The Thieves of Manhattan (6 page)

“Check back Monday,” he told her. “How’s that soun’ like a good idea?”

Roth was there on Monday, but the girl wasn’t.

And neither was the library.

The sirens should have alerted him, but Roth didn’t even notice their wail until he arrived at the place where the entrance was supposed to be. Where the library had been were mounds of rubble, charred manuscripts, the shell of a building with its windows blacked out, smashed in; firefighters were moving deliberately but slowly through the wreckage as if there was no longer any urgency to their mission. The air was thick and dark, suffused with the stench of burned paper, which flurried in the breeze like black snow. The site was bordered by yellow caution tape, and when Roth tried to get a closer look, he couldn’t get past news reporters, gawking spectators, and police officers, who were trying to push everybody back so they could gather what appeared to be already beyond salvaging.

I had heard of the fire at the Blom—when he was still working, my dad often directed me to interesting news stories about libraries. He told me about the legendary Belgian library of Jean Népomucène Auguste Pichauld, a fictional library full of imaginary books. He taught me about tragedies that had befallen famous libraries throughout history—the great fire in Alexandria in 48
B.C
., the destruction of the Louvain Library in 1914, the fires set at the Los Angeles Public Library in the mid-1980s. He told me about the destruction of obscure libraries as well—those in Norwich, in Lynbrook, Long Island, and on the East Side of Manhattan at the Blom. Roth told me that the story of the Blom fire made all the New York papers and television stations.

An investigation was conducted, arson suspected but never confirmed; the fire could just as well have been caused by the library’s antiquated electrical system and generally shabby condition. What remained of the building was demolished, the ground was cleared; within a year, another building rose, condominiums, and soon there was no sign that the Blom Library had ever been there. There was no Girl in the Library anymore, no Hooligan Librarian, no
Tale of Genji
. Roth had witnessed an interesting beginning to a story, perhaps, but nothing more. That was the problem with trying to write about reality, Roth thought—the modern human condition, whatever that may have been, didn’t follow the arc of a good plot: characters appeared then drifted away; conflicts remained unresolved; imaginary love affairs stayed imaginary; even as dramatic an incident as a fire blazing through a strange old library was rendered banal or inconclusive in explanation. If anyone wanted to know who the Girl in the Library might have been, what might have happened to the Hooligan Librarian, if anyone wanted a more compelling story than an unexplained fire and a pile of rubble, ash, and blackened books cleared away to make room for condos, he’d have to invent a story.

“And that’s what I did,” Roth told me. “I made up a story.”

By now, I had finished my beer, and the 106 Bar was filling up. Couples were drinking pitchers, guys from the neighborhood were watching football on TV, hollering at the screen as they ate handfuls of wasabi peas from small wooden bowls, a jukebox played “People of the South Wind.” Roth had taken off his charcoal gray gatsby and hung it on the back of his chair. He was an especially good-looking man, I began to think, one who
inspired confidence as much as he demonstrated it, who held within him the promise of success, the kind of man I wouldn’t have minded seeing myself become in fifteen years if I could figure out a way to clean myself up, keep myself fit, and make a pile of dough.

“Why’re you telling me all this?” I asked.

“Patience, Ian,” said Roth.

I was feeling buzzed from the Guinness, and I was no longer in any rush to leave the bar. I had nowhere else to go but home, and no one was waiting for me there. Roth asked if I wanted to hear about the story he wrote, and when I told him I did, that I was a sucker for stories, he handed me another twenty and told me to buy us a second round.

Jed Roth started the novel
A Thief in Manhattan
as an original modern tale, but one that encompassed elements of classic adventures he loved—fights and chases, shoot-outs, a mysterious damsel in distress with a surprising secret. It began with a library much like the Blom, a hooligan librarian, a lovely, pale woman admiring
The Tale of Genji
, and a man at the next table wondering what it all might add up to.

It didn’t seem like much to build a story on, Roth thought, but
Genji
was the book that had invented novels, so it didn’t seem like a bad place to start. Roth tried to imagine himself back at the Blom Library, then asked himself, “What if?”

