Amateurs, Professionals, and the Distance Between

Leonard suggested we meet in a diner. Not a good diner — a specific one, on a stretch of Gratiot Avenue in Detroit that he said he used to drive past on the way to somewhere else. The kind of place with a counter and six booths and coffee that has been on the burner since the Ford administration. He was there before me, sitting in the last booth with his back to the wall, wearing a sport coat over a polo shirt, drinking that terrible coffee like it was perfectly fine.

Stevenson was late. Not fashionably late — genuinely late, in the way of a man who had misjudged the distance or perhaps the century. When he arrived, he stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the linoleum and the fluorescent lights and the laminated menus with the same careful attention he might have given a harbor he was entering for the first time. Taking its measure.

“Sit anywhere,” the waitress said without looking up.

Stevenson sat across from Leonard. I was in a chair I had pulled up to the end of the booth, my notebook on my knee, already aware that the geometry of the seating had placed me at a disadvantage — neither beside nor across from either of them, but adjacent, like a court reporter.

“I have read your work,” Stevenson said to Leonard, before either of them had acknowledged me or ordered anything. “You write about criminals.”

“I write about people who happen to be criminals. There’s a difference.”

“I am not certain there is.”

Leonard took a sip of his coffee. “In your stories, the criminals are pirates. They murder people and steal things and you make them charming. Long John Silver is one of the great villains in English literature and every kid who reads that book wants to be him, not the boy.”

“Jim Hawkins is not meant to be wanted,” Stevenson said. “He is meant to be inhabited. The reader is inside Jim. They want to be Silver because Silver is outside — Silver is the spectacle, the performance. But the experience of the book is Jim’s. The fear is Jim’s.”

“That’s a nice distinction. I’m not sure the reader makes it.”

“The reader does not need to make it. The book makes it for them.”

I tried to enter the conversation. “The story we’re here to discuss is a heist. Not piracy — a heist. An ensemble. People planning to steal something, and the plan going wrong. I was thinking about who these people are. Amateurs, probably. People in over their heads.”

Leonard looked at me for the first time. He had a way of looking at you that was not unkind but was very flat, very evaluative, like a poker player deciding what you were holding. “Amateurs are funny. Professionals are interesting. You want both in the same room.”

“I want amateurs,” I said. “The whole thing held together with spit and optimism. Like Topkapi — like Ambler. That feeling of a plan that was never quite a plan, more like a set of assumptions that happen to line up for about fifteen minutes before the whole structure lists.”

“Topkapi is a comedy,” Stevenson said. “A comedy of incompetence. The humor depends on the audience knowing more than the characters — seeing the cracks before they do. I am not sure I want that. Comedy of that kind requires distance. You watch the fools stumble. You do not stumble with them.”

“You don’t need distance for comedy,” Leonard said. “My guys are funny and you’re right there with them. Chili Palmer is funny because he takes himself seriously. The comedy comes from the gap between how he sees himself and how the situation actually works. You don’t need to be above him. You need to be next to him and slightly ahead of him.”

“Slightly ahead,” Stevenson repeated, as if testing the phrase. “Yes. That is a kind of dramatic irony, but intimate. The reader is not the omniscient audience in the balcony. The reader is the friend who can see the punch coming but cannot warn him in time.”

“Right. Exactly that.”

I wrote that down because it felt like something I could use — the reader as the friend who sees the punch coming. But I wanted to push past the comedy, or at least through it. “The other piece of this is identity. The Ripley element. Someone in the ensemble is not who they claim to be — or they become someone else in the process of the heist. The competence is a mask. The persona they adopted for the job starts to fit better than the original.”

Stevenson set down his coffee cup. He had ordered tea, and when the tea arrived it was a Lipton bag in lukewarm water, and he had looked at it with the expression of a man who has experienced genuine hardship and recognizes this as a minor instance of it. He drank it anyway. “This is the question I find most interesting. The moral cost of becoming someone you are not. In my story of Jekyll and Hyde — which I know is the one everyone mentions, and I wish they would not, because it has been reduced to a parable about duality when it is really a story about the pleasure of abdication — the terror is not that Hyde exists. The terror is that Jekyll likes being Hyde. The mask is not a burden. It is a relief.”

