Pest Control

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “Broadway!”

  Bob feared Mary would focus on the financial impact of unemployment rather than the fact that he was now free to pursue his dream. Three-to-two, Mary’s favor.

  “Thirtieth Avenue!”

  “Screw it,” he thought. “I’ll just tell her the truth and hope she understands.”

  “Astoria Boulevard!” Bob’s stop.

  All he could do was try. So he gathered himself and stepped into the afternoon sun, unemployed, but inspired.

  Chapter Four

  In a luxurious office suite on the Champs Elysees not far from the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, a large man, somehow managing to look cryptic, sat on a soft Italian leather sofa wearing a five-thousand-dollar charcoal-grey suit and an expensive tie which insinuated that fools could be parted from their money in France as easily as anywhere else.

  His name was Marcel, and there was no getting around the fact that he was fond of cream sauces. He was a large man in an old-fashioned sort of way, more pear-shaped Sydney Greenstreet than barrel-chested John Goodman.

  Marcel was a middleman, a go-between for people who needed a crime committed and the people with the skills necessary to grant their wishes.

  Marcel’s young assistant, Jean, stood silently next to Monet’s Terrace at Le Havre, which adorned the far wall. Jean looked impressionable in a single-breasted lambs wool-blend classic Shetland sports coat with flap pockets. The smooth lines of the coat were disrupted only slightly by the delicate bulge caused by his small handgun.

  The remaining walls of the office were decorated with Manets and Jerry Lewis posters. The Eiffel Tower, hard and erect, made for a nice view out the window.

  Marcel shifted his considerable weight forward and laid a large briefcase on the glass-and-chrome coffee table in front of his guest, Klaus, who had just flown in from a certain chaotic African nation. Klaus opened the briefcase and took in the sight of row after row of bundled American hundred-dollar bills.

  “From the grateful people of the newly formed African Democratic Republic,” Marcel said.

  Klaus snapped the case shut.

  “Aren’t you going to count it?” Marcel asked.

  “That would only serve to insult you,” Klaus answered.

  “Not at all. I wouldn’t be offended in the least.”

  “You should, as it would imply that I thought you were stupid enough to try to shortchange me.”

  Jean cocked an eyebrow and smoothed the pleats in his trousers, noting the slightly fuller silhouette resulting from the straight cut of the legs.

  Marcel smirked. “Of course, you are right. It is all there.” He leaned back into the depths of the sofa.

  “Then we are through.” Klaus stood abruptly and moved for the door. He had a charter waiting to fly him to Monte Carlo.

  “Wait,” Marcel said. “Before you go, I have another job to tell you about.”

  Klaus paused at the door, then turned, unaware that Jean approved of his tailor.

  Marcel tossed a folder onto the table. After a moment’s reflection, Klaus crossed to the table and picked up the folder, prompting a self-satisfied smile from Marcel.

  The folder contained detailed biographical information and a photograph of a tanned, silver-haired man in his fifties.

  “Hans Huweiler,” Marcel explained. “He is the owner of Amaron Laboratories, Limited. His loving family would like to see him…‘retire,’ thus giving them control of the company and its five hundred million dollars in assets.”

  Without looking any further, Klaus tossed the folder back onto the table.

  “I pass,” he said flatly.

  “Monsieur,” Marcel countered as he stuffed the papers back into the file, “the $250,000 fee would go far in settling your considerable gambling debts.”

  “Find someone else. A greedy family is no reason to kill,” Klaus said.

  Jean squinted as he toyed with the idea of pulling on the loose thread he noticed on his silk shirt, but he decided to wait until he had some scissors.

  Klaus took his briefcase of cash and walked to the door. He turned back to Marcel and chilled him with an icy stare. “And you, my rotund friend, you will live much longer if you keep in mind that my debts are of no concern to you.”

  Marcel held his hands up, palms out, as if deflecting the stare. Klaus turned and left.

  After a moment, Marcel spoke. “Well, that is just great. Now we have only two weeks to find someone for this job.”

