Vespers (18 page)

Dr. Lipman’s practice was located in a series of rooms in the back of his country home.

The three-story stone house was more than one hundred years old, situated near the Walkill River on seven thickly treed acres. The pediatrician had just begun examining his last patient when Joyce and Gentry pulled up the long, sloping gravel driveway. A young male receptionist invited them to sit in the waiting room, but they chose to go outside, behind the house. The quiet there was nearly absolute. The canopy of leaves was thick and the rolling grounds were dark. The river moved quietly around a bend, the surface rippling with the last glow of the dying sun. It was like a fairy tale forest, Joyce thought. And unlike the night before-she was happy to note-there were insects and unobtrusive bats.

“It’s weird how the bats are behaving themselves,” Gentry said.

“Very.”

“It reminds me of kids who used to get strung out. As long as they had their fix they were fine.”

“I’d guess any addictive substance is like that,” Joyce said. “Nicotine, alcohol.”

Gentry picked up a stick and started peeling away the bark. “We could have a very serious problem on our hands, couldn’t we?”

She nodded.

“How do you exterminate bats?”

“I’ve never had to do it,” she said, “but I’d say poison or gas. The problem with the New York subways is that there are probably so many outlets, so many places the bats could sneak out. And it’s not like rats where you can put out poison pellets. If these bats are all insectivorous, you’d have to poison the bugs first. I don’t even know if that’s possible. Then there’s our giant bat. If it exists, it would probably be very fast and powerful.”

“It’s powerful, all right,” Gentry said.

She gave him a look.

“Remember those hatch marks on the grate at Grand Central?” he said. “If there’s a big bat, it may have left hanging upside down.”

“Bats do that.”

“Yeah, but like you said, holding up that much weight would take a lot of muscle.”

“It would,” Joyce agreed, “though it also could have been crawling along the roof using its feet and first fingers. Those are the ones located at the top of each wing. Which makes sense,” she added. “The bat would have fed, crawled back into the tunnel, and left the guano mound after that. It’s digestive system would have been stimulated after flying and eating.”

When they heard a car pull away they walked back to the office. When they entered, Dr. Lipman was talking to his receptionist.

“Be with you two in a minute,” he said pleasantly.

Andy Lipman looked as though he was in his early sixties. He was chunky and stood about five-foot-seven. He had a round face, a wide mouth, and lively eyes beneath thick brown eyebrows. His skin was dark from the sun, and he was bald save for a ring of short, light-brown hair. He had on a red bow tie, a white shirt, and jeans that were a little snug in the waist.

Lipman thanked the receptionist, told him to go home, then walked across the waiting room. He offered his hand.

“When you called,” he said to Joyce, “I didn’t realize you were Dr. Joyce of the Bronx Zoo. I took the liberty of having Warren look you up on the Net. You’ve published a great deal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I always talk to my kids when they come in here,” he said. “Ask them what they’ve been doing. A couple of them have come in talking about the tours they had with the ‘bat lady.’ ”

“That’s me,” she said.

Lipman’s eyes shifted to Gentry.

“Detective Robert Gentry,” he said, “NYPD.”

“Pleased to meet you. And also curious.” He motioned toward a well-worn couch. “Sit down. Tell me what I can do for you.”

Joyce sat. Gentry remained standing. Lipman slipped into an armchair at a right angle to the sofa.

“Doctor,” said Joyce, “did you hear about the bat attack last night at the Little League game?”

“I did.”

“There have been several incidents like that over the past few days,” Joyce said. “The first was in New Paltz several days ago. The latest was this morning in New York-deadlier than all the others, I’m afraid.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“There was an indication at several of the sites that there may be an oversized specimen of vespertilionid bat. A mutation. After reading your paper, we wondered if there might be a connection between the bats you encountered in Russia and the bats we’re seeing here.”

“What we need to know, sir,” Gentry said, “is whether you brought anything back from either trip to Siberia. Something that might have affected the bat population in some way?”

Lipman regarded Gentry. “Should I send for my attorney?”

