Vespers Read online

  “Kathy,” the anchor asked, “where are these bats coming from?”

  “Ernie, it seems like they’re coming fromall over,” she said. “We’ve been talking to air traffic controllers at JFK and LaGuardia, at Newark, White Plains, and as far north as Newburgh. Their radar has been picking up movement that’snot attributable to aircraft. They say it’s being made by bats.”

  “Do you have binoculars?” Joyce asked.

  “In the closet.” He pointed to the hall.

  Joyce hurried over.

  “What are you going to do?” Gentry asked.

  “I want to get to the river,” she said. “See what’s happening.”

  Gentry grabbed his pager, pulled on his shoes, and ran after her.

  It was only a block to the West Side Highway. Traffic was thin and Joyce didn’t wait for the light. She ran across, Gentry beside her. They jogged onto the pier at the end of Christopher Street. The wide, reconstructed deck extended several hundred feet into the Hudson, and during summer days it was jammed with sunbathers. Tonight there were about two dozen people. All of them were standing and looking north. They had probably been here already, enjoying the evening, when someone noticed what was happening.

  Joyce reached the end of the pier and looked north through the binoculars. “Holy Mother of God.”

  Gentry peered up the river. Four police patrol boats had stopped around the lower Eighties. They were shining their spotlights up and toward the north. It looked like a scene out of an old war movie: the white lights crisscrossing against the black sky with waves of enemy aircraft moving overhead. Only instead of planes they were bats. More police boats would probably be taking up positions north and south of the bridge to keep sea traffic from the area.

  “It looks like they’re coming south,” Gentry said.

  “No, they’re spreading,” Joyce informed him.

  “Spreading as in spreading out?”

  “No. The group is growing. The bats are flying back and forth. Like a loom, knitting in and out.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. Waiting, maybe. It looks like a holding pattern. The bats that are already there wait for new bats to arrive. As more bats show up, they join the perimeter.”

  “Why?”

  “I wonder-” she said thoughtfully.

  Gentry’s pager beeped. It was a Manhattan number he didn’t recognize.

  “What do you wonder?” Gentry asked.

  “Do you have to check that out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell you when you get back. I want to think it through.”

  Gentry ran back toward the shore. There was a pay phone on the other side of the highway, and Gentry called the number.

  It rang once before someone answered. “Yes?”

  “Hi. This is detective Robert Gentry-”

  “Detective,” said the voice, a husky monotone, “this is Gordon Weeks, Office of Emergency Management.”

  So the guano has hit the fan,Gentry thought. Gordy Weeks was the big gun, “the lion tamer,” the press had dubbed him. In a crisis situation, the former marine called all the plays. Even Mayor Taylor deferred to him, and Taylor-a longtime FBI man who’d run the bureau’s New York field office-was not hesitant to take charge in most situations.

  “I’m told you’ve been working with Dr. Nancy Joyce of the Bronx Zoo,” Weeks said.

  “That’s right.”

  “We’ve been trying to find her.”

  “She’s with me,” Gentry said. “I’m at a pay phone. We’re out on the Christopher Street pier watching the bats.”

  “Can you get her down to SevenWorld Trade Center?”

  “Sure-”

  “Robert!”

  Joyce was running across the highway. A car had to jam on its brakes to keep from hitting her. She didn’t seem to notice. He had never seen her this driven.

  “Hold on,” Gentry said into the phone. “Nancy’s coming. I think something’s up.”

  “Something is,” Weeks said, “bats. They’re stretched from the George Washington Bridge down to just below the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. I need a think tankfast and ESU said she may have answers-”

  “Wait a second, sir,please! ” Gentry said. “She’s pretty agitated. She may have something.”

  “Look, I’ve got the police commissioner on the other line,” Weeks said. “Call me back as soon as possible.”

  Gentry said he would. The OEM director hung up.

  Joyce arrived, breathless. She leaned against the phone. “Robert, I need to get above the bats.”

