Vespers

Eighteen

Nancy seemed a little more relaxed on the way to Washington Street. That allowed Gentry to stop thinking about her long enough to try and buy the idea that there could be a big bat under the streets of New York. Not a “giant” bat. That was too much. It was the stuff of fairy tales, like a dragon or a centaur or a flying horse. A “big” bat was like a python or a great white shark or a condor. Though it was a hell of a lot more than you wanted to meet in the woods or on a beach or on a hillside, it wasn’t something that defied reason.

But even “big” bothered him, and his mind continually returned to logical explanations. A psychotic or sociopathic killer, as Lieutenant Kilar had said. Cultists. Pro-hunting radicals. An animal that had escaped from a zoo, like the big cat that ran free for several days down in Florida a year or so back. Or even like the ostrich that got its feathers up somewhere in South Africa and killed a woman by raking her to death with its claws. Gentry still wasn’t entirely convinced that this wasn’t the work of a mountain lion.

Yet Nancy and certainly her mentor believed in the big bat. Gentry could still hear Lowery responding, “Such as?” when Nancy said there had to be another explanation. He seemed so confident. Hell, maybe he was. Gentry didn’t like the man, but he hadn’t liked a lot of people, starting with the street scum he used to use as informants. Not liking them didn’t make them wrong.

Thinking about dragons led Gentry to dinosaurs, and something suddenly occurred to him.

“ Nancy,” he said, “if there is a big bat, could it possibly be a throwback of some kind? I remember when I was a kid reading about a prehistoric fish that somebody found. It was about five or six feet long, ugly-looking thing. And it was still alive.”

“That was different,” Joyce said. “The fish was a coelacanth. It was discovered off South Africa in 1938.”

“But it was prehistoric.”

“Not exactly. It wasn’t a product of genetic declension. It was an animal that was thought to be extinct but had simply gone unchanged since prehistoric times.”

“Got it. Like cockroaches.”

“Exactly like cockroaches. Science comes across those once in a while, like the Blewitt’s owl that was thought extinct for over a century and was found a year ago in the woods of India, alive and well.”

“That’s too bad, about the fish. I thought I had something.”

“Evolution doesn’t work in reverse,” Joyce said. “Elephants don’t suddenly become woolly mammoths and cats don’t become saber-toothed tigers. Once an attribute is discarded, it stays discarded.”

“But didn’t someone find woolly mammoths frozen somewhere in Siberia?” Gentry asked. “Weren’t they perfectly preserved and didn’t people even eat the meat?”

Joyce smiled slightly. It was a warmer smile than before. “Did you also read that when you were a kid?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. I read a lot back then. Books, comics, baseball card backs, cereal boxes. My mother left home, my dad worked, and we had shitty TV reception.”

“You also said something like that back at Grand Central. About loving to learn things when you were a kid.”

“I did love to learn. That’s one reason I became a cop. To follow clues. Figure things out.”

“Well, the thing about the mammoths is that they were dead. Even so, the fossil record doesn’t show anything resembling a giant bat. Like cockroaches and the coelacanth, bats have been around for more than fifty million years in more or less the form that you see them now.”

Gentry was silent again. This left him where he started, and his mind went looking for sensible explanations.

“Genetic drift is a possibility,” Joyce said, thinking aloud.

“Which is?”

“New animals sometimes evolve when a species splits into two or more new forms. That sometimes happens due to geographical isolation. Genetic recombination is also a possibility.”

“Is that the same as recombinant DNA?” Gentry said.

“Yes,” Joyce said. “It’s genetic engineering performed by nature. Sometimes chromosomes inherited from the parents swap segments because of physical breakage.”

“Because of-?”

“Could be a number of things. Radiation. Chemicals. Internal mechanisms we don’t understand. That can set up all new hereditary patterns.”

“How long does genetic recombination usually take?”

“It can happen quickly or it can take years. Two parents under six feet tall can produce a child seven to eight feet tall. Or the height of humans can increase steadily over centuries. There are no rules.”

They reached Gentry’s apartment building. The front door was propped open with a wedge. One exterminator was spraying the hallway, another was in Mrs. Bundonis’s apartment. The scent was like mildew. Gentry walked in holding the large pizza. Joyce was right behind him holding her nose.

“How’s it look?” Gentry asked the woman spraying in the corridor.

