CHAPTER 12
9:10 AM
December 28
Two men and a dog moved in a halting shuffle along the wide corridor. The beagle, Daisy, padded silently along and stopped at the sixth doorway. The two men froze and held their breath. The dog nosed the door open and pushed inside. They followed her inside. Daisy sniffed and pawed at the crumpled sheets that lay at the foot of the bed in the vast suite, gave one short bark, and promptly sat down.
“What does that mean?” Mr. Ullman, the general manager asked. He was a sweating, pallid man in his mid-fifties who demanded that the employees call him Mr. Ullman, never by his first name. He looked like he might be sick any minute.
Daisy’s handler, Roger Bickle, was a round little man dressed in a white uniform with a red bow tie. He knelt down and peeled up the fitted sheet from the mattress. Using a pen flashlight, he lifted the edge of the mattress and examined the seams. Daisy barked again.
“What does that mean?” Mr. Ullman asked again, impatience cracking his voice. “Why is he doing that?”
“It’s a ‘she,’ sir, and it means that we have a positive result.”
“Positive? So that is . . .” Mr. Ullman was clearly overwhelmed and confused. He refused to give up the hope that a positive result meant that his rooms were pest-free.
The exterminator shook his head. “It’s not a good thing, sir. I’m sorry.” He stood, grim and apologetic, hoping his professional appearance would reassure the general manager. Roger secretly liked wearing his company’s uniform. He went along with the usual bitching and moaning about the ridiculous outfit in the locker room, but every morning, he felt proud to clip on the bow tie. He believed the uniform carried authority, and had a calming effect on clients.
He circled the bed, pulling up the fitted sheet as he went. “I’m afraid to inform you that Daisy has given us a positive sign. And what that means, sir, is that you have an infestation of bedbugs.” He swept the pen light along the seams in the mattress and focused on a spot near the headboard. “Yes. Here we are. You can clearly see a physical presence right here.”
Mr. Ullman got closer, put on his glasses, and stooped over, peering at the circle of light. He saw brown spots dotting the fabric and what looked like tiny, finely crumbled scabs. “What is it?” he finally asked.
“Bedbug fecal matter,” Roger said with no small amount of satisfaction. For a moment, he thought the general manager might actually vomit. “See, what happens is—”
“Please, I don’t need to know.” Mr. Ullman sank back onto the leather couch. “All I want to know is how to get rid of them. Quickly and quietly.”
“They might be in the couch too,” Roger pointed out helpfully.
Mr. Ullman leapt to his feet and swatted at the tail of his suit coat. He looked like he was about to cry. Instead, he fingered his tie.
Roger grunted and pulled the mattress sideways about a foot. Lying on the floor, he shone the pen light on the underside of the mattress. “Yes, sir. There is most definitely an infestation of bedbugs here.” He pinched something tiny between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like the husk of some foreign fruit seed. “Here we have an exoskeleton.”
He swung his flashlight back to the wall. “And like any bug, when there’s one, there’s a ton.” He held the exoskeleton out.
Mr. Ullman waved it away. Now that the harsh reality had settled in, he only wanted to know one thing. “How do we get rid of them?”
Roger struggled to his feet. “That, sir, is not an easy question.”
“Surely you must have some kind of pesticide for these things.”
“Yes and no,” Roger said while checking the other side of the bed. “DDT nearly wiped them out fifty years ago, but of course, to the benefit of humanity”—he had a quiet laugh with himself—“that’s been banned. Most of the bugs they’ve tested show signs of immunity anyway. Bedbugs are awfully . . . resilient. The main problem with pesticides is that even if you find one that works, all you’re doing in a building like this is driving them from one room to another, or one floor to another. They can fit anywhere.”
“A building like this? Are you kidding? This floor was just completed two weeks ago! This entire building is brand new!” Mr. Ullman was starting to take the infestation personally.
The Serenity was Chicago’s latest luxury hotel, inhabiting an entire city block, stretching from Washington to the south to Randolph on the North Side, and Dearborn to State, west to east. Much of the space near the streets had been carefully landscaped, layered with reflection pools and birch trees. The building itself was triangle shaped, both in footprint and profile. It rose one hundred and thirty-four floors above the city, culminating in a great sweeping point at the top. The leading edge of the building faced the lake, flanked on both sides by curving slabs of gray windows. The locals had immediately dubbed it “The Fin,” as in a shark’s dorsal fin, to the dismay of the owners and Mr. Ullman.
Mr. Ullman kept trying to get the exterminator to understand the true significance of the hotel. “We have been in the news practically every day for weeks now. It has all been carefully orchestrated, I can assure you. Surely, you heard about the charity ball last night? Everyone in town was here.”
Roger considered this. He spread his hands apart in a helpless gesture. “If this building is so new, then why would it have so many bugs?”
Mr. Ullman licked his lips, then pressed them together so tightly they almost disappeared. He did not want to discuss the matter. “I think you will understand our need for discretion. We had a . . . situation, where we discovered that a group of homeless people had been hiding in the unfinished sections near the roof, and using these rooms to sleep in at night. We scrubbed and fumigated everything, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I can only assume . . .” Mr. Ullman gestured helplessly. They contemplated the room in silence, until finally Roger felt compelled to say something, anything. “Yes, well. The problem is that once they are established, it can be very difficult to eradicate them. The females lay an average of up to five eggs per day when they’ve had a good meal. That’s over two hundred eggs in their lifetime. And the babies are ravenous. That’s what I’m assuming we have here. Bedbugs molt five times before reaching adulthood. That’s why I’m finding so many exoskeletons.”
Roger slid the entire bed away from the wall and shined his light behind the headboard. “Aha! Here we go.” He produced a pair of tweezers and held it up for the manager. Up close, it wasn’t exactly menacing. The little bug was about the size of an apple seed. Six feeble legs waved about helplessly.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Ullman said. “Fine. But now what do we do?”
Roger dropped the bug in a specimen vial and secured it in the chest pocket of his uniform. “To be absolutely sure, I would recommend clearing out every piece of furniture in these rooms and destroying them. Start over. At the very least, dispose of all the mattresses, the couches, the easy chairs. Anything with padding and fabric.”
Mr. Ullman was aghast. “Are you joking? Do you have any idea of what this couch cost? More than your annual salary, I’m guessing. That chair? Hand built in Italy. The mattress alone cost over fourteen thousand dollars for God’s sake. Are you seriously saying there is no chemical that we can use to kill these things?”
Roger shook his head. “The amount you’d have to use would destroy the furniture. Heat can kill these things, but again, you’d risk ruining the furniture.” He thought for a moment. “Bedbugs can live up to a year without eating. But they have very weak jaws. They’re just tubes, really, one for injecting you with their saliva, which contains both an anesthetic and an anticoagulant, and the second one sucks out your blood. Fascinating stuff, really when you—”