as an assistant, he never told Ellen Curl to put aside her work—but his curiosity was piqued. So, after Templen closed the door to his office, Roth picked up Blade Markham’s manuscript and turned to the dedication page. And then he burst into hysterical laughter.

  THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART VI

  Jed Roth and I were walking up Amsterdam Avenue now, passing shuttered storefronts, restaurants with chairs up on tables, all-night groceries populated mostly by hard-luck men and women standing on line for lottery tickets. Drunk Columbia University students were laughing too loudly, trying to walk straight lines as they searched vainly for bars that were still open. Roth said he had something he wanted to show me at his apartment, and I was too drunk to be suspicious anymore.

  “So, what happened next?” I asked.

  As we headed west on 111th Street toward Riverside Drive, I was trying not to slur my words; Roth, who I thought had drunk as much beer as I had, was still as precise as ever in his speech, as if he had already memorized his lines. His slacks and gatsby were as smooth as when the night had begun.

  Roth said that he supposed he could have stopped reading Blade Markham’s manuscript after a page or two, when it became clear to him that just about every word was “utter horseshit,” but he read the entire thing. He supposed, too, that he could have just told Rowell Templen that he had read Blade by Blade and that he wasn’t interested. Instead, he channeled all the frustration he felt at the ignominy of editing diet, exercise, and celebrity books, all his anger at the direction Merrill Books and JMJ Publishers were taking, into marking up just about every page Blade Markham had typed. He noted every grammatical flaw, every preposterous boast. He worked past midnight, insisting that Rowell Templen stay until he was done. And when that time came, he called Templen into his office and proceeded to berate him for the better part of an hour, ostensibly to teach the punk a little bit about publishing and literature.

  Everything about Blade by Blade was a lie, Roth told Templen, and if the young assistant couldn’t or didn’t care to sniff out the BS in Markham’s manuscript, well, then, why didn’t he either join the circus or go to business school? He didn’t know whether Templen was gullible or just cynical, but either way, he didn’t belong here.

  The kid didn’t flinch, just stood there the whole time, hands folded in front of his portnoy, the same arrogant, pinched lips, the same bored slouch, the same empty stare, the same tosses of his oily, shoulder-length hair, while Roth became more and more agitated. When Roth finally ran out of insults, Templen merely took the manuscript from him, said “Thank you, Mr. Roth,” then walked out.

  “The skill I had was one I hadn’t realized was a skill,” Roth told me as we turned north onto Riverside Drive. A faint halo rainbowed the half-moon overhead, and the neighborhood was silent save for the occasional whirring of a passing taxi or the footsteps of a doorman heading home at the end of a shift. Soon, Roth and I were the only ones on a long stretch of sidewalk.

  “What skill?” I was walking with a jittery, drunken feeling; the streetlights were making crazy zigzags, as if I were looking through the viewfinder of a camera I couldn’t hold still.

  “The ability to tell not only if something actually happened, but, also, whether the telling is true,” said Roth. “Because sometimes fiction lies too.”

  As we walked into the lobby of his five-story building, with its marble floor and staircase, and its cathedral ceilings, Roth flashed me a knowing look. In that look, I could see that he was trying to tell me that he and I shared this ability, this sense of knowing what was and wasn’t true. I didn’t know exactly how he sensed that about me other than remarks he’d perhaps overheard me making to Faye about Blade by Blade at Morningside Coffee. But if he could discern the truth of a manuscript by page two, maybe he could do the same thing with people.

  “I was so sure everyone else would see what a fraud it was. It seemed so obvious to me,” Roth said as we entered his elevator and he pushed the number four button. “I soon learned I was wrong.”

  THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART VII

  Roth was working at his desk on a Friday afternoon, ready to head home, when his door swung open.

  “Busy, Jed?” James Merrill, Jr., asked, and before Roth could respond, Merrill told him, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  In all my years of reading at open mikes, working at the coffee shop, and at private publishing parties, I had never met James Merrill, Jr. I knew him only from pictures in the Sunday Styles section—a man with a sophisticated, John Steinbeck mustache and tailored Savile Row suits—and from the other night at the Blade Markham party, when I had seen him pop a grape into his mouth. I associated him with a golden era of publishing, a time when men spoke with the vaguely British inflection of 1940s Hollywood film stars. But to Roth, Merrill was a dolt who had never edited a single manuscript on his own, perhaps had never even read a book of any length all the way through; he based his impressions of the books he published on their first and last pages and on the coverages his editors and their assistants provided for him.

