Vespers (2 page)

Breen didn’t tell whoever it was to shut the hell up. A parent did that. Breen waited for the bats to attack. When they didn’t, he wondered if it had anything to do with not moving. Or maybe not moving forward. Tommy and Scott had both gone toward the woods.

There was only one way to find out. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his jacket away from the bats. When the animals didn’t react, he took a cautious step back with his right foot.

Almost as one the tiny heads clicked to the right. He moved toward the woods.

Breen wanted to swear and run. He did neither. If the bats had wanted to attack, they would have. He waited several seconds. When nothing happened, he took a second step back, this time to the left. The twenty-odd small heads didn’t move.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Okay. If you’ll let me go that way, I’m leaving.”

Breen stepped again. Then again. The bats still didn’t move. When he reached the edge of the parking lot, Breen finally turned toward the diamond. The players and all of the parents were standing and watching. He walked swiftly toward the cage.

“What happened out there?” Bob Kidd asked. “Is Tommy-”

“I don’tknow.” Breen snapped. Cold perspiration dripped from the band of his cap. He picked up the pace as he approached the grandstand. He looked up at the parents and children. “All right,” he said. “I need everybody to go that wayslowly.” He pointed toward the picnic area. “If you’ve got jackets, use them to cover your heads. Does anybody have a phone?”

“I do,” one of the mothers said.

“Call nine-one-one.”

She punched in the number.

“Tell them we’ve got bats-maybe thirty of them. Two people are seriously injured. Tell themnot to come along Forest Road. Tell them they should pull in by the pond.”

The woman said all right. Coach Breen walked with her as she placed the call.

In less than a minute, the diamond and grandstands were empty.

When there was no longer a threat, the bats returned to the skies. They continued scooping down insects, watching one another, and making certain that nothing but wind and moonlight approached the forest.

One of the things Detective First Grade Robert Gentry liked about running the Accident Investigations Squad at Midtown South was that when he left the station house he left the work there as well.

Fender benders and buckets kicked over by window washers and pedestrians tripping over gas or water hoses didn’t depress him the way being a narc had for more than ten years, five of those spent deep undercover. Minor accidents didn’t have the same kind of despair and deterioration and rippling consequences as drug addiction. And major automobile or structural accidents were handled jointly by the NYPD and the Fire Department, with the ranking Fire Department official in command. All Gentry had to do was show up. When he came home at night he also didn’t have to wonder whose footsteps or shadows were behind him. And thanks to those long years he’d spent pretending to be Nick Argento, buyer and seller of hard drugs, he no longer had a wife to worry about. For Gentry, worrying that he’d been found out by a pusher or smuggler who’d gotten to the house and to Priscilla had always been his greatest fear.

Police Commissioner Joe Veltre had personally selected Gentry to run the small, relatively cushy AIS nearly six months before. It was the equivalent of a papal dispensation, since Veltre’s appointment as top cop had been given a big boost by Gentry’s successful antidrug efforts.

Gentry usually quit the station house around six P.M., leaving the report writing to Detectives Second Grade Jason Anthony and Jen Malcolm. Anthony in particular enjoyed the detail work. He’d come over from the Multi-Agency Salvage Yard Task Force and said it was gratifying to make order out of chaos.

Maybe. All it did for Gentry was make him want to look out the dirty office window and think. Think about the past. About that one here-then-gone instant that had taken him from narcotics to where he was. Think about Bernie Michaelson and what it had been like to have a partner, to be closer to someone than he’d ever managed to be with his wife. Think about how he missed that-and Bernie. They had been so attuned to each other that even when they hadn’t been able to speak, the movement of an eyebrow, the slope of a shoulder, the shape of a smile told the other one everything he needed to know.

