Gentry walked up to Forty-second Street and headed east to Grand Central. This time his mind was not on the sunshine.
According to Captain Sheehy, Captain DiFate said that the bats at the Central Park Zoo had gone wild shortly after sunrise. They were trying to escape through the two grated air ducts in the bat house. So far they hadn’t succeeded, though DiFate said that many of the bats were bloody from the effort and still wouldn’t give up. He added that the police deployment had nothing to do with the bats per se. It had to do with zoo and park authorities being concerned that nearly one hundred squealing bats might upset the other animals. They didn’t want people trying to get in to see the “wild” lions and trumpeting elephants.
Captain Sheehy added that he wasn’t worried about the bats in Central Park or Westchester or anywhere else. If they got loose in the city and the Health Department couldn’t handle them, NYPD sharpshooters would. “Skeet,” he called them with a chuckle.
Gentry wasn’t so sure about that. Any animal that could terrify a cockroach had his cautious respect. He hoped that Nancy Joyce had an explanation for what was going on.
Gentry entered the busy terminal and headed toward the grand staircase on the western side of the concourse. Just like when he walked home at night, he loved the crowds. The life. The energy. He needed to get that back. As he walked, he looked up at the newly restored constellations on the hundred-foot-high ceiling. It was green and bright, and it helped take his mind off bats. He thought back to how his father used to tell him about the constellations. Only in New York would builders have been audacious enough to block out God’s heaven and put up one of their own. He admired that.
Metro North ran most of the trains coming in and out of the city from upstate New York and New England. They had their own police force, which was chartered by the city and worked closely with the NYPD. They were based in the most elegant headquarters in New York: the former Vanderbilt apartments. The rooms, made of marble and stone, had been erected in 1912 for the convenience of the family that ran what was then the New York Central Railroad.
Gentry paid a call on Captain Ari Alberto Moreaux. When Moreaux was the operations coordinator for Midtown South, he worked closely with Gentry at SNEU. Moreaux got burned out just nine months before Gentry had his own problem up in Connecticut. The long hours and slime stains they all had to deal with were bad enough. But for Moreaux, the capper came when a major heroin dealer got stopped on lower Broadway for a routine traffic violation. The officer found a joint in the car ashtray. One of Moreaux’s undercover boys was in the car with the dealer and saw two years of work going down the toilet for a simple pot bust. Instead of letting the cop arrest the dealer, the undercover guy flashed his badge to the traffic cop, blew the scumbag dealer away, and put a “throwaway” in the hand of the corpse-a gun he kept for just that purpose. The traffic cop covered for him and said the dealer reached for the gun to discourage the arrest. Moreaux couldn’t take it anymore. Now, as the captain freely admitted, he was happy to be dealing with the menace of drunken commuters, panhandlers, and cigarette smokers who lit up while they were still inside the station.
It was good to see Moreaux. He still had his son Jonathan’s framed second-grade history report on the wall, a one-pager on the origin of the wordcop. Gentry hadn’t known until he read that when the New York state legislature gave the city its first police force in 1845, the officers had refused to wear uniforms. As a compromise, they agreed to wear copper badges to identify themselves as peace officers-hence the name.
Jonathan Moreaux was now a “copper” cadet himself.
Gentry explained to the captain that he wanted to take Dr. Joyce out to the tracks where the guano had been found. Moreaux had no objection and asked the desk sergeant to radio Officer Stiebris. The rookie was told to meet Detective Gentry and Dr. Joyce at the main information booth in half an hour.
Gentry thanked Moreaux and they agreed to have dinner the following week. Moreaux said he’d picked the spot, someplace he could get a burger instead of the stomach-burning shit Gentry ate. Then the detective went downstairs to wait beside the small kiosk.
As Gentry stood there, he watched the midmorning crowd. The people were mostly commuters hurrying from the tracks on the north side of the station to subways and exits on the south, west, and east. Very few of them bothered to look up at the constellations.
That’s what the world is all about,Gentry thought. Rushing. Rushing to work, rushing from work, rushing to entertainment and shopping and eating. It was ironic. Gentry had the siren at his disposal, but he rarely rushed anywhere. His life on the force had been about patience and waiting. Cooling off arguments when he was on the beat. Nurturing the trust of gang members when he was undercover. Taking part in stakeouts. When he was off duty all he wanted to do was relax. With a lady if possible, but alone was fine too.
