pages, he wouldn’t ask why it had taken eight hours for me to finish, just, “Are you sure that’s all you want to do?” or “You’re certain you like it just the way I wrote it?” I would shrug and say yes, but by the end of the week, I was getting bored, both with the job and with Roth’s story, which was thinner than I remembered. Though the plot remained amusing, the characters were too broad and lacking in substance. Roth didn’t seem to give a damn about the people in his book; I couldn’t empathize with any of them. Iola Jaffe was a foul-mouthed harpy; Norbert Piels, an illiterate dunce; the Girl in the Library was a schoolboy’s fantasy; Roth’s hero was too suave and unflappable to be believed. I had trouble deciding whether to make changes or to leave everything just as Roth had written it and get on with my own work. The more I looked at how long it would take to complete the book at this pace of three pages a day, the more I started to add details—a line of dialogue I’d overheard, a little descriptive flourish, backstories for each character.
As the days drew on, I spent more time on A Thief in Manhattan, less on my own work; if I was really going through with this plan, then I wanted the narrator’s voice to be my own. Roth’s manuscript didn’t offer many details about his lead character, who had been named Roth but had little in common with the man I saw every day. His Roth seemed more sketch than fully realized human being, as if a screenwriter had created him, uncertain of who would wind up playing the role in the movie.
I began adding details from my own life—I gave the novel’s hero not only my name but my history: a childhood in a tiny, rural Indiana hamlet between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, a law-student mother who died young, a deceased librarian father. I gave him a hot Eastern European ex-girlfriend, too, and when it came to describing the Girl in the Library, I made her a sexy smart-ass with a baseball cap, boots, paint-spattered jeans, red hair, a concert jersey, and the tattoo of a twilight flower on a shoulder. For one of the chase scenes, I even used my knowledge of the freight trains that used to pass through my hometown.
I began to work longer hours and Roth paid me for overtime. I took research field trips, went to the New York Public Library microfilm reading room, where I studied whatever I could track down about the history of the Blom Library. I couldn’t find much—a 1951 piece about the library’s history; items about various accidents that had struck the library over the years; obituaries from the Times for Chester and Cecille Blom; an “Also Worth Noting” listing in a 1974 travel piece about “Undiscovered New York,” and then the Metro pieces about the Blom fire, which hewed to the story Roth had already told me, that arson had been suspected but never confirmed, and that the most valuable manuscripts—the first editions, the Shakespeare folios, The Tale of Genji—had been destroyed. One afternoon, I took a taxi from Roth’s apartment to the site of the Blom Library on Lexington to see the condo building that had replaced it. The trips didn’t help me to add much to the manuscript, but the story did begin to feel more real and true, the characters more sympathetic.
Soon, Roth began taking me on his own field trips—Lessons in Lying, he called them. He said he had little doubt in my ability to fess up to the whole story when the time was right but was less certain about whether I could bluff agents and publishers and, later, journalists, all of whom would be necessary for our plan. He took me to Atlantic City, where he won three hands at a blackjack table; to swank parties and clubs where he quietly but confidently talked his way past bouncers; I stood beside him in a supermarket checkout line where he handed a cashier a ten-dollar bill, took his change, then claimed he had given her a fifty.
“You didn’t give me any fifty,” the cashier told him.
“I did,” said Roth. He stared at her until she reached into the cash register for more change.
Roth said he didn’t care about the few bucks he made here and there from these little “lessons”; he was after “far bigger