Jeff Rovin - Vespers

“I never see a swarm of any size. I usually get someplace after most of them are hiding.”

“Right,” Gentry said. “But have youheard of one? Why would they swarm in the thousands?”

“Roaches are funny. They find all kinds of reasons to move around. A change in temperature, a flood, a food shortage-”

“Predators?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Bats?”

The exterminator shrugged. “Why not? I found some kinda foul dung down in the basement. Could’ve been guano.”

“Any idea how bats might have gotten in there?” Gentry asked.

“There’s a drain in the floor down there,” the exterminator told him. “Looks like it once emptied into the river, probably as part of an old sewage system. I found it when I saw cockroaches coming out from under an old desk and moved it. The metal drain cover was rusted. This close to the water, everything rusts. Your super’ll have to get that taken care of. Maybe bats or even seagulls found a nest of roaches near the river and started feeding on them. One nest spills into another, that one into another-pretty soon you have a stampede.”

Gentry thanked the woman. Then he and Joyce squeezed by her.

When they reached the apartment, Gentry handed Joyce the pizza and pulled his keys from his pocket. “This place was not exactly clean when I left.”

Gentry stepped into the short hallway and switched on the light. The first impression wasn’t as bad as he expected. Ahead, in the small living room, the blinds were up and the sunlight made things seem a little cleaner. And he’d thrown out the Thai food he’d been eating, so the cockroaches wouldn’t get it. To the right, the bedroom door was shut. The detective took the pizza back, then held it high so Joyce could enter. She walked in and he kicked the door shut with his foot. He watched her slender form as she moved ahead, framed by the bright window.

“Very sunny,” she said.

Joyce turned around in the living room and then faced him. He couldn’t see her expression, but he could feel her eyes. His breath came a little faster, and he felt a kind of longing that he hadn’t experienced in a very long time. He turned away-not to avoid the feeling but to freeze-frame it.

He walked into a small kitchenette to the left and put the pizza on a tiny drop-leaf table. “Where do you live?”

“Up in the Bronx.”

“Is it pretty safe where you are?”

“Very. I carry a thirty-eight when I go to work. Licensed and loaded.”

Gentry shot her an approving look. Not because she was a lady with a gun but because she was smart.

“You take it to a firing range, keep it in good shape?”

“Oh, yeah. I grew up with guns. The thirty-eight was a high school graduation present from my dad.”

“We’ll have to go shooting sometime.”

“That might be fun.”

Gentry went back to the pizza. He wasn’t thinking about bats just then. A lot of longings were coming back.

He pulled a cookie sheet from under the sink and aluminum foil from a cabinet. “How long have you been at the zoo?”

“Going on three years.”

“I bet there’s a lot of competition for jobs like that. Curators and heads of departments, that sort of thing.”

“It’s pretty intense.” Joyce’s voice had dropped a little and she did not elaborate. She ambled toward the computer, then turned back. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Actually, yes,” Gentry said. “Boot the computer. Just turn on the surge protector under the desk-everything else’ll come on.”

Joyce bent over the folding chair. The surge protector was lying on its side on the floor amid a cluster of dust bunnies. She switched it on. The computer and monitor snapped to life.

Joyce got onto the Internet and typed in two keywords:bat andanomalies. She sat back as Gentry put the pizza in the oven, then poured Cokes for them both.

The first list of ten articles and Web sites popped up after a few seconds. Joyce scanned the headings. The first article was about bats that had recently been lured from caves to farms in Colorado in the spring and so far ate nineteen million rootworms, saving a fortune in pesticides. There were also articles on the reproductive habits of the world’s smallest bats, on bats that lived more than twenty-five years, and on tiger moths that emitted high-frequency clicks that disoriented attacking bats and forced them to break off their attacks.

“Anything?” Gentry asked as he brought the Cokes over.

“I’ve seen most of these,” she said. “Nothing helpful unless you want the latest information on the bumblebee bat.”

“Which is?”

“The world’s tiniest mammal,” she said. “From Thailand. Smaller than a penny.”

“Why couldn’t we have been infested with those bats?”

“Because then you’d really be miserable,” Joyce replied. “I had one fly in my ear while I was sleeping. You think a mosquito at night is bad? Bumblebee bats buzz and bite and leave very tiny, wet droppings that run into your ear canal and harden very, very fast. Not fun.”

“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.