Gentry saw Nancy Joyce coming toward him from the east side of the terminal. That was where the Number 5 subway train would have dropped her. She was moving briskly against the human wave, ducking and weaving gracefully. The scientist was slightly shorter than he’d expected, about five-foot-five. She was carrying a bright orange shoulder bag and was still dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing on television the night before.
Gentry stepped away from the kiosk to greet her. She had a firm handshake. She made and held eye contact. She really did have beautiful eyes.
“Thanks for coming,” Gentry said.
“Thanks for calling.”
“I don’t know if you heard, but there’s been some kind of bat uprising at the Central Park Zoo,” Gentry said.
“I know. That moron Berkowitz called as I was leaving. I sent my assistant Marc to have a look.”
“How bad is it over there?”
“It must be pretty bad if Berkowitz called,” Joyce said. “He’s not really a bat guy, he’s a rodent guy. Handles everything from chipmunks to chinchillas. He waited five hours before calling-doesn’t like anyone messing with his fiefdom, especially if it’s a woman.” Joyce shook her head. “The joke is, if Berkowitz’s rich wife hadn’t given so much money to that place through all her not-for-profit charities, he’d probably be writing flash cards instead of helping to run a zoo.”
“You know, I never realized that about-”
“Berkowitz?” Joyce said. “Oh, yeah. The man’s great at self-promotion. He brings his cuddly little animals to schools and goes on TV, but he doesn’t know half as much as he should for that job.”
“No,” Gentry said. “I never realized that chinchillas are rodents.”
Joyce looked at him. Then she looked down, embarrassed. “Yeah. They are.” She suddenly seemed to have the weight of all those constellations on her back.
“Y’know, when I was a kid I used to love learning things like that,” Gentry said.
“Me too. Look, I’m sorry.”
“About?”
“I shouldn’t have gone off like that. Patronage in science is a major sore spot with me.”
“Patronage bothers me, too,” he said. “The worst thing about it is when we have to do their jobs plus ours because they’re incompetent.”
She looked back at him. There was a hint of a smile in her eyes. “Right. I’m also very tired, which isn’t helping my mood any.”
“Understood.”
Joyce seemed a little peppier now. “You want to get going?”
“We’re waiting for Officer Stiebris. He knows the way. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”
Joyce nodded. She leaned heavily against the information booth.
“You want some coffee?”Gentry asked. “Maybe a bottle of water? We’ve got a long hot walk ahead.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, though.”
“So, the last day’s been pretty tough?” Gentry asked.
“Yeah.”
“Whatdo you think is going on?”
“I wish I knew. The only universal explanation I can think of is that we’re seeing some kind of bat dementia, though there’s no precedent for it and I have absolutely no idea what could be causing it. The initial lab results from the two patients and the deer carcass came in just as I was leaving. Unfortunately, they don’t tell us very much.”
“What do they tell you?”
“In terms of the two people, nothing more than we already knew. In terms of the deer, only that there’s definitely bat saliva in the blood. But it’s possible the vespers simply lit there-”
“I’m sorry. The who?”
“The vespers. Vespertilionids,” Joyce said. “That’s the breed of bat we’re dealing with.”
“Oh.”
“It’s possible they landed on the deer after it was already dead,” Joyce continued. “But vespers very rarely eat meat, and they definitely aren’t scavengers.”
“Unless they were suffering from dementia, as you said.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, though we haven’t exhausted all the tests, we didn’t find any kind of microbe in the saliva that might cause the bats to act this way. In fact, except for rabies there reallyisn’t a condition we know of that would do this. And rabies wouldn’t cause the kind of-I’ll call it cooperation, for lack of a better word, that the witnesses reported.”
“So you really haven’t got much to go on, have you?”
“No. Though there was something else-what look like several large teeth marks in the deer carcass. They’re about two to three inches long. They look like a mountain lion could have made them, but there were no footprints anywhere. Dr. Nadler made a mold from a gnaw mark in one of the shoulder bones. When Marc is finished at the Central Park Zoo, he’s going to run the mold over to Dr. Lowery at the Museum of Natural History. Maybe he can identify it.”
“I didn’t realize big cats live in the region.”
