Jeff Rovin - Vespers

“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.

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.