“For what?”
“Trusting me,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now I think we’ve had enough soul baring. How about some music?”
She selected a tape at random and slugged it into the cassette player.
Two hours later, with the sun setting along the Catskills, with their life stories having been told, with the Association and Simon and Garfunkel and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap having turned through the player, Gentry and Joyce arrived in New Paltz.
Twenty
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.