“Like your usualcucaracha infestation,” the middle-aged woman said as she continued spraying.

“Usual?”

“Hit-and-hide. They’ve got legs designed for running and antennae that tell them where to run. Toward food, away from danger. They pour into a place and then they seem to disappear. But they haven’t. They’re hiding in every damn place you can think of. In drains and behind cabinets and under refrigerators or stoves or toilets. They’re also in some places you wouldn’t think of, like Mr. Coffee filter pots and inside computer printers.”

“Did you ever hear of a swarm this size?”

“I never see a swarm of any size. I usually get someplace after most of them are hiding.”

“Right,” Gentry said. “But have youheard of one? Why would they swarm in the thousands?”

“Roaches are funny. They find all kinds of reasons to move around. A change in temperature, a flood, a food shortage-”

“Predators?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Bats?”

The exterminator shrugged. “Why not? I found some kinda foul dung down in the basement. Could’ve been guano.”

“Any idea how bats might have gotten in there?” Gentry asked.

“There’s a drain in the floor down there,” the exterminator told him. “Looks like it once emptied into the river, probably as part of an old sewage system. I found it when I saw cockroaches coming out from under an old desk and moved it. The metal drain cover was rusted. This close to the water, everything rusts. Your super’ll have to get that taken care of. Maybe bats or even seagulls found a nest of roaches near the river and started feeding on them. One nest spills into another, that one into another-pretty soon you have a stampede.”

Gentry thanked the woman. Then he and Joyce squeezed by her.

When they reached the apartment, Gentry handed Joyce the pizza and pulled his keys from his pocket. “This place was not exactly clean when I left.”

Gentry stepped into the short hallway and switched on the light. The first impression wasn’t as bad as he expected. Ahead, in the small living room, the blinds were up and the sunlight made things seem a little cleaner. And he’d thrown out the Thai food he’d been eating, so the cockroaches wouldn’t get it. To the right, the bedroom door was shut. The detective took the pizza back, then held it high so Joyce could enter. She walked in and he kicked the door shut with his foot. He watched her slender form as she moved ahead, framed by the bright window.

“Very sunny,” she said.

Joyce turned around in the living room and then faced him. He couldn’t see her expression, but he could feel her eyes. His breath came a little faster, and he felt a kind of longing that he hadn’t experienced in a very long time. He turned away-not to avoid the feeling but to freeze-frame it.

He walked into a small kitchenette to the left and put the pizza on a tiny drop-leaf table. “Where do you live?”

“Up in the Bronx.”

“Is it pretty safe where you are?”

“Very. I carry a thirty-eight when I go to work. Licensed and loaded.”

Gentry shot her an approving look. Not because she was a lady with a gun but because she was smart.

“You take it to a firing range, keep it in good shape?”

“Oh, yeah. I grew up with guns. The thirty-eight was a high school graduation present from my dad.”

“We’ll have to go shooting sometime.”

“That might be fun.”

Gentry went back to the pizza. He wasn’t thinking about bats just then. A lot of longings were coming back.

He pulled a cookie sheet from under the sink and aluminum foil from a cabinet. “How long have you been at the zoo?”

“Going on three years.”

“I bet there’s a lot of competition for jobs like that. Curators and heads of departments, that sort of thing.”

“It’s pretty intense.” Joyce’s voice had dropped a little and she did not elaborate. She ambled toward the computer, then turned back. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Actually, yes,” Gentry said. “Boot the computer. Just turn on the surge protector under the desk-everything else’ll come on.”

Joyce bent over the folding chair. The surge protector was lying on its side on the floor amid a cluster of dust bunnies. She switched it on. The computer and monitor snapped to life.

Joyce got onto the Internet and typed in two keywords:bat andanomalies. She sat back as Gentry put the pizza in the oven, then poured Cokes for them both.

The first list of ten articles and Web sites popped up after a few seconds. Joyce scanned the headings. The first article was about bats that had recently been lured from caves to farms in Colorado in the spring and so far ate nineteen million rootworms, saving a fortune in pesticides. There were also articles on the reproductive habits of the world’s smallest bats, on bats that lived more than twenty-five years, and on tiger moths that emitted high-frequency clicks that disoriented attacking bats and forced them to break off their attacks.

“Anything?” Gentry asked as he brought the Cokes over.

“I’ve seen most of these,” she said. “Nothing helpful unless you want the latest information on the bumblebee bat.”

