Free The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer Page A

father’s last months, he said the meds never did much; the stories I read to him were all that seemed to ease his pain. Now my headache was gone, my drunkenness, too, and even if I was not as awake and chipper as Roth seemed to be—he kept walking in and out of the room, whistling, refilling my coffee mug, offering sandwiches and other snacks, apparently amused by the idea of playing Jeeves—I wasn’t ready to pack it in, and not just because of the five hundred bucks.
    Loath as I might have been to admit it at first,
A Thief in Manhattan
was a great read. While I was blazing through it, I no longer felt angry with Roth for having insulted me; in fact, I forgot how angry I had been. No, it wasn’t particularly literary. In a writing workshop, I probably would have ripped it apart—peopled by broad, outlandish characters, filled with unbelievable events. But it was fun and fast, and I just wanted to keep flipping pages to learn how Roth would make it all turn out. The man who had written this wasn’t some cynical former editor; he wasan ambitious and creative young man, one who loved books and adventures, and hadn’t yet learned to stop asking
What if?
    Apart from the story itself, what I liked most about
A Thief in Manhattan
were Roth’s knowing literary references, the sorts of details that might have seemed precious to some readers, but not to a librarian’s son. Throughout, Roth employed a literary sort of slang; he called an overcoat a “gogol,” a smile a “cheshire,” and an umbrella a “poppins.” He called trains “highsmiths,” because they appeared so often in Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers, and referred to money as “daisies,” since in
The Great Gatsby
, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Daisy Buchanan’s voice as being “full of money.” At the end of Roth’s manuscript, he included a glossary of literary terms, but I didn’t need to consult it much; the only one I didn’t get was “canino,” Roth’s word for a gun, which he took from the name of a heavy in
The Big Sleep
, a book I had never read.
    References to books appeared on nearly every page of Roth’s novel. When the reader first encountered the foul-mouthed manuscript appraiser Iola Jaffe, she was looking up from the Riverside Shakespeare, specifically Act III, Scene ii, of
Othello
, where Iago tells the Moor, “Men should be as they seem.” In the novel’s climactic moment, when it appeared the hero was about to be shot dead by Norbert Piels, he was able to wrest the gun away, shoot his adversaries, Piels and Jaffe, then hop an 8:13 train, 813 being the Dewey decimal number assigned to fiction. The longitude and latitude of
The Tale of Genji’s
location corresponded to the Dewey numbers for illustrated books and foreign reference works. I knew that Roth’s book was probably filled with more clues and in-jokes I wasn’t getting, but I was reading too quickly to try to figure out all of them.
    I kept turning pages, reliving all the parts of the adventure Roth had told me, feeling surprised by all the plot twists that he hadn’t. I felt “Roth”’s passion for the Girl in the Library, his sorrow at the sight of the Blom reduced to rubble after Norbert set it ablaze in a fit of rage upon realizing that Roth had stolen
The Tale of Genji;
I felt my heart thump when Roth was being chased by Iola and Norbert, felt both horror and catharsis when Roth shot them dead, then buried them in the desolate field beneath a golden cross, and I felt elated when Roth was about to be reunited with the Girl in the Library. And when I read the last page and its final, charmingly hokey line, a question spoken in darkness by the Girl—“True love never has to end, so why shouldn’t our story continue after the last page has been written?”—I couldn’t help but think that Roth was talking about not only one love affair and one story, but about all stories, for a good story never has to end when it lives on in our minds. And I couldn’t