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 a large plastic bag from his kit and sealed the rat inside it with another sponge of halothane, this one a fatal dose. He stuffed the bag inside the sack to hide the evidence, then continued about his business, starting in the kitchen. He pulled out the heavy, eight-burner stove and the dishwasher. He checked the pipe holes under the sink. He saw no droppings, no burrows, but he seeded a little bait behind the cabinets anyway, because he was there. He did so without telling the occupants. People get nervous about poison, especially parents, but the truth is that rat poison is all over every building and street in Manhattan. Anything you see that resembles berry blue Pop Rocks or green kibble, you know rats have been spotted nearby.

Billy followed him down into the basement. It was neat and orderly, with no evident trash or soft refuse for nesting. Vasiliy scanned the space, sniffing for droppings. He had a good nose for rats, just as rats had a good nose for humans. He switched off the light, much to Bill’s discomfort, and switched on the flashlight he wore clipped to the belt of his light blue overalls, shining purple instead of white. Rodent urine shows up indigo blue under black light, but here he saw none. He baited the crawl spaces with rodenticide and put down corner “motel”-type traps, just in case, then followed Billy back up to the lobby.