Jeff Rovin - Vespers

“Always. But this one’s got me hooked. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He smiled at her. “What about you?”

“My assistant Marc will cover the school lectures.”

“Excellent. So how about it? We can work together.”

She thought for a moment. “Sure. It makes sense.”

“Then I have a suggestion. The subways are going to be screwed up for a while, and getting to the Bronx will be a pain. My apartment’s a short walk away. Why don’t we go there?”

“Nice one.” She allowed the hint of a smile. “You inviting me up to see your guano?”

“Absolutely. It’s a babe magnet.”

Her smile flowered a little more.

“You can use my computer, and if you’re hungry we can eat. Also, if they find anything in the subways, I’ll hear about it and we can go right over.”

Joyce nodded. Now Gentry smiled.

Fortunately, the mayor was arriving as they were leaving. The cluster of reporters gathered outside-Kathy Leung among them-failed to notice Nancy Joyce.

Gentry stopped at a pay phone and called NYPD ICCU, the Inter-city Correspondence Unit, also known as the Stat Unit. He wanted to get them working on the bat attacks as soon as possible. This small division, which is composed mainly of civilians, primarily involves itself with collecting information from and disseminating information to police departments in other cities. The wait time for information is typically a day or two. But Gentry got preferential treatment. That was because he made it a point to remember the birthdays of key personnel with flowers or Knicks tickets. It was a habit he’d started during his days as a narc, when he couldn’t afford to wait more than a few hours for background checks on possible perps in Bridgeport or New Haven or White Plains.

Gentry asked Max Schneider to go back a year and check bat assaults in the northeast and up into Canada. Max promised to beep him as soon as he had something.

Ten minutes later, after paying for a sausage and onion pizza at a small shop on Hudson Street and Eleventh, Joyce and Gentry were on their way to the detective’s apartment.

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?”