As he usually did, even in the most inclement weather, the thirty-three-year-old NYPD veteran walked downtown from the station house on West Thirty-fifth Street. It was nearly two miles to the West Village, and he enjoyed every block of it. He loved the half sentences of lives he heard as people passed. He loved the smells of restaurants and delis and roasted peanuts hawked by street-corner vendors. He loved the loud tabloid headlines and magazine covers he caught as he passed racks or shop windows. There was always something small to enjoy, and when small got boring there was always something big to savor: the Empire State Building over his left shoulder, the World Trade Center straight ahead. They were different every day, sunshine glinting off both like sequins or clouds hanging low over the tops. There were also old facades, a low-flying dirigible now and then, and the parade of automobiles and trucks and buses. Gentry especially enjoyed the Fashion Institute of Technology on Twenty-seventh Street, and he always slowed on the wide sidewalk to watch the young people coming and going with portfolios. There was life and energy among the young, not just the emaciation and death that he’d become accustomed to during those ten long years.

He walked, too, because he had nowhere to rush to.

There had been women for the first three or four months after he’d quit narcking. Women he met on the job, in coffee shops, on blind dates, at dances. Women who helped him forget, for a few hours, the loss of his wife and then the loss of his undercover partner. But sometimes, in the small hours of the night, he’d look at the woman sleeping next to him. He knew how to turn her on but notwhat turned her on. He’d try to remember her name. And he’d feel dirty inside.They were using each other the way they’d use a back scratcher. He’d spent enough time as a narc watching people destroy their spirits while they thought they were doing happy things to their bodies. So he put a stop to that. He hated being alone, but being with those ladies was worse. They were like mirrors that showed you your own scars. They were alone too.

Walking also gave him time to finish the serial thinking he’d started in his small office. To come to terms with the event that had ended his career as Nick Argento. It was tough, still.

Gentry was married to the Seventh Avenue route. It took him a little out of his way to the east, but Ninth Avenue was too sedate and Eighth Avenue was too damn crowded with people waiting to get into the trendy bar, jazz club, or café of the week. However, he did vary a key part of his routine each night. Sometimes he stopped for Thai takeout, sometimes he grabbed a salad, and sometimes he ate in at a sushi place on Hudson Street because he loved the monster-sized dragon rolls and there was a waitress who was simply the most elegant woman he had ever seen. Old Mrs. Bundonis who lived next door to Gentry warned him that he was going to die of malnutrition or worms. Also of not dressing warmly enough. He was actually glad she did that; he’d always wondered what it would be like to have a mother.

Tonight was Thai night, and Gentry stopped at his favorite hole-in-the-wall on Seventh Avenue. He got caught up on the saga of the counter guy and his four old aunts who had come to visit from Bangkok and showed very little interest in leaving. When Gentry got to his one-bedroom apartment on Washington Street-with a double-order of mei grob, since the portions were appetizer-small-he slipped off his navy blue blazer, white shirt, and cobalt blue tie, pulled on his gray NYPD sweats, and crashed in front of the tube.

For years, the Bronx meant only one thing to Nancy Joyce. It was the ultimate killer place to use in the game Geography, until her older brother Peter discovered there was a place called Xochihuehuetian, Mexico.

Her view of the borough changed when she moved there. What she discovered was that the past, the present, and the future all coexisted in the Bronx.

The past were the remnants of the thousands of families that had settled here in the first two decades of the twentieth century. That was when New York City ’s northernmost borough offered spacious apartments with central heating, refrigerators, and private bathrooms-amenities that were undreamed of in the older, more crowded Manhattan.

The present were the families that had moved here in the years following World War II, when affordable public housing went up and the exclusive nature of the borough ended.

The future were the families that had come to the Bronx, lured by fire-sale prices and a near-evangelistic desire to rejuvenate neighborhoods that had surrendered to drugs and crime and the homeless.

Twenty-nine-year-old zoologist Dr. Nancy Joyce was part of the past. The things that were real but foggy, just out of reach. Two years before, when she had been hired by the Bronx Zoo and became what her coworkers and school groups affectionately called “the bat lady,” she had moved into the three-bedroom Bronx apartment that belonged to her eighty-seven-year-old widowed grandmother. Nancy Joyce and her brother had spent very little time here as kids. They grew up in rural Connecticut, and more often than not Dad drove down to get Grandma Joycewicz and bring her up to the country.

