Free The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer Page B

help but think that the reason why lately I had such trouble finishing stories was not because I wanted them to go on and on, but because I never really knew how to begin one. I wished I could learn how to start a story and see it through to the end so clearly that it could live on after the last page.

A MODEST PROPOSAL
    “So?” Roth asked. I put the manuscript down on the coffee table and took a long look out at his view of Riverside Park.
    “So what?” I asked.
    “So, what do you think?”
    I considered, then told Roth the truth, that I thought
A Thief in Manhattan
was a good story. To earn the five hundred dollars that was still on the coffee table, I told him that the book was a little violent and amoral for my tastes. Then I made some obvious points about his story’s plausibility: I said that maybe I wouldn’t have made all the Dewey decimal references—one was fun; three was overkill. I told him that I had a basic sense of most of the characters, but maybe Roth could have described the Girl in the Library better and told more about what happened after his hero reunited with her. Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels were amusing foils, but without knowing their backstories or motivations, I ultimately grew weary of Iola’s profane rants and Norbert’s cruelty; I saw only glimmers of their humanity, never saw them as fully realized characters. The hero, too, Roth, wasn’t sufficiently defined. I said that I couldn’t tell whether the character was supposed to be a naïve, inexperienced guy in over his head, or whether he’d been conning the reader from the beginning and knew a whole lot more than he was letting on. I also told him that I didn’t necessarily see why, even in an escapist caper, burying a valuable manuscript in some desolate field outside Manhattan made much sense, and when Roth muttered something about statutes of limitations and the fact that he liked to add “little turns of the screw” to his stories, I told him that, even so, a safe deposit box would have been better. But mostly, I said, my opinions didn’t matter much, because
A Thief in Manhattan
was an entertaining story, and one that he could probably publish if he still wanted to—so what was he planning to do with the book?
    Roth took a seat next to me on his couch, put his feet up on his coffee table, and then said that, actually, he himself wasn’tplanning on doing anything with the manuscript. He asked if I remembered what Geoff Olden had told him about it.
    I did: “No serious house in New York would ever consider publishing this in its current form, and there was only one way anybody ever would—
if every word of it was true.”
I could hear Olden saying that, cackling in his imperious, unctuous, snide, know-it-all way.
    “Man, what a jackass,” I said.
    “No, Olden was right,” said Roth, adding that
A Thief in Manhattan
was, in fact, too implausible, too slight, and too shallow. Fiction had to be plausible, more so than the truth. And Roth’s novel wasn’t plausible.
    “That’s why the book will be published, yes, but not as fiction, Ian. It will be published as a memoir.”
    I laughed a little when Roth said that, thinking he was making a joke about
Blade by Blade
. But when he stared straight at me, I saw he wasn’t joking.
    Wait, I said, beginning to put it together, did Roth really mean to say that he would try to pass off his novel as truth, that he would present everything—the chase scenes, the gunfights, the search for the Girl in the Library—as a memoir?
    “You’ll say it all really happened to you?” I asked.
    “No,” Roth said, and then he smiled. “No, Ian. We’ll say it all happened to
you.”
    I tried to play it off like I still thought he was joking, but now he was regarding me even more intensely, as if I’d become his coconspirator. And somehow, I felt as if I already had.
    “Yes, you’ll say
you
wrote it,” Roth continued. He kept repeating that word
you
as if he were slapping me in the