The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  By the time I ran into Anya Petrescu again, on a Sunday in early spring, I was nearly done with my final draft of A Thief in Manhattan. The fourth rewrite was my idea; Roth had said it was good enough to start sending to agents, but I felt the book wasn’t ready. I wanted one more draft to make the writing tighter, the characters more vivid and sympathetic, the pace even faster.

  I was in ABC Carpet & Home looking for a queen-size proust to replace my crappy pull-out couch, when I saw Anya with Blade; they were looking at prousts too. Blade had an arm draped over one of Anya’s shoulders and she had a hand on his waist. I couldn’t understand any of the words either was saying, but I immediately recognized her Eastern European inflections and his affected street patter. They were moving in perfect synchrony, the sure sign of a couple that has been having chinaski for some time.

  In her black golightly and tights with her backpack over both shoulders, Anya was lovely as ever; in his baggy, hip-hop jeans and steel-toed boots, Blade was still a joke. But what struck me most about them was how small they appeared in comparison to how I had remembered them. He was no taller than I was, and she was a good deal shorter than that.

  Ee-yen!

  I had been intending to let the two of them go about their business, but Anya spotted me, gave a little yelp of delight, clapped her hands, then dragged Blade over to meet me. As she spoke, she seemed to be attempting to appear more confident than I remembered her, which had the effect of making her seem less so. She used to tell me how goot I looked, how moskyoolar and mennly, but this time, when I was dressed in an off-white linen gatsby, new jeans, boots, and franzens, she didn’t comment about my appearance. Instead, she talked about herself as if she could see that I had become the person who needed to be impressed. If Blade remembered who I was or that he had almost thrown me out of Geoff Olden’s window, he didn’t show it. He was soft-spoken, deferential, called me blood, bro-ham, and compadre; apparently, I looked like someone worth knowing.

  Anya took off her backpack, put it on a bed that she and Blade had been eyeing, and pulled out a galley copy of We Never Talked About Ceauşescu; it would be published in the fall. She was so nerf-ous about the book, Ee-yen, she said as Blade rubbed her back with husbandly concern; she was sure that eff’ryone would hett eet, that refyooers would reep eet to shreds and call her a tellentliss leetle fekk. She handed the galley to me, said I could tekk it as long as I promeesed to come to her book party and to buy a feenished one when eet vas pobleeshed.

  I took the book, flipped through it, stifling a laugh when I got to the back cover and read each laudatory blurb; they had all been written by Geoff Olden’s clients. The one in the biggest type was Blade Markham’s (“Man, this is some righteous shit, yo!”). But I kept a straight face—a blurb from Blade would look good on A Thief in Manhattan too.

  This time, unlike our last meeting at KGB, I was the one who cut it short. I pecked Anya on the cheek, shook hands firmly with Blade, then bought the proust that the two of them had been looking at, before I headed home to rest up for my next week with Roth. On the uptown highsmith, I cracked open my galley of We Never Talked About Ceauşescu. I spent the afternoon and half of the evening reading it over cups of tea. And when I was done, I was pleased to note that I hadn’t been wrong about Anya—her stories were beautiful, timeless, profound; her writing, if this was possible, was even lovelier than she was; each character was deeply human, each hemingway was exquisite, each metaphor resonant. I closed the book thinking I had lived an entire life in Romania with a wonderfully talented, creative, and generous spirit.

  At the same time, I thought that night as I turned out my bedside lamp, Anya’s stories seemed quiet and small. And I couldn’t imagine them selling all that well.

  AN AGENT

  “So what’s the next step?” I asked Roth.

  Little green shoots had appeared on the branches of the trees outside his living room windows; the early morning joggers on the paths below were still exhaling steam, but they were wearing only sweatshirts or light jackets. I could make out silhouettes of boats chugging down the Hudson River. Roth and I had stayed up all night; now dawn was fading, and we were sipping from flutes of champagne, two copies of the final draft of A Thief in Manhattan on the glass table in front of us.

