Gods and Beasts

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Newsletters

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  For Ben and Bella, and Freddy:

  Two eyes and tadda!

  “Nearly all men can stand adversity,

  but if you want to test a man’s character,

  give him power.��

  Abraham Lincoln

  1

  Martin Pavel heard it all as if through a pillow: the faint whine of ambulances, the helicopter murmur overhead, the muffled shouts of men in bulky uniforms, paramedics and cops shouting urgent instructions to each other—Get that tape, move them back. But it was bluster against a chaos long past. The chaos had sauntered casually out of the post office and walked off. Now the chaos was in the city somewhere, looking in shop windows, eating, maybe, watching TV, maybe, calm, certainly. Wherever the chaos was it was calm. Martin wished he was with it.

  He was sitting on the curb, his legs splayed out into the Great Western Road. He saw the crowds gathered at the brink of the hill and down by the lights, craning to see, knowing that this number of police cars and the helicopter circling overhead meant something big had happened.

  The traffic lights across the road changed, the red glow visible side-on. Martin realized with a start that it was dusk. The world was actually getting darker, it wasn’t just his perception of it. He arched his back to take a deep breath and almost dislodged the small boy koala-clamped to his chest. The boy faced in obstinately, squeezing, starting when anyone came near.

  As the fog of shock began to lift, Martin remembered automatic fire, red explosions on the old man’s back, the tilt of his torso, the greasy slide. Ambushed by the image, terrified at his reaction to it, he cupped the boy’s head, pulled him in, tucking his jacket around his back.

  The boy huddled in tight as Martin’s field of vision turned green. A paramedic’s uniform. The man knelt down in front of him, bobbing and weaving his head as he tried to catch Martin’s eye: “Pal, pal, can you hear me?”

  Martin managed a nod.

  “Are you injured?”

  He shook his head.

  “And the wee man? Is your son hurt?”

  Martin blinked slowly. “Not…” He opened his mouth to speak and the boy whimpered with fright, but Martin had to say it: “He’s not my son.”

  “Who is he?”

  Martin balked. The boy was his now, there was no changing that, but that wasn’t what the man was asking. He twisted at the waist, thumbing back at the shattered post office window. Inside, it was splattered with red and black. “His.”

  The boy began to worm deeper into Martin’s chest, crushing the breath from him.

  Martin lifted his knees, fiercely pressing the boy into him, trying to steal him back from a world where your grandfather could do something like that.

  Pushed in a canvas wheelchair, through the A&E waiting room; not very clean, not very nice. Not Caracas but not Cedars-Sinai either. A glass bulletproof box for the admission staff, chairs in rows. The boy on his knee still, arms clamped around his neck, eyes shut tight.

  Through a door. A tall woman was waiting to meet him. She was blond, gray suit. “I am DS Alex Morrow. I’ll come and talk to you soon.” Martin nodded. They moved on.

  Into a corridor of curtained cubicles. The person pushing the chair parked them in a quiet corner, pulled a curtain around them, kicked the brakes on and went away.

  Time passed. Clocks ticked and trolleys rolled. Nurses’ shoes squeaked by beyond the curtain.

  The sudden sound of frantic footfalls, and a woman’s high voice: “Joseph?” The boy loosened his arms and legs, pushed himself out from Martin, listened for it again. “Joe!”

  He clambered down from Martin’s lap, stood facing the curtain as if afraid to pull it back. He looked tiny and helpless and close to tears, this engine, and Martin’s hand rose towards him, needing him to come back. He dropped his hand quickly, remembering what a man craving the touch of a boy would look like, part of a generation brought up to suspect themselves.

  He saw the boy shiver at the curtain, shoulders by his ears. On safari Martin had seen lions, hippos, even leopards, making kills, giving chase. He saw a hippo bite a lion’s leg off. Exciting, surprising, humbling even, but nothing compared to what he had seen today because today had been utterly needless.

  The curtain yanked back. A red Puffa jacket, long, like a bloody sleeping bag. The small boy didn’t look up but stood, frozen, staring at the woman’s legs. “I’m sorry, Mummy.”

  She fell to her knees, wrapped him up in her. She was hefty, thick around the hips—though the thick quilted coat wasn’t helping that—with a dark, fine face. They stayed there for a long time until the nurse coughed impatiently.

  The mother looked up at Martin and her raw-eyed sorrow gave way to horror. She pulled the boy out to look at him, spat furiously into her hand and rubbed at his face with her spittle. Martin looked at the back of his arm: he was covered in dried bloody freckles.

  Smearing the blood into the boy’s hair, she spat again, weeping and spitting. The nurse handed her a wet wipe. She scrubbed hard, shoving his head back on his neck, and his eyes rolled in ecstasy at her touch.

  She stood up. Her sorrowful face was familiar to Martin and he realized then that the dead grandfather was her father, and that she had loved him very much.

  The curtain fell shut and they were gone and Martin was left alone and cold and numb.

  People spoke to one another out of sight. Telephones rang. Time ground past around him.

  A young medic came to see him. She shone a pen torch into his eyes, looked in his ears, asked him if he had been hit on the head. He hadn’t. He was in shock, she told him. She left.

