She wrote a note to Jack Dawson, asking him to call her this evening. He had to be told about the rat, so that he could arrange to have the building superintendent hire an exterminator. She fixed the note to the refrigerator with a magnetic plastic butterfly that was usually used to hold a shopping list in place.
After she put on her rubber boots, coat, scarf, and gloves, she switched off the last light, the hall light. Now, the apartment was lit only by the thin, gray, useless daylight that seemed barely capable of penetrating the windows. The hall, windowless, was not lit at all. She stood perfectly still by the front door for more than a minute — listening.
The apartment remained tomb-silent.
At last, she let herself out and locked the door behind her.
A few minutes after Nayva Rooney had gone, there was movement in the apartment.
Something came out of Penny and Davey's bedroom, into the gloomy hallway. It merged with the shadows. If Nayva had been there, she would have seen only its bright, glowing, fiery white eyes. It stood for a moment, just outside the door through which it had come, and then it moved down the hall toward the living room, its claws clicking on the wooden floor; it made a cold angry, hissing noise as it went.
A second creature came out of the kids' room. It, too, was well-hidden by the darkness in the apartment, just a shadow among shadows — except for its shining eyes.
A third small, dark, hissing beast appeared.
A fourth.
A fifth.
Another. And another…
Soon, they were all over the apartment: crouching in corners; perching on furniture or squirming under it; slinking along the baseboard; climbing the walls with insectile skill; creeping behind the drapes; sniffing and hissing; scurrying restlessly from room to room and then back again; ceaselessly growling in what almost sounded like a guttural foreign language; staying, for the most part, in the shadows, as if even the pale winter light coming through the windows was too harsh for them.
Then, suddenly, they all stopped moving and were motionless, as if a command had come to them. Gradually, they began to sway from side to side, their beaming eyes describing small arcs in the darkness. Their metronomic movement was in time with the song that Baba Lavelle sang in another, distant part of the city.
Eventually, they stopped swaying.
They did not become restless again.
They waited in the shadows, motionless, eyes shining.
Soon, they might be called upon to kill.
They were ready. They were eager.
CHAPTER THREE
I
Captain Walter Gresham, of Homicide, had a face like a shovel. Not that he was an ugly man; in fact, he was rather handsome in a sharp-edged sort of way. But his entire face sloped forward, all of his strong features pointing down and out, toward the tip of his chin, so that you were reminded of a garden spade.
He arrived at the hotel a few minutes before noon and met with Jack and Rebecca at the end of the elevator alcove on the sixteenth floor, by a window that looked down on Fifth Avenue.
“What we've got brewing here is a full-fledged gang war,” Gresham said. “We haven't seen anything like this in my time. It's like something out of the roaring twenties, for God's sake! Even if it is just a bunch of hoods and scumbags killing one another, I don't like it. Absolutely won't tolerate it in my jurisdiction. I spoke with the Commissioner before I came over here, and he's in full agreement with me: We can't go on treating this as if it were just an ordinary homicide investigation; we've got to put the pressure on. We're forming a special task force. We're converting two interrogation rooms into a task force headquarters, putting in special phone lines and everything.”
“Does that mean Jack and I are being pulled off the case?”
“No, no,” Gresham said. “I'm putting you in charge of the task force. I want you to head back to the office, work up an attack plan, a strategy, figure out everything you'll need. How many men — both uniforms and detectives? How much clerical support? How many vehicles? Establish emergency liaisons with city, state, and federal drug enforcement agencies, so we don't have to go through the bureaucracy every time we need information. Then meet me in my office at five o'clock.”
“We've still got work to do here,” Jack said.
“Others can handle that,” Gresham said. “And by the way, we've gotten some answers to your queries about Lavelle.”
“The phone company?” Jack asked.
“That's one of them. They've no listed or unlisted number for anyone named Baba Lavelle. In the past year, they've had only two new customers named Lavelle. I sent a man around this morning to talk to both of them. Neither is black, like your Lavelle. Neither of them knows anyone named Baba. And neither of them made my man the least bit suspicious.”
Driven by a sudden hard wind, snow grated like sand across the window. Below, Fifth Avenue briefly vanished beneath whirling flakes.
“What about the power company?” Jack asked.
“Same situation,” Gresham said. “No Baba Lavelle.”
“He might've used a friend's name for utility connections.”
Gresham shook his head. “Also heard back from the Department of Immigration. No one named Lavelle — Baba or otherwise — applied for any residency permit, either short-term or long-term, in the past year.”
Jack frowned. “So he's in the country illegally.”
“Or he's not here at all,” Rebecca said.
They looked at her, puzzled.
She elaborated: “I'm not convinced there is a Baba Lavelle.”
“Of course there is,” Jack said.
But she said, “We've
Gresham was keenly interested, and his interest disheartened Jack. “You think maybe Lavelle is just a red herring? Sort of a… paper man behind which the real killer or killers are hiding?”
“Could be,” Rebecca said.
“A bit of misdirection,” Gresham said, clearly intrigued. “In reality, maybe it's one of the other mafia families making a move on the Carramazzas, trying to take the top rung of the ladder.”
“Lavelle exists,” Jack said.
Gresham said, “You seem so certain of that. Why?”
“I don't know, really.” Jack looked out the window at the snowswept towers of Manhattan. “I won't pretend I've got good reasons. It's just… instinct. I feel it in my bones. Lavelle is real. He's out there somewhere.
He's out there… and I think he's the most vicious, dangerous son of a bitch any of us is ever going to run up against.”
II
