Vespers

Four

Following this evening’sunprecedented bat attack, which left two people in critical condition, authorities in the small Westchester town are looking foranswers.”

“They oughta be looking for exterminators, Kath,” Robert Gentry said to the TV.

Gentry was leaning back on the sofa. The nineteen-inch TV rested on a typing table on the other side of the snug living room; there was a small desk with a computer next to it. The half-eaten container of mei grob sat on the folding chair to his left. He held a large black decaf, no sugar, in his right hand. The blinds of the one window were pulled up, and he had a partial view of the Hudson and the sparkling lights of coastal New Jersey.

Gentry’s dark eyes lingered on the young Hong Kong-born reporter. Her silky brown hair was bobbed to just above the collar of her maroon blazer, and she had beautiful, dark eyes. He liked Kathy Leung. They had dated several times after meeting at a Police Athletic League function when she came to New York from a Connecticut TV station. It didn’t work out. She went for taciturn lugs like her six-foot-six, red-meat-eating camera operator, Tex “T-Bone” Harrold. But Gentry still liked her.

Kathy was standing in front of a cordoned-off, very flat field. A trio of hefty state troopers stood stiffly behind her. Occasionally they motioned for people off-camera to stay away. Behind the state troopers were rows of parked cars and a dark forest.

“One person who may be able toprovide those answers,” said Kathy, “is Dr. Nancy Joyce. She’s the Bronx Zoo’s expert on chiroptera-bats. We’re with her, live.”

The newswoman turned to a head-taller young woman with short, raven black hair. Nancy Joyce had a long, very pretty face with full lips and large hazel eyes. She looked a little pale, but Gentry didn’t imagine that bat scientists got out much during the day.

“Doctor, I understand you’ll be going into the field when your assistant arrives with protective gear.”

“Correct.”

“At this point, is there anything at all you can tell us about what happened here?”

Gentry nodded. “Yeah. The final score was bats two, people zero.”

The slender scientist squinted as she looked into the TV spotlight. “Only that this attack is not indicative of ordinary bat behavior. Bats are normally quite docile creatures. They live in colonies, but they don’t hunt in packs. And they don’t hunt people.”

Gentry sipped his decaf. “Didn’t, Doctor.”

“Typically,” Dr. Joyce went on, “the worst kind of human-bat encounter is when a bat gets into the house.That usually occurs when the bat pursues an insect through an open window.”

“High-speed chase,” Gentry said. He liked this woman, too. He liked her husky voice and the fact that she seemed a little ill at ease on camera.

“What aboutvampire bats?” Kathy asked. “There’s been some talk of that because of the amount of blood spilled here-”

“No,” Joyce said emphatically. “Sanguivorous bats are found in South America and usually attack sleeping prey. And they don’t inflict the kinds of lacerations that were found here.The incision is so fine, in fact,that most victims seldom even wake.”

“There’s also been talk about microwaves,” Kathy said. “Is there any way that radiation from the town’s cellular phone tower can affect bat behavior?”

“Only if they kept getting disconnected,” Gentry said. This lady, Dr. Joyce, was a professional. He liked people who knew what they were talking about.

“Again, no,” Joyce said. “Those towers put out signals in the one-thousand- to three-hundred-thousand-megahertz range. That’s a lot higher than the thousand-kilohertz upper range of bat echolocation.”

“So, no effect.”

“None,” Joyce assured her.

“Are rabies a concern?”

“We won’t know until we’ve had some medical reports,” Joyce said. “But again, that’s unlikely. Bats are highly symptomatic carriers of the virus. Unlike dogs, which can turn violent, a bat that develops hydrophobia usually becomes very sick and dies. Bats can also carry other diseases, from a protozoal sleeping sickness called Chagas disease to histoplasmosis, an airborne fungus that comes from inhaling dusty bat guano. But those are extremely rare.”

“I see. Finally, Doctor, what exactly are you going to look for here?”

“What I hope to find are one or more of the bats that were involved in this assault,” the scientist said. “With any luck they’ll attack me so I can observe their behavior-”

“Ohmigod! Ohmigod!”

Mrs. Bundonis’s voice soaked through the thick wall behind Gentry. The detective muted the TV and listened.

“Mrs. B?” he shouted.

“Getaway! Oh God! ”

Gentry dropped the remote, swung from the sofa, and hurried to the door. He slipped his revolver from the holster hanging on a flea-market coatrack, listened, then walked into the hallway.

It was after eleven. The seventy-nine-year-old widow usually went to bed by ten. Maybe she was having a nightmare. She did sometimes, though usually it was just a moan or two. This was something he hadn’t heard before. She was still screaming as he crossed the old linoleum tiles on tiptoe.

There were three apartments on the first floor of the four-story building. A composer rented the big one across the hall; he tended to work at night, in earphones. Mrs. Bundonis’s apartment was on the west side of the Washington Street building, near the front. It was possible, Gentry thought, that someone could have gotten in through a window, which was unbarred; there were no signs of forced entry at the front door. He held the gun in his right hand, barrel down, and knocked with his left.

“Mrs. B?”

She was shouting in Lithuanian now. Her voice came from high in the room, as though she were standing on a chair.

“Mrs. B!” he yelled. “It’s Bob Gentry.”

“Oh-oh!Detective!”

He heard a stomp as the woman got off the chair. Then she tromped across the floor. She undid the chain, turned the latch, and opened the door.

“Detective, it’sterrible! ” she said as she moved aside. Her fine gray hair was in a long braid, and she was wearing red silk pajamas. He never would have imagined the pajamas. Mrs. Bundonis pulled on Gentry’s sleeve. “They’re all over! Come. Come!”