  It was done—300 pages of heart-stopping adventure and utter hokum in which I, Ian Minot, stole The Tale of Genji, escaped my adversaries, and got the girl. There they were—two thick stacks of paper with my name printed on the title page, and by now, I felt as if I had actually earned that authorship. I had never written anything this long, had never, even in a short story, paid so much attention to each sentence, had never experienced the frustration and exhilaration of working day after day on the same project. I felt as if I had crossed a finish line and was only beginning to come down from a runner’s high.

  Roth was wearing a silvery jacket and slacks, sleek and slippery like the skin of some serpent. He wore black, square-toed shoes, and a black silk shirt with one button undone. He had the aspect of James Bond emerging from some death-defying battle into a Monte Carlo casino, and now here he was, ready for the baccarat tables and a roll in the hay with Fatima Blush. I still longed to have that same unflappability—I was wearing the same gatsby and slacks I had worn for today’s session, and they were good ones, but now they had creases in them, and when I looked down at my shoes, I could see they needed a good shine.

  “What’s next?” he repeated. “We get you an agent.” His voice was low and a bit rough, the one hint that he hadn’t slept.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Roth cleared his throat—he seemed to like this game, liked knowing the lines I didn’t; he wore the same smile I had seen him wear on Broadway in front of Morningside Coffee right after I’d chucked his copy of Blade by Blade halfway down the block. I fancied that maybe I’d looked a little like he did now when I saw Anya with Blade in the bedding department of ABC.

  “Who would you think?” asked Roth.

  “You know more agents than I do,” I said.

  “Then tell me characteristics,” he said.

  I paused before answering, pondered, wanted to reveal myself to be the good student he’d trained. I took another sip of champagne.

  “Someone young,” I said. “Someone hungry and inexperienced, desperate for their first deal.”

  Roth looked me up and down with a knowing nod, suggesting that my description more closely matched myself than the agent he had in mind. “Very clever, Ian,” he said. “Also very wrong.”

  Roth finished his champagne, put his flute down on the table, then walked to the window seat, where he sat and gazed out over the park. He was in his early morning mode, a time when words seemed to come more slowly and had a hint of confession about them, as if for the first time he was revealing secrets about himself.

  “Let me tell you a story with a moral,” he said as he turned back to me. Fifteen-odd years ago, Roth said, he didn’t have much cash, but he hadn’t wanted his family’s money to bail him out either. So every week when he bought groceries, he switched tags on the most expensive items. Before he approached the register, he tried to find the person who looked like the dumbest, least experienced cashier, assuming they wouldn’t notice what he’d done.

  “Know what happened?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I got busted every time.”

  He smiled as if his meaning was evident, but I wasn’t getting it. “So, what’s the moral?” I asked.

  “That the least-experienced people are the ones you have to watch out for,” he said. “The smarter a person seems and the more powerful they are, the easier it gets to trick them. Because they wouldn’t dream you’d ever dare.

  “No,” continued Roth, “we’ll get you a smart agent, a veteran, the cockiest one we can find. Taking him down will be as easy as swatting a fly.”

  He listed names of agents, all of whom I’d heard of, most of whom had sent me rejection letters—Ira Silverberg, whos
e agency had sent me a form letter, even though he’d seemed excited about my stories when I’d told him about them while tending bar at a party for one of his clients; Kassie Evashevski, whose encouragement that if I wrote a truly great story, she’d “love to see it” fell flatter each time I received the same letter; Nicole Aragi, who sent me a handwritten paragraph explaining how sorry she was that she hadn’t liked the “rubbish” I had written. Roth said that all of them could do a great job for us, but when he mentioned Geoffrey Olden, I asked if he really thought Olden would fall for it.

  “Why Olden?” he asked, but we both knew the answer; Roth wasn’t the only one who wanted revenge.

  GETTING GEOFF OLDEN

  Though I relished the idea of duping Geoff Olden, I had reservations about trying. After all, he’d read A Thief in Manhattan when Roth had submitted it as a novel. But as always, Roth’s confidence allayed my concerns. People in publishing had short memories, he said, Olden especially. He barely remembered books he had rejected months ago. Olden turned down dozens of novels every week; there was no way he’d remember one he’d read in an afternoon more than a decade earlier, let alone one that was now a memoir.

