Vespers Page 2

  Walking also gave him time to finish the serial thinking he’d started in his small office. To come to terms with the event that had ended his career as Nick Argento. It was tough, still.

  Gentry was married to the Seventh Avenue route. It took him a little out of his way to the east, but Ninth Avenue was too sedate and Eighth Avenue was too damn crowded with people waiting to get into the trendy bar, jazz club, or café of the week. However, he did vary a key part of his routine each night. Sometimes he stopped for Thai takeout, sometimes he grabbed a salad, and sometimes he ate in at a sushi place on Hudson Street because he loved the monster-sized dragon rolls and there was a waitress who was simply the most elegant woman he had ever seen. Old Mrs. Bundonis who lived next door to Gentry warned him that he was going to die of malnutrition or worms. Also of not dressing warmly enough. He was actually glad she did that; he’d always wondered what it would be like to have a mother.

  Tonight was Thai night, and Gentry stopped at his favorite hole-in-the-wall on Seventh Avenue. He got caught up on the saga of the counter guy and his four old aunts who had come to visit from Bangkok and showed very little interest in leaving. When Gentry got to his one-bedroom apartment on Washington Street-with a double-order of mei grob, since the portions were appetizer-small-he slipped off his navy blue blazer, white shirt, and cobalt blue tie, pulled on his gray NYPD sweats, and crashed in front of the tube.

  Three

  For years, the Bronx meant only one thing to Nancy Joyce. It was the ultimate killer place to use in the game Geography, until her older brother Peter discovered there was a place called Xochihuehuetian, Mexico.

  Her view of the borough changed when she moved there. What she discovered was that the past, the present, and the future all coexisted in the Bronx.

  The past were the remnants of the thousands of families that had settled here in the first two decades of the twentieth century. That was when New York City ’s northernmost borough offered spacious apartments with central heating, refrigerators, and private bathrooms-amenities that were undreamed of in the older, more crowded Manhattan.

  The present were the families that had moved here in the years following World War II, when affordable public housing went up and the exclusive nature of the borough ended.

  The future were the families that had come to the Bronx, lured by fire-sale prices and a near-evangelistic desire to rejuvenate neighborhoods that had surrendered to drugs and crime and the homeless.

  Twenty-nine-year-old zoologist Dr. Nancy Joyce was part of the past. The things that were real but foggy, just out of reach. Two years before, when she had been hired by the Bronx Zoo and became what her coworkers and school groups affectionately called “the bat lady,” she had moved into the three-bedroom Bronx apartment that belonged to her eighty-seven-year-old widowed grandmother. Nancy Joyce and her brother had spent very little time here as kids. They grew up in rural Connecticut, and more often than not Dad drove down to get Grandma Joycewicz and bring her up to the country.

  When Joyce came to the Bronx after obtaining her Ph.D., the apartment was a revelation. The walls of the living room and dining room were almost entirely covered with browning, frame-to-frame photographs. They were a shrine to a lost world. Her grandmother’s family, the Cherkassovs, had been Russian aristocrats-starched men and formal women who stood or sat in studios, in salons, and on porticos of beach homes or country cottages. Her grandfather’s family had been Polish laborers, and the pictures of them showed rumpled, tousle-haired men and women holding scythes or working oxen in the fields. The Cherkassovs fled after the Russian Revolution, and they ended up sleeping in woods and fields where they were found one sunrise by Joseph Joycewicz. He took one of the refugees as his wife, and they sailed for America.

  Even if she hadn’t heard that story when she was growing up, Nancy Joyce would have been able to read it in this picture diary, its fragile pages lovingly preserved behind glass.

  There were also some newer pictures. Her father and his older sister as children. Joseph up in Westchester hunting with his son. The family at Coney Island and Atlantic City and on Forty-second Street taking in a double feature. Probably a Western, which her grandfather was said to have loved. He believed that westerns were accurate depictions of history. Just like the black-and-white photographs on the wall.