  Roth followed Merrill down the hall to the conference room, where Rowell Templen and Geoff Olden were already seated, drinking scotch with Blade Markham, who was boasting of having glugged slivovitz with snipers in Sarajevo and faced down fellow gangbangers in South Central LA.

  “Tell it to ya’ straight, son,” Blade told Templen, who had asked him if he kept in touch with any of the people in his stories. “If I gave y’all the righteous answer to that, I’d have to waste all y’all, yo.”

  Roth surveyed the convivial conference room. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that Jim Merrill and Rowell Templen had made a deal with Blade Markham behind his back. His mind reeling with thoughts of betrayal, he gritted his teeth. He shook hands with Blade, then seethed as Merrill told Roth that he had just signed a half-million-dollar contract to publish Blade by Blade. Apparently, Merrill said, “young Rowell” had discovered the manuscript on his own and had taken the initiative of bringing it directly to Merrill’s attention.

  “Young Rowell will be working directly on the book, but I’d like you to look over his shoulder a bit during the process,” Merrill said to Roth, then added, as he always did, that the opening of Blade by Blade, probably the only part that he had troubled himself to read, was “a real knockout.”

  This news would have been humiliating enough, but when Templen looked up at Jed with an oily, smug, and victorious cheshire, and observed that he was sure he would “find Jed’s feedback invaluable,” Roth could not stand it anymore. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, then walked fast out the door, letting it slam behind him.

  Jim Merrill caught up with Roth when he was halfway down the hall and demanded to know the meaning of his behavior; exactly who did he think he was? Roth thought of trying to convince Merrill that Blade’s book was a fraud, but after Merrill informed Roth that he had outbid three other publishers for the book and was planning to make Blade by Blade his lead title for the following autumn, Roth just walked away.

  “You can’t leave when I’m talking to you, Jed,” Merrill said.

  “Of course I can,” Roth responded. “Because I don’t work for you anymore.”

  THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART VIII

  “Well,” Jed Roth said, handing me a glass of faulkner with two ice cubes in it as I sat on his living room couch, “now you have some idea why Rowell Templen has my job and I have none, why Blade Markham has a book contract and you have none, why we’re two jobless men with enough free time to drink whiskey after midnight.”

  I clinked Roth’s glass and swigged to the freedoms afforded to the unemployed.

  Roth said his initial inclination after leaving Merrill was to start looking for another editing job, but he figured that he would probably find himself in a similar predicament, continuing to work in a frightened in
dustry more concerned with its own survival than its legacy, one that had never quite lived up to his fantasy version of it anyway. He would spend more time improving the writing of celebrities who had been signed for their names, not their prose; more time ignoring obvious inventions in fake or exaggerated memoirs if those inventions would mean better sales. He would continue to live in a world of books, but would read fewer and fewer of them. When he had started out in New York, he’d read so much, but ever since he had begun working at Merrill, he read only the books that were relevant to his job, which wasn’t really reading at all. He was unable to recall the last time he’d read solely for pleasure.

  “So,” I asked Roth as I sipped the whiskey that I certainly didn’t need, “you would have published my stories if you could have?”

  Roth laughed as if my question was so presumptuous and the answer so obvious that he didn’t need to offer it.

  “Of course not,” he finally said, and when I looked at him, somewhat dumbfounded and more than a little defensive, he said, “No, Ian. You’re a decent writer. You know how to take a story from your life and tell it in a way that makes it sound smart and sad and witty and real. You know how to do that, but in the end, so what?”

  “So, you’d think that would be enough,” I said.

  Roth made a peh sound with his lips. “Why would you think that, Ian?” he asked, and in the suddenly fierce gaze with which he now regarded me, I could see the way he had tried to face down Rowell Templen, could now see the hint of his deep, well-concealed rage.

