The following is an excerpt from the novel Ascher:
Riordan asked me if I was a friend of Ascher’s and so I told him the truth, right there on Broadway, the snow turned gray and filthy as the dirt of the city settled upon it. I despised Konrad Ascher down to his very name, I said. Never has a more grotesque man walked this earth than Konrad Ascher, I said to this Riordan, trailing after me along the street. What more, or less, was there to say about such a deplorable human being as Konrad Ascher had turned out to be, and for that matter, had been his entire life, a man who kept his sorrows to himself while walking the lonely roads that life had offered him? I truly had no cause to vilify Konrad Ascher other than to correct the horrific imbalance that I had endured at the memorial service by speaking these words of truth. Riordan had large, pointy ears and small eyes and something rodent-like in his aspect and demeanor, some grotesque cartilaginous suppleness that would let him slither through the slightest of openings. How a rat could appear in human form was beyond me, and yet, in a moment of astonishing candor, as we approached my very building only a month before, he came forth with a confession extraordinary not merely for its candor but for the verification it provided me of all I had come to hold true about this strangely sinister man. All my life there has been something rat-like about me. I scavenge, I feed off what others throw away, I prey on and try to dominate those who are weak, Riordan said on that particular day, only feet from the building where I lived. Put aside for the moment the characteristics of a rat. The point is only that it was Riordan himself who was making this revelation for me to hold onto for all time.
Download the full pdf here: Ascher