The Thieves of Manhattan (5 page)

“Motherfucker,” I heard myself say as I darted toward the man.

I have no idea if he smiled or gaped, I wasn’t focusing on his face. I felt a chilly but overpowering sense of purpose as I reached for the man’s book, grabbed it from him, threw open the door to the café, whipped the book as hard as I could down the street, then got right up in the man’s face. I could see my breath fog up the lenses of his franzens as I warned him to never, no,
never
come into our café again, and if I ever saw him with that book again, I’d “burn the thing to cinders.”

Only when the Confident Man left the café did I notice that everyone inside was staring at me, even Joseph, who had hauled himself up the steps just in time to see me hurl
Blade by Blade
half a block down Broadway.

Joseph didn’t need to say anything; I knew that I was done at Morningside Coffee. Faye had talked him out of firing me
half a dozen times before, but I knew she couldn’t do it now. I ripped off my smock and visor and threw them onto the floor. Then I went straight for the tip jar, poured its contents out on the counter, tallied them up, took my third, and stuffed the money in my pocket before blasting out the door.

I headed down Broadway, not really knowing where I was going, just that wherever it was, I wanted to get there fast. I could feel my pulse just about everywhere in my body; it beat against my temples as I began making my usual quick transition from exhilarated “I can’t believe I did that!” to panicked “What the hell did I just do?” Then I saw the Confident Man, his newly scuffed copy of
Blade by Blade
in one hand as he stood under a streetlamp at 115th Street. He was staring straight at me.

“Buy you a beer,” he said.

“No, thanks,” I said. I walked faster, but he kept pace.

“It wasn’t a question,” he said.

I stopped, but my heartbeat quickened.

“Look,” I said, “nothing personal, all right?”

“Of course it’s personal,” the Confident Man said. “You spend your life trying to tell stories that are true, and you get nothing to show for it. Then you see some con artist getting rich writing a memoir full of lies. How can you not take it personally?”

There was something uncanny about how accurately he had read my thoughts, almost as if he were not simply a man trying
to engage me in conversation but a conjurer showing me some parlor trick he had mastered.

“Buy you a beer, Ian?” he asked.

I could feel his hypnotic gaze pulling me in.

“You know my name?” I asked.

“And your work, too,” he said.

“My stories?”

He nodded. “I’ve even read some of them. They’re smart, well-turned, but the fact is, they’re just too quiet and small. Nothing ever really happens in them; nothing much is at stake.

“Beer?” he asked again.

We stood silently on Broadway for nearly a minute, neither of us moving aside for pedestrians. We stared at each other as I tried to figure out who he was, what his game might be.

“Just tell me what you want,” I finally said.

“I want you to listen to a story,” he said. “It won’t cost you anything.”

Okay, I said, I’d let him buy me a beer.

At the 106 Bar on Amsterdam Avenue, I chose a window table as close to as many other customers as possible. I let the Confident Man buy the beers but insisted that he give me the money so I could go up to the bar and order them just in case he’d been planning to slip anything into mine. I was tempted by his offer to let me keep the change from his twenty, but when I came back from the bar with the beers, I gave him the money—if he
wanted to buy me another beer, maybe, but I wouldn’t take anything from him, at least not until I knew who he was, and how he knew my name and my work. Even then, I wouldn’t have compromised my principles for a lousy four bucks.

After I’d had a few sips of my Guinness and we’d chatted a bit, just small talk and pleasantries about some stories I’d written and he’d apparently read, I began to relax. My headache began to recede too. Something felt reassuring about the Confident Man’s presence, his nonchalance, his ability to anticipate anything I might say, the way he seemed to know me as well as I knew myself. His demeanor seemed as smooth as his Jay Gatsby jacket and slacks, his manner of speaking as clear as the lenses in those black-framed franzens.

His name was Jed Roth, he told me as he leaned back in his chair, and until recently, he’d worked as an editor for Merrill Books. I had, in fact, sent some of my stories there—supposedly, the publisher didn’t accept unagented submissions, but all it cost me to try was the stamps and the paper, and who knew, maybe if I wrote REQUESTED MANUSCRIPT in big block letters on my envelope, I would catch the attention of some panza going through the slush pile. The Requested Manuscript gambit never worked for me. Once, I tried submitting a story to Miri Lippman’s
The Stimulator
magazine and wrote REQUESTED MANUSCRIPT on it in marker; when the story was returned to me, someone, probably Miri herself, had scrawled NOT in front of REQUESTED.