“Which is?”

“The world’s tiniest mammal,” she said. “From Thailand. Smaller than a penny.”

“Why couldn’t we have been infested with those bats?”

“Because then you’d really be miserable,” Joyce replied. “I had one fly in my ear while I was sleeping. You think a mosquito at night is bad? Bumblebee bats buzz and bite and leave very tiny, wet droppings that run into your ear canal and harden very, very fast. Not fun.”

“But you love them,” Gentry said.

“From behind a net, I love them very much.”

Gentry went back to the kitchenette and slipped the pizza from the oven. He came over with two slices on a plate and a shirt pocket full of crumpled paper napkins. He pushed aside the stack of magazines and set the plate down next to the keyboard. Then he went and got his own plate and sat on the iron radiator beside the desk. He placed a napkin alongside Joyce’s plate.

She asked the computer for a second list of articles. She sat back and took a bite of pizza. “What about you?”

“What about me?” Gentry asked.

“How long have you been in the West Village?”

“Five years.”

She took a swallow of Coke and a second bite of pizza. “I had the impression-I don’t know why-that police officers liked to get out of the city when their shift was finished.”

“Some do,” Gentry said. “Mostly the married ones. I’ve got a car in case I need to get away. But I was born and raised down here, on Perry Street. I did the suburbs thing when I got married. After the divorce, I came back. It’s where I want to be.”

The second list came up on the monitor, and Joyce began scrolling through the headings. Gentry leaned forward so that he was closer to the monitor. There were articles about fishing bats that can detect a minnow’s fin sticking two millimeters above a pond’s surface. Frog-eating bats that identify the edible from the poisonous by listening to the mating calls of the male frogs. Gentry kept his head facing forward, but his eyes shifted toward Joyce.

She clicked on the third list. “How long were you married, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Eight years. To Priscilla Nicole Francis. She was a bank teller I met on my beat. We bought a little house in Norwalk, Connecticut. She wanted a family, a real life. But after I went undercover I saw her maybe two or three nights a week. And I was kind of a drag to be with even then. Obsessed with the guy I was trying to bring down. I don’t blame her for leaving.”

“Do you still talk to her?”

He shook his head. “She remarried, to an up-and-coming branch manager up there. They have a big house and a little daughter. I’m not really a part of any of that.”

His voice had become wistful, though he wasn’t aware of that until Joyce looked down at her lap.

“Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be asking these things.”

“It’s okay,” Gentry assured her. “I don’t get to talk to people much, except to tell them to calm down or fill out a form or get me a report.”

“Or get out of a tunnel.”

“Or get out of a tunnel,” he agreed.

“I’ve got the same problem,” the young woman said with a little laugh. “I spend so much time looking after the bats at the zoo or telling school groups about them or keeping up on current literature and research that I actually forget how to talk to people sometimes.”

Gentry’s pager beeped while she was speaking. He looked down. “That’s the Stat Unit.”

“Do you need me to get off the Net?”

“No, I’ve got a second line.”Gentry walked toward the kitchen and punched in the number. “By the way,” he said. “You may not be around people much, but I’ve enjoyed the time we’ve spent together. Even the rough spots.”

Even across the apartment Gentry could see her pale cheeks flush. She thanked him.

The conversation with the head of the Stat Unit was short, and Gentry didn’t bother writing anything down. He hung up and walked back.

“Well?” Joyce asked.

“There isn’t a lot to report. The only other bat attack they found that was like the others happened in New Paltz. That’s about, what-thirty or forty miles west of the Hudson?”

“Something like that. What happened?”

“Three days ago a group of hikers in the Catskill Mountains got blitzed,” he said. “They had to jump into a pond and stay underwater.”

“Are they all right?”

“Except for cuts and never wanting to go back there, yes. They said the bats left them alone after about fifteen minutes.”

“That was about how long the attack lasted at the Little League game,” Joyce said. She drummed the desktop. “So we’ve got three attacks that lead toward New York. Aggressive bat behavior that is localized in time and place.”

“No big bats,” Gentry said. “Not in the three reports, anyway.”

“Well,” Joyce said, “like an old geometry teacher of mine used to say, a point is just a point. But two points make a line and three points make a plane and a plane is something you can stand on. After we finish going through these articles, we’ll take a look at what we’ve got in the pattern of those bat attacks.”