  Agitated, Marcel stuffed the spilled contents back into the folder. “How do these people expect us to find anyone on such short notice? Jean, I am telling you, sometimes I wish I had simply inherited money instead of having to work so hard for it.”

  “Shall I call Chantalle?” Jean asked, trying to imagine what she might wear to a meeting.

  Marcel crossed to the window. “I suppose you should.”

  Chapter Five

  Bob and Mary and their daughter, Katy, lived at 2439 Thirtieth Street in the Astoria section of Queens. Their narrow two-story red-brick house had a shallow front porch which was overwhelmed by several hastily applied layers of dark green paint.

  This stretch of Thirtieth Street, just off Astoria Boulevard, was located in a weary-looking but generally safe neighborhood near the end of the RR line, which ran on elevated tracks above Thirty-First Street.

  It was a quiet neighborhood populated by decent lower-middle-class people who had to work for a living. People who’d have to win the lottery before they could own their homes.

  The interior of 2439 Thirtieth Street was comfortable and never gave you that awful feeling you were about to run into a snotty photographer from Architectural Digest. A sort of inadvertent minimalism was at work in the living room, the family photo on the mantel serving as the apparent focus.

  The photo featured Bob with his arms around Mary and Katy, everyone smiling deliriously. They were one dog and half a child away from being a paradigm of American family units.

  The cramped kitchen emphasized a tired, olive-green electric range and a matching refrigerator which shuddered noticeably every time the compressor needed to rest.

  The remaining rooms in the house were equally uninteresting, save one. With Mary’s permission and assistance, Bob had transformed the downstairs bedroom into his workshop. This room was dedicated to the study of several species of invertebrate animals belonging to the class Insecta. This was Bob’s Bug Room.

  The small space was cramped with grey steel shelving units, several garage sale tables, a work desk with an ancient word processor, and a rickety swivel chair on casters.

  Several plastic insects—Christmas gifts from Katy—perched on the front lip of the computer next to a couple of mummified insect carcasses. The carcasses came from the backyard, and Bob had adopted them as his mascots; there was a Mole Cricket (Gryllotalpa hexadactyla), a European Ground Beetle (Carabus nemoralis), and a Northern Walkingstick (Diapheromera femorata). Katy named the cricket Jiminy, after the world’s only two-legged insect who carried an umbrella. The beetle and the walkingstick were named Ringo and Slim, respectively.

  The room also housed dozens of terrariums, each populated with a different species of creature with chitinous exoskeleton and tri-segmented body. The “bugquariums,” as Bob called them, were topped with fine mesh screens and equipped with special bluish-purple lights which gave the room an eerie, scientific glow that seemed somehow to comfort the bugs.

  In addition to the eight species of Assassin Bugs that were part of Bob’s experiment, the room housed other insects he had collected over the years.

  Lodged like an air-conditioning unit in the room’s only window was a large white box, the closed half protruding into the room, the other half exposed and open to the outside world. The box hummed electrically but was actually powered by what
the Portuguese called “Abelhas assassinas.” The American media preferred the term “killer bees.”

  Bob had acquired these for a college experiment on honey production and had kept them around for the honey after receiving a B+ on his project. They were generally placid, hardworking insects which didn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them.

  In order to keep the queen from leaving to start a new colony (what beekeepers called “absconding”), Bob installed a “queen excluder,” a narrow doorway which kept the queen (who was larger than the other bees) from leaving.

  Meanwhile, the drones droned and the workers spent the days gathering pollen, drinking nectar, and feeding royal jelly to the queen and larvae.

  Whenever Bob harvested their honey (which the bees did consider a bother), he used his homemade bee smoker—a device which delivered burned burlap smoke to calm the hive. Always budget conscious, Bob had made his own smoker instead of buying one. He had fashioned his out of some galvanized steel scraps.

  On the opposite side of the room, as far as possible from the source of Bob’s honey, were the Bee Assassins (Apiomerus crassipes). The intervening feet prevented the insects from taunting one another.

