Vespers Read online

  “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.

  Nineteen

  Nancy Joyce felt herself winding down as she sat in Gentry’s Cutlass. The running, the long hours, the thinking. Being stonewalled by the lieutenant and his rat catcher.

  And the anger. Gentry and Lieutenant Kilar had both drilled in the same deep, rich oil field and gotten a gusher.

  She was tired inside and out. But that was to be expected. What was unexpected was what came with the exhaustion. As Gentry picked his way through the moderately heavy afternoon traffic on the West Side Highway-he didn’t grumble at the other cars the way she would have-Joyce found herself slipping into an unexpected contentment. The horrors of the day hadn’t left her. But there was a welcome familiarity to at least one part of it: being back in the field. And this time it was not with a man she revered and feared, but someone who was more of an equal. A partner.

  A companion?

  Joyce opened her eyes wide to snap away the reverie and get off that track. She had known Gentry half a day. And it hadn’t been love at first or second sight. But she couldn’t shake the surprising awareness she felt of the man next to her. If there wasn’t exactly a magnetic pull, there wasn’t a desire to go anywhere either. And for her, Ms. Camp Alone, Stay at Home, that was something truly different and a little unsettling.

  “You can go ahead and shut your eyes if you want,” Gentry said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I saw you start to doze a little.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  He nodded. “If you want music there are a bunch of tapes in the glove compartment. I don’t know if it’s your taste, but you can look.”

  Joyce popped open the door and looked in at the tossed-in collection. “This reminds me of the way I used to store tapes of Professor Lowery’s lectures. You have any preferences?”

  “Anything’s fine. It’s all fifties and sixties rock.”

  “No seventies and eighties, huh?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “That was my era,” Joyce said. “Queen. Prince. Michael Jackson.”

  “The King of Pop. All the royalty.”

  “You got it.” Joyce began looking through the only occasionally labeled tapes.

  “I used to like them too,” Gentry said. “But when I was undercover, this guy we were trying to bring down always listened to contemporary rock in the car. His favorite was the Police, which I guess was kind of ironic. Now it’s one of those association things. I can’t listen to any of that music without thinking of the son of a bitch.”

  “Why did you give up undercover work?” Joyce asked.

  “Because I was burned out. I was pretty close to quitting anyway.”

  “Anyway?”

  “Yeah. Even if it weren’t for what happened to Bernie Michaelson. My junior partner.”

  “What did he do to drive you out?”

  “Exactly what I told him,” Gentry said.

  Joyce frowned. “You lost me.”

  “Never mind. It’s a long story.”

  “That’s what you said when you called before,” she replied. “It’s a long drive. I’m interested in hearing about it if you feel like talking.”

  Gentry looked at her. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “Whatever it was you said I had no idea about back at the hospital.”

  “I’m still not following-”

  “What you said I didn’t know the half of. When you told me about SDS.”

  “Sorry. No deal,” she said emphatically. Then she added, slightly softer, “I can’t, Robert. I’m not sure I could even articulate it all. I’m not sure Iunderstand it.”

  Gentry turned his eyes back to the road. Joyce resumed going through the tapes, but her mind wasn’t on them. She understood this much: men alwayspushed. Why? Because they wanted to help or because knowledge gave them some kind of control-

  “Bernie Michaelson was my partner for seven years,” Gentry said suddenly.

  Joyce stopped shuffling the cassettes. She looked over. His hands were squirming slowly around the wheel.

  “All he ever wanted to be was a cop. Son of cop, grandson of cop, that kind of thing. He started out as my ghost-someone who covers an undercover cop when he’s making buys in the street. See, when you’re undercover you can’t wear a bulletproof vest. It’s bulky, and if you get patted down you’re screwed. The ghost stays until you’re clear of the scene or makes the buy if you don’t show. Mizuno, this guy we’d been after for years, spent the summers in Colombia and the winters in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He stayed at home every night during basketball season and watched the game. Every night, no exceptions. We finally had the goods on him-audiotapes, fingerprints, bank account numbers, paper trail-and arranged with the cops up there to pick a night for the pinch. On the night we picked, the Knicks were getting creamed so Mizuno decided to go out and see his girl in Fairfield. His two bodyguards got up to start the car and make sure the coast was clear. This is two minutes before the Bridgeport narc squad is due to move in. If the guys had left then, they would have seen the strike team taking up positions on the lawn and outside the doors. We have to keep everyone where they were, in front of the TV, for two more minutes.

  “This Mizuno happened to like my sense of humor. So I told him he had to wait and listen to this joke I’d heard. I told the bodyguards I needed their help, it was a visual. I was going to make something up, some story. But Mizuno wasn’t in the mood. He told the guys to go ahead, and then he started to get out of his chair. I was standing between him and the TV. The front door was a few steps to my left. Bernie was sitting in the chair next to Mizuno. We looked at each other. There was nothing to do but try to take the three of them down ourselves and have the narc guys back us up.

  “I nodded toward Bernie and then toward Mizuno. I was going to go after the other two. Bernie nodded back. The problem was, we weren’t allowed to wear guns around the boss. So I had to get one from the bodyguard who was coming toward me, and Bernie had to get Mizuno’s. Bernie moved when I did. I succeeded. Bernie didn’t. Mizuno shot him in the chest and leg. I nailed the b
astard in the shoulder before I turned back to deal with the bodyguards. The narcs came in then and cleaned up. Bernie died en route to the hospital. I got out of the narc business a couple of weeks later. Commissioner Veltre shifted me over to Accident Investigations. Important, but a little less stressful.”

  Joyce had been sitting still. The glove compartment was still open. “Robert, I’m sorry.”

  He nodded.

  “I can’t even imagine what that was like.”

  “It was pretty bad for a while,” he admitted. “Now it comes and goes, though I go through the drill almost every day-the should’ves and could’ves and why did I do this instead of that. I can’t shake the idea that the narc squad might’ve been able to handle it without us. That maybe the best thing would have been for Bernie and me to do nothing.”

  “Maybe then it would have gone worse than it did.”

  “It’s possible,” Gentry admitted. “At least, that’s what my new best friend Father Adams in the Chaplain Unit’s been trying to tell me for six months now. He and I get together every other week for a spirited spiritual exchange. But this is pretty thick,” he tapped his skull, “and what’s inside is still telling me that I blew it. That’s the reason you and I had out little to-do back in the tunnel. I love working with people. Always have. With my sources in the street way back when, with other detectives, with my forensics guys, even with our sorry goddamn softball team. I like working with you. But if something happens to anyone else I’m with, it’s going to be an accident or an act of God. It’s not going to be because I didn’t look out for the people who were with me.”

  The car continued along the Hudson River. Sunlight and pleasure boats skipped across the waters. Joyce closed the glove compartment without selecting a tape. Her eyes drifted ahead to the George Washington Bridge.

  “Everybody screws up,” she said. “Sometimes it happens when you think you’re doing the right thing. When you’d absolutely swear it. When you’ve thought about it, and gone back and forth about it, and hadweeks to decide, not seconds. This field-the curatorships, the associate curatorships, the directorships, the assistant directorships-is every bit as competitive as you said it is. There are about fifty Ph.D.’s for every available position. If you manage to get one of those you can really vindicate yourself. Say ‘fuck you’ to all the people who thought you were crazy as a kid for liking what you did. For dreaming of being a circus aerialist or running cruises along the Amazon.”