Joyce finished reading the third list of bat anomalies and clicked on the fourth and last collection. She took another bite of pizza while it downloaded.

As the headings appeared, Gentry bent closer and read along with Joyce. Once again, he forgot about the bats.

Priscilla used to joke, and then complain, that when he would come home he would always want sex. However tired he was, however unclean inside or out.What she never understood was that he needed her. He needed the sanity and beauty that she alone brought to his life. He needed to be reborn and reassured that those things did exist. Intimacy was the only way he knew to take that in perfectly. Soft words spoken close to the cheek, a soft touch, a soft breath. Sex was a transfusion of all that was good and wholesome and healthy in her to all that was worn out and spoiled and dead in him.

Maybe that was too much responsibility to put on any one person. But that was what he needed. And right now, for the first time in a very long time, he wanted that kind of closeness again. He was both relaxed and excited by the warmth of Nancy’s bare neck and cheek. By the scent coming from her, not perfume but the slightly musky smell of dried sweat and fear that was almost like the smell of sex. By the smoothness of the flesh behind her ear. In a perfect world, where he could stop time and steal an indulgent moment without fear of rejection, he would touch that soft skin with his lips.

“Can you see okay?” she asked. She slid the chair to the left.

“Just fine,” he replied.

The moment was gone, but it had been filed away with the others. He backed up a little.

“Now here’s something I haven’t seen,” she said.

Gentry looked at the computer as she pointed to one of the items.

“A follow-up report from the town of Chelyabinsk in Siberia.” Joyce clicked on the file and finished her pizza while she waited for it to download. The article appeared a minute later. It was a week-old posting from theInternational Journal of Pediatrics. “That’s why I never saw it,” Joyce said. “I usually just stick to the bat sites.”

The paper was by radiation specialist Dr. Andrew Lipman. Lipman wrote in a preface that he’d returned to the Russian city on Lake Karachai where, just over eight years before, children had suffered from moderate radiation sickness at a newly opened camp near the lake. Accompanying a team of Russian scientists, he’d found leaking canisters of waste that had been buried years before by a secret munitions plant in nearby Kopeysk.

“ ‘However,’ ” Joyce read, “ ‘the illness suffered by the children was not due to the waste itself, which had been buried deep inside a cave two years before. It was due to radioactive bat guano that was found in the water. The guano was produced by bats that had been living in the cave and depositing droppings in a river that fed the lake.’ ”

“Radioactive waste,” Gentry said. “That could’ve caused some seriously screwed-up chromosomes.”

“Yes,” Joyce said, “but around eight thousand miles away.”

“You said bats migrate. Is there any way they could have flown here from Russia?”

“No.”

“But radiation could cause serious mutations.”

“Theoretically yes. If it didn’t kill the bats. But it’s still a huge, huge leap from finding radioactive guano in a lake in Russia eight years ago to what we’re seeing here.”

“That may be a huge leap in zoology,” Gentry said. “In my line of work we call it a ‘two-p’-poor prospect. But sometimes poor prospects pay off, even if it’s only to send you in a direction you hadn’t thought about. Maybe we should find this Dr. Lipman and ask him if there was anything unusual about the bats.”

“I suppose it’s worth a call.”

“Does the article tell you anything about him?”

“There’s usually a short biography at the end.” Joyce scooted to the bottom of the posting. “It says he’s a pediatrician who’s done work around the world under the auspices of the United Nations Children’s Fund. That was why he went to Siberia when they had the problem with the sick kids. It also says that he has a-” She stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Gentry asked.

She pointed. Gentry looked at the rest of the bio. It said Dr. Lipman had a practice in New Paltz.

“That’s got to be a coincidence,” Joyce said.

“Maybe,” Gentry said. “Or maybe he brought back samples.”

“Jesus,” Joyce said. “But even if he did, going from radioactive guano to completely aberrational bat behavior is a big step. And that was more than ten years ago.”

“I meant that maybe Lipman brought back samples of the bats.”

Joyce looked up at him. She didn’t say anything.

“Let’s call Dr. Lipman,” Gentry said. “Just to find out. Just to make sure nothing strange went on.”

Gentry called information, got the number of the office, and called. It would take just under two hours to drive to New Paltz. They made an appointment to see Dr. Lipman at six o’clock. Then they cabbed up to Gentry’s garage on West Forty-sixth Street, picked up his car, and headed north.