  “Why would you think that would be worth something?” Roth asked. “Writing a book can be a profoundly optimistic act; expecting someone to read, buy, and publish it is always a phenomenally presumptuous one. Why would a marketing department put money behind anything you wrote? Why would someone who didn’t know you spend twenty-five dollars to read your stories of small people leading small lives? Your stories aren’t unusual, Ian, nothing happens in them. Your characters don’t do much; they rarely have anything of value at stake. You’re not famous, you’re not rich, you’re not outrageously talented, you have no platform. Tell me exactly what there is about you that anybody would want to sell or buy?”

  “So, that’s what it’s about now?” I asked.

  “That’s what it was always about,” said Roth. “Selling books. You thought it was about charity?”

  I glared at him, initially unable to speak. So this was where his story had led: some cynical advice given by an embittered man who thought he could apply his lousy experiences to the life of a total stranger. Who was he to judge me, him with his thousand-dollar Jay Gatsby suits and his cashmere gogol and his designer franzens. I went back and forth in my mind, cursing Roth and cursing myself, cursing Roth for his cynicism and myself for my naïveté, cursing him for what he said and myself for the fact that he might be right.

  Roth saw how angry and frustrated I was getting and started to laugh, as if he had known exactly how I would react. “What are you sniggering about?” I asked.

  He held up one finger, turned with a little flourish, then left the room. I finished my drink in one gulp and stood up, but before I could make a move for the door, Roth returned with a bound manuscript and tossed it on the coffee table in front of me. I glanced at the title page—“A Thief in Manhattan, a novel by Jed Roth.”

  “Read it,” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe if you find someone who wants to publish it, someday I might,” I said.

  “Now,” said Roth, and then he said it again, slowly but forcefully: “Now. I want you to read it now, Ian.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Read it now.”

  “Why should I?” I asked.

  “Read it and I’ll tell you,” said Roth.

  “What for?”

  “Read it and you’ll know.” He saw my eyes settling back on the title page, then looking back up at him. “It doesn’t cost anything to read,” he said.

  “It costs my time.”

  “What’s that worth to you?” He reached into a pants pocket, pulled out his wallet, took out a hundred-dollar bill, and tossed it onto the coffee table. And when I didn’t say anything, he tossed another bill in my direction, then another. When there were five C-notes on the table beside A Thief in Manhattan, I asked what the five hundred bucks were really for.

  “A reading fee,” he said. All he wanted was for me to sit on his couch, read his manuscript, then tell him what I thought. For that, he would pay five hundred dollars, and afterward, if I chose, I could walk out and we would never speak about this again. I looked at the manuscript. I looked at the money. Back then, five hundred seemed like a lot.

  “All right,” I said, and flipped to the first sentence: “She was standing in a library.”

  A THIEF IN MANHATTAN

  Jed Roth was making another pot of coffee, I was about half-done reading his manuscript, and out the window, dawn was beginning to purple the sky that was becoming visible through the nearly bare trees in Riverside Park. Roth asked if I needed to take a break or if I wanted to take a nap and finish reading when I woke up. No, I said, I’d keep reading until I was done.

  Looking back, knowing how long it had been since I’d gotten any sleep, I’m surprised I was able to stay awake. But once in a while, a story can work as well as coffee or speed. During my father’s last months, he said the meds never did much; the stories I read to him were all that seemed to ease his pain. Now my headache was gone, my drunkenness, too, and even if I was not as awake and chipper as Roth seemed to be—he kept walking in and out of the room, whistling, refilling my coffee mug, offering sandwiches and other snacks, apparently amused by the idea of playing Jeeves—I wasn’t ready to pack it in, and not just because of the five hundred bucks.

  Loath as I might have been to admit it at first, A Thief in Manhattan was a great read. While I was blazing through it, I no longer felt angry with Roth for having insulted me; in fact, I forgot how angry I had been. No, it wasn’t particularly literary. In a writing workshop, I probably would have ripped it apart—peopled by broad, outlandish characters, filled with unbelievable events. But it was fun and fast, and I just wanted to keep flipping pages to learn how Roth would make it all turn out. The man who had written this wasn’t some cynical former editor; he was an ambitious and creative young man, one who loved books and adventures, and hadn’t yet learned to stop asking What if?