  A nurse came with a pill and he took it. It felt a little like his stepmother’s Xanax, but fast. After a while it made everything feel softer. It was nice.

  A different nurse appeared, cupped his elbow, prompting him to stand up. Tenderly, watching Martin’s feet and making encouraging noises, she led him down the corridor, around a corner and into a small bright room with white walls and a dead computer on a desk.

  The blond policewoman was there with a man. They stood up and introduced themselves: DS Morrow and DC Harris. They shook his hand.

  They all sat down.

  The policeman brought out a clipboard with photocopied sheets of questions. He was holding on to his bag as well as the board, though, and when he sat down the board slipped from his hand, sliding towards the floor. He was unduly alarmed, his fingertips scrabbled to catch it and he grabbed at the paper, ripping the blank top sheet out from the metal clip.

  They all watched the board drop to the floor, bounce on the corner and land face up, a filled-out form below: Joseph Lyon, 9 Lallans—the policeman’s hand fell over the address. He picked it up, pulled out the ripped top of the blank sheet. His lips were bloodless with embarrassment. Martin didn’t understand why it was such a big deal.

  The woman took charge. She asked Martin to tell her what happened in the post office in the Great Western Road. Why did he go in there?

  He was sending gifts home for the holidays.

  Martin should have gone home by now but he couldn’t face it. He used the excuse of fictitious exams and a fictitious local girlfriend. He was going to her fictitious parents’
for Christmas lunch. They would split up in January. His parents would never know he’d made her up.

  He didn’t tell the cops any of that, just that he was Martin Pavel, twenty-one years old, a geology student at Glasgow University. He had been in the post office with two parcels to send home for Christmas.

  “Where is home?”

  San Francisco.

  She looked skeptical. “In America?”

  California.

  “Did you grow up here, in Scotland?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “But you have a Scottish accent.”

  Aye.

  She looked angry about that. “Where are you from?”

  Here. As much as anywhere.

  “But you didn’t grow up here and your family aren’t here…”

  The questions were too complicated, the answers too wordy, and all he could think was he wanted the gunman to come here with his pistol and blow them away. He shook his head at the weight of it and the woman leaned forward, speaking softly to comfort him, when Martin knew he didn’t deserve it.

  “Look, never mind. Forget that just now. In the post office, before, who else was there?”

  The grandfather was right in front of him, holding hands with the boy.

  The man had white hair, a square face like the mother who came for the boy. He wore a red Berghaus jacket with black shoulders and a red scarf. He was tan, like a Sicilian peasant, and his clothes were as well pressed as a Parisian’s, yet he spoke with a Glasgow accent.

  Martin arrived at the back of the queue. He turned off his music and the boy smiled up at the grandfather and said, “Sausage rolls?” and the grandfather nodded seriously and said, “Of course, sausage rolls.”

  Martin got stuck in that memory. Of course. Of course, sausage rolls. Internal goods, taking the matter of the sausage rolls very seriously.

  “Did the old man seem nervous?”

  No, because nervousness would denote uncertainty. He had none of that. He had given the boy to Martin with certainty, served the chaos, the gun-wielding barbarian, with a firm, dignified clarity. Martin wished it had been him who’d done it and he knew it was wrong to feel that way. He started to cry.

  “Take your time,” said the woman, trying to hurry him.

  He was calm, the grandfather. Very calm. Of course, sausage rolls. The boy smiled and turned away, looking over at a “Happy Christmas” banner that had slipped its moorings on one side and was flapping languidly in the breeze from a fan heater.

  Beyond them, a big queue snaked through the retractable ribbon barrier to the counters. Five, maybe six people: a tall guy in expensive cycling gear, very fit, orange cycling bag and a black peaked helmet. Jumpy, impatient, watching the clock. Another man beyond him maybe, and a woman towards the front. Martin was only vaguely aware of the queue because he began playing with his phone. Checking e-mails, deleting junk. A woman arrived, stood behind him. He didn’t see her face but he knew her hair was yellow. He had watched it turn pink in the bloody mist.

  There were three serving counters open in the post office, out of a possible four. Martin was often in there because it was on the way to the library, and he had observed the family that ran it. The man he took to be the father was always working: an Asian man in his fifties, a salting of the hair at his temples, polite and industrious; the post office was open on Sundays too. The daughter had a feminized version of her father’s face, thinner chin, long black hair and glittery barrettes. She was too old for barrettes.

  A younger man, a cousin maybe, he didn’t look like the father and daughter but they behaved like family members, stood close to each other and conversed in single word asides.

  “When did you become aware of the gunman?”

  Martin sat up straight as he remembered a figure in his peripheral vision stepping in through the post office door. Black clothes, a heavy canvas bag. It stepped sideways, behind the free-standing shelves of stationery just inside the door; it slid behind displays of birthday cards, crappy fridge magnets, teddy bears with tartan sashes, cheap shit.

  Martin checked his phone again.

  The figure stepped back out. And the bag was no longer heavy. The man walked to the front, striding straight past the queue. Cutting the queue got everyone’s attention, even before they noticed his pale gray mask, long before they noticed the curl of the AK-47 clip peeking past his thigh.

