The Thieves of Manhattan (15 page)

When I met Roth the morning before my lunch with Olden, Roth was back in his usual form. He told me that the key to winning Olden’s trust was to refrain from acting either too eager or blasé. I was to let Olden decide who he thought I was; he treated people as if they were manuscripts. He liked to talk about how awful books had been before he got his hands on them, how unpolished and untutored his writers were before they had met him.

As for me, now that Roth had convinced me that Olden wouldn’t recall having read
A Thief In Manhattan
before, I had only two questions.

“What if he recognizes me?” I asked, remembering the night at the KGB and the Blade Markham party.

“He won’t,” Roth said. “When he met you before, you were
nobody. Now you’re a potential client. To Olden, those are two completely different people.”

“What about my short stories?” I asked. “Can I mention them to him?”

“Not yet,” said Roth.

“When?” I asked.

“You’ll know.”

I arrived at Fifty-fifth Street intentionally about ten minutes late, and was seated with Olden at his usual table. He was wearing a pale yellow sport coat over a black shirt and was eyeing one of his two watches—he wore a Rolex on one wrist, a red, blue, and green Swatch on the other. The two watches, one expensive, one not, was a fashion quirk that Roth told me Olden had picked up in Milan. Olden looked peeved at my tardiness, but when I caught his eye, he was all smiles and cackles.

“You don’t look like a thief,” he said as he shook my hand.

“Neither do you,” I said.

He liked that joke; cackled louder.
“Bueno conocerte, ladrón,”
he said.

Michael’s tablecloths were white, its chairs black leather with wooden frames and armrests, and the air was thick with talk of books and deals. Nearby, Olden informed me, the director of Knopf publicity was showing a new catalog to the nonfiction reviews editor of
Publishers Weekly
, who was taking notes on a pad. David Hirshey, executive editor at HarperCollins, was forking a chunk of salmon as he sat across from an author who wore a black T-shirt under a blue blazer and was muttering something about soccer. The ICM superagent Esther Newberg was dining with Patricia Cornwell.

As for me, I was wearing an old Ian Minot outfit—a wrinkled
white shirt that was now a little small in the shoulders and too loose around the stomach, battered jeans, a flimsy belt, and scuffed boots. The only stylish touch was the franzens. Roth had said that either dressing up or down for Olden would be a waste of time—Geoff said that anyone who didn’t dress like him was a “fashion victim” no matter what they wore. But I liked dressing down; later, when I would wear my new gatsbys to meet Geoff, he could take credit for my transformation.

Olden didn’t talk about
Thief
during the first part of our lunch, and I didn’t talk much at all. Editors and industry reporters kept coming over to shake Olden’s hand and schmooze. He didn’t introduce me to anybody, though, just waited until they were out of earshot, then talked smack about them—which agent was sleeping with which editor, whose novel was tanking on
Bookscan
, whose wouldn’t “earn out,” whose magazine wouldn’t last, who was about to get fired. He pointed out to me the agent with the eating disorder, the one with a coke habit, the one who had been justly hit with sexual harassment charges, the one who was having an affair with the editor of
The Stimulator
. He gestured to each of the writers he spotted and explained why he’d been right to reject their work.

I nodded and smiled through Geoff’s bitter monologues, kept smiling through my beet-and-goat-cheese salad and my poached halibut and Geoff’s
“El bistec, por favor,”
but I could barely contain myself when he seemed to start talking smack about me. He said he’d just gotten back from a “SpeedFuck” in Key West. He took lots of free trips—he twirled a sea scallop on the end of a fork—free trips were viewed as perks in the industry, but he hated them. The moment you started getting something for free, you didn’t want it anymore. He loathed
booksellers’ conventions and book fairs, all those slutty publicists getting drunk on expense accounts and getting fat on hors d’oeuvres, behaving as if publishing were a sorority rush; he hated all those lascivious foreign publishers acting as if every American thoroughfare were the Reeperbahn, cutting short meetings so they could return to their hotel rooms and watch pay-per-view porn. When the economy went down and took half the industry with it, he wouldn’t miss any of it. The worst part, he said, were the SpeedFucks—three-day weekends in resorts where writers paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of having their work evaluated by “industry professionals,” meaning him. One had to try to find constructive things to say about manuscripts so that their authors would feel they had gotten their money’s worth. But Olden said he didn’t even need to read the pages an author had written in order to critique them; he needed only to look at the writer. He could instantly recognize the permed, overweight women with their romance novels; the doughy, middle-management men who thought they could write thrillers; most of all, he despised the scruffy young men who thought they were better than the others, fancying themselves literary authors as they droned on about tending bar or pouring coffee, as if such experiences were meaningful or unique.

