The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  No, I said.

  Did I remember that the Hooligan Librarian was named Norbert Piels? That Iola Jaffe was the manuscript appraiser? That her office was located on Delancey Street? Did I remember the street address?

  Did I at least remember the name of the narrator of the story? he asked. The name of the thief?

  No, I said.

  Well, then he’d give me a little hint, Roth said—the name was Minot. He spelled it out for me. I-A-N M-I-N-O-T. This was my story now, he said.

  And then he picked up his red pencil, crossed out “A Novel by Jed Roth” on the title page, and replaced it with “A Memoir by Ian Minot.”

  MY COUNTERLIFE

  I wanted to move on to step two as quickly as possible, but in the first weeks, Roth seemed to view his main responsibility as being to slow me down. Rushing smacked of desperation, he said, and the only thing that could jeopardize the plan was trying to reach the end of it too fast. The project couldn’t be a simple matter of putting my name on a manuscript he’d written, and then, at the appointed time, revealing that it was false—I had to know the whole story inside and out as if I had written it myself.

  To ensure that I would work at his pace, he paid me by the hour, not the job, which would be over only when he said it was. I was to edit just three pages a day, and retype them myself; as long as I maintained his basic story and characters, I could change as much or as little as I wanted.

  I arrived at his apartment between nine and ten every morning, and worked at the computer in his office—a spare, clean nook with good light, a desk, a comfortable swivel chair, and a view of the park. Roth left me alone most of the time. I would stay until five, and he was usually back by then, sometimes sipping a takeaway cup of tea from my former place of employment. He’d look over the pages I had copied and printed out, then pay me in cash.

  In the beginning, I worked as little as possible on the story, typed the pages fast right when I got to Roth’s place, changing little other than the occasional comma or phrase, after which I worked on editing my own stories. Then I’d gaze out at the snow falling on Riverside, or snoop through Roth’s belongings, curious whether I might learn something he hadn’t told me. But I found nothing that contradicted his stories—on his shelves were copies of books he had edited alongside some of his favorite classics. In his drawers, none of which were locked, were marked-up manuscripts he had worked on; there were files of financial documents that went back nearly a decade, pay stubs from Merrill Books, holiday cards from Francine Prose and Miri Lippman, photos of Jed with Jim Merrill, Jr., during happier days, copies of some of Jed’s early stories with long, evocative titles (“A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross”; “Blood Is Thicker Than Nothing”) that he’d placed in magazines and literary journals.

  At the end of my workday, when Roth would look over my manuscript pages, he wouldn’t ask why it had taken eight hours for me to finish, just, “Are you sure that’s all you want to do?” or “You’re certain you like it just the way I wrote it?” I would shrug and say yes, but by the end of the week, I was getting bored, both with the job and with Roth’s story, which was thinner than I remembered. Though the plot remained amusing, the characters were too broad and lacking in substance. Roth didn’t seem to give a damn about the people in his book; I couldn’t empathize with any of them. Iola Jaffe was a foul-mouthed harpy; Norbert Piels, an illiterate dunce; the Girl in the Library was a schoolboy’s fantasy; Roth’s hero was too suave and unflappable to be believed. I had trouble deciding whether to make changes or to leave everything just as Roth had written it and get on with my own work. The more I looked at how long it would take to complete the book at this pace of three pages a day, the more I started to add details—a line of dialogue I’d overheard, a little descriptive flourish, backstories for each character.

  As the days drew on, I spent more time on A Thief in Manhattan, less on my own work; if I was really going through with this plan, then I wanted the narrator’s voice to be my own. Roth’s manuscript didn’t offer many details about his lead character, who had been named Roth but had little in common with the man I saw every day. His Roth seemed more sketch than fully realized human being, as if a screenwriter had created him, uncertain of who would wind up playing the role in the movie.

