The Royal Family Read Online Free PDF

driver pins above the shearline, chamber by chamber; the plug rotated three or four degrees, making a shelf on which the top pins must rest so that they couldn’t slam back down like a vindictive whore’s teeth. (No sidebar, fortunately; this was not a General Motors car lock.) Now the bottom pins could move unobstructedly in their channels of vileness.
    The lock opened on the fifth bounce. He stepped into the greasy light.

 
     

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• BOOK II •
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Irene

 
     
     
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    “Generous, chivalrously generous!” Keller assented, much touched. “But, you know, prince, it is all in dreams, and, so to say, in bravado; it never comes to anything in action!”
     
    D OSTOYEVSKY , The Idiot (1869)
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| 15 |
    To say that there were times when Henry Tyler knew his life was ashes would have been an understatement in the English manner. People who possess no backbones whatsoever (and preferably no minds, either) can be most easily pleased, like children eating ice cream; where the ice cream money comes from, and under what conditions they receive it—to say nothing of the sanguinary destiny of even the most miraculous vanilla-chocolate cow—never breaches the barriers of their victorious vacuity. Next case: Roman senator types, so prodigiously favored or ossified with backbones that they can scarcely sit down, constitute the second most fortunate regiment of souls; when events fail them, pride carries on, and when the latter dies they will probably succeed in staggering a few steps farther, fortified by philosophic resignation, until they fall at last into their open graves, muttering: At least I did the right thing. —Tyler, like most of us, had not so much claimed membership in as been claimed by the third group, comprised of those who know, and are shamed, but do not or cannot act. If the grim first half of that black Book (rarely to be met with in Tenderloin hotels because its pages were long ago cannibalized for rolling papers) truly knows whereof it speaks, why, then Tyler’s own losers’ club got inaugurated in the days of Cain and Abel, whose parents, like evicted junkies who boast that even now they can wrap the landlord around their grimy little fingers, had continued to insist that they could still get right with God. Why, sooner of later He’d have to forgive them! It just wasn’t Christian for Him to go on holding a grudge like that. After all, they’d only eaten one apple—they hadn’t even finished it, if you consider the core, which had borne a worm or serpent or something (and wasn’t that God’s fault, to provide them with rotten fruit?); no, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that apple had scarcely been worth saving. (Thus spake the whore who’d stolen a mere twenty from Tyler’s pocket while he was on Mason Street calling his answering machine.) Remembering Eden’s swanky landmarks—the silvery river of vodka, the meadows of opium poppies springing white and orange in a nutmeg breeze, the Chinese-style zen rock garden whose sparkling pebbles were all refined crack cocaine—Adam and Eve could scarcely believe that their happy pre-Lapserian eternities had become dust. Anyhow, they weren’t damned; they were on parole. Nothing was final. If I put a gun to my head, I know perfectly well that even after I’ve pulled the trigger I can always duck out of the way or even blow the bullet back down the barrel with a cheery gust of breath, because it was I who initiated the cause; what injustice if I couldn’t control the effect!—No matter, the expelled spouses said to one another; He could come talk to them anytime and they’d help Him see the light. (Call this no backbone at all, or else backbone so well crystalized as to occupy the cranial cavity.) But Adam and Eve’s boys, sullen, lice-infested, and pallid from too many seasons of hunting blind-fish in the familial cave, never owned that solace. Imperfection had not originated with them, nor hadresponsibility. They