The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,45

revenge.

GETTING GEOFF OLDEN

Though I relished the idea of duping Geoff Olden, I had reservations about trying. After all, he’d read A Thief in Manhattan when Roth had submitted it as a novel. But as always, Roth’s confidence allayed my concerns. People in publishing had short memories, he said, Olden especially. He barely remembered books he had rejected months ago. Olden turned down dozens of novels every week; there was no way he’d remember one he’d read in an afternoon more than a decade earlier, let alone one that was now a memoir.

Roth told me that he knew how to get just about any agent in New York to represent our book, but if I wanted Geoff Olden, he would take a bit more work than most of the others. Some agents responded well to flattery, some responded best to their clients’ recommendations, some were horny humberts who were interested only in good-looking authors and asked potential clients to submit photos, while other agents, most of them really, were just looking for books with that elusive combination of commercial potential and literary heft.

Geoff Olden was not particularly different from the rest of the agents—he understood the usefulness of everything Roth mentioned; all successful agents did. What distinguished him was his need to always be proving someone else in the industry wrong. He measured his worth by the successes he had had with authors his competitors had overlooked. The phenomenal sales of Blade by Blade were delicious, but not nearly as much as the fact that they had come after more than a dozen other agents had turned the book down.

Roth and I didn’t approach Olden directly; instead, we crafted query letters to the agents Olden most despised, hoping these letters would earn immediate and insulting rejections. We sent sample chapters from Roth’s earliest and most overwrought stories and A Thief in Manhattan drafts, pages from my least-consequential stories, comparing them favorably to works written by the agents’ most celebrated clients (“Dear Mr. Wylie: In my coffee shop romance, you may well find themes reminiscent of those in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”; “Dear Mr. Parks: In my depiction of contemporary New York, you may hear echoes of Jonathan Lethem’s descriptions of Brooklyn”; “Dear Mr. Simonoff: Since I assume you’ve grown weary of representing Joompa Laheeri … [sic]”).

I had expected that the agents would send back the same curt form letters that I generally tended to receive. But the letters Roth helped me write must have gotten under their skin. Within weeks, we had assembled a portfolio of damning rejections from a Who’s Who of literary agents who lambasted the author of A Thief in Manhattan for his poor manners, his bad taste, his lousy grammar, and his ham-fisted writing style, which, three agents said, would “never find an audience in today’s market.” We bundled the letters in a packet and sent them to Geoff Olden, complimenting him on having the foresight to recognize what other agents had overlooked. Roth said that once Olden had read our letter, he would ask his assistant, Isabelle DuPom, to shoot me a quick email, requesting my complete manuscript.

On the morning I got the email from Olden’s office just as Roth had predicted I would, I FedExed a copy of A Thief in Manhattan to him with a short, fawning note, then returned to Roth’s apartment, where I asked Jed how long I should expect to wait for Olden’s response.

Jed looked at his watch. “About seventy-six hours,” he said, and when I laughed, he shrugged, a little irritated, it seemed to me. Wasn’t I done doubting him? Wasn’t the script playing out exactly as it had been written? Wasn’t I done fussing about longitudes, latitudes, 8:13 trains, and seventy-six-hour estimates? He asked if I wanted to bet whether he would be right or not, and when I told him I didn’t, he suggested that I take the next seventy-five hours off; when the seventy-sixth arrived, we would get back to work.

AN UNEXPECTED GUEST

I had told Roth that I wouldn’t gamble about when Olden would respond, but I probably should have taken that bet—for Olden didn’t call in seventy-six hours; he called the very next afternoon, when I was jogging south along the Hudson River.

I knew it was Olden before I answered; hardly anyone ever called me on my cellphone anymore, and Roth’s number never appeared as “restricted.” Geoff told me that he had just finished reading “Thief”—the man seemed fond of abbreviations—and found it to be muy