The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  “Only losers get one chance,” I said. “I’m gonna keep getting ’em. Either Jim Merrill buys the books, edits them, or they’re out and you’re out. You call me when it’s done.

  “You’ll excuse me,” I added, remembering Roth had said exactly that when he walked out on Merrill Books rather than help Rowell Templen edit Blade by Blade.

  THE FABULIST

  In the past, after I had done just about anything that I considered to be uncharacteristically bold, I immediately started to regret it. Moments after I had thrown Jed Roth’s book down Broadway, then lost my job, I was already wondering if I had done something stupid. This afternoon, I had no second thoughts, in fact I kept gaining confidence with every step as I jogged to the Broadway-Lafayette subway station. I could take on anybody, I thought; I was in a zone. Throw me a basketball, I’ll nail every free throw; pass me a pool cue, I’ll sink every shot; introduce me to any woman, I’ll tell her my story and she’ll fall in love with me. I didn’t play basketball, though, I didn’t know of any pool halls nearby, and as for women, I was out of practice; when I flipped open my cellphone, I saw only two names of people with whom I wanted to share my tale.

  I arrived at Morningside Coffee shortly after five, always the slowest part of the day save for closing time. When I peered through the window, I felt as if I were gazing into a past I had gladly left behind, a world of small people leading small lives—smart, well-turned tales, perhaps, but nothing anybody would really want to read about.

  Joseph was behind the counter, looking slower and heavier than ever. Faye wasn’t even pretending to work; she was sitting on a stool behind the register, sketching in a notebook; she didn’t look up when I came in.

  I strutted toward the counter, one hand in a front pocket of my butter-colored suit jacket. Joseph spotted me first. He looked me up and down, seemed to understand in one glance that I had moved on while he was standing in place.

  “Nice duds,” he said with a smirk.

  Faye still wasn’t looking at me, so I kept talking to Joseph even though he was behaving, like always, as if he had something against me, maybe because my presence reminded him that he would always be stuck here, now 325 pounds and still counting.

  “Hey, man,” I said, “get cast in any shows?”

  “Hell, no,” he said, adding that he had all but given up acting. The only times he ever got cast was as a funny fat guy. He’d liked acting because he thought doing it would allow him to escape his life, but what was the point if you only ever got to play the same role, and never got a chance to play a hero? Joseph sighed, then asked the question I was waiting for—“What about you? Sell any books, man?”

  “Maybe I did.” I brushed a speck of lint off my jacket.

  “Lucky you,” said Joseph. He shuffled to the sink, while I leaned on the counter where Faye was sketching, effortlessly as always. She was drawing a landscape—water, a bridge, a clock tower. Maybe when she was done with it, I could buy it from her gallery and put it on my wall, I thought.

  “Sell any paintings, Betty?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” Faye said, still sketching.

  “You’re lying,” I said. “I know for a fact you sold at least one.”

  Faye stopped drawing, then looked up at me. I never understood how much she must have liked me before until I saw how she was looking at me now. For a moment, I wondered if I’d lost even more than I realized that last night with her at the KGB.

  “What do you want, Ian?” she asked.

  I tried small talk, told her I was just passing by and wanted to see how she was doing.

  “I’m doing shitty, Ian,” she said, “but why would you care?”

  “Well, we never really had a chance to talk.” I thought I had gotten pretty good at BSing by now, but Faye could see through me: I had come here to brag and make her feel like she had missed out on something, but now I just felt petty and small.

  “So, how’s your Ukrainian?” she asked.

  “Romanian,” I muttered.

  “Whatever works,” said Faye. “Look, Ian,” she told me, “I’m seeing someone else anyway. I was even when we were going out.”

  Joseph smiled, and in that smile I could see that Faye was telling the truth.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “Because I thought I might’ve liked you better,” she said. “Turns out you fooled me; I just liked your stories.

  “For a while, I thought you were an honest, decent guy,” she continued. “Then you showed me who you really were, no different from the rest of them. I was upset for a while, but it was really my fault. I’m over it now anyway. Whatever. It’s done.”

  “I just thought you’d like hearing about something that happened to me today,” I said. “It’s another good story.”