When Joyce came to the Bronx after obtaining her Ph.D., the apartment was a revelation. The walls of the living room and dining room were almost entirely covered with browning, frame-to-frame photographs. They were a shrine to a lost world. Her grandmother’s family, the Cherkassovs, had been Russian aristocrats-starched men and formal women who stood or sat in studios, in salons, and on porticos of beach homes or country cottages. Her grandfather’s family had been Polish laborers, and the pictures of them showed rumpled, tousle-haired men and women holding scythes or working oxen in the fields. The Cherkassovs fled after the Russian Revolution, and they ended up sleeping in woods and fields where they were found one sunrise by Joseph Joycewicz. He took one of the refugees as his wife, and they sailed for America.

Even if she hadn’t heard that story when she was growing up, Nancy Joyce would have been able to read it in this picture diary, its fragile pages lovingly preserved behind glass.

There were also some newer pictures. Her father and his older sister as children. Joseph up in Westchester hunting with his son. The family at Coney Island and Atlantic City and on Forty-second Street taking in a double feature. Probably a Western, which her grandfather was said to have loved. He believed that westerns were accurate depictions of history. Just like the black-and-white photographs on the wall.

It wasn’t just the photographs that had a story to tell. There was the porcelain statue of the Greek hunter Orion holding a dead stag. The arrow had been broken off by her father, who had tried to pull it out and fire it from a homemade bow when he was three years old. There was the sofa that her grandfather had gone to lie on at night when the pain of the cancer that consumed him kept him awake. He went there to read the Polish novels he loved or to cry because he would be leaving his Anya far, far earlier than either was prepared for. He was forty-nine when he finally succumbed. There was the worn and faded rug that Joseph had bought Anya for their tenth wedding anniversary. The tattered seat cushion on the rocking chair, from the first cab that Joseph had driven. The radio that her father and his older sister had grown up listening to. Their schoolbooks on the shelf. The rifle with which Joseph had taught his son how to hunt. The old Victrola and the elderly woman’s large collection of 78s.

When Grandma Joycewicz died, her granddaughter kept the apartment but refused to change very much in it. She put cable TV and a VCR in the living room and added a CD player and small speakers. She also replaced the old black rotary phone on the nightstand with a cordless. And she put in an extra phone jack so she could go on-line with her laptop. Joyce had never found it strange to be on-line in “this old place,” as her grandmother used to call it. An on/off switch let the present in and then sent it back out again. The apartment remained a comforting retreat.

Her handful of semiclose friends thought Joyce was being trendily retro. It didn’t matter. The place had an air of the melancholy that suited her fascination with things dark and haunting. “This old place” was a reminder of a time when lives that had been upheaved by chaos were set right by love. A time where the pace was slower but hopes were much, much higher. A time when each day was precious because twentieth-century medicine was still in its adolescence.

On her days off, like today, the young woman thoroughly enjoyed staying at home and catching up on current research and reports about bats, answering E-mail from former classmates and other scientists, and then relaxing by reading trashy novels, planning hunting trips, or talking on the phone with her mother or her sister-in-law, Janet.

For reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint, those calls always left her feeling as if she’d done something wrong.

Both her mom and Janet worried about her living alone and also-more so, she suspected-about herbeing alone. No husband. No boyfriend. No prospects of one. As Joyce had told them both many times, it wasn’t that she was uninterested in meeting men. It was that she was uninterested in seeing most of the men she did meet. Except for a couple of five-and six-year-old gentlemen she’d caught smiling at her from school groups, most of them were aggressive and charmless.

Joyce had been in an unusual relationship during school, followed by years of fieldwork abroad, so she’d missed the “window” of the early twenties that both her mother and sister-in-law had caught. And then she’d been with Christopher, who had heard her give a talk at the zoo. That relationship went from chummy to kinky-it was the only way he could stay interested-and made her question the entire concept of trust. Today, the men who asked her out were either single men in their late twenties or early thirties who were interested in relationships that lasted until the next prospect came along; divorced men who were like concrete, poured and set in bizarre ways; or married men who were interested only in sucking up some passion before going home to familiarity and comfort. None of which was for her. She’d rather stay home or go to a movie or work late. Occasionally she’d have dinner with her mentor, Professor Kane Lowery. She had always been alone, and she functioned just fine that way. Not that she felt her mother or Janet believed her. Joyce could imagine the conversations the two women had with each other.