  An important part of Bob’s experiments, the Bee Assassins were cat-quick and resourceful killers which fed on any insect guileless enough to happen within range. Ruby-red with handsome black markings, the Bee Assassin waited patiently until a victim came near. Then, with alarming quickness, it pounced on its prey, thrusting its piercing mouthpart into the victim’s back before injecting a paralyzing salivic fluid.

  Then, with both simple and compound eyes staring coldly into space, the Bee Assassin slowly sucked the body juices from its prey, leaving behind nothing more than a withered corpse.

  Bob hoped to cross-breed the Bee Assassin’s quickness into one of his cockroach killing hybrids.

  Next to them were the Jagged Ambush Bugs (Phymata erosa), savage kill-crazy insects which slaughtered other bugs even when they weren’t feeding. They simply liked to kill.

  Pale greenish-yellow with clubbed antennae, the Jagged Ambush Bug was so-called because of the ragged spines which lined the sides of its prothorax. Its forelegs were swollen with muscle and perfectly adapted to seizing and holding prey as it fed. It would rip a silverfish in half for the sole purpose of amusing itself. It’s orange eyes had large, black pupil-like spots on them and the eyes rotated sickeningly like a chameleon’s, resulting in an unsettling, murderous stare.

  Recently, Bob had made progress with his scheme for cross-breeding the various Assassins to create the souped-up hybrid he wanted. But that progress had not come easily. At first, Bob had hoped cross-breeding them would be as simple as cross-breeding dogs appeared to be. Naturally, it turned out to be more difficult than that. Bob started his futile attempts at cross-breeding simply by putting males and females of different species together in the bugquariums. However, he had a hard time coaxing certain species to copulate with one another and so, in frustration, he once put a mayonnaise jar lid filled with apricot wine in the bugquarium and dimmed the lights. While this resulted in some entertaining drunken insect behavior, it didn’t solve his problem.

  Bob eventually enlisted the help of one of his former college professors who showed him how to cross-fertilize the eggs to achieve the desired hybrid life forms. The relative ease of the breeding process was due to the fact that the insects were genetically close enough to cross-breed directly.

  Three of the remaining bugquariums were reserved for beetles, termites, and cockroaches—toothsome delights for the predacious insects.

  Bob kept one of the terrariums populated with standard House Crickets (Acheta domestica) because he loved the sound they made with the stridulating organs on the dorsal surface of the tegmina. There were few things in life Bob enjoyed more than the noise crickets made when they rubbed their files against their scrapers. The sound reminded him of camping trips with his dad.

  Every summer Bob’s father took him to Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. There they fished and hiked all day and at night they sat by the campfire, roasting weenies and marshmallows, the heat of the orange and blue flames arresting Bob’s eyes so he stared at the fire, hypnotized, until his father would suddenly shout, “Fireflies!” snapping Bob from his sleepy-eyed stare and sending him chasing the winged light through the darkness.

  Fireflies, Bob now knew, were Lampyrid Beetles which used the enzyme luciferase and something called luciferin to create their flashing light.

  Bob remembered these trips fondly, and they were one of the reasons he wanted to leave New York City. He wanted to live in a place where man-made lights didn’t drown out the twinkle of the stars, a place where you could fish and chase fireflies.

  But for now, all Bob could do was keep a few crickets around as noisy reminders of this goal.

  Occasionally late at night, as Bob researched some aspect of insect genetics, he found himself mesmerized by the sounds the bugs made in concert.

  For reasons Bob never understood, the Bug Room would suddenly go quiet. Then a sort of low-level white noise would begin—the aggregate sound caused by the waving of maxillary palpi and proboscides, plus the brattling of roaches—the stiff, hair-like spurs on their legs lightly scraping metal as they scuttled across the fine mesh screens atop the bugquariums.

  The clacking of smacking mandibles offered a lively percussive element, and the slurping and sucking of labial palpi smoothed the rough harmonic edges.