“They do. The problem is they wouldn’t be strong enough to haul a deer up a tree.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about bats or cats, but I can’t help thinking this deer thing is a prank. Some kind of antienvironmentalist statement.”
Joyce shook her head. “The wildlife commissioner up there said he knows those groups. They print leaflets and bitch on-line. Besides, nobody’s taken credit for killing the deer. But if and when they do, I want to know how they got the damn thing up there.” She looked at Gentry again. “Do you mind if I ask why you’re so concerned about this?”
“Like I told you on the phone, I had a late-night run-in with bats myself. They chased a couple hundred cockroaches from my neighbor’s wall.”
“But you didn’t actually see any bats.”
“That’s right.When I took a look behind the switchplate they were coming from, I found bat guano.”
“How much?”
“I probably could’ve filled seven or eight sandwich bags.”
“Actually, Detective, that’s pretty consistent-”
“Robert,” he interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“You call me Robert and I’ll call you Nancy.”
“All right,” she said. “Anyway, that much guano is consistent with transient bat habitats in the city’s tunnels and subways. Manhattan has always been a stopping-off point for bats migrating from Canada and New England to the warmer states in the South.”
“It’s funny,” Gentry said. “I never thought of any animals migrating except for birds.”
“Bats do, and for exactly the same reason as birds. Insects are extremely scarce during the winter. Bats usually start the trip in late summer and get where they’re going by midfall.Whenever bats are en route, they’ll usually duck into a shelter to stay cool, eat or drink, stay out of the wind, and hide from predators like cats, hawks, snakes, and owls. That could be the case here.”
“As far as I know, we’ve never had a bat problem or even a bat sighting in my building before.”
“Did you ever have a cockroach problem?”
“Not much of one. And I’m right on the Hudson.”
“I’m not a bug expert, but they could have been chased into your building from somewhere else. A small colony of bats in a subway tunnel might have found a pocket of them. Or they could have been chased in by an upswing in predation near the river.”
Arvids Stiebris arrived as Joyce was speaking. The tall, powerfully built railroad officer clasped Gentry’s hand tightly. Arvids had been a rookie pitcher on the Metro North softball team during the season that just ended. Gentry had played left field from Midtown South and whiffed during three at bats in the last, crucial playoff game. The kid had an unhittable sinker. Robert Gentry was an okay loser and he admired talent, but the “Heroes from West-chester” profile Kathy Leung had done on Arvids really rankled him-“Hartsdale’s gift to Grand Central…and the pitcher’s mound.”
Gentry introduced the officer to Dr. Joyce. Arvids fixed his dark eyes on her.
“I saw you on TV last night with Kathy. That was great spin you put on the bats. Makes you almost want one as a pet.”
“That wasn’t spin, it was the truth,” Joyce said. “If bat diets were compatible with captivity, they’d make wonderful pets.”
“Maybe,” Arvids said. He started toward the ramp that led downstairs. “But I wouldn’t want one unless it was housebroken. That is one potent stench they produce.”
“It’s no worse than that of any other animal,” she replied, “including humans. You’re just not used to it.”
“I’ll take your word for that,” Arvids said.
Gentry thought Joyce was being a touch defensive. But then, he didn’t like it when anyone outside of the department criticized cops. Stereotypes could be frustrating to people who knew better.
“Anyhow,” Arvids went on, “I checked with station maintenance. No one’s been back in the tunnel to clean up the mound. Because this whole thing involved a medical situation, the health inspector has to do an on-site report. You know, tell everyone there’s no danger before they can clean up the guano. That’s supposed to happen later this afternoon.”
“Not that I’m complaining but why are they waiting so long?” Gentry asked.
“They just did a major rat sweep in the north end of Central Park,” Arvids said. “Quiet operation, ethyl chloride-every effective. But a lot of people are still in the field cleaning up the bodies.”
Arvids led Gentry and Joyce to the lowest platform on the east side of the subway terminal. The clerk buzzed them through the service entrance. As they entered and made their way across the crowded ramp, Gentry got the same feeling he’d had earlier-that there was something “off” down here. Subdued. He couldn’t explain why he felt that way.
They walked to the end of the platform. When they reached the far side, Arvids hopped down. Joyce jumped down after him. Gentry sat on the concrete and slid off.
A moment later they were in another world.