And maybe that was a good way to write a story, he
thought—start with reality, take a vicious left turn, slam on the gas, never look back. Maybe all stories started with “What if?”
What if
the Girl in the Library’s interest in the
Genji
wasn’t some passing fancy but a long-held personal obsession;
what if
Roth’s interest in the Girl wasn’t an idle reverie but a deep passion, the sort of love at first sight he’d read about in novels but never truly experienced?
What if
the Hooligan wasn’t just a librarian but also a thief who was planning to steal
The Tale of Genji? What if
every time the Hooligan said a manuscript was out or “unavailable,” he had actually brought it to a crooked appraiser’s office and fenced it?
What if
Roth had seen the Hooligan Librarian pilfering valuable documents from the Blom, heard the man discussing the
Genji
, then decided he would steal that book for the Girl himself?
What if
he actually involved himself in the story?

Roth imagined himself as the hero of a classic thriller, one in which a naïve young man stumbles upon a crime and soon finds himself in a situation beyond his control. He imagined hiding in the Blom Library until late in the evening, crouched in darkness among the stacks, inhaling the aroma of all those ancient volumes, breathing some of the same air and dust that had once been inhaled by Shakespeare, Chatterton, and Marlowe. He imagined watching the Hooligan Librarian insert some precious document into a metal case, lock it, then head out.

And then, in his imagination and in the story he was beginning to scribble as fast as he could because now he was getting excited, he was following the Librarian, yes, tailing that hooligan, and here they went—now out of the musty library, now onto the rain-puddled sidewalk, now into the subway station, now onto the uptown 6 train,
Excuse me, miss, excuse me, sir, hold
that door
. He imagined himself keeping an eye on the metal case as he squeezed his way through the crowds at Grand Central, then onto the Times Square shuttle,
Pardon me, sorry, pardon me
. He imagined emerging from another subway all the way down at Delancey Street, out into a windy, rain-soaked night, neon light now quivering in puddles, pedestrians clutching tightly to black poppinses, some of those poppinses blown inside out. He imagined keeping to the shadows; trying to stay warm and dry in his gogol; hiding in the doorway of a bodega. He imagined himself watching the Hooligan Librarian pounding the buzzer on a panel in a doorway across the street; the door clicking open; the Librarian disappearing inside the dilapidated six-story building.

The faster Roth wrote, the more ideas kept coming. “What if?” he kept asking himself.

What if?

Up five flights of rickety stairs where the Librarian was headed, there was a seedy fencing operation masquerading as a manuscript appraisal service. Stacks of dusty manuscripts were piled on lopsided shelves, and jewelers’ loupes and magnifying glasses were scattered on a long desk. Behind the desk, Roth imagined, there was a woman about seventy. She wore thick Joan Didion glasses and her silver hair was parted down the middle and gathered in a tight bun. She was straitlaced in appearance, but she swore like a sailor; every other word out of her mouth seemed to start with an F. Roth decided that the fence would be Iola Jaffe, sole proprietor of Iola Jaffe, Rare Manuscripts and Appraisal Services.

Roth felt himself immersed in the story now, could imagine his characters’ physical appearances, their names. Once
Norbert Piels—yes, Piels would be the name of the Hooligan Librarian—once Norbert Piels had finished cutting some deal with Iola Jaffe, he would exit the apartment, step out into the rainstorm with his case, hail a cab. And Roth, or whoever the hero was—he hadn’t come up with that name yet but Roth was as good a name as any—would catch a taxi too. And then,
zhooooom
, a game of Follow That Cab, detective stuff, noir thriller, 1940s, a lady cabdriver:
“You keep a good tail on that taxi, there’ll be a twenty in it for you, sugar.”
Across Delancey they ride, up the West Side Highway, exit at Ninety-sixth Street, windows foggy, wipers going, north to Tiemann Place, where two taxis stop:
“Keep it.” “Thanks for the change, mister—say, you know, I get off work at twelve.” “Some other time, precious.”
The two men emerge from their taxis; one heads for a droopy prewar midrise, the other follows at a distance. Roth stands under a streetlamp, watches Norbert Piels enter his building, waits for a light to go on,
look, there’s one
, fourth floor.