“See, with you I knew right away you were a good writer,” Olden said.

“How?” I asked.

“Your glasses,” he said, then went on to tell me why he thought my book was special. But now I was listening with only half an ear. The other ear and a half was already replaying Olden’s diatribes as I thought of all the daisies but mostly the
time I’d wasted on hoping to win over the likes of Geoff Olden, who disdained not just my stories but me. I thought of the literary seminars I’d attended when I first came to New York, the tickets I’d bought to book fairs. I fought the desire to walk out of Michael’s, to say that any triumph that might come at the end of my ordeal was not worth this humiliation. I kept telling myself that I was only playing a role and reciting lines, that Ian Minot wasn’t sitting here, ordering a trio of sorbets, that Geoff Olden was lunching instead with the author of
A Thief in Manhattan
.

Over coffee, Olden offered his criticisms of
Thief
—too long, he said, book groups rarely chose books longer than 250 pages anymore; the opening was slow, it really needed to grab people; the conclusion was too abrupt,
let us savor it more;
there were too many swearwords—most readers were women and they didn’t like characters who swore; the title needed work too. As he criticized both Ian Minot and the author of
A Thief in Manhattan
, I wasn’t sure which of us felt more resentful.

When the check came, Olden eyed it, raised his eyebrows, and whistled. He put down his platinum card, then handed me three pages of typewritten notes. As I scanned them, I kept thinking about how each of us should and would react—Ian versus the author of
Thief
. The author, the one whose glasses I was wearing, was a hustler, a rogue, a bit of a romantic, too—a man who believed in love and art and didn’t care how much something was worth or what some agent thought about his story as long as it could get him back to the woman he loved. Then there was Ian, the schlep in the wrinkled shirt and scuffed boots; he wouldn’t have been granted entrance to this lunch in the first place. The only person remaining was me, the man who
was not yet done being Ian Minot but who was not quite ready to be the author of
A Thief in Manhattan
. So I just thanked Geoff for his notes and didn’t say anything else; I figured I’d let him decide who I was supposed to be, and get back to work.

Geoff asked if I could return
Thief
to him in two weeks. But the day after our lunch, when I went back to Roth’s place, I couldn’t summon the motivation. Isabelle DuPom called me at Olden’s behest to ask how I was doing, and I told the truth—that I was working to return the manuscript to her boss at the appointed time and that making the changes was harder than I’d anticipated. Isabelle asked if I needed more time, and though I said no, I’d meet the deadline, I continued to fritter away days. After a week passed, I began to panic when I realized that half my time had elapsed, and I had not come close to cutting
A Thief in Manhattan
down to the size Olden had requested.

I spent the following week cutting and rewriting, chopping this paragraph and that, lishing entire chapters. But when the next Monday arrived and I reread my work, I realized that I had made the book worse. The shorter manuscript took longer to read; it lurched from incident to incident; Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels were as shallow and cartoonish as Roth had initially written them—their actions were not only improbable but also dull. The book was becoming one that Roth had warned me about—no reader would care whether it was true or not, and so wouldn’t feel betrayed when I revealed it to be false. I considered
calling Olden to ask for more time, but because I knew that I had to become the sure-of-himself author of
A Thief in Manhattan
, because I knew that I had to be an actor and not a reactor, had to act like something big was at stake, I vowed that I would send in the revised manuscript to Olden the following morning as promised, no matter how much work was left.

