Bedbugs

free. But still … she cleared her throat, shook her head. “But …” Susan gestured around the apartment. “There are so many of them.”

“I’ve seen worse.” Kaufmann looked around. “Well, not worse. But close.”

“But I couldn’t kill them. They can’t be killed.”

“Oh, yeah?”

In a swift, athletic motion, Dana Kaufmann squatted and snatched a bedbug between two thick fingers. A split second later, she held up the squashed corpse for Susan’s inspection: a crumbled brown shell, a tiny gush of bright red blood at its center.

“Dead.”

Susan reached forward with a trembling hand and wiped the bug’s bloody broken body off Kaufmann’s fingertip onto her own. “Jesus,” she whispered. She began to shake, overcome by a confusing wash of shame and fear. “Dana. Dana, I tried to murder my husband last night. With a butcher’s knife.”

The exterminator raised her eyebrows slightly, let out a long low whistle, and shrugged. “Well, you know, infestations place extraordinary strain upon a relationship.”

Despite everything, Susan laughed.

“Now, come on,” said Kaufmann. “Let’s kill some fucking bedbugs.”

“The first thing we do is, we clean. Here, and your landlady’s apartment. Basement, too. This entire building needs to be scoured, disinfected, and decluttered, down to the canvas. No hiding places: no bugs.”

“But the book …”

“Right, right. The book. Your friend the mental patient wrote that the curse of the evil bedbugs will stay with you forever and always, no matter what you do or where you go. Well, guess what? The ancient Greeks said if you baked the bedbugs in a pie with meat and beans, they’d cure malaria. That, too, was total nonsense.”

Susan smiled weakly.

“Here’s what is not nonsense. We’re going to vacuum every room, we’re going to steam clean your mattresses and linens, we’re going to dry clean every piece of fabric in this apartment. We’re going to scour every exposed surface. Then we pack up your infestibles to be sealed and pumped with Vikane.”

“Vikane?”

“A fumigant. Industrial strength. Forty-eight hours in Vikane, no bug lives. No egg lives. Nothing. Then we proceed to the application of silica gel and pyrethroids.” Dana Kaufmann’s confidence, her sense of power and purpose, was palpable. She was like a general, rallying for battle. “Do you have a vacuum cleaner with a hose attachment?”

“In the closet.”

“Good. You relax. Drink your coffee.”

Susan did as she was told, slowly sipping from her mug and taking deep, cleansing breaths, watching the sunbeams play across the handsome brown hardwood of the kitchen floor. Already it seemed like there were fewer bedbugs than there had been an hour ago, when Kaufmann first pulled her from the bonus room. She heard the vacuum cleaner roar to life and allowed herself to hope that maybe Kaufmann was right: she would clean, they would pack her infestibles in Vikane, apply the pyrethroids and the silica dust and whatever else … and, in time, everything would be OK. Everything would go back to—

“Oh, shit,” Susan said suddenly. “Alex. I have really got to call Alex.”

She had recovered her iPhone in the morning, found it in a corner of the bonus room, shut off with a dozen bedbugs nesting in the UBS slot at the base. Now she turned it on, but before she could dial her husband, it rang. The incoming number was one she didn’t recognize, a 718 area code.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is … ”

The mechanical roar of the vacuum was moving down the hallway now, coming closer.

“What?”

“I’m—”

“Hold on.”

Susan lowered the phone and shouted to the living room. “Dana, can you cut the vacuum for one second?” Susan turned back to the phone. She had to call her husband. He must be worried sick.

Except — he was supposed to come back, come back to get her. Where was Alex?

“I’m sorry … who is this?”

“My name is Jack Barnum. I think I used to live in your apartment.”

A nervous, prickly energy erupted into Susan’s chest. Beneath thick smears of calamine lotion, her itches sang to life. Kaufmann poked her head into the kitchen, holding up the vacuum hose with an inquiring expression. “Can I …?” Susan shook her head “no,” and the exterminator set it down with a sour expression.

“Yes, Jack? Yes, you did.” She held the phone with her chin, reached around to scratch beneath her shoulder blades.

“I read the note you sent to Jessie, on Facebook. I finally figured out her password. It was my middle name. That was her password, my middle name … my …” Susan could hear raw, throaty grief in his voice, grief and bafflement.

Alarm bells were clanging in Susan’s mind. She scratched the sole of her right foot with the craggy big toenail of her left. “Jack? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Do you know where she is? Did you — Jesus, did you find her?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know where she is. Jack, can you tell me what happened in this apartment?”

Jack Barnum said nothing, but she heard his agonized, fearful breathing, tearful and labored. Dana Kaufmann, not one to waste a spare moment, was now crouched on all fours beneath the kitchen sink, right at Susan’s feet, scouring the baseboards with a thick-bristled brush.

“What happened, Jack?”

“She … Jessie … poor Jessie, she got this idea, somehow. That we had bedbugs. And I didn’t believe her. Because I never saw them. Never. And she …” His voice trembled again, and petered out. “She …”

“She tried to kill you.”

“Yes. Jesus, how did you know that?”

Oh, God — oh, God — they were already here. The bugs were here before Jessie and Jack even moved in. Shivers chased up and down Susan’s spine like electric pulses. Her whole body itched: searing, dry, tingling, horrible itches. They were already here.

“Anyway, so, I freaked out, and I mean, I just ran.” Jack sobbed again, a single guttural wail. “I left her here.”

Dana was watching Susan now, looking up at her with her head tilted and one eyebrow raised.

“And then they kept torturing her,” Susan said. “And she flipped out, and, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she bolted. She left so fast she left the cat behind. And—”

“The cat?”

“What?”

A cheery knock sounded at the front door. “Yoo-hoo?” called the genial, throaty voice. “Suze?”

“No,” Jack said. “We never had a cat.”

Dana was on her feet and out of the kitchen, halfway down the hall, while Susan stared into dead air, thoughts tumbling into her brain:

Never had a cat.

The knock came again, a happy little “shave-and-a-haircut” knock.

“Wait, Dana! Don’t—”

It was too late. The exterminator pulled the door open and Andrea Scharfstein smashed the side of her head with a hammer. Kaufmann stepped back, swayed on her feet and pivoted toward Susan, an expression of dumb surprise frozen on her face. Then she pivoted again, back toward Andrea, and Susan saw the inside of her head where her forehead had been cracked like a pumpkin, clumps of red and gray under the cap of her skull. Andrea twirled the hammer in her hand and struck again, this time with the claw side, tearing a huge, messy divot into Kaufman’s face. While her hand, still clutching the hammer, hovered in the space between them, a badbug flitted