  “Above? You mean upriver?”

  “No, I mean higher than. Can you get me a helicopter?”

  “I suppose. Why?”

  “Because I think I know what’s happening, and I need to make certain.”

  “What’s happening?”

  Joyce said, “The courtiers are being assembled. The king is already here. And I believe the queen is on her way.”

  Twenty-Seven

  As they hurried back to Gentry’s apartment, the detective told Joyce that if the Office of Emergency Management apparently had been put in charge of the crisis, Gordy Weeks would have to okay her plan to fly up into the bats.

  “There may not be time to visit him and do a whole conference thing. Will he listen to me over the phone?”

  “I think so,” Gentry said.

  “And will he listen tome?”

  “He asked for you by name,” Gentry said. “Look, I know Gordy Weeks only by reputation. He doesn’t let bureaucracy, red tape, ego, or gender get in the way of fixing problems. He also doesn’t have a lot of time to screw around here. They’ll probably have to close the harbor, the Hudson air lane into LaGuardia-can’t afford to have bats sucked into jet engines. He’ll listen and you’ll get a quick yea or nay.”

  “How much clout does he have?”

  “In a crisis, Weeks reports directly to Taylor. And I don’t think the mayor has ever gotten in the way of anything he wanted.”

  As they entered the apartment and Gentry punched in the phone number, Joyce quickly assembled her facts. Robert was right. A manager in the middle of an unprecedented crisis wouldn’t have much time to listen-or to argue. She would have to make her point fast.

  It was clear to her that the Russian female had had at least twin offspring, possibly more. The same bat could not have attacked the ESU team in New York and killed those sheep in New Paltz. And a male bat would not have come ahead, alone, to prepare a new home for another male bat. But a male bat would have come ahead for a female. He would have found a nest, settled in, and then relayed his signature cry from bat to bat-a distinctive series of bleats that would have told her exactly where he was.

  He also would have gathered food for her arrival.

  If a she-bat were on her way to New York, if she’d left New Paltz a few hours before, then she would be arriving very soon. Especially with an honor guard or a protective wall of drones already gathering. They, too, must have been summoned by the male.

  If all that were true, it was important that Joyce be able to spot the female coming in. It was imperative that she watch where the female went so they could find the male. And she could do that most efficiently from the air.

  When Weeks got on the phone, Joyce told him all of that. When she was finished, Weeks informed her that Al Doyle was in the command center with him helping to monitor and assess the situation. Doyle’s contention was that the bats were here as part of a massive migration. Doyle said they would probably move on, since-like the subway bats-they were vespertilionids that didn’t eat fruit and preferred flying insects to crawling insects.

  “But,” Weeks said, “Al can’t explain what a night watchman just reported from the World Trade Center. The guard entered a bloody elevator carriage, shined his flashlight through the open hatchway, and saw a woman being hauled up the cable. He said that whatever was holding her was dark, about the size of a bull, and had wings.”


  The veteran watchman had never been drunk or stoned on the job. And the sighting corroborated what Lieutenant Kilar of the ESU had dutifully noted in his report on the subway killings: that bat expert Dr. Nancy Joyce of the Bronx Zoo believed there might be “an abnormally large specimen” of bat inhabiting the NewYork subway system.

  “I’m having trouble signing onto this,” Weeks said. “But people are dying and I’ve got to explore every possible lead. You can have your chopper.”

  Weeks told Joyce that he needed his helicopters for reconnaissance and transportation. His office would arrange with the police commissioner to have an ESU helicopter pick her up at the pier in fifteen minutes. The OEM director had only two requests: that she stay in constant radio communication with his assistant, Marius Pace, and that she not fuck up.

  Joyce promised.

  She kept the binoculars and grabbed her camera. Gentry went with her to the pier to wait. He had only one request: that she come back safely.

  Joyce promised.

  Ten minutes later, she and two ESU fliers were airborne in an Aviation Unit Bell-412.