  She paused for a moment. I could see her deciding whether she wanted to hear the story. But no, she was done with fakes like me.

  “Why don’t you tell them to someone who still cares about you,” she said. “You should go back to your Ukrainian; you guys deserve each other.” She didn’t look up when I walked out the door.

  Now the only person I wanted to talk to was Anya, but I needed two fitzgeralds at the 106 Bar before I could call her. And when I heard Blade’s recorded voice on her number, I needed another.

  “Yo,” he said. I could imagine him throwing his hands out, flashing his phony gang signs. “This here’s the number for Blade Markham and Anya Peh-tresh-KOO. Y’all wanna rap with Anya, press one. Y’all wanna talk with the main man, press two. Y’all wanna suck mah dick, you press the motherfuckin’ three, yo.”

  I didn’t leave a message. To tell the truth, I was laughing too hard. The woman I had loved had left me for a fraud, and now I was a fraud too; it was pretty funny. I sat at the bar for hours, ordering fitzgeralds until the bartender told me I’d had enough, and did I need a taxi to take me home? A taxi might have been a good idea. That way I wouldn’t have fallen asleep on the train and woken up at 207th Street to see Blade’s grinning mug staring down at me from the subway ads.

  By the time I got home, morning had arrived, and my cellphone was ringing. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did it, you ladron culo,” Geoff Olden said with a cackle. He asked when I would be available to meet Jim Merrill, Jr., at the Century Club. “Oh, and por favor?” he said after we had set the time and date. “Those short stories of yours better be good, Ian. I already told Merrill they were.”

  THE HONORED SOCIETY

  I met Geoff Olden and Jim Merrill, Jr., at the Century Club on Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, a relic of Manhattan’s artistic and literary past. New York city law decreed that cigars could no longer be smoked in the club, but the cloakroom still smelled of them and so did the doorman’s jacket; women were now admitted to the club, but the place still exuded an old boys’ clubhouse, a place where men gathered in dim, smoky light to drink, chortle, and discuss the serious business of literature and art out of the sight of their wives and mistresses. The ghosts of onetime members Winslow Homer, the architect Stanford White, and the late railroad magnate and manuscript collector Chester Blom seemed to swoop in and out of the dining room and bar.

  Michael’s Restaurant may have been located less than a mile from here, but entering the Century Club was like stepping fifty years into the past. The difference between the two was that of new publishing versus old. It was that of JMJ Publishers versus Merrill Books, between the works of literary titles that Jim Merrill published under his old company’s name and the diet and exercise books JMJ published to keep Merrill Books solvent. Here at the Century Club, there was no overt discussion of deals or bottom lines, no crass displays of publishers’ catalogs. It was a place where cash was rarely seen and money exchanged only via scribbles on club members’ accounts. Conversations were confidential, muffled by carpets. Men wore corduroy blazers and sipped brandy from snifters; waiters in slightly frayed uniforms called members by name and spoke to them in low, respectful tones—“R
ight this way, Mr. Minot,” “Good afternoon, Mr. Merrill,” “Pleasure to see you again, Mr. Olden.”

  A concierge directed me up the stairs to the bar, where Geoff Olden was sitting beside Jim Merrill, Jr., who wore a powder blue suit with a pink, four-petaled boutonniere. Olden was dressed more conservatively than usual: black suit, gray shirt buttoned to the neck; the only color was the yellow frames of his eckleburgs. The bartender was serving a fitzgerald to Merrill Jr. and asking whether Mr. Olden would be having “the usual.” When Olden said, “Si, señor,” the bartender took down a cordial glass and poured a Lillet.

  To me, Jim Merrill, Jr., had the respectable air of an old-school gentleman—narrow, salt-and-pepper steinbeck; tan, weathered skin that suggested summers spent on yachts; and a deep, soothing voice that told you at once how welcome you were at his club and how unusual it was for him to invite anyone new to it. To Jed Roth, Merrill Jr. was an unworthy inheritor of a great name, knew only what drinks to order, what sort of outfit to wear to lunch, and what tie to wear to dinner. But I couldn’t help but feel flattered by the way Merrill looked at me, as if he were granting me the privilege of marrying his daughter.

