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Authors: Ethan Canin

The Palace Thief

BOOK: The Palace Thief
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Praise for
The Palace Thief

“Four brilliant longer stories, each seamlessly structured and with prose and characters to linger over.… Canin keeps readers so thoroughly engaged that the anticipation of resolution is almost like dread.”             —
Publishers Weekly

“Richly satisfying.”                       —
USA Today


The Palace Thief
is wonderful.… These stories, so wise and knowing, instruct and inform us, shed light on our inner lives. The achievement of Ethan Canin’s
The Palace Thief
—[an] addition to what is becoming the most distinguished body of work of any young American author—is that he gives affecting, unnerving voice to ordinary lives—and indeed, shows us how we struggle to live and make sense of this world.”      —R
OBERT
C
OLES

“Superb.”                                      —
Time

“Masterful … a keen and compassionate talent. His writing is cut of whole cloth; it is beautiful and it wears well.”

—New York
Daily News

“A heartening tribute to the form … captivating to the point that I found myself dreading the inevitable denouement. An exquisite performance.”        —G
AIL
C
ALDWELL
,
Boston Sunday Globe

“Ethan Canin’s achievement is one of both artistry and humanity.”


Newsday

“This is a beautiful book, the language and structure complex but clear, every trick and turn of the writing done in the service of the characters whom we can love and return to, time and again.”


The Orange County Register

“Brilliantly realised and beautifully written.”  —
The Times
(London)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1994 by Ethan Canin

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1994.

“Accountant” was originally published in the May 1993 issue of
Esquire
magazine. “Batorsag and Szerelem” was originally published in the July 1993 issue of
Granta
magazine. “The Palace Thief” was originally published in the Fall 1993 issue of
The Paris Review
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Canin, Ethan.

The palace thief / Ethan Canin.

p.   cm.

Contents: Accountant—Batorsag and Szerelem—City of broken hearts—The palace thief.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-853-9

1. Men—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.A495P34   1994

813′.54—dc20   93-26888

www.atrandom.com

v3.1

The author wishes to thank Po Bronson, Camille Capozzi, Chard deNiord, Alex Gansa, Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine, Michael Goldman, Leslie Graham, Maxine Groffsky, Kate Medina, Steve Sellers, and Judith Wolff for help with this book.

 

I

ACCOUNTANT

 

I
am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small. I have worked diligently, and I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years, yet now I must also say that due to a flaw in my character I have allowed one small trespass against my honor. I try to forget it. Although now I do little more than try to forget it, I find myself considering and reconsidering this flaw, and then this trespass, although in truth if I am to look at them both, this flaw is so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself, and this trespass was devious. I have a wife and three children. My name is Abba Roth.

I say this as background, that is all. I make no excuses for myself, nor have I ever. The facts are as follows: We live in San Rafael, California, and I work at Priebe, Emond & Farmer, the San Francisco firm, where I have worked since the last days of the Eisenhower administration. At one time or another we have owned a Shetland pony, dug a swimming pool, leased a summer cottage at Lake Tahoe, and given generously to the Israel
General Fund, although all that we still do is lease the cottage. My wife’s name is Scheherazade, and she will not answer to Sherri, her childhood appellation, anymore. We have two daughters, Naomi and Rachel, and a son, whose name is Abba also, although I know this name is not in fashion.

Recently a man I knew as a child called me at my office, and this is how this incident began. His name is Eugene Peters and we have known each other for most of our lives. We grew up together in Daly City, California, a suburb of San Francisco that, like accounting, has become the object of some scorn by particular segments of society. A popular song has been written on the theme that all the homes in Daly City are identical, although this happens not to be correct. In reality there were any number of different architectural plans used in the neighborhood where Mr. Peters and I grew up, although by coincidence he and I did in fact grow up in houses that happened to be built from the same one. The plans, of course, had been reflected on an axis so that each house became the mirror image of the other—each contained a living room, with the kitchen set in a side bay, two bedrooms off a short hallway, a basement downstairs, and on the garage side of the front yard a palm that in our childhoods grew from a seedling to the height of the roof. His room abutted from the left of the upstairs hall, as mine did, in our own house, from the right; their bathroom was on the right of the same hall and ours was on the left, et cetera, so that it sometimes struck me as odd when the floors and walls in his house were covered with furnishings belonging to his parents and not my own. We rode bicycles together and later drove in his Plymouth convertible; later still, we double-dated, and we played on the same baseball team. I played third base and Eugene, whose father had gone to Notre Dame with our coach, played shortstop.

BOOK: The Palace Thief
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