“Doctor,” Joyce said quickly, “this isn’t an official inquiry. We’re not interested in placing blame. We’re simply trying to isolate a problem by tracing it to its source.”

Lipman folded his hands in his lap. “The source of the problem is selfishness. Doing what is expedient. Russia, the Soviet Union, was very good at that. Did you ever hear of Dzerzhinsk?”

Joyce said she hadn’t. Gentry shook his head.

“It’s a city of three hundred thousand people, two hundred fifty miles east of Moscow. For forty years toxic gases were manufactured in factories there. Blister and mustard gas, rocket fuel, DDT-everything. When the Soviet Union shut down, do you know what was done with the poison that had not been distributed? It was buried. Rusted, bloated barrels were buried right there in the soil. I was called in when thousands of children became ill. And what do you suppose was causing the illnesses? Coal. Coal that was being burned in the homes. Coal that had absorbed lethal levels of dioxin while it was still in the ground.” He snickered. “The Russian solution to the problem was not to try and clean up the city. No. It was, ‘Don’t burn coal from here,’ or, ‘Don’t eat food grown here.’ It was pathetic.”

“You couldn’t have been surprised,” Joyce said. “The Soviets didn’t admit there was a problem at Chernobyl until high radiation levels were detected in Sweden.”

“I wasn’t surprised,” Lipman said. “Just sad for the people. Their solution to the radiation at the Chelyabinsk site was the same. Contain and downplay. So I would know how to treat the children, I tried to find out if there were anything else buried in that cave, any chemical barrels like the ones in Dzerzhinsk. But no one evenknew. They simply didn’t care.”

“A toxicological soup,” Joyce said.

“Nearly half a century old,” Lipman remarked. “And who knows where else in the world there are similar ‘soups’? China, Iraq, other sites in the former Soviet Union-maybe even the United States, God help us. The potential for ecological catastrophe is enormous. But getting back to Chelyabinsk, during my first visit there, the Russian military eradicated all the bats in the cave. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. I didn’t see the colony myself, but I heard that they were not…normal.”

“In what way?” Joyce asked.

“One of the soldiers who went into the cave said that some of them, in what looked like the nursery, had bodies the size of foxes.”

“How were the bats destroyed?” Joyce asked.

“The troops used fire, flamethrowers. You could smell the death for more than a mile. The few bats that managed to escape were on fire, squealing. It was awful. The engineers dammed the river inside the cave, sealed the entrance with explosives, and then drained the section of lake near the camp. The water was trucked away, and the lake bed was filled with rocks and soil. The radiation count was negligible, and that was that. Except-” He stopped.

“Go on,” Joyce said.

“I stayed on to help the United Nations team treat the children. Most of them were taken to a local clinic for observation. They were suffering from acute radiation syndrome-very, very mild cases that resulted in headaches, nausea and vomiting, malaise. All of them were ambulatory. I kept the children out in the daylight as much as possible. Sometimes, here, I treat my own patients out back. I’ve always believed in the therapeutic effects of the sun. I had my large medical case with me at all times. You never know what you’ll need in a foreign country. Among the things I had in there were dried banana chips. They contain high levels of potassium, a very useful cleansing agent for bodily fluids, and children don’t mind eating them-”

“One of the bats got in there,” Joyce said.

Lipman steepled this thumbs and tapped them together. His expression was pinched, odd.

“Driven from its home. Hungry. Cold. It got in your case.”

“I wasn’t with the case at all times,” Lipman admitted. “Sometimes I walked away with the children. I didn’t think-didn’t know.”

“What happened?” Joyce passed.

Lipman looked down. “When I came home, the bag flew with me in the cabin and was not inspected at customs. One of the perks of charity work. I put it in the backseat of the car, and because I got home very late, I left it there until the next morning. When I got it, I smelled something funny, so I opened the case. The banana chips were gone and there were feces in the bag. I moved my instruments aside and took out my journal. A bat was lying on its back beneath it.”

“What did it look like?” Joyce asked.