  “Mr. Minot,” Merrill said, standing to greet me.

  “Compañero,” said Geoff Olden. He tried to step between me and Merrill, but it was clear that the latter viewed my agent as merely a means to an end, something unpleasant yet necessary to the process. Like the presence of women or the absence of cigars, Geoff Olden was to be tolerated at the Century Club, never truly accepted.

  “Ian, I’d like you to meet Jimmy Merrill,” said Geoff.

  “It’s Jim,” Merrill told him curtly, then assessed me with a satisfied, proprietary smile, as if a brand-new car had been delivered to his building, and he found the vehicle to his liking.

  “Well,” Merrill said as he shook my hand, “well, well, well.” He turned to Geoff, then gestured to me. “Now, that looks like a writer,” he said. “Welcome aboard, my friend.”

  Merrill asked what I would be drinking. I ordered a fitzgerald, and he smiled approvingly. Yes, he seemed to be thinking, that’s a writer’s drink.

  “What a book, what a life,” he said, adding that the first page of Thieves “certainly set the scene,” and that my last page “really packed a wallop.”

  “But you know something?” Merrill asked as we clinked glasses. “I’m even more excited about your short stories.”

  MY FRIEND JED

  I was still feeling buzzed when I arrived at Roth’s place in the evening to tell him about my meeting with Merrill. The apartment looked emptier than before, and when Jed spoke, the walls seemed to reverberate with the hint of an echo.

  He stood by his kitchen counter, uncorking a bottle of champagne, then poured the contents into two chilled flutes. He regarded me with an unfamiliarly distant look—the intensity of our months working together had been replaced by something approximating nostalgia or perhaps regret, as if he had already moved on to the next chapter. When I told him of the argument I had had with Geoff Olden, the way I had swung a deal for my short story collection, when I told him about the fitzgeralds I had quaffed with Merrill at the Century Club, Roth reminded me of my father during his last months, when I had read him my stories and told him my plans. Though my dad wouldn’t say what he was thinking, I thought I could tell—my stories made him happy, granted him momentary escape from his world, but he knew he would not play any part in them; I would be moving on without him.

  But not until Roth sipped his champagne and told me how much he’d miss me after all this was over did I realize that he seemed to view the evening as the beginning of a farewell. He said that we’d be meeting even less frequently now, and rarely in public. He didn’t want to run the risk anymore of people recognizing us and thinking we were working together. The best con-artist teams were usually made up of mismatched pairs, Roth said, an old black man and a young white girl, a bag lady and a fresh-faced kid; as for us, we could now almost pass for brothers.

  I hadn’t really thought past this point, had figured that I would keep meeting with Roth, working at his desk, that at least our business relationship would continue, that after this project, he would have another scheme. But no, we would be going our separate ways—25 percent for him, 15 for Olden, the rest for me.

  Roth and I stood side by side at his window, looking out over Riverside Park, two men in light-colored gatsbys, black shoes, no ties. I asked Roth what he might do. He said he had no immediate plans; he’d stay in New York for a while, but then, when some “things” had “sorted themselves out for better or worse,” he would move away. This New York was so different from the city in which he’d grown up. Manhattan was all about money now, all about trying to make enough of it just to survive. He’d still have money, but there would be fewer and fewer things he would want to buy with it.

  I asked Roth if he’d ever work in publishing again. No, he said, that business was dying. Books would never disappear entirely, there would always be places to buy them, libraries where you could read them. But for him, they had lost their romance. He wondered if that day when he had stumbled upon the wreckage of the Blom Library had been a sign of what was to come, a world he had sought erupting in flame, then being reduced to ashes. He said he might start some new business in Europe, maybe in London, or perhaps in some other foreign country whose language he didn’t speak, one where it would take him a lifetime to understand what old traditions were passing, so he wouldn’t regret their disappearance. Now, the only relevant regret he had was that he wouldn’t be able to see Geoff Olden’s and Jim Merrill, Jr.’s faces when they learned the truth about The Thieves of Manhattan.