“Who is?”

He saw them before she answered.

Cockroaches large and larger were pouring from behind a light switch on the riverside wall of the apartment. Hundreds of them fanning across the living room floor. Some were rushing into the bathroom, others into the recessed kitchen area next to the door, still others into the radiator. Some were congregating on the bed, scurrying under the blankets, the pillows, the mattress.

“I didn’t do this,” Mrs. Bundonis said. “I keep the bread closed tight, all the time. I keep a clean house.”

“I can see that,” Gentry said quietly. “It’s all right, Mrs. B. This isn’t your fault.”

The detective had never seen anything like this anywhere. Even in apartments where bodies had been sitting for a day or two, cockroaches didn’t swarm. And they couldn’t have come from just one nest. There were too many. But what was most amazing was that the cockroaches weren’t just moving. They seemed to be in flight, running away from the wall.

Gentry told Mrs. Bundonis to wait in the hall.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. She was still holding tight to his sleeve.

“First, I’m going back to my apartment to put some shoes on,” he said calmly. “I’ll call the super and then I’ll have a look around. Maybe something died somewhere. Or maybe there’s a cockroach war going on.”

“A war?” she said.

“That’s a joke, Mrs. B. You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Mrs. Bundonis released Gentry’s sleeve but only to swat at her leg. There was nothing there. She followed Gentry to his door.

The detective phoned Barret Neville, the super. Neville lived several blocks away on Perry Street, but he wasn’t in. Gentry left a message telling him what was happening. Then he put his gun back in the holster, pulled on the Frye boots he’d had for fifteen years, grabbed a flashlight and small screwdriver from the cupboard and stuck them in his deep pockets, and went back to Mrs. Bundonis’s apartment. The woman watched from the doorway as he went in.

The stream of cockroaches had abated somewhat, though the bugs were still moving east. Gentry knew they’d find their way into his apartment before long; all these bastards did was eat, drink, reproduce, and infiltrate. Not that he was knocking it. That was all he did for ten years as an undercover cop.

Gentry walked toward the light switch. It wasn’t possible to avoid stepping on bugs, and he didn’t try. The crunching was ugly, slippery; he made a face. It surprised him that after sixteen years on the force, half of them spent undercover in the drug world, something like this could disgust him. But it did.

He stopped at the light switch. There was an opening of roughly a quarter inch along the bottom. Gentry wondered if the bugs had created that in their crush to get out. But get outwhy?

He started unscrewing the faceplate. There was a strange smell coming from behind it, like cleaning fluid or ammonia. A fire would certainly drive cockroaches from their homes, but there was no smoke. And the tiny basement had a fire alarm. So did the apartments.

He removed the two screws and carefully slipped the plastic plate from the wall. He shook a few cockroaches from the inside and set it on the windowsill. The smell was stronger now.

There was a two-inch space between the age-hardened plasterboard and the old brick wall behind it. He shined his flashlight into the area behind the light switch. He pressed his face to the wall, closed one eye, and looked down.

Cockroaches were everywhere except on what looked like small, dark anthills. The mounds were tucked against the plasterboard about an inch apart. The cockroaches were circling wide around them. He angled the flashlight to either side. To the right was a pipe-probably from the kitchen sink-and went down into the basement. Where it went from there he had no idea.

Gentry shook off a bug that had crawled from the flashlight onto his hand. He turned to Mrs. Bundonis, who was still in the hall.

“Have you heard any kinds of noises in the wall?” he asked.

“Just the pipes.”

“No scratching or tiny little feet?”

She shook her head.

He looked back down inside the wall. Mice didn’t leave waste like that, but something did.

“You have a wire coat hanger?”

“Over there.” She pointed to the closet beside the kitchen recess.

Gentry strode over to the closet like a titan, crushing bugs as they continued their flight. “What about a Baggie?” he asked after he’d retrieved the hanger. He began untwisting it.

Mrs. Bundonis pointed to a cabinet over the sink. Her bare feet remained planted in the hallway, as though the cockroaches could never find their way past the threshold.

When Gentry had the plastic bag and had straightened the coat hanger, he went back to the wall. He began feeding the wire past the light switch and down the plasterboard.

“If I electrocute myself, call nine-one-one,” he said.

“All right,” she said helpfully.

Gentry’s mouth twisted unpleasantly. The only person who ever got his dry sense of humor was that shit-wad Akira Mizuno, head of the drug-running operation he helped to bust last year. That was one of the reasons Gentry had been able to get as close to the crime boss as he did. Between wiping out his Armenian, Colombian, and Vietnamese rivals and getting kids addicted to crack-he had a wall chart with target “enrollment” on it-the murderous fuck liked a good joke, liked to chill. Gentry wondered if laughing boy was enjoying life-without-parole at the Attica Correctional Facility.

Gentry managed to poke the tip of the wire hanger into one of the mounds. He carefully withdrew the sample and shook it into the Baggie. The substance came off easily, like powder. Gentry repeated the procedure four more times to make sure he had enough. Then he zip-locked the plastic bag, threw the hanger into a wastebasket, and went back to the hallway.

“I’m going to knock on doors and tell the other tenants what’s happening,” he said. “Then I’ll pack some of your things and get you up to your daughter’s place. You can call her from my apartment.”

“Thank you.” She patted his arm. “It’s nice having you next door. You’re a good man.”

Gentry smiled as Mrs. Bundonis walked past. The septuagenarian ladies loved him. They really did. Then he glanced down at the Baggie. He had no idea where he was going to sleep tonight.

But he knew where he’d be early in the morning. Giving his old friend Dr. Chris Henry a little shit.