  Twenty-Eight

  In all her years of bat hunting, Nancy Joyce had never had the opportunity to ride in a helicopter. Within five seconds of lifting off from the pier, she realized she’d have been happy to postpone the experience indefinitely.

  The chopper ascended, which wasn’t the same as taking off. Not to her. As it arced steeply from the pier, the sense of motion up and away and then forward was pronounced. It was like being in a bumper car that had suddenly added a third dimension of mobility.

  But that wasn’t all. The helicopter was incredibly loud. Even though Joyce was in the seat directly behind the pilot, she would have had to yell if she wanted to converse. Fortunately, as soon as they were airborne, the copilot handed back a headset. It fit entirely over her ears. That not only deadened the clapping-loud drone of the rotors, it enabled Joyce to communicate with the fliers and Mr. Pace without shouting.

  The chopper was also fast. Joyce was accustomed to cabs picking and weaving their way through New York traffic. The helicopter was above the bats and just about ten blocks away before she even had a chance to adjust the mouthpiece of the headset and sit back.

  All of that went through her mind in moments. She forced herself to concentrate on the horizon. On the bats.

  The pilot said, “Dr. Joyce, all I was told is that you want to observe the bats. You’re going to have to tell us from what height and where.”

  “I want to be able to watch the river facing north,” she said. “How high are we now?”

  “Seventeen hundred feet.”

  “How high would you say the bats are?”

  “Maybe six hundred feet. Six fifty tops.”

  “Does your propeller cause any kind of downdraft?”

  “It does,” he said. “If we get on top of the bats and go much lower than above twelve hundred feet, we’re gonna stir them up like a blender.”

  “Then make it twelve hundred feet,” she said. “But the bats might ascend. If they do, we should be ready to get out of their way.”

  “Understood.”

  “Dr. Joyce?” said a voice with a gentle British accent. “This is Marius Pace.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

  “You didn’t,”he assured her. “You were busy. Gordon advises me that what you’re watching for is a very large bat.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “How large is large?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Eagle? Condor?” he asked.

  “More like a Cessna,” she replied.

  “You mean as in the private airplane?”

  “Yes.”

  Pace said,“ That’s large, all right. And if and when you see this bat, is it your intention to pursue?”

  “Only to watch where it’s going,” she replied. “If possible, I want to get close enough to see what it looks like, take some pictures.”

  “I understand,” Pace said. “All right, then. From now on I’ll just be listening in. If you need anything, ask.”

  She looked out as the helicopter reached the shifting carpet of bats. They were bottom-lit, twenty or thirty thousand of them swimming back and forth on a bright and luminous sea. It was majestic, mesmerizing, and inexplicable. Worse, she didn’t know exactly where it was all going. If and when one of the big bats arrived, would these smaller bats go or stay? And if they stayed, would they stay peaceably?

  Joyce hadn’t really thought about the personal danger until now. If these bats became territorial like the others, things could get very bad. She also realized, suddenly and belatedly, that when she took off Gentry had really been worried about her. Joyce hadn’t had anyone except her assistant feel that way for a long time. It felt nice.

  Joyce wondered what Professor Lowery was making of all this. He would have a perfect view of the river from his apartment window. She also wondered what the bats were making of them. What they might be thinking, feeling. They’d be picking up the movement of every bat, every bird, every insect, the choppers, the people. The input had to be overwhelming.

  “Can you hover?” Joyce asked the pilot.

  He said he could.

  The helicopter stopped moving forward.

  As Joyce looked down on the thick mesh of bats, anticipation grew. Behind the helicopter, the dark cloud had spread southward almost down to Forty-second Street. To the west, the bats had reached nearly to the New Jersey shore. State police helicopters were already hovering over the New Jersey Palisades. Bats were still joining the group from all directions.

  And then she saw something. Something large just beyond the bats.