  The two of us stood before the darkening sky, the leaves and the branches of the London plane trees slowly but inevitably fading into night. I couldn’t help but feel some regrets too, not about Geoff Olden, but about Merrill, a man whose name I had once respected. He was putting his money and faith in me, and I would repay him with the truth—that he had trusted a liar.

  “Second thoughts?” Roth asked. I nodded.

  “Remember this,” he said, and as he spoke, I could see another flicker of the anger he usually hid so well. “When you were already a writer and a pretty honest, stand-up, wholesome Midwestern guy, you were invisible to Jim Merrill, Jr. At best, you were some hick serving coffee somewhere he would never have gone. Only when you became a liar and a thief did he ask you to his club, buy you a drink, and tell you that you were a writer.

  “No matter what happens, never forget that, Ian,” said Roth. “You’ll follow the plan exactly as we discussed. When the time is right, you’ll tell everyone it was all a lie.”

  “When will the time be right?”

  “Don’t you think you’ll know that?” Roth asked.

  Yes, I said, I would. “But until that time comes,” I said, “if Merrill or Olden or anybody else asks whether or not the story is true…”

  “Here’s the funny thing,” Roth said, interrupting. “They’ll never ask you.”

  Roth finished his champagne and rolled the stem of his flute nimbly between thumb and middle finger. “When all is said and done, book people don’t know much about the lives real people live. They think the only Manhattan is the one they live in. They’ve read too much, lived too little. They think everyone acts like they’re part of some big story. Just keep acting like you’re part of the story you’ve written, Ian, and they’ll believe it’s true.”

  Act like you’re part of some big story, I thought as I finished my champagne. Yes, I knew how to do that now.

  MY OWN SWEET TIME

  The rest of the summer lurched by in haphazard fashion—spurts of frantic action separated from each other by long stretches of aimless slothfulness, euphoric moments closely followed by days of desolation. There were interviews with publishing industry magazines, furious email exchanges with copy editors, strategy sessions with publicists, meetings with Merrill and Olden to discuss potential covers for The Thieves
of Manhattan, and follow-up meetings when those covers didn’t meet with the approval of buyers for the chain stores. I had my picture taken by top-notch author photographers: Marion Ettlinger for the U.S. market; Jerry Bauer for overseas. And yet none of this happened in an orderly way. My days were absolutely full or utterly empty; weeks were chaotic or just plain blah; on my calendar, July was a mess of scribbles and cross-outs, but August had nothing on it save for the launch party for We Never Talked About Ceauşescu. Jim Merrill spent his August in Nantucket; Geoff Olden in Rhinebeck. I had more free time and ready cash than ever, and less of an idea of what I might do with it.

  Roth had prepped me for the ups and downs of publishing, the stops and starts. This was an old plodder of an industry vainly struggling to move at twenty-first-century speed, he said. Sure, you could now pdf your manuscript to your editor instead of delivering it to his or her office, and yes, you could edit your book on a laptop at Starbucks instead of scribbling upon parchment with a plumed ink pen, but some aspects of publishing couldn’t move any faster than they had a thousand years ago in the days of The Tale of Genji. Novelists couldn’t write any quicker, and authors of memoirs couldn’t live their lives any faster. Though one could speed up individual steps, the whole process required too many of them to kick the business into a higher gear. Magazines were reviewing books for issues that would be coming out six months from now, publishers were signing up manuscripts that wouldn’t be in bookstores for years. What seemed like a good idea for a book in outline form now might well be irrelevant when the Times reviewed the finished version three years later, if the Times would even review it, if the Times would even have a book review section, no sure thing given the declining circulation numbers of newspapers nationwide; if the editor of the book would even still have a job at the publisher that had employed him or her when the contract for the book had been signed—if the publisher itself hadn’t been folded into some conglomerate or been driven out of business entirely. In the past half decade, half a dozen magazines about books had launched and folded, replaced, for the most part, by book blogs, which no one knew how to make money off of. And, though the Merrill Books autumn catalog was already labeling me a “bold new voice in the world of memoirs,” no one, other than Roth, myself, the copy editor, and maybe Jim Merrill had read any of The Thieves of Manhattan.