Read Online How To Succeed in Evil by Patrick E. McLean - Free Book Online Page A

complicated.”
    “Your work. Your small penis.”
    “But,”
    “And you never any fun. And you never buy me any cocaine.”
    “What?”
    “You’re no fun,” pouts Cindi with an ‘i’.
    “This conversation is over.”
    “You bet your small penis it’s over. Don’t call me again.”
    She storms off. Excelsior will have to look for true love elsewhere. The waiter sets the check down and leaves quickly. Excelsior does not look up at him. If he had caught even the slightest hint of a smile he would have burned the waiter down in front of everybody. His eyes grow hot again. Sometimes it comes out as lasers, sometimes as tears. Either way, choking back the emotion is the smart thing to do.
    Excelsior knocks back the drink and throws money at the check. He thinks it’s ridiculous that he should have to pay the check. How many times has he saved this city? And what thanks? I mean really, a key to the city? A key that opens no doors.
    As he wings his way out of town, the question rattles around in his head “Does he wear the costume, or does the costume wear him?”

Chapter Eleven 
    Edwin Dresses for Dinner

    To Edwin’s way of thinking the ultimate end of formal dress is to show the human form in its best light – to present one’s self to advantage. And, to that end, any garment should lend authority, gravity and dignity. It should minimize weakness and vice, maximize strength and virtue. And to fully focus the force of personality through the lens of fabric, a man requires a tailor.
    And not just any tailor. What is required is a remarkable man. An artist working faithfully in a rapidly disappearing art,  deeply rooted in a tradition that stretches back through the centuries. A tradition that includes countless suits, crafted to fit countless numbers of men – gentlemen and rogues, saints and killers – the just and the unjust alike. When viewed at this level the tailor’s art encompasses, not merely needle and thread, scissors and fabric, but the whole cloth of mankind in all its shapes and sizes. And this is exactly the altitude from which Mr. Giles, Edwin’s tailor, considers his craft.
    Mr. Giles is descended from a long line of Saville Row tailors. So the material he has measured most carefully is the cloth of his own life. Each suit he has made has taken over 1,000 stitches. Each stitch has been made by hand. With measuring, fitting, and adjustments these thousand stitches absorb about 100 hours.
    So 100 hours per suit, divided into perhaps 50 working years, makes 20 suits a year. A few allowances for quality, tuning up old suits, having a nice weekend, and working at a reasonable pace — this is, after all, a marathon, not a vulgar sprint — and Mr. Giles has calculated the span of his own life. He believes he will live to make 1000 perfect suits.
    Fortunately, Mr. Giles has no modern ideas about retirement. Many, many people have worked hard to make him the craftsman he is. And he is happy to be absorbed in a long and honorable tradition. He will work until he can no longer maintain the standard. And his fervent wish is to die in the harness, on the job, with the feel of the fabric between his fingers. When he lets go his grip on this world, the last thing he wants to feel is a fine worsted wool slipping between his fingers as he goes.
    The suit that Edwin lays out on the four-poster bed is suit number seven hundred and twenty-one.
    When this particular suit was fitted, Mr. Giles explained to Edwin that cloth that he had selected, or spoken for (and hence the term Bespoke tailoring) was the last of a very old fabric. A fine fabric, and one that he had used to cut a suit for Edwin’s father. At this mention of his dead father, Edwin had stiffened slightly, causing the cuff of his pants to rise 1/32 of an inch by Mr. Giles measurements. For Mr. Giles, this 1/32nd of an inch was a vast gulf filled with meaning. The good tailor quickly changed the subject to silence. Edwin had not thought of his