  I began adding details from my own life—I gave the novel’s hero not only my name but my history: a childhood in a tiny, rural Indiana hamlet between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, a law-student mother who died young, a deceased librarian father. I gave him a hot Eastern European ex-girlfriend, too, and when it came to describing the Girl in the Library, I made her a sexy smart-ass with a baseball cap, boots, paint-spattered jeans, red hair, a concert jersey, and the tattoo of a twilight flower on a shoulder. For one of the chase scenes, I even used my knowledge of the freight trains that used to pass through my hometown.

  I began to work longer hours and Roth paid me for overtime. I took research field trips, went to the New York Public Library microfilm reading room, where I studied whatever I could track down about the history of the Blom Library. I couldn’t find much—a 1951 piece about the library’s history; items about various accidents that had struck the library over the years; obituaries from the Times for Chester and Cecille Blom; an “Also Worth Noting” listing in a 1974 travel piece about “Undiscovered New York,” and then the Metro pieces about the Blom fire, which hewed to the story Roth had already told me, that arson had been suspected but never confirmed, and that the most valuable manuscripts—the first editions, the Shakespeare folios, The Tale of Genji—had been destroyed. One afternoon, I took a taxi from Roth’s apartment to the site of the Blom Library on Lexington to see the condo building that had replaced it. The trips didn’t help me to add much to the manuscript, but the story did begin to feel more real and true, the characters more sympathetic.

  Soon, Roth began taking me on his own field trips—Lessons in Lying, he called them. He said he had little doubt in my ability to fess up to the whole story when the time was right but was less certain about whether I could bluff agents and publishers and, later, journalists, all of whom would be necessary for our plan. He took me to Atlantic City, where he won three hands at a blackjack table; to swank parties and clubs where he quietly but confidently talked his way past bouncers; I stood beside him in a supermarket checkout line where he handed a cashier a ten-dollar bill, took his change, then claimed he had given her a fifty.

  “You didn’t give me any fifty,” the cashier told him.

  “I did,” said Roth. He stared at her until she reached into the cash register for more change.

  Roth said he didn’t care about the few bucks he made here and there from these little “lessons”; he was after “far bigger game.” In fact, he wrote a check to the PEN American Foundation for the daisies he’d won at blackjack, didn’t pocket the excess change he’d received from the supermarket cashier—he handed it to some homeless dude on our way out of the store. What he really wanted to do was to show me the right way to tell a lie—the secret to a good one was the perfect combination of self-confidence and understatement, that delicate balance between offering too much and too little information. The point was not to be able to anticipate or predict everything, but to behave as if you could. The same was true of writing, he said, and, as I delved further into the manuscript, he paid more attention, simplified what I wrote; he liked bold, improbable proclamations relayed in short, declarative hemingways, the fewer adjectives and metaphors the better. And though I bristled at each red line Roth drew through my sentences, when I retyped them and read them back to myself, they did sound better.

  On my way out of Roth’s apartment at night, he would loan me books, memoirs mostly, and I’d read them on the bus and at home. I read In Cold Blood, Go Ask Alice, and the memoirs of Casanova. I read Blade by Blade, too, saw how artfully each memoir was constructed. I began to see my own definition of truth evaporating, saw the artistry and artifice in all I was reading, saw how a lie is not only what
you say but what you omit, and by the time I was half done rewriting A Thief in Manhattan, I was almost convinced that just about every memoir I had ever read was bunk. Even the truth began to seem fake—telling the truth is one of the best ways to disguise a lie, Roth told me; what makes it a lie is why you’re telling it.

  A month into the project, my self-confidence was soaring—I had faith in Roth, in the books he had edited. I had faith in the clothes he wore, all the daisies he seemed to have, the confidence he had and that he also inspired in me. On Roth’s advice, I started dressing better, not exactly like him but not like me anymore either. I got a haircut, shaved every other morning. I even got fitted for glasses and bought a pair of black-framed franzens.