“That’s the Ripley problem,” I said. “Tom Ripley kills Dickie Greenleaf and takes his life, and the scary thing is not the murder. It is that Ripley is better at being Dickie than Dickie was. He’s more attentive, more charming, more present. The stolen identity fits. And then it starts to become the real identity, and there is no moment you can point to where the performance ends and the person begins.”

“I don’t write that kind of character,” Leonard said. He said it plainly, without apology. “My people are who they are. They might lie about their name, they might run a con, but inside they are always the same guy. Jack Foley robs banks because he is a bank robber. He puts on a suit and pretends to be a businessman and it is always a bank robber in a suit. The suit does not change him. The audience knows what’s under the suit. That is part of the fun.”

“But what if the suit starts to change him?” I said. “What if one of the people in the heist takes on a role — a cover identity, a persona — and discovers that the persona is competent in ways the real person is not? The persona can talk to people, can command a room, can make decisions without that half-second of doubt. And then the heist is over, or the heist fails, and they are supposed to go back to being themselves, and they cannot. Or they will not.”

“That is not a heist story,” Leonard said. “That is a psychological novel wearing a heist costume.”

“What is wrong with a heist costume?” Stevenson asked, and for the first time he smiled — not broadly, but with a particular kind of pleasure that I think was aesthetic. “All adventure is costume. You dress the questions in action. The sword fight is about something other than swords. The chase through the heather is about something other than running. If your heist is about identity — about the mask becoming the face — then the heist is the mechanism, not the subject. And the mechanism is better for being exciting.”

“See, this is where we part company,” Leonard said. He shifted in the booth. His coffee cup was empty and he turned it slowly on the saucer, a gesture I had seen him describe characters making in his novels — the small physical business that substitutes for interiority. “For me the mechanism is the subject. The heist is the story. How these guys plan it, how they screw it up, what they say to each other when it goes sideways. I don’t need the heist to be about anything else. The heist is enough.”

“Nothing is enough in itself,” Stevenson said.

“A good scene is enough in itself.”

“A good scene carries its meaning inside it, like a seed. You may not see the tree, but the seed knows what it is.”

“You just described subtext. Every writer uses subtext. I’m not arguing against subtext. I’m arguing against making the subtext the text. If your character turns to the camera and says ‘This heist is really about how we all wear masks’ — ”

“No one is suggesting that.”

“You were getting close.”

I laughed, which I should not have, because it made Stevenson stiffen and Leonard glance at me with an expression that said: pick a side or be quiet. I picked quiet for a while.

Stevenson spoke next. “The multiple voices. We have been told this story requires multiple voices — two or three narrators, each giving their version of the heist. Their accounts may overlap or contradict. I find this interesting. In Doyle’s work, Watson narrates, and the truth comes through Watson’s admiration and Watson’s limitations. The narrator’s blindness is the reader’s window. If we have three narrators, we have three sets of blindness. Three windows onto different parts of the same event.”

“Three unreliable narrators,” Leonard said.

“Not unreliable. Partial. Each tells what they saw, and what they saw is determined by who they are. The safecracker sees the vault. The lookout sees the street. The one who organized the thing sees — what? The plan. The beautiful plan that is no longer the plan because reality has intervened.”

“I like that,” I said, breaking my silence. “The organizer’s version is the most wrong because they are narrating the plan, and the plan is dead. The safecracker is the most accurate because they are narrating physical reality — this dial, this click, this door — but they have no idea what is happening elsewhere. And the third voice…”

“The third voice is the one who changed,” Stevenson said. “The one who put on the mask and cannot take it off. Their narration is unreliable not because they are lying but because they no longer know which version of themselves is speaking.”

Leonard refilled his coffee from the pot the waitress had left on the table. A gesture of terrible optimism, given the coffee. “The voices need to sound different. Not just different opinions — different rhythms. Different sentence lengths. One guy talks in short bursts, all action, no reflection. Another one circles, qualifies, can’t get to the point. The third is precise — too precise. Performing competence.”

