nodded with the quiet pride characteristic of exterminators. An exterminator succeeds in silence. Success means leaving behind no indication of his success, no trace that a problem ever existed, that a pest had ever been present or a single trap laid. It means that order has been preserved.
He pulled his wheeled case behind him like a computer repairman’s tool kit. The interior of the loft opened to high ceilings and wide rooms, an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo that cost three million easily in New York real estate dollars. Seated on a short, firm, basketball-orange sofa inside a high-tech room done in glass, teak, and chrome, a young girl clutched a doll and her mother. A large bandage covered the girl’s upper lip and cheek. The mother wore her hair buzzed short; eyeglasses with narrow, rectangular frames; and a nubby, green knee-length wool skirt. She looked to Vasiliy like a visitor from a very hip, androgynous future. The girl was young, maybe five or six, and still frightened. Vasiliy would have attempted a smile, but his was the sort of face that rarely put children at ease. He had a jaw like the flat back of an ax blade and widely spaced eyes.
A panel television hung on the wall like a wide, glass-framed painting. On it, the mayor was speaking into a bouquet of microphones. He was trying to answer questions about the missing dead from the airplane, the bodies that had disappeared from the city’s morgues. The NYPD was on high alert, and actively stopping all refrigerated trucks at bridges and tunnels. A TIPS line had been set up. The victims’ families were outraged, and funerals had been put on hold.
Bill led Vasiliy to the girl’s bedroom. A canopy bed, a gem—encrusted Bratz television and matching laptop, and an animatronic butterscotch pony in the corner. Vasiliy’s eyes went immediately to a food wrapper near the bed. Toasted crackers with peanut butter inside. He liked those himself.
“She was in here taking a nap,” said Billy. “Woke up feeling something gnawing on her lip. The thing was up on her pillow, Vaz. A rat in her bed. Kid won’t sleep for a month. You ever heard of this?”
Vasiliy shook his head. There were rats in and around every building in Manhattan—no matter what landlords say or tenants think—but they didn’t like to make their presence known, especially in the middle of the day. Rat attacks generally involve children, most often around the mouth, because that’s where the food smell is. Norway rats—Rattus norvegicus, city rats—have a highly defined sense of smell and taste. Their front incisors are long and sharp, stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron. Gnawing rats are responsible for one-quarter of all electric-cable breaks in the city, and the likely culprit behind the same percentage of fires of unknown origin. Their teeth are comparable in pure hardness to steel, and the alligator-like structure of their jaw allows for thousands of pounds of biting pressure. They can chew through cement and even stone.
Vasiliy said, “Did she see the rat?”
“She didn’t know what it was. She screamed and flailed and it ran off. The emergency room told them it was a rat.”
Vasiliy went to the window that was open a few inches to let in a breeze. He pushed it open farther and looked down three stories to a narrow cobblestone alley. The fire escape was ten or twelve feet from the window, but the centuries-old brick facing was uneven and craggy. People think of rats as squat and waddling, when in fact they move with squirrel-like agility. Especially when motivated by food or by fear.
Vasiliy pulled the girl’s bed away from the wall and shed its bedding. He moved a dollhouse, a bureau, and a bookcase in order to look behind them, but he did not expect to find the rat still in the bedroom. He was merely eliminating the obvious.
He stepped out into the hallway, pulling his wheeled cart along the smooth, varnished wood. Rats have poor eyesight and move largely by feel. They get about quickly by repetition, wearing paths along low walls, rarely traveling more than sixty feet from their nest. They don’t trust unfamiliar settings. This rat would have found the door and turned the corner, hugging the right-hand wall, his coarse fur gliding against the floorboard. The next open door led into a bathroom, the young daughter’s own, decorated with a strawberry-shaped bath mat, a pale pink shower curtain, and a basket of bath bubbles and toys. Vasiliy scanned the room for hiding places, then sniffed the air. He nodded to Billy, who then closed the door on him.
Billy lingered a minute, listening, then decided to head back out to reassure the mother. He was almost there when he heard, from the hallway bathroom, a terrific BANG!—the sound of bottles falling into the bathtub—and a loud grunt and Vasiliy’s voice, grown fierce, spurting Russian invective.
The mother and daughter looked stricken. Billy held out a hand to them in a gesture of patience—having accidentally swallowed his gum—then rushed back down the hall.
Vasiliy opened the bathroom door. He was wearing Kevlar-sleeved trapping gloves and holding a large sack. Something in the sack was writhing and pawing. And that something was big.
Vasiliy nodded once and handed the sack to Billy.
Billy couldn’t do anything other than take it, otherwise the sack would fall and the rat would escape. He hoped the fabric was as sturdy as it seemed, the big rat twisting and fighting inside. Billy held the sack out as far from his body as his arm would reach while still allowing him to hold the flailing rat aloft. Vasiliy was, meanwhile, calmly—but too slowly—opening his cart. He removed a sealed package, a sponge prepared with halothane. Vasiliy took back the sack, and Billy was only too happy to relinquish it. He opened the top just long enough to drop the anesthetic inside, then closed it again. The rat struggled just as violently at first. Then it began to slow down. Vasiliy shook the sack to speed up the process.
He waited a few more moments after the fighting stopped, then opened the sack and reached inside, pulling the rat out tail first. It was sedated but not unconscious, its pink-digited front paws still digging their sharp nails into the air, its jaw snapping, its shiny black eyes open. This was a good-size one, maybe eight inches of body, the tail another eight. Its tough fur was dark gray on top, dirty white below. Nobody’s escaped pet, this was a wild city rat.
Billy had moved many steps back. He had seen plenty of rats in his day, yet he never got used to them. Vasiliy seemed to be okay with it.
“She’s pregnant,” he said. Rats gestate for just twenty-one days and can birth a litter of up to twenty pups. One healthy female can breed two hundred and fifty pups each year—with half of that litter more females ready to mate. “Want me to bleed her for the lab?”
Billy shook his head, showing almost as much disgust as though Vasiliy had asked if he wanted to eat it. “The girl had her shots at the hospital. Look at the size, Vaz. In the good name of Christ. I mean, this isn’t”—Billy lowered his voice—“this isn’t some tenement in Bushwick, you catch my drift?”
Vasiliy did catch his drift. Intimately. Vasiliy’s parents had first settled in Bushwick after they came over. Bushwick had seen waves of émigrés since the mid-1800s: the Germans, the English, the Irish, the Russians, the Polish, the Italians, the African Americans, the Puerto Ricans. Now it was Dominicans, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Ecuadorians, Indians, Koreans, Southeast Asians. Vasiliy spent a lot of time in the poorest neighborhoods of New York. He knew of families who used couch cushions, books, and furniture to wall off parts of their apartments every night, trying to keep out rats.
But this attack, indeed, was different. Daylight. The boldness. Usually it is only the weakest rats, forced out of the colony, who surface in search of food. This was a strong, healthy female. Highly unusual. Rats coexist in a fragile balance with man, exploiting the vulnerabilities of civilization, living off the larger breed’s waste and refuse, lurking just out of sight, behind the walls or beneath the floorboards. The appearance of a rat symbolizes human anxiety and fear. Any incursion beyond the usual nocturnal scavenging indicates an alteration in the environment. Like man, rats are not accustomed to taking unnecessary risks: they have to be forced from the underground.
“Want me to comb it for fleas?”
“Christ, no. Just bag it and get rid of it. Whatever you do, don’t show it to the girl. She’s traumatized enough as it is.”
Vasiliy pulled