  I maintained Roth’s three-pages-per-day pace, but instead of seeming like too little work, it seemed like almost too much. I felt like an apprentice artist, painstakingly copying the work of a master, and I had to work late to get the pages done. I also began to question the parts of the story that hadn’t made sense the first time I’d read the book. Why would a man who didn’t speak proper English find employment at a library, I’d ask myself, and rewrite the Hooligan Librarian’s dialogue. How could our hero know that a train would arrive at just the perfect time to save him? I’d wonder, and leave the time vague. And why would anyone bury a valuable book beneath a golden cross in some desolate field outside Manhattan? As if there was really any undeveloped land left near Manhattan anyway.

  Late one night, when I was halfway through the manuscript, Roth was working on a scene I’d rewritten. In it, the hero escapes with The Tale of Genji, but instead of burying it under a cross, he takes it to a bank and locks it in a safe-deposit box.

  Roth quietly read and reread my pages, marking them with his red pencil. Finally, he put them down and looked at me. Why had I changed the scene? he asked.

  Roth listened as I offered my confident explanation—his version was more entertaining, but mine was more plausible. That’s why he and I were well suited to each other; he had good plot ideas, but I knew how to place them in the realm of believable human behavior. Didn’t he think my version was more realistic?

  Roth remained calm, but he regarded me with an increasing intensity that began to resemble anger. Yes, he said, I was right; mine was more realistic. Also, he added, it would be even more realistic for there to be no stolen manuscript. Also, it would be even more realistic for there to be no fire. Also, the chase scenes were unrealistic, didn’t I think so, particularly the one with the train. Maybe I was right, he said, maybe the librarian at the Blom shouldn’t be a hooligan, maybe he should be a fussy and fastidious bookworm who wears bow ties, high-waters, and wingtips, and maybe Iola Jaffe shouldn’t swear so much when she appraises book manuscripts—maybe she should smack the hero with a purse instead of face him down with a gun, and maybe a better story would be of a young man who sits in a library fantasizing about meeting a girl admiring The Tale of Genji but never speaking to her. Or, maybe an even more realistic story would be one about a young man working at a coffee shop, dreaming of publishing a book but never actually writing one, watching his Ukrainian girlfriend do it while he serves java to punters; maybe that would be the most realistic story of all.

  By the time I figured out that Roth was mocking me, he was just about done. What the hell had we been doing here all this time? he demanded. What the hell was the point of all this, Ian, what did I think we were doing? Writing something realistic? Hadn’t I learned anything? Hadn’t he said that the way to write was to ask What If, then lay on the gas? I was writing like a guy who had run a red light but kept looking back to see if the cops were catching up.

  Well, shouldn’t we just leave out the patently ridiculous parts? I asked. Wouldn’t that make the book easier to sell?

  Did I know anything about selling books? Roth wanted to know.

  No, I said, but still, there was no way anybody would believe this book.

  “No, there isn’t,” he said, “and that’s because you’re not writing like you trust the story. Because part of you is still a small-town Midwestern boy who doesn’t know how to tell a lie. You’ll never succeed in telling one if you don’t act like you trust it yourself.”

  Yes, he said, I could make his story more “believable,” but did I know what would happen then?

  No one would publish it? I asked.

  Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, Roth said, but the point was that no one would care if my story was true or not. And if no one gave a damn about whether something was true, then they certainly wouldn’t give a damn when it turned out to be false. Had I missed the entire point of the plan? The point was not to tell fewer lies, but to tell bigger and better ones, to tell bestseller lies, not mid-list lies, to state those lies boldly, clearly, without apology. He wanted to see fewer safe-deposit boxes and more golden crosses in empty fields; he wanted to see more hooligans, hunchbacks, wizards, and dwarves.

  “Don’t worry about anyone thinking your story’s false,” he said. “Try writing a story they’ll want to believe is true.”

  Then Roth apologized for raising his voice. In fact, he said, he felt bad for me.

  “Why bad?” I asked.

  “Because now you’ll have to start over from the very beginning.”