“Like nothing I’d have wanted my kids to see.” Lipman rubbed his mouth. “It was misshapen. The body was large, muscular, all shoulders, legs, and belly. The head was difficult to see because it was tucked low against the chest. But the mouth was extremely wide and the eyes were red and protruding-like the large marbles children used to play with. The ears were high, but I couldn’t see them clearly. The wings were folded against its side, but I remember there was a very long hook on top of each wing.

“That’s digit one,” Joyce said. “The thumb.”

“What happened to the bat?” Gentry asked.

“When I saw it, I was startled,” Lipman said. “I jumped away and the bag spilled over. The bat crawled out.”

“It didn’t fly?” Joyce asked.

“No.”

“Had the wings been hurt in the fire?”

“They didn’t seem to be, but I never saw them spread. The bat crept along the carpet, right here,” he said. “It was maybe nine or ten inches long and it moved slowly, arduously.”

“But it never spread its wings?” Joyce asked.

“No. I wanted to help the poor thing. But when I walked toward it, it vaulted up to the window there”-he pointed to a double window above the couch-“tore through the screen, and jumped out. By the time I went outside, it was gone.”

“Do you have any idea where?”

“I didn’t then,” he said. “I called the wildlife commissioner and told him there was something potentially dangerous out by the Walkill. I wasn’t worried about it being radioactive, but just something alien in the wild. They searched for it up and down the river but found nothing. I didn’t know what happened to it until about a month later.”

“What did happen?” Gentry asked.

“Some hikers found it up the road a way. It was dead. They took a picture of it. I saw the photo in the wildlife section of the local newspaper, and it was unmistakably that bat. Same face, same general build, though it was somewhat desiccated from having been out in the sun. There was one difference, though.”

“It was no longer as bloated as it had been,” Joyce said.

Lipman looked at her. “That’s right. How did you know?”

“Because,” she said, “it was no longer pregnant.”

"I have a question,” Gentry said.

The detective was driving slowly through the early evening dark. The sky was blue-black, and a very bright, clear star was already up in the northwest. Gentry’s goal was a wooded area just off of Route 32 North. Located nearly a mile northeast of Dr. Lipman’s home, that was where the newspaper article said the dead bat had been found. Gentry didn’t know what Nancy expected to find there some eight years later, and she didn’t say. But he agreed that since they were in the area it was probably worth a look.

The young woman was sitting with her knees up against the dashboard. She was holding a rough map the pediatrician had drawn for them on a sheet of prescription paper.

“It’s Jupiter,” Joyce said.

“Pardon?”

“The planet outside your window.”

“What about it?”

“I saw you looking at it. I thought you were going to ask if I knew what it was.”

“No, that wasn’t my question. My dad had been in the navy-he used to point out all the planets and stars.”

Joyce grew slightly embarrassed. She slumped forward a little, into her knees. “Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what?”

“Assumed you didn’t know what that was.”

“Oh, come on. It’s no different from what I did back in the subway, telling you about the third rail.”

“Not many people go walking on subway tracks,” she said. “A lot of people look up at the sky.”

“I didn’t,” Gentry said. “That’s why my dad made a point of telling me about it. About Jupiter and Venus and Orion and Polaris. I was a gutter kid. Bounced balls against the curb, swirled sticks in puddles, fished things out of grates. So ease up on yourself.”

She seemed to, a little.

“If you really want to depress me,” Gentry said, “you’ll know off the top of your head how far it is from the sun.”

She laughed. “About half a billion miles.”

Gentry made a face.

“Hey, I used to be outside a lot at night,” Joyce said. “I wondered about these things so I looked ’em up.”

“You’re amazing,” Gentry said.

“Actually, Robert, what I am is a goddamn smarty-pants. All the kids used to say that.”

“Hump ’em. They were jealous.”

“No, they were kids. Two-legged pack animals. Anyway I don’t want to talk about that. What was your question?”

“What I wanted to know was about radiation. Why is it that radioactivity sometimes causes mutations in living things but at other times it kills them?”