The Tyrant's Novel Read Online Free PDF

by the silence this announcement produced. Why shouldn't we be enthusiastic though? After all, Andrew had achieved a big state job, and the house to go with it. We said, Well, that's remarkable. Congratulations, Matt. You must be proud, Sonia!
    But Wilf quickly got to the point. Don't do it, he advised.
    Matt's smile frosted. Do you say that, he asked, because you're not in favor at the moment?
    Wilf declared, I say it because I have not sought favor. I haven't consented to become an apparatchik.
    And when was your last feature film? asked Sonia, offended for her husband's sake.
    I make my films with handheld cameras. So do my assistants. We are documenting this age, and it will be interesting to those who come after us.
    Sonia said, So you look for your rewards after you're dead?
    Wilf Apple said, No, I get my rewards now. By being free of people like Old Billy Salter.
    As the dialogue grew poisonous, Toby Garner sat forward, a genial soul. As much as I admire that, Wilf, he said, we have to live. After all, like Matt, I took Great Uncle's shilling, I'm afraid. But whose shilling am I to take if not his?
    Wilf Apple said, Your work is not as censorable as ours.
    Toby Garner cast his hands up, passing judgment on no one. Of everyone at this table, he said, you'd be the hero of the future, Wilf. Your name will be justly honored. You create the record of intolerable times.
    Wilf Apple murmured, It's not only Great Uncle. The Western sanctions are shit too.
    Garner said, I should perhaps welcome young Matt to the circle of government employees, but my story, the story I want to tell—listen to it well, Matt, because you're not just joining a payroll. You'll find yourself squeezed, sooner or later. I thought I was squeezed by having to alter a colonnade here and there. But what happened to me two days ago, it was the true damn squeeze!
    He laughed confidingly in his wife's direction. He said, It made me light-headed with exhilaration, because I could be dead now, the bullet angled up into my brain. So I'm ecstatic.
    This compelled our attention.
    He told his two-days-old tale. At the Northbourne Palace he had supervised the installation of Courtney Witt's brilliantly designed bronze gates: dazzling with the reflected sun, opened and closed by means of electronic devices embedded in their stone columns. So that something so brilliant would not be tarnished, he had left a road, a gap in the stone wall, either side of the gates for the trucks bringing their cement and steel, their milled cedar, their mosaic tiles, to enter and exit, all without the risk of collision with Witt's lovely work.
    Two afternoons before this party of the Kennedys, as the day shift of construction workers was going off duty, three vanloads of Overguard men in their red berets so feared by the populace, their camouflage kit which implied that some peril to the state was imminent, and their automatics carried in the particularly ominous way, the butt poking up over their shoulder blades, arrived outside Toby Garner's prefabricated on-site office. Eight of them crowded in, others milled in the dust outside.
    They told him that an hour earlier, Great Uncle had passed the site on his way somewhere. Great Uncle's location was of course always secret, to the extent that the chefs of each of his twenty palaces, soon to become twenty-one with the completion of Northbourne, prepared three meals a day, just in case someone malicious were watching for a clue to Great Uncle's whereabouts.
    Anyhow, an hour before, Great Uncle had passed the Northbourne site and remarked to those who were riding with him that there was a gap either side of the great bronze gates, and that this detracted somewhat from them, and made him angry on the lovely gates' behalf. He told the Overguard escorts that when he passed by again, sometime after nine P . M ., certainly before ten, he wanted to see the gaps between the stonework walls and the dazzling gates closed.
    When they declared that