The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,18

but Piels does, and it starts rumbling south. Roth or whatever his name is runs for the train station stairs, down to the street, and catches a cab: Blom Library, Thirty-third and Lex, and make it fast. When he gets to the library, he tries Norbert’s keys, then opens the door. He enters the reading room, waits for his eyes to get accustomed to the dark. And then he sees it under glass: The Tale of Genji. The “Shining Lord.” The illustration on display is so lovely, the shimmering cover magnificent. But there is only a moment to admire, because the Librarian is approaching the door, the door is opening, and bam! Roth brings his fist down on the glass. It shatters, the alarm sounds, and our hero grabs The Tale of Genji and runs for the back door, down the stairs, out to the street.

Taxi!

Back to Delancey Street, back to Iola Jaffe and her rare and most probably stolen manuscripts, up the stairs to the sixth floor—What is this? Roth wants to know. What is it worth? Iola Jaffe, a grim-visaged figure all in black, lips pursed as if she just tasted something foul, hisses: How much is this Genji worth?

Iola Jaffe sighs, contemplating. “No one ever has any questions about literary merit,” she says. “No one asks about provenance or cultural relevance. Just ‘how much?’ World full of Philistines! How much? Twenty years ago, the price at auction for one like this was six point six million. That’s how motherfucking much.”

“And today,” Roth asks, pressing her, “how much would this one be worth today?”

“Today?” she asks.

Iola Jaffe steps into another room. There are sounds of clattering, the mewing of cats—she’s the sort of woman who would keep cats. When she returns, she’s holding a loaded .38-caliber canino.

“Today, I’ll take it for free,” she says, and directs Roth to put the manuscript down. He backs away, raises his hands. But then he reaches forward and lunges for the gun. They wrestle and the gun flies to the floor. Iola goes for the canino, while Roth goes for the book. He grabs it, throws open the door, and runs out. Iola fires her weapon; hammetts whiz past Roth’s head as he races down the stairs, fourth floor, third floor, second, first. He pushes the door hard, shoving Norbert, who has just arrived, and knocking him to the ground. “Wot you done?” Norbert Piels asks, his eyes wide. Manuscript under an arm, our hero jumps into a taxi: Step on it, driver!

THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART V

The crowd at the 106 Bar was thinning out. The game on the bar’s TV was over; the sports fans were heading home. The bartender shouted, “Last call.” Roth and I were nearly done with our fourth beers, and he was winding up his story. He had, in fact, managed to put elements into it from just about every genre he loved. In the cat-and-mouse game between the narrator, the Hooligan Librarian, and Iola Jaffe, there were elements of espionage fiction; in the chase for the manuscript, he had found a sort of treasure hunt. In the hero’s seemingly futile search for the Girl in the Library, Roth modernized tales of knights. And in the climactic confrontation, which he borrowed from one of his own short stories, the one entitled “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross,” hero and villains fought it out for the Genji, which was buried outside Manhattan in the titular location. The scene was an updated and fairly brutal Western shoot-out in which the hero offs his foes before hopping a train to find his girl.

A Thief in Manhattan didn’t sound like the kind of story I’d write or read, and certainly not the sort I’d mention when trying to impress anybody. Back then, I tended to define my tastes in opposition to whatever was deemed either brilliant or popular; the quality or success of a work was probably directly proportional to how much I envied it. But Roth was a talented storyteller, one confident his listener would follow him wherever he went. So I was surprised when he told me he had been unable to find anyone to publish his novel.

Times were different in publishing fifteen years earlier, when he wrote his book, Roth said, and the smarmy, pretentious agents and publishers he approached felt A Thief in Manhattan wasn’t sufficiently literary. It was just a fun page-turner that didn’t aspire to be anything more. Roth told me that he