His own van said BPCS-CNY on the back, standing for Bureau of Pest Control Services, City of New York. The health department inspector, Bill Furber, met him on the stairs inside. Billy had a sloping blond mustache that rode out the face waves caused by his constant jawing of nicotine-replacement gum. “Vaz,” he called him, which was short for Vasya, the familiar diminutive form of his given Russian name. Vaz, or, simply, V, as he was often called, second-generation Russian, his gruff voice all Brooklyn. He was a big man, filling most of the stairway.

Billy clapped him on the arm, thanked him for coming. “My cousin’s niece here, got bit on the mouth. I know—not my kinda building, but what can I do, they married into real estate money. Just so you know—it’s family. I told them I was bringing in the best rat man in the five boroughs.”

Vasiliy 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.