  Apart from the story itself, what I liked most about A Thief in Manhattan were Roth’s knowing literary references, the sorts of details that might have seemed precious to some readers, but not to a librarian’s son. Throughout, Roth employed a literary sort of slang; he called an overcoat a “gogol,” a smile a “cheshire,” and an umbrella a “poppins.” He called trains “highsmiths,” because they appeared so often in Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers, and referred to money as “daisies,” since in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Daisy Buchanan’s voice as being “full of money.” At the end of Roth’s manuscript, he included a glossary of literary terms, but I didn’t need to consult it much; the only one I didn’t get was “canino,” Roth’s word for a gun, which he took from the name of a heavy in The Big Sleep, a book I had never read.

  References to books appeared on nearly every page of Roth’s novel. When the reader first encountered the foul-mouthed manuscript appraiser Iola Jaffe, she was looking up from the Riverside Shakespeare, specifically Act III, Scene ii, of Othello, where Iago tells the Moor, “Men should be as they seem.” In the novel’s climactic moment, when it appeared the hero was about to be shot dead by Norbert Piels, he was able to wrest the gun away, shoot his adversaries, Piels and Jaffe, then hop an 8:13 train, 813 being the Dewey decimal number assigned to fiction. The longitude and latitude of The Tale of Genji’s location corresponded to the Dewey numbers for illustrated books and foreign reference works. I knew that Roth’s book was probably filled with more clues and in-jokes I wasn’t getting, but I was reading too quickly to try to figure out
all of them.

  I kept turning pages, reliving all the parts of the adventure Roth had told me, feeling surprised by all the plot twists that he hadn’t. I felt “Roth”’s passion for the Girl in the Library, his sorrow at the sight of the Blom reduced to rubble after Norbert set it ablaze in a fit of rage upon realizing that Roth had stolen The Tale of Genji; I felt my heart thump when Roth was being chased by Iola and Norbert, felt both horror and catharsis when Roth shot them dead, then buried them in the desolate field beneath a golden cross, and I felt elated when Roth was about to be reunited with the Girl in the Library. And when I read the last page and its final, charmingly hokey line, a question spoken in darkness by the Girl—“True love never has to end, so why shouldn’t our story continue after the last page has been written?”—I couldn’t help but think that Roth was talking about not only one love affair and one story, but about all stories, for a good story never has to end when it lives on in our minds. And I couldn’t help but think that the reason why lately I had such trouble finishing stories was not because I wanted them to go on and on, but because I never really knew how to begin one. I wished I could learn how to start a story and see it through to the end so clearly that it could live on after the last page.

  A MODEST PROPOSAL

  “So?” Roth asked. I put the manuscript down on the coffee table and took a long look out at his view of Riverside Park.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “So, what do you think?”

  I considered, then told Roth the truth, that I thought A Thief in Manhattan was a good story. To earn the five hundred dollars that was still on the coffee table, I told him that the book was a little violent and amoral for my tastes. Then I made some obvious points about his story’s plausibility: I said that maybe I wouldn’t have made all the Dewey decimal references—one was fun; three was overkill. I told him that I had a basic sense of most of the characters, but maybe Roth could have described the Girl in the Library better and told more about what happened after his hero reunited with her. Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels were amusing foils, but without knowing their backstories or motivations, I ultimately grew weary of Iola’s profane rants and Norbert’s cruelty; I saw only glimmers of their humanity, never saw them as fully realized characters. The hero, too, Roth, wasn’t sufficiently defined. I said that I couldn’t tell whether the character was supposed to be a naïve, inexperienced guy in over his head, or whether he’d been conning the reader from the beginning and knew a whole lot more than he was letting on. I also told him that I didn’t necessarily see why, even in an escapist caper, burying a valuable manuscript in some desolate field outside Manhattan made much sense, and when Roth muttered something about statutes of limitations and the fact that he liked to add “little turns of the screw” to his stories, I told him that, even so, a safe deposit box would have been better. But mostly, I said, my opinions didn’t matter much, because A Thief in Manhattan was an entertaining story, and one that he could probably publish if he still wanted to—so what was he planning to do with the book?