For a moment, I thought that Roth might be offering to publish my work, but he said he didn’t work for Merrill anymore, hadn’t in more than a year, wasn’t working as an editor anywhere now.

“What happened?” I asked. Roth held up his copy of
Blade by Blade
, showing me the spine with the Merrill Books logo on it.

“This happened,” he said.

I chuckled when he showed me the book. I still hated it, sure, but said I doubted that it had much to do with why Roth was no longer working for James Merrill, Jr.

“Are you sure about that?” asked Roth.

“No.” I shrugged.

“Well, then maybe you should hear the story now,” Roth said.

I told him to go ahead.

Jed Roth said his story was probably fairly similar to mine, but other than the facts that we both loved books and had spent our early adulthoods in New York trying to write them, that didn’t really seem to be true. He was the son of a privileged family; his ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. I had grown up in a small town that nobody had ever heard of midway between Indianapolis and Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of a law student and a university librarian. Roth had been educated in literature and writing at some of the finest East Coast schools; twenty years after my mom died, I had dropped out of grad school to take care of my dad and had never completed my degree.

A little more than a decade earlier, when he was about my age, Roth intended to devote his life to books—writing them,
reading them, selling them. He worked at bookstores, took internships at publishers. When he wasn’t working, he was reading in libraries, writing in cafés, submitting stories to journals and magazines, reading those stories aloud at open-mike nights. This part sounded fairly familiar to me, but even here, our life stories weren’t as similar as Roth seemed to think—I was always more interested in character than plot; Roth said he didn’t care much about developing characters, what was important to him was telling a good tale.

Roth had tried to work as much as possible in places that would inspire him to write, the older and more atmospheric the better—the Society Library, the Mercantile, the reading room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. At these and other locations, Roth read classic yarns, swashbuckling high-seas adventures, hard-boiled detective stories, Western shoot-’em-ups, stories of prospectors digging for gold. He read Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, B. Traven, G. K. Chesterton, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He liked chase scenes, confrontations aboard tall ships or fast-moving trains. When he first started trying to write seriously, he imitated the stories he was reading, wrote penny dreadfuls, fast-paced thrillers, tales that whipped by so fast the pages practically turned themselves. He gave his stories mysterious, evocative titles—“A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross”; “It’s Always Darkest Just Before the Kill.” In every one of his stories there were treasure maps, plot twists, and clues; his chapters were short, and every one ended on a suspenseful scheherazade. He said he was a fast writer; he figured he could make a living cranking out one story after another.

But after he’d begun submitting the stories to prominent literary agents and publishers, he received just about the opposite
responses that I tended to receive regarding mine—there was too much going on in his work. Sure, the stories were entertaining and suspenseful, but they didn’t speak to contemporary society or the human condition. Given all there was to write about in the modern world, who still wanted to read about buried treasure or prospectors digging for gold? Roth needed to draw on his own experiences and observations.

Roth said he had never thought of writing from his own experience; to him, writing a story was supposed to be about making something up. He had never considered reading to understand more about the human condition; reading was all about escaping it.

Disheartened, Roth spent hours when he wasn’t working wandering the streets of Manhattan searching for modern stories, adventures with contemporary settings. He felt hopelessly out of date; maybe he had been born in the wrong era. The stories he read in newspapers concerned property crimes, home invasions, bribery scandals, and all that was too dull, depressing, and real. He truly wanted to write swashbucklers and Westerns, but there were no pirates doing battle on the East River, no cowboys riding horseback on the Central Park bridle paths, no treasure maps in Riverside Park. Nowhere could he detect any glint of buried gold. He placed a few stories in obscure journals and men’s magazines, published some in anthologies with titles such as
Fantastic Yarns
and
Unknown Tales
, but the most he ever made from his writing was fifty bucks.

