The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,25

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’t planning 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 face with it. “You’ll say it all happened to you just like it did in the book. And if you agree, Ian, here’s what will happen next. Agents will want to represent your book. Publishers will want to buy your book. There will be reviews of your book, there will be interviews with you, and then …”

“Then what?” I asked.

“Then what? Then, when a hundred thousand copies of your book have already been shipped to every bookstore in America, you’ll say that every word in it is a lie, that it was all made up. And here’s the part you’ll like, Ian. When people ask why you did it, why you took a book full of lies and pretended it was true, you’ll tell them that you did it because it was the only way to get anyone to pay attention to your stories. And soon those stories you wrote, the ones no one would publish because they were too small and no one knew who you were—everyone will want to publish them. Because you’ll be somebody then, Ian. You’ll have a name.”

I couldn’t tell whether he thought I was the stupidest guy in the world, or the cleverest and most cynical. He seemed to be suggesting that the two of us had a lot in common, had been implying that ever since we’d sat down at the 106 Bar and he’d told me his life story, and I had no idea whether he thought he was paying me a compliment or the nastiest insult he could devise.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you’re the first person I’ve met who might hate Blade by Blade even more than I do,” Roth said. He told me that he’d been coming to the café before I’d noticed him. He had heard me mouthing off about Blade Markham, and that’s when he’d come up with the idea