I must have spent hours pacing in front of Roth’s window, watching the wind blow the bright green leaves of the London plane trees, watching the ripples in the Hudson River, watching traffic zooming south but getting backed up in the northbound lanes on the Henry Hudson Parkway, watching the sky brighten as the sun rose behind Roth’s building. Cut about fifty pages, Olden had told me; lose the swearwords; change the beginning, the ending, the title. I watched the sun dip into the river, watched the sky grow dark and the trees disappear into its blackness. I saw southbound traffic stall, then ease up, watched the separation between river and sky evaporate.

Finally, in a blaze of inspiration and swagger, I returned to the original manuscript, glanced at it for just a moment. On the computer screen, I selected the entire document, then changed the font from twelve-point to nine, switched from Times to Palatino. The page count was now just about 250. Olden hadn’t liked the first paragraph, so I lished it and started with the second. Olden didn’t like the swearwords, so I figured what the hell, and just cut all of them out except for Iola Jaffe’s. He had found the conclusion too abrupt, so I added some paragraph breaks. I looked at the title, wondered what was wrong with
A Thief in Manhattan
anyway, and just changed it to
The Thieves of Manhattan
. I wrote a note to Olden thanking him for his
input—cutting it down really improved the pace, I said. I saved my document, addressed my email to Olden, then clicked
SEND
.

Before I headed out of Roth’s apartment, I paused in the living room, where Roth was gazing out over Riverside Park. “Did you make those changes Olden wanted, Ian?” he asked.

When I told him yes, Roth nodded, then said he had faith that whatever I had done would meet with Olden’s approval.

“But Ian,” Roth added, turning to me. He hoped that I hadn’t worked too hard on the manuscript; just about all I really had to do was change the font and the type size, cut the swearwords, and rearrange some paragraphs, and Olden would be happy as long as I gave him credit for improving the book. For a moment, I felt angry that Roth hadn’t told me about this, but then I smiled, knowing that I had passed another test. The plan was going forward as smoothly as Roth said it would, and I felt certain that it would work.

“Tanto mejor,”
Geoff Olden said as he sat across from me in his Soho office clutching
The Thieves of Manhattan
to his chest,
“Tanto tanto mejor.”

The offices of the Olden Literary Agency were sleek, elegant, and understated, as though Geoff Olden had art-directed them for a film in which he played the starring role. Aside from Geoff’s clothing and accessories, everything was black, white, or silver—white walls, black floors, chrome details on his furniture; his receptionist and junior agents wore black, white, and
gray—so that Geoff’s mustard yellow blazer and matching eckleburgs stood out as the splashes of color in his otherwise black-and-white world.

“You’re a courageous man,” Olden told me.
“Muy valiente
. Only a man of great courage could write something so true.”

He put down the manuscript, reached across his desk to shake my hand, then, apparently thinking better of it, stood up, walked around the desk, and pulled me up into a hug. I could feel his chest heave as he cackled.

Olden didn’t listen to me any more than he had at our last meeting. Now that I had signed a contract with him, he talked about his other clients, tried to impress me with the company I would be keeping. The names of his authors went right past me until he told me of a “young Russian writer” whom he had signed up as a “low-value/high prestige client.” Some of his clients’ books, he said with a wink, meaning that he was referring to
The Thieves of Manhattan
, were projects that publishers liked because they could become commercial blockbusters. Others, he said, helped to establish or confirm agents’ and publishers’ reputations as arbiters of literary taste. Publishers didn’t always expect to make a lot of money on these sorts of books, and far fewer of them were being published than in years past, but every house had to put out some. The greatest thing, he said, was to find a book that did it all—won every award, made every year-end Top Ten list, and still sold like the dickens.

Geoff didn’t need to tell me he was referring to
We Never Talked About Ceauşescu
, but he did anyway, holding up the galley with the ghostly image of the Romanian flag superimposed over a photograph of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. On the flyleaf was a sultry black-and-white portrait of
Anya taken by Annie Leibovitz. I wondered how much she’d had to pay Leibovitz for that photo, then thought probably nothing—Anya knew how to get people to do things for free.