  Then, from their white box, the bees would join in, the humming of their wings vibrating cello-like from the string section of this insect symphony. Finally, all of this was underscored by the soothing tone of the crickets’ chirping.

  If he were in a playful and manipulative mood, Bob would vary the temperature in the crickets’ terrarium, thereby altering the rate of their chirping. Then, with a pencil, he would tap on the bees’ container, aggravating them and thereby changing their hum from a hopeful major to a foreboding minor key.

  Thus, with his number two baton in hand, Bob gleefully conducted the stridulating organ opus in bee minor.

  In addition to the sounds, the room had a smell all its own.

  Individually, Assassin Bugs didn’t seem to have a fragrance, but when grouped together (and possibly fearing they were part of some hideous experiment) they secreted an aroma that was sweet but not unpleasant.

  The bee hive’s soft odor came from the pheromones which they secreted.

  The roaches and termites were a different story. Their offensive redolence was magnified significantly when such large numbers lived in confined quarters. Fortunately, their stink was mitigated by the other smells in the room. The sundry bug scents co-mingled with one another, resulting in what Bob liked to think of as his own brand of jitterbug perfume. Bob enjoyed the buggy bouquet.

  The grey steel shelving units held an impressive library of reference books on Bob’s segmented-bodied friends, including some of the classics, like Know Your Parts—Head, Thorax, and Abdomen: The ABC’s of General Insect Anatomy; Sexual Attractants and Reproductive Practices of the Order of Hymenoptera; and Diptera—True Order or Just Another Sub-Class?

  Several shelves were reserved for volumes on the chemical agents used to kill and control insects, including Death in a Can—a History of Chlorinated Hydrocarbons; D.D.T. and the E.P.A.Abbreviations for Ruin; and Meditations on Pyrethrins with Technical Piperonyl Butoxide.

  Of course, Bob had everything ever published by the late Pedro W. Wygodzinsky, the one-time curator of entomology at the American Museum of Natural History and acknowledged expert on Assassin Bugs. Bob also enjoyed the nonfiction of Sue Hubbell, especially her works A Book of Bees and Broadsides from the Other Orders—a Book of Bugs.

  But the books that held the most interest for Bob—the books that were going to serve as the blueprints to his dream—were Biological Control
Agents and Effective Use of Predator Insects. What these volumes and others like them advocated were natural, nontoxic means of managing the insects that so outnumbered mankind.

  This, Bob’s instinct told him, was his destiny: to control the world of pests naturally. And the only thing standing between Bob and his destiny was an overworked waitress with an unused business degree.

  Chapter Six

  “I am so sorry, Marcel,” she said, “but I am booked through the end of the year. I have business in Haiti next week. I’m in Rwanda after that, then I’m doing some consulting in Mogadishu.”

  The woman was so beautiful that it had been said she could kill with her looks, though she usually employed a custom-made sniper’s rifle and explosive, teflon-jacketed bullets. Her name was Chantalle and she was in Marcel’s office discussing employment opportunities.

  “I understand,” Marcel said with a hint of disappointment. “It is a last-minute job. I do not know how these people expect me to work on such short notice.” He sighed. “I tried Reginald, but he is in Singapore and won’t be available until next month. My clients want this matter taken care of before that.”

  Jean was sitting on the sofa next to Chantalle, but was not paying particular attention to the conversation. He was lost somewhere in the softness of Chantalle’s angora sweater.

  “What about Ch’ing?” Chantalle asked.

  “He has custody of his kids for the rest of the month and he just won’t give that up for a contract this size. Who would have guessed he would turn out to be such a doting father?”

  “And I suppose our friend Klaus is too scrupulous to handle your Mr. Huweiler?” Chantalle spat out the question with contempt.

  “Ohhhhh, but of course. ‘A greedy family is no reason to kill,’ he says. Really! What do such things matter?”

  Chantalle shook her head, embarrassed by Klaus’ ethics.