The Blom Library on Lexington Avenue and East Thirty-third Street had once been the property of Chester Blom, an early-twentieth-century railroad magnate and collector of manuscripts and East Asian art. The dusty and mildewed reading
room of the Blom Library was filled with seemingly priceless curiosities—Shakespeare folios, letters the Bard wrote to Anne Hathaway, obscure Gospels written on parchment, codexes of the Comte de Graal, original letters written by Cicero, Rousseau, Goethe, and Voltaire. The Blom’s most prominently displayed possession was a rare and precious bound copy of Murasaki Shikibu’s
The Tale of Genji
, an eleventh-century illustrated version of the classic book that had been used by professional readers who performed Murasaki’s tale before wealthy spectators, many of whom were unable to read.
Genji
was a thousand-page epic concerning the loves and travails of the eponymous son of a Japanese emperor. It was considered by many to be the world’s first novel and the foundation of modern fiction, and this manuscript was its earliest-known surviving exemplar. The book, with its stained leather cover, adorned with gold filigree, and opened to its exquisite, first illustrated page, which depicted Genji’s birth, was displayed in a glass case in the reading room. The character of Genji was nicknamed the “Shining Lord” for his beauty, and the shimmering gold leaf on this book’s cover inspired its own nickname—the “Shining Lord Manuscript.”

Chester Blom’s widow, Cecille, had willed the library and its collection to a private foundation that was run by her heirs, to be used solely for the study of its contents. The library and its reading room were open to members of the Blom family and to scholars and writers who successfully completed a detailed application and paid a five-hundred-dollar annual membership fee. One evening, while walking south on Lexington toward the bookstore where he was working at the time, Roth looked through the library’s windows, saw the reading room’s green
desk lamps and its sagging bookshelves, and, immediately after entering, applied to become a member.

“An odd place, that Blom Library,” Roth told me as he sipped his beer, clearly relishing his memory of the place. The Blom collection was bizarre not only for its contents, Roth said, but for the way the library was run. It was too dark and musty to allow anyone to seriously read or study for any great length of time. Manuscripts that were available on certain days became unavailable on others. Well-qualified applicants who truly needed to see a copy of a specific manuscript for their scholarly work often found their research proposals rejected; people like Roth, who just wanted to browse, read, or write, were accepted. Unlike Roth’s other favorite libraries, which kept conventional workday hours, the Blom had an idiosyncratic schedule that actually suited Roth well—before he was due to open mail at Merrill Books or after he was done with a bookstore shift, he would hole up in the library. He’d sign out one rare manuscript or another, put on thin white cotton gloves to read for the first half of his library session, then brainstorm stories for the second half.

The Blom’s front desk was manned by a gruff, bald, and muscular goon who seemed to have little affection for literature. He smoked unfiltered vonneguts in the reading room and flicked ashes onto his desk. He spoke little and when he did, mangled the English language—“Wot you said?” he’d ask whenever Roth asked to see a volume. He’d demand Roth’s ID, study it, then ask, “Wot useta be your name is?” Even though the man never seemed to do much other than work crossword puzzles, he would often tell Roth not to bother him, to sit back down and return later—“How’s that soun’ like a good
idea?” he’d add. Roth began to refer to him as the “Hooligan Librarian.”

Most of the regulars at the Blom were academics, writers, or well-heeled senior citizens, who Roth thought might be descendants of Chester and Cecille Blom. Most were men, but one day, a young woman caught his eye. He never learned her name, even now still referred to her only as the “Girl in the Library,” and said he just remembered the color of her hair and eyes, and the pallor of her skin. As she strolled through the reading room, behaving as if she owned it, she seemed fascinated by all the documents and books, but particularly
The Tale of Genji
. Roth watched her intently studying the book through its locked glass cover, its beautiful, snow-covered landscapes, its parasol-hefting noblewomen, its splendid kimonos. She took notes in a little red book. Roth wondered who she was, whether she could read the language or whether she was just fascinated by the images. He imagined her to be a graduate student or perhaps a young editor working on a new translation of the book. He resolved that he would introduce himself to her and ask. But she didn’t stay long. He saw her ask the Hooligan Librarian if she could take out the “Shining Lord,” but the man said no, that wasn’t allowed; the book was “too delicate-like.” She asked to see some other manuscripts in the collection; no, the man told her, those weren’t available.