  THE HAPPY COUPLE

  And so I began again, typing all through the winter. Roth made corrections, encouraged me to expand my ideas and eliminate everything that felt too quiet. Our workdays lasted twelve hours at a minimum, and by the end of them I was exhausted. Everything became an argument—I agreed to keep his desolate field and his golden cross, and he grudgingly allowed me to get rid of the gratuitous reference to its longitude and latitude; he insisted on keeping the improbable names of Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels but assented to lishing some of the former’s monologues and eliminating some of the latter’s tattoos; I argued that the end of the book, in which “Roth” and his Girl reunited, was too hokey and romantic, but Roth convinced me to leave it as it was—readers liked happy endings, he said, stories where heroes got what they wanted.

  When it came to developing biographies for the characters of Iola and Norbert, we rejected almost all of each other’s suggestions, so that when we finally arrived at stories both of us could live with, I had no idea who had come up with the ideas. We decided that Iola Jaffe had not always been a crooked manuscript appraiser; she had once been an academic, who turned to crime when she’d failed to find a publisher for her research into the origins of the novel and had been rejected for tenure by her university. And Norbert was no mere hooligan—he’d been one of Iola’s most promising students and research assistants, an ex-con whom Iola had nurtured, but he’d suffered a severe head injury when a shelf at the Blom had collapsed on him. Even though he no longer spoke proper English, and recognized manuscripts only for the money they could fetch, he remained loyal to Iola, and still played the role of her research assistant, albeit in a very different context.

  One of our biggest arguments came in regard to the fates of Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels. “Roth” had shot them dead in his story, but though I was willing to put my name on a thief’s autobiography, I wasn’t about to say that I’d killed anyone, even a fictional character, even in self-defense. So Roth let me leave Iola’s and Norbert’s fates vague, but he advised me to hang on to his original draft; someday, I might find that his version worked better.

  Midway through the third draft, the book became as much my obsession as it had once been Roth’s. A Thief in Manhattan haunted not only my waking hours but also my dreams, until I could almost see the Girl in the Library, could see flames rising, books in ashes; I could see the Hooligan Librarian and the Foul-Mouthed Manuscript Appraiser, I could hear the voices of “Norbert Piels” and “Iola Jaffe” and could now understand how they had gotten to be who they were. I could see the desolate field and the golden cross and The Tale of Genji buried beneath it. I could feel the thump of the approaching 8:13 train in my chest, feel my heart racing as I tried
to catch it. I could feel myself becoming the author of A Thief in Manhattan, book in hand, leaping off a train, then running to find the Girl in the Library.

  As winter drew on, I couldn’t find any time to work on my own stories. It seemed as if just about all I did was type, read, sleep, and run every morning and night back and forth between my place and Roth’s. On Sundays, my one day off, I went shopping. I bought slicker shoes, better gatsbys that Roth had shown me in catalogs. I moved out of my West Harlem studio and found a better apartment in Hamilton Heights, a two-bedroom on the top floor of a newly rehabbed condo building with good light on a secluded block that looked like the sort of place where a serious writer would live. I bought a desk with a good chair, bookshelves, which I filled with classics, and when I grew weary of staring at bare walls, I took a trip to the Van Meegeren Gallery. Even though Faye wasn’t there, I paid cash for my favorite of her paintings—the fake Wyeth that depicted a country house, a meadow, a graveyard, a white car on a distant road, and a little doodle of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz. It reminded me a little of home, and I thought having it on my wall would inspire me.

  Sometimes on the Riverside jogging path, women would smile at me or ask for directions. I was always polite but never broke stride long enough to begin a real conversation. I felt as if I was at the midway point between who I was and who I sensed myself becoming. How could I have described myself anyway? As a former barista in a scam with a confident man? Or as the author of A Thief in Manhattan, a novel that would pose as a memoir before I would reveal that it had been a novel after all? The man I really wanted to be was the one I would become after all that was done, the author of the short-story collection that had been written by a fake memoirist now finally telling the truth.