  Roth told me that he knew how to get just about any agent in New York to represent our book, but if I wanted Geoff Olden, he would take a bit more work than most of the others. Some agents responded well to flattery, some responded best to their clients’ recommendations, some were horny humberts who were interested only in good-looking authors and asked potential clients to submit photos, while other agents, most of them really, were just looking for books with that elusive combination of commercial potential and literary heft.

  Geoff Olden was not particularly different from the rest of the agents—he understood the usefulness of everything Roth mentioned; all successful agents did. What distinguished him was his need to always be proving someone else in the industry wrong. He measured his worth by the successes he had had with authors his competitors had overlooked. The phenomenal sales of Blade by Blade were delicious, but not nearly as much as the fact that they had come after more than a dozen other agents had turned the book down.

  Roth and I didn’t approach Olden directly; instead, we crafted query letters to the agents Olden most despised, hoping these letters would earn immediate and insulting rejections. We sent sample chapters from Roth’s earliest and most overwrought stories and A Thief in Manhattan drafts, pages from my least-consequential stories, comparing them favorably to works written by the agents’ most celebrated clients (“Dear Mr. Wylie: In my coffee shop romance, you may well find themes reminiscent of those in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”; “Dear Mr. Parks: In my depiction of contemporary New York, you may hear echoes of Jonathan Lethem’s descriptions of Brooklyn”; “Dear Mr. Simonoff: Since I assume you’ve grown weary of representing Joompa Laheeri … [sic]”).

  I had expected that the agents would send back the same curt form letters that I generally tended to receive. But the letters Roth helped me write must have gotten under their skin. Within weeks, we had assembled a portfolio of damning rejections from a Who’s Who of literary agents who lambasted the author of A Thief in Manhattan for his poor manners, his bad taste, his lousy grammar, and his ham-fisted writing style, which, three agents said, would “never find an audience in today’s market.” We bundled the letters in a packet and sent them to Geoff Olden, complimenting him on having the foresight to recognize what other agents had overlooked. Roth said that once Olden had read our letter, he would ask his assistant, Isabelle DuPom, to shoot me a quick email, requesting my complete manuscript.

  On the morning I got the email from Olden’s office just as Roth had predicted I would, I FedExed a copy of A Thief in Manhattan to him with a short, fawning note, then returned to Roth’s apartment, where I asked Jed how long I should expect to wait for Olden’s response.

  Jed looked at his watch. “About seventy-six hours,” he said, and when I laughed, he shrugged, a little irritated, it seemed to me. Wasn’t I done doubting him? Wasn’t the script playing out exactly as it had been written? Wasn’t I done fussing about longitudes, latitudes, 8:13 trains, and seventy-six-hour estimates? He asked if I wanted to bet whether he would be right or not, and when I told him I didn’t, he suggested that I take the next seventy-five hours off; when the seventy-sixth arrived, we would get back to work.

  AN UNEXPECTED GUEST

  I had told Roth that I wouldn’t gamble about when Olden would respond, but I probably should have taken that bet—for Olden didn’t call in seventy-six hours; he called the very next afternoon, when I was jogging south along the Hudson River.

  I knew it was Olden before I answered; hardly anyone ever called me on my cellphone anymore, and Roth’s number never appeared as “restricted.” Geoff told me that he had just finished reading “Thief”—the man seemed fond of abbreviations—and found it to be muy bueno. The conversation, despite taking place more than a day early, went as Roth had predicted. It began with compliments: Olden said he liked the terseness of my writing, how no words were wasted; it would be easy to read on a Kindle or a Nook; he liked the depth and humanity of my characters; the book was nonfiction that read like fiction, which was the best and rarest of finds, akin, he said, to a tofu product that really tasted like meat. But he said that he did have some changes to discuss before he would agree to represent me. Could his assistant, Isabelle, arrange a time for lunch?

  “At Miguel’s,” he said, just as Roth told me he would refer to Michael’s Restaurant.