“Performing competence,” I repeated. “That is the Ripley voice. The one who has studied how a competent person speaks and is reproducing it perfectly, and the perfection is the tell. A genuinely competent person is sloppy. They skip steps. They assume you know things. The performer never assumes. The performer fills in every gap because they are terrified of the gap.”

“Now you are writing the story,” Leonard said. “Which is what you should be doing instead of sitting here.”

“One more thing,” Stevenson said. He was looking out the window at Gratiot Avenue, at the used car lot across the street with its strings of plastic pennants hanging limp in the grey air. “The moral weight. I will not write a story — or permit a story written under my influence — in which theft is without cost. The adventure may be comic. The characters may be likable. The plan may be clever. But someone pays. Someone always pays. Not as punishment — I am not interested in morality tales. But as consequence. The coin has to come from somewhere. Ambler understood this. His amateurs in Topkapi escape, more or less, but they do not escape cleanly. Something adheres. Something has changed about how they see themselves.”

“Guilt,” I said.

“Not guilt. Guilt is too Catholic and too tidy. Knowledge. The knowledge that they are capable of this. That the plan they made and the thing they did was inside them all along, and now that it has been done it cannot be undone, and they must carry forward as people who have done this thing. Jekyll’s problem. Not the act but the knowledge that the act was pleasurable.”

Leonard was quiet for a moment. Then: “In Get Shorty, Chili Palmer is a loan shark who goes to Hollywood and discovers he is good at making movies. Better at making movies than at collecting debts. And the question the book asks — not out loud, because I do not ask questions out loud — is whether Chili was always a movie producer who happened to be a loan shark, or whether Hollywood turned him into something new. I never answered it. I don’t think it has an answer.”

“It does not,” Stevenson agreed. “And the absence of the answer is the story.”

“So your character,” Leonard said to me. “The one who puts on the mask. What do they steal?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Figure out what they steal and you will know what the story is about. Not what they steal from the vault. What they steal from themselves.”

The waitress came by and asked if we wanted anything else. Leonard ordered a piece of pie. Stevenson asked for more hot water. I sat with my notebook and the feeling that the conversation had arrived somewhere important without any of us intending it to, and that if I tried to name the place we had arrived, it would disappear. So I did not name it. I wrote down Leonard’s last sentence — what they steal from themselves — and underneath it I wrote: the performer fills in every gap because they are terrified of the gap. Between those two lines, I thought, was the story. Or enough of the story to begin.

Stevenson was still looking out the window. “The pennants,” he said. “On the car lot. They are designed to suggest celebration, but there is nothing to celebrate. They are an imitation of festivity applied to commerce. A performance of joy in the service of transaction.”

“They’re just pennants,” Leonard said.

“Nothing is just anything.”

“Some things are. That’s the difference between us. I look at the pennants and I think: someone hung those up this morning, probably the same guy who does it every morning, and he did not think about what they meant because they do not mean anything to him. They are part of his job. The meaning you are assigning to them is real — I am not saying it is not real — but it is yours. It is not the pennants’.”

“Whose story is this, then?” Stevenson said. “The man who sees meaning in the pennants, or the man who hung them?”

Leonard finished his pie. “Both. Neither. It depends on who is telling it.”

“Which brings us back to the voices.”

“Which brings us back to the voices.”

I closed my notebook. Not because I was finished, but because the conversation had reached a point where continuing would thin it out, and I had learned enough to be dangerous. Three voices. A heist that was also a performance. Amateurs with one professional in disguise, or one amateur who performs professionalism so well that the performance becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself. The comedy of miscalculation running underneath the psychology of self-reinvention. Stevenson’s insistence on moral consequence without moralism. Leonard’s insistence that the scene is enough, that the scene carries its meaning whether you name it or not.

The waitress brought the check. Leonard reached for it. Stevenson reached for it at the same time, and they both held it for a moment, and then Stevenson let go, and Leonard paid, and Stevenson looked at me and said, very quietly: “That is how the heist ends. Two people reaching for the same thing and one of them letting go, and neither of them certain whether letting go was wisdom or defeat.”

Leonard left a thirty percent tip, in cash, tucked under his saucer where the waitress would find it after they left.