The Thieves of Manhattan Read Online Free Page A

isn’t the right word to describe the Chelsea townhouse where Geoff Olden hosted his
Blade by Blade
bash. His was the sort of New York dwelling I only ever saw in movies. On screen, it would have served as an embassy, a ballroom for some costume drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis, or maybe as Woody Allen’s apartment. There was a spiral staircase, an enormous, built-in library with books alphabetized and organized by subject, a kitchen that was bigger than my apartment, three bathrooms, a billiard table, a back deck with a hot tub. That was only the first floor, and Olden owned all three. Mind you, none of this had been purchased with the money he made as a literary agent; that career paid for the summer home in Rhinebeck, the wardrobe, and the eckleburgs. This Chelsea place had been in the Olden family since 1909, when Henry Olden made his first million in textiles. I liked to think that Geoff was sole heir to a jockstrap fortune, but I have no idea what was manufactured in the Olden Textile Mills, only that whatever it was must have generated lots of dough.
    Save for the waiters, the bartenders, the coat checkers, andme, the Blade Markham party was an anybody-who’s-anybody sort of affair—there was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., toting a walking stick and wearing a tuxedo, having just returned from
The Rake’s Progress
at the Met. There was a trio of drunk writers, all named Jonathan, each of whom was complaining that the
Times
critic Michiko Kakutani had written that she’d liked their earlier books better. The publisher James Merrill, Jr., was popping a grape into his mouth; Pam Layne was in a corner with one of her assistants, Mabel Foy, both trying far too hard to keep a low profile; the writer Francine Prose smiled at me and waved, then frowned when she realized that she had me confused with someone else.
    Anya stuck to my side during our first half hour at the party, when she said she didn’t recognize anybody, and spent all that time joking with me, squeezing my ass, and pushing me to the dining room to score appetizers that she claimed she was too shy to snag for herself. We had fun laughing at the whole scene. It was like a swingers’ party for celibates, I said—everyone checking one another out, leading one another into private rooms, whipping out their contracts and client lists to measure whose was bigger.
    But after Olden showed up with Blade Markham and his posse of droogs and cornered Anya, I barely saw her at all. Instead, I drifted from room to room, getting free drinks and eavesdropping. Publicity, marketing, and editorial assistants were in full effect, but I didn’t recognize many of them—they were a transient lot, all waiting to score their first book contract, after which they would give their bosses two weeks’ notice. A pair of these overeager types was chatting up Blade Markham’smoist, officious editor, Rowell Templen of Merrill Books, and I didn’t know what irritated me more—their sense of desperation or mine of abject futility.
    I kept drinking and drifting, feeling more and more aimless as time wore on. If this were really a swingers’ party, I would have been the one creepy humbert who couldn’t have gotten laid even here. I tried starting conversations but never knew how to finish them. Elsewhere, when people asked what I did, I said I was a writer. Saying it in a room full of authors, agents, and editors seemed ridiculous, but saying I worked in a café and wrote stories without finishing them wasn’t much of an icebreaker either. I contemplated inventing an autobiography, but I wasn’t good at lying. I finally decided to say I was living in New York on my inheritance; this had the advantage of being easy to remember because it was true—no one needed to know that barely four thousand dollars remained of the money my father had left me—but by the time I settled on this story, I couldn’t find anyone who seemed interested in hearing it.
    Anya was in the main ballroom, her back