The Thieves of Manhattan (17 page)

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.”

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.

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
.

This pace might have been inconvenient for the industry as a whole, but it was phenomenally useful to the con artist who knew how to exploit the flaws in a world that spun at two different speeds. By the time the truth behind
The Thieves of Manhattan
would be revealed, all the checks would be cashed, and
Myself When I Am Real
would be in the hands of a copy editor.

Nearly a year had passed since I had gone with Anya to hear her read at KGB’s “Literal Stimulation,” and now I was walking into the Big Box Books on Broadway for the launch event of
We Never Talked About Ceauşescu
. When I worked up the street at Morningside Coffee, I was greeted every morning by the sight of a scowling, even-bigger-than-life cardboard Blade Markham in 3B’s window; tonight, his picture was gone, replaced by a giant cutout of Anya’s book cover. Blade Markham was here in person, though, standing with his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans at the front of the store near the podium. Geoff
Olden was shaking hands, smiling, passing out pairs of business cards.

A familiar crowd was here—Anya’s editor, her publicists, creative writing students from Columbia, and a few unsuspecting bookstore customers trying to make their way past the crowd to get whatever book they had come here to find, probably
Blade by Blade
. Isabelle DuPom was standing beside Geoff Olden near stacks of
We Never Talked About Ceauşescu
. Isabelle and I had dated for a few weeks in late July and early August, but we were a bad match. She was my agent’s employee and she had a book manuscript she was hoping to sell—exquisitely crafted but hopelessly small stories about her childhood in Montreal; I was an up-and-coming author with a big book on the way. We went to movies, attended readings, made exuberant yet passionless chinaski, and talked about books and writing, but when I was with her, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something was phony about our relationship, realizing too late that the phony thing about it was me.

Out the window of the bookshop, I could see traffic on Broadway, could see the café, too. For a moment, I thought I saw Faye in her baseball cap and paint-spattered jeans peering through the bookshop window—wishful thinking on my part. I longed to tell her stories again, but I knew she was no longer interested in hearing them.

I took my place behind the back row of folding chairs, most of which were filled when Blade Markham took the stage and bent down to speak into the microphone that had been positioned at Anya’s height. Blade spread his arms out, then flapped them at his side, like a quarterback trying to silence the home
crowd. He asked everyone to “give it up for Anya Peh-tresh-KOO, whose first book,
We Never Talked About Chow-Chess-Koo
, just
dropped
, yo.”

Blade applauded, hands above his head, and then the audience joined in. Anya embraced Blade before stepping to the podium. Something was shining on the ring finger of her left hand—apparently, she and Blade were engaged.

Anya had just started to read when Blade spotted me and walked fast in my direction, truth cross thumping against his chest. I didn’t know whether Geoff or Anya had told him I was here, whether he recognized me from the furniture store or from Geoff’s apartment, but when he asked me to “step outside for a minute, son,” I sensed he might want to roll me once and for all. I whispered that I was here to listen to Anya read, but he slapped me hard on a shoulder—“You’ve heard Anya read before, my man,” he said.