The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,20

and formed a more commercial imprint, JMJ Publishers. Jed Roth had thought that the further he rose in the company and the longer he stayed, the more freedom he would have. The opposite turned out to be true. He found himself questioned at every turn, burdened with thankless assignments—diet books, ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies—as Merrill Jr. paid greater attention to the highly profitable JMJ Publishers.

When a six-hundred-page memoir, written by a two-bit thug and music business hanger-on named Blade Markham, arrived at Merrill Books, Jed Roth had been working there for over ten years. He had a spacious office with a dramatic view, a list of about three dozen authors, and also a new assistant named Rowell Templen, who had been foisted upon him by James Merrill, Jr., who was either sleeping with Templen or owed Templen’s father a favor. Templen, an oily, sideburned twenty-four-year-old Princetonian, fond of velour blazers worn over V-neck sweaters and ties, had an obsequious air that, to Roth, rendered him immediately untrustworthy. Templen’s accommodating manner and his way of meekly knocking before entering Roth’s office could not disguise his ruthless ambition any more than the bottles of Listerine he kept in his desk and in his sport-jacket pockets could disguise his penetrating halitosis.

Jed was sitting at his desk, working through a gossipy Hollywood memoir as fast as he could, when Templen knocked twice, then entered with an intimidating tolstoy of pages.

“Time to read today, Mr. Roth?” he asked.

Roth said that he didn’t, but asked what Templen had in mind. Templen showed him the title page of Blade by Blade. He said he knew that Roth didn’t like to be bothered with submissions before they had been summarized, but he hoped Roth would make an exception. This book was brilliant, Templen said, so raw and so true; when he had read one of Blade Markham’s prison scenes, he practically palahniuked all over his desk. Roth told Templen to put Markham’s manuscript in his box and he’d look at it someday when he had the chance, but Templen said, No, Mr. Roth, there wasn’t any time to wait—three other publishing houses were already considering the book, and he was sure it would sell by the end of the week.

Roth didn’t know whether to feel angered or amused by Templen’s presumption—in all his years as an assistant, he never told Ellen Curl to put aside her work—but his curiosity was piqued. So, after Templen closed the door to his office, Roth picked up Blade Markham’s manuscript and turned to the dedication page. And then he burst into hysterical laughter.

THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART VI

Jed Roth and I were walking up Amsterdam Avenue now, passing shuttered storefronts, restaurants with chairs up on tables, all-night groceries populated mostly by hard-luck men and women standing on line for lottery tickets. Drunk Columbia University students were laughing too loudly, trying to walk straight lines as they searched vainly for bars that were still open. Roth said he had something he wanted to show me at his apartment, and I was too drunk to be suspicious anymore.

“So, what happened next?” I asked.

As we headed west on 111th Street toward Riverside Drive, I was trying not to slur my words; Roth, who I thought had drunk as much beer as I had, was still as precise as ever in his speech, as if he had already memorized his lines. His slacks and gatsby were as smooth as when the night had begun.

Roth said that he supposed he could have stopped reading Blade Markham’s manuscript after a page or two, when it became clear to him that just about every word was “utter horseshit,” but he read the entire thing. He supposed, too, that he could have just told Rowell Templen that he had read Blade by Blade and that he wasn’t interested. Instead, he channeled all the frustration he felt at the ignominy of editing diet, exercise, and celebrity books, all his anger at the direction Merrill Books and JMJ Publishers were taking, into marking up just about every page Blade Markham had typed. He noted every grammatical flaw, every preposterous boast. He worked past midnight, insisting that Rowell Templen stay until he was done. And when that time came, he called Templen into his office and proceeded to berate him for the better part of an hour, ostensibly to teach the punk a little bit about publishing and literature.

Everything about Blade by Blade was a lie, Roth told Templen, and if the young assistant