  “In his right hand or left hand?”

  He was holding it in his right hand, down by his right leg, away from the queue. It was a pistol.

  “You said an AK-47…”

  Yeah, but an AK-47 pistol.

  “What’s the difference, for someone who doesn’t know much about guns?”

  Pistol: shorter barrel, of course.

  He wore a tightly fitted hunter’s hood that covered his mouth and neck and head but not his eyes.

  “With two holes for the eyes?”

  No. It had one continuous hole. An oval. It was a hunter’s hood. The cops didn’t understand so Martin had to explain: it was made of fitted felt not knitted wool, tailored to fit around the chin and mouth, stop the prey smelling the hunter’s breath. Martin had seen them when he was hunting in Canada.

  The gunman stood at the front of the queue. The balaclava looked comfortable. And the eyes inside looked comfortable. That’s what really struck Martin: this man was in control of his entire world but he wasn’t anxious or doubting or searching for guidance. He wasn’t attending a psychiatrist and weeping like a girl. He was comfortable.

  “What do you mean by comfortable?”

  Martin remembered those eyes. The man wasn’t anxious. Not at all. The eyes were shining as he lifted the gun to his face. Deep blue eyes framed with white lashes.

  The cyclist screamed. No one looked at him. They were hypnotized by the gunman. He raised his chin so his lips came to the brim of the eye hole and shouted, “Get down on the fucking ground!”

  “What did he sound like?”

  Greenock–Ayr-ish accent, lower working class. Spent a bit of time in Birmingham, England, maybe.

  “Ayr-ish?”

  Wide, open-mouthed vowels from the West Coast and the mellifluous lilt of a Birmingham accent. Also, he had a kind of roughness to his voice, as if he’d smoked a lot the night before, as if he’d hurt his throat shouting over music at a nightclub.

  “What happened then?”

  Everyone got down on the floor. They scrabbled to the ground as if it was a race. They lay as flat as they could, noses pressed to the dirty wet floor, all of them. Except the grandfather. He stayed on his feet.

  “How do you know that?”

  Martin was nose-down on the floor when he saw the boy next to him, curled up walnut-tight, knees under his chest, fists over his mouth. The grandfather had shifted two steps away, so it looked as if the boy was with Martin.

  He heard the grandfather mutter, “You?” like a question.

  The gunman breathed, “You.”

  A pause. The grandfather waited for the gunman to turn away and then he whispered to Martin, “He’s yours.”

  Thinking back, Martin didn’t know if the grandfather was talking to him or the boy but, suddenly, he was part of their story.

  “Who was part of what story?”

  Martin, he was part of their story.

  “Do you mean you felt detached before?”

  No, but he had obligations to them because he was part of their story now. The policewoman looked blank. Story, he explained, we are in a story now. She looked skeptical.

  “No, we’re not. This is real.”

  He opened his mouth and shut it again. It was too much to explain, being Scottish from California, barbarians, and being in a story. She frowned, annoyed at him. “He said ‘he’s yours’ and what then?”

  The old man stood, facing the gunman, fists tight at his side, Martin could only see up to his chest.

  “Did you know the grandfather?”

  Martin said he didn’t.

&n
bsp; “Are you sure?”

  Martin thought about it, his life before that moment. Gray streaks of time, lawyers, walks, heat and hills, palm trees, rats, and oranges and arguments. And then he remembered the grandfather, catching his eye in the queue, their eyes meeting, click, a blink, click, second look. Nothing. No hint of recognition.

  Martin was sure he didn’t know him. He would have remembered the man. He was very tan and neat but very Scottish and Martin would have asked him why.

  “He said ‘he’s yours’ and then?”

  And then quiet, a deep, horrible quiet, until the gunman spoke again: “Fucking get out here, then.”

  “He said it to the grandfather?”

  Yeah.

  “What did he mean by that?”

  He meant come out here. He meant stand by me, feel the glorious heat of me. He meant come here and help me and then I’ll kill you.

  “And what did the old man do?”

  Martin told them what he had seen: fucking get out here. The old man’s loafer heels lifted off the ground in response, as if he was saluting: a soldier chosen for a glorious mission. The heels of the leather loafers were metal-tipped for long wear, made a loud tick-tack when they hit the floor.

  One loafer stepped high, across the cyclist, who was sobbing into the ground, over the people and the bags sprawled on the floor. Martin’s eyes followed the feet until they stood a foot away from the black trainers at the counter. The gunman handed the canvas bag to the grandfather and the old man held it open for him.

  “He willingly helped the guy?”

  Martin didn’t answer. Of course he helped him. She hadn’t been there. Martin wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t witnessed it himself.

  “Where were you then?”

  The question flicked him back to the sound of the boy panting face down into the wet smears from the street. For no reason, Martin lifted his arm over the kid’s back and pulled him over and in, until their foreheads were pressed tight together. The boy looked at him with emotionless brown eyes. Martin looked back and they blinked at each other, anchored, hearing the world beyond but seeing nothing. Martin was an only child and a lonely child. Lying on the dusty floor, looking at the boy, he had never felt closer to anyone. The gunman had done that for them.