  It wasn’t just the photographs that had a story to tell. There was the porcelain statue of the Greek hunter Orion holding a dead stag. The arrow had been broken off by her father, who had tried to pull it out and fire it from a homemade bow when he was three years old. There was the sofa that her grandfather had gone to lie on at night when the pain of the cancer that consumed him kept him awake. He went there to read the Polish novels he loved or to cry because he would be leaving his Anya far, far earlier than either was prepared for. He was forty-nine when he finally succumbed. There was the worn and faded rug that Joseph had bought Anya for their tenth wedding anniversary. The tattered seat cushion on the rocking chair, from the first cab that Joseph had driven. The radio that her father and his older sister had grown up listening to. Their schoolbooks on the shelf. The rifle with which Joseph had taught his son how to hunt. The old Victrola and the elderly woman’s large collection of 78s.

  When Grandma Joycewicz died, her granddaughter kept the apartment but refused to change very much in it. She put cable TV and a VCR in the living room and added a CD player and small speakers. She also replaced the old black rotary phone on the nightstand with a cordless. And she put in an extra phone jack so she could go on-line with her laptop. Joyce had never found it strange to be on-line in “this old place,” as her grandmother used to call it. An on/off switch let the present in and then sent it back out again. The apartment remained a comforting retreat.

  Her handful of semiclose friends thought Joyce was being trendily retro. It didn’t matter. The place had an air of the melancholy that suited her fascination with things dark and haunting. “This old place” was a reminder of a time when lives that had been upheaved by chaos were set right by love. A time where the pace was slower but hopes were much, much higher. A time when each day was precious because twentieth-century medicine was still in its adolescence.

  On her days off, like today, the young woman thoroughly enjoyed staying at home and catching up on current research and reports about bats, answering E-mail from former classmates and other scientists, and then relaxing by reading trashy novels, planning hunting trips, or talking on the phone with her mother or her sister-in-law, Janet.

  For reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint, those calls always left her feeling as if she’d done something wrong.

  Both her mom and Janet worried about her living alone and also-more so, she suspected-about herbeing alone. No husband. No boyfriend. No prospects of one. As Joyce had told them both many times, it wasn’t that she was uninterested in meeting men. It was that she was uninterested in seeing most of the men she did meet. Except for a couple of five- and six-year-old gentlemen she’d caught smiling at her from school groups, most of them were aggressive and charmless.

  Joyce had been in an unusual relationship during school, followed by years of fieldwork abroad, so she’d missed the “window” of the early twenties that both her mother and sister-in-law had caught. And then she’d been with Christopher, who had heard her give a talk at the zoo. That relationship went from chummy to kinky-it was the only way he could stay interested-and made her question the entire concept of trust. Today, the men who asked her out were either single men in their late twenties or early thirties who were interested in relationships that lasted until the next prospect came along; divorced men who were like concrete, poured and set in bizarre ways; or married men who were interested only in sucking up some passion before going home to familiarity and comfort. None of which was for her. She’d rather stay home or go to a movie or work late. Occasionally she’d have dinner with her mentor, Professor Kane Lowery. She had always been alone, and she functioned just fine that way. Not that she
felt her mother or Janet believed her. Joyce could imagine the conversations the two women had with each other.

  The telephone rang while Joyce was heating some lentil soup and reading about computer simulations that proved that bats, like dogs, see in very sharp black and white. The caller was Kathy Leung, a TV reporter who covered the Westchester County beat. There had been a large-scale bat attack at a small-town park an hour north of the city. It had sent two people to the hospital in very serious condition. Kathy had gotten Dr. Joyce’s number from the zoo and was calling from the broadcast truck. If they swung by, would she be interested in coming up to provide some professional commentary from the site?

  Not really, Joyce admitted, but that’s what she’d do if it were her ticket to the scene of the attack. Kathy said they’d be there in ten minutes. Turning off the burner and covering the soup pot, Dr. Joyce was out the door and on the curb as the van pulled up.

  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, cockroach
es 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.