“I nodded toward Bernie and then toward Mizuno. I was going to go after the other two. Bernie nodded back. The problem was, we weren’t allowed to wear guns around the boss. So I had to get one from the bodyguard who was coming toward me, and Bernie had to get Mizuno’s. Bernie moved when I did. I succeeded. Bernie didn’t. Mizuno shot him in the chest and leg. I nailed the bastard in the shoulder before I turned back to deal with the bodyguards. The narcs came in then and cleaned up. Bernie died en route to the hospital. I got out of the narc business a couple of weeks later. Commissioner Veltre shifted me over to Accident Investigations. Important, but a little less stressful.”

Joyce had been sitting still. The glove compartment was still open. “Robert, I’m sorry.”

He nodded.

“I can’t even imagine what that was like.”

“It was pretty bad for a while,” he admitted. “Now it comes and goes, though I go through the drill almost every day-the should’ves and could’ves and why did I do this instead of that. I can’t shake the idea that the narc squad might’ve been able to handle it without us. That maybe the best thing would have been for Bernie and me to do nothing.”

“Maybe then it would have gone worse than it did.”

“It’s possible,” Gentry admitted. “At least, that’s what my new best friend Father Adams in the Chaplain Unit’s been trying to tell me for six months now. He and I get together every other week for a spirited spiritual exchange. But this is pretty thick,” he tapped his skull, “and what’s inside is still telling me that I blew it. That’s the reason you and I had out little to-do back in the tunnel. I love working with people. Always have. With my sources in the street way back when, with other detectives, with my forensics guys, even with our sorry goddamn softball team. I like working with you. But if something happens to anyone else I’m with, it’s going to be an accident or an act of God. It’s not going to be because I didn’t look out for the people who were with me.”

The car continued along the Hudson River. Sunlight and pleasure boats skipped across the waters. Joyce closed the glove compartment without selecting a tape. Her eyes drifted ahead to the George Washington Bridge.

“Everybody screws up,” she said. “Sometimes it happens when you think you’re doing the right thing. When you’d absolutely swear it. When you’ve thought about it, and gone back and forth about it, and hadweeks to decide, not seconds. This field-the curatorships, the associate curatorships, the directorships, the assistant directorships-is every bit as competitive as you said it is. There are about fifty Ph.D.’s for every available position. If you manage to get one of those you can really vindicate yourself. Say ‘fuck you’ to all the people who thought you were crazy as a kid for liking what you did. For dreaming of being a circus aerialist or running cruises along the Amazon.”

“Or devoting your life to bats.”

“That too. But if you make a deal that gets you the vindication but costs you self-respect, it’s worse than a wash. You never know if you could have done it without the deal. Or if failing on your own would have been better.”

“Lowery,” Gentry said.

Joyce nodded. She felt tears behind her eyes.

“I’m sorry I started this,” Gentry said, “You don’t have to-”

“I want to.” She laughed and wept. “Hey, I’m crazy. Resentful one second, blubbering my heart out the next. But you did something not too many people do. You changed what you wanted to suit me. And then you trusted me with something very private. That gets to a girl faster than showing her your guano. Which, by the way, you never did.”

Gentry smiled.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Professor Lowery. He was my mentor and he was my first lover.”

Gentry’s smile lost some of its glow.

“I fell for him big-time,” she went on. “He was curator of the museum back then, curator emeritus now. Loves research. Controlled experiments. I thought, when we started our affair, that he was trying to help me reach my potential. And part of him was. Then I started to suspect he was trying to work some kind of “thing” through me. Like Eliza Doolittle. Take an unlikely student-a moody, introspective kid not from a rich or proper family and make her the top figure in her field. Give her the tools, the tutoring, the experiences no one else has. Take her around the world and make sure her papers are published in all the right journals, even if you don’t agree with them.” She snickered. “We had a big argument over the question of whether bats have rudimentary emotions. But he got behind my paper anyway.”

“Because it wasn’t about science,” Gentry said. “None of this was.”

“No. You’re right. It was about ego. Make her a successful woman in a man’s profession and it’s your legacy.Your legacy, not hers. I went with the flow because I wanted to get where the river was going. And I was afraid to tell this towering figure, ‘Wait a second.’ But when you get there and look back, you realize that even though you know your stuff and may in fact be the best, you don’tfeel like it. So I’m a big shot in the bat world. A successful woman.The bat lady. But inside I’m Lowery’s girl. And the worst part of it is, I still kowtow. Which I guess you saw.”

“Yeah,” Gentry said. “The ‘Nannie’ was kind of a giveaway. But it’s not too late, you know.”

“To tell him off?”

“Not in a rude way,” Gentry said. “But you don’t have to be so deferential either. I think that hurts you. It’s also better than getting mad at everyone else you think might be trying to control you.”

“I don’t know if that’d solve things, Robert. Besides, part of the problem-the biggest part-is that I still care about Professor Lowery. I don’t love him and I’m not sure I ever did. But I don’t want to hurt him.”

They were quiet for a moment. Then Gentry shrugged a shoulder. “Well, this was none of my business to begin with. And I do want to thank you.”

“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.

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.”