  She raised the binoculars, and the pilot nudged the nose of the chopper to the northwest to give her a better view. The George Washington Bridge was hidden save for an occasional glint of light.

  “Go down!” she said suddenly.

  “Where?” the pilot asked.

  “Underneath the bats.”

  “You mean through them-”

  “No. Go around-anywhere. I need to get under the bats. Something’s out there, flying low. It’s going to come in under the bats.”

  The chopper swung to the east, toward Manhattan. It moved so fast that if Joyce hadn’t been wearing her seat belt she’d have been thrown against the door. The pilot dropped them lower as Joyce sat back up and watched through the binoculars.

  “Where to now?” the pilot asked as they fell below the bat line.

  “Stay about one hundred feet up. Go north slowly.”

  The pilot did. They passed through the Eighties. The Nineties. Joyce looked ahead. Something was there. It had ducked under the canopy of bats and was moving slowly. She unbuckled her seat belt for a better look.

  “There it is!” she said excitedly. “Mr. Pace? Tell Mr. Weeks we found it! We found it and it’shuge.”

  The bat was still beyond the range of the searchlights, but she knew it was there because she could make out its outline as it moved forward, blocking the shore light and headlights behind it.

  And of course it was flying low. New Paltz was far, and there were no thermal currents from the sun to heat the air and help lift the bat. There was no reason for it to tire itself out by flying high.

  As the bat neared, as it began to pick up the light, Joyce could see that itwas enormous. There was nothing to compare it to but the other bats, and it dwarfed them. The wingspan looked to be about ten-to-twelve feet across-at this distance, in the dark, it was still difficult to tell. The body was thick, like a long barrel, with lumpy masses on the back. Joyce assumed they were muscle. The head was wide and pie-round. She couldn’t quite make out the ears, though they were nearly as high as the head was long, and they were extremely close together.There was a large bulge near the back of the bat, on the bottom. Joyce assumed they were the legs.

  “Man oh man,” the copilot said. “Are all these other bats here for-
” He was interrupted when the helicopter shook.

  The pilot and copilot both looked at their instruments.

  “What was that?” the copilot said.

  It happened again-a hard, spine-ringing thump from below.

  “It feels like we’re being hit from the bottom!” the pilot said.

  There was a third strike, rougher than the others, this time from the pilot’s side. Then something seemed to tug the helicopter toward the left. Joyce turned away from the distant giant and its entourage. She moved back to the pilot’s side and looked out the window just as a monstrous face appeared beneath the portside landing skid. Joyce watched while it rose slowly, followed by two white hooks as thick and large as elephant ivory. The hooks were at least six feet apart.

  “Get us out of here!” she screamed.

  The copilot looked back. “Oh shit-”

  A pair of large ruby eyes rolled toward Joyce just as a blast of vapor from the awesome mouth clouded the window. A moment later one of the hooks crashed against the pane. It didn’t break through, but the tip raked downward, cutting a deep rut.

  The pilot swung the chopper around and swept toward the southeast. Ahead, brightly lighted, the retired battleshipIntrepid appeared through the window.

  “What’s wrong?” Pace demanded.

  “It’s one of them!” Joyce cried as the hook came again. It wasn’t a hook, she knew, it was the bat’s thumb. This time the tip of the finger came through the shatter-resistant window.

  “One ofwho?” Pace said.

  “One of the giant bats!” she screamed. “It’s on the helicopter!”

  “What do we need to do?” Pace asked, his voice calm.

  The pilot rocked the helicopter from side to side as he flew down and toward the shore.

  “Are you doing that or is he?” Joyce cried.

  “I am,” the pilot replied. “Trying to shake him-”

  “Forget that!” she yelled. “Can you put us in the water?”

  “I can’t land on it-” the pilot said.

  “I mean drag the runner through it! Bats hate submersion. It weighs them down.”

  “I can try,” the pilot said tensely as he guided the chopper back to starboard and dropped toward the river.