In Roth’s story, he stands there all night, watching. Waiting for morning. Then, early the next day, the skies clear, and Norbert Piels lumbers out of the apartment building, heading for the 125th Street elevated train platform. Our hero follows him down the street, up the escalator, onto the platform. The southbound number 1 train arrives, doors open, people jostle to get on. Piels, too big and bulky for the gatsby he’s wearing, tries to shove his way past, but our hero shoves him back:
’Scuse me, pardon me, bugger off, how’s that soun’ like a good idea?
In the confusion, Roth reaches into the Librarian’s pocket, grabs his keys, pockets them, and the train doors close. Roth doesn’t board the train but Piels does, and it starts rumbling south. Roth or whatever his name is runs for the train station stairs, down to the
street, and catches a cab:
Blom Library, Thirty-third and Lex, and make it fast
. When he gets to the library, he tries Norbert’s keys, then opens the door. He enters the reading room, waits for his eyes to get accustomed to the dark. And then he sees it under glass:
The Tale of Genji
. The “Shining Lord.” The illustration on display is so lovely, the shimmering cover magnificent. But there is only a moment to admire, because the Librarian is approaching the door, the door is opening, and
bam!
Roth brings his fist down on the glass. It shatters, the alarm sounds, and our hero grabs
The Tale of Genji
and runs for the back door, down the stairs, out to the street.

Taxi!

Back to Delancey Street, back to Iola Jaffe and her rare and most probably stolen manuscripts, up the stairs to the sixth floor—
What is this?
Roth wants to know.
What is it worth?
Iola Jaffe, a grim-visaged figure all in black, lips pursed as if she just tasted something foul, hisses:
How much is this
Genji
worth?

Iola Jaffe sighs, contemplating. “No one ever has any questions about literary merit,” she says. “No one asks about provenance or cultural relevance. Just ‘how much?’ World full of Philistines! How much? Twenty years ago, the price at auction for one like this was six point six million. That’s how motherfucking much.”

“And
today,”
Roth asks, pressing her, “how much would
this
one be worth
today?”

“Today?” she asks.

Iola Jaffe steps into another room. There are sounds of clattering, the mewing of cats—she’s the sort of woman who would keep cats. When she returns, she’s holding a loaded .38-caliber canino.

“Today, I’ll take it for free,” she says, and directs Roth to put the manuscript down. He backs away, raises his hands. But then he reaches forward and lunges for the gun. They wrestle and the gun flies to the floor. Iola goes for the canino, while Roth goes for the book. He grabs it, throws open the door, and runs out. Iola fires her weapon; hammetts whiz past Roth’s head as he races down the stairs, fourth floor, third floor, second, first. He pushes the door hard, shoving Norbert, who has just arrived, and knocking him to the ground. “Wot you done?” Norbert Piels asks, his eyes wide. Manuscript under an arm, our hero jumps into a taxi:
Step on it, driver!

The crowd at the 106 Bar was thinning out. The game on the bar’s TV was over; the sports fans were heading home. The bartender shouted, “Last call.” Roth and I were nearly done with our fourth beers, and he was winding up his story. He had, in fact, managed to put elements into it from just about every genre he loved. In the cat-and-mouse game between the narrator, the Hooligan Librarian, and Iola Jaffe, there were elements of espionage fiction; in the chase for the manuscript, he had found a sort of treasure hunt. In the hero’s seemingly futile search for the Girl in the Library, Roth modernized tales of knights. And in the climactic confrontation, which he borrowed from one of his own short stories, the one entitled “A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross,” hero and villains fought it out for the
Genji
, which was buried outside Manhattan in the titular
location. The scene was an updated and fairly brutal Western shoot-out in which the hero offs his foes before hopping a train to find his girl.

A Thief in Manhattan
didn’t sound like the kind of story I’d write or read, and certainly not the sort I’d mention when trying to impress anybody. Back then, I tended to define my tastes in opposition to whatever was deemed either brilliant or popular; the quality or success of a work was probably directly proportional to how much I envied it. But Roth was a talented storyteller, one confident his listener would follow him wherever he went. So I was surprised when he told me he had been unable to find anyone to publish his novel.