  When I was done talking to Isabelle—I wondered if she was one of those beautiful, golightly-clad women who’d ignored me at the Blade Markham party—I started running, didn’t even stop to catch my breath when I got to Roth’s apartment building. I slapped the UP button for the elevator, and when the doors didn’t immediately open, I took the stairs two at a time until I reached the fourth floor, where I slid down the hallway before arriving at Roth’s door, which I slapped hard with my palm. I heard a rustling, then footsteps approaching.

  Roth was wearing a black murasaki, belted at the waist, and black socks. He wasn’t wearing his franzens, and he looked older and more tired than usual. Apparently, I had interrupted him, or woken him up. I had never seen Roth without his glasses. Or his pants. He stood in his doorway, regarding me expectantly.

  “Olden called,” I said.

  Roth nodded brusquely as if to ask why I was telling him what he had already told me would happen.

  “He asked to set up a lunch,” I said, and when Roth appeared to be expecting new information, I told him that he had been right; we’d be eating at Michael’s.

  “Wanna go out?” I asked. “Get a brew? Celebrate? My treat?”

  Roth’s weariness took on a more impatient tone.

  “There’s nothing to celebrate yet, Ian,” he said. “We’ll discuss it after the weekend.”

  Roth began to close the door, then stopped.

  “Oh, and Ian?” he said. “Next time we’re not scheduled to work together and you have something you want to discuss: call first.”

  I nodded and told him I’d come by next week at our usual time. But when I walked out of the building, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for having bothered him. I had begun to think that he and I were friends, but apparently, this was only a business relationship and we were just using each other for what each of us wanted. I would become a published author and he would get his money and revenge. I had been hoping that there might be more to it, but that’s all there was.

  MEETING AT MICHAEL’S

  When I met Roth the morning before my lunch with Olden, Roth was back in his usual form. He told me that the key to winning Olden’s trust was to refrain from acting either too eager or blasé. I was to let Olden decide who he thought I was; he treated people as if they were manuscripts. He liked to talk about how awful books had been before he got his hands on them, how unpolished and untutored his writers were before they had met him.

  As for me, n
ow that Roth had convinced me that Olden wouldn’t recall having read A Thief In Manhattan before, I had only two questions.

  “What if he recognizes me?” I asked, remembering the night at the KGB and the Blade Markham party.

  “He won’t,” Roth said. “When he met you before, you were nobody. Now you’re a potential client. To Olden, those are two completely different people.”

  “What about my short stories?” I asked. “Can I mention them to him?”

  “Not yet,” said Roth.

  “When?” I asked.

  “You’ll know.”

  I arrived at Fifty-fifth Street intentionally about ten minutes late, and was seated with Olden at his usual table. He was wearing a pale yellow sport coat over a black shirt and was eyeing one of his two watches—he wore a Rolex on one wrist, a red, blue, and green Swatch on the other. The two watches, one expensive, one not, was a fashion quirk that Roth told me Olden had picked up in Milan. Olden looked peeved at my tardiness, but when I caught his eye, he was all smiles and cackles.

  “You don’t look like a thief,” he said as he shook my hand.

  “Neither do you,” I said.

  He liked that joke; cackled louder. “Bueno conocerte, ladrón,” he said.

  Michael’s tablecloths were white, its chairs black leather with wooden frames and armrests, and the air was thick with talk of books and deals. Nearby, Olden informed me, the director of Knopf publicity was showing a new catalog to the nonfiction reviews editor of Publishers Weekly, who was taking notes on a pad. David Hirshey, executive editor at HarperCollins, was forking a chunk of salmon as he sat across from an author who wore a black T-shirt under a blue blazer and was muttering something about soccer. The ICM superagent Esther Newberg was dining with Patricia Cornwell.

  As for me, I was wearing an old Ian Minot outfit—a wrinkled white shirt that was now a little small in the shoulders and too loose around the stomach, battered jeans, a flimsy belt, and scuffed boots. The only stylish touch was the franzens. Roth had said that either dressing up or down for Olden would be a waste of time—Geoff said that anyone who didn’t dress like him was a “fashion victim” no matter what they wore. But I liked dressing down; later, when I would wear my new gatsbys to meet Geoff, he could take credit for my transformation.