Dark Banquet by Bill Schutt

sandwich.
    Greenhall explained that there were still regions in South America where very few people visited—the deep Amazon, and parts of Brazil’s Planalto Central, for example.
    â€œBesides,” he added,
“draculae
bones have been uncovered right alongside the remains of living species.”
    These facts, combined with the relatively recent discoveries of “living fossils” such as the coelacanth (a lobe-finned fish thought to be extinct for sixty million years) apparently gave the old vampire meister at least some hope that
Desmodus draculae
might still haunt the South American wilderness. *31
    â€œIf only,” I replied. If only.

I have not seen anything pulled down so quick since I was on the Pampas and had a mare that I was fond of go to grass all in a night. One of those big bats they call vampires had got at her in the night, and, what with his gorge and the vein left open, there wasn’t enough blood in her to let her stand up.
    â€”Bram Stoker
    3.
    SNAPPLE, ANYONE?
    I t was still dark when we arrived at the slaughterhouse, but there were already several cars parked outside the nondescript, single-floor structure. We stood in the parking lot, finishing hot drinks—and not saying much—until the loud clank of a metal gate caused me to jump slightly.
    â€œYou need
more
caffeine,” my companion said, sipping her decidedly low-test tea-water thing.
    I responded by pouring the remainder of my cup onto the gravel.
    As we approached the door, the aroma of my coffee gave way to the acrid tang of disinfectant and something else, something metallic, coppery.
    There were new sounds coming from within the building, shouts and a deep organic vibrato.
    At the abattoir, the workday was about to begin and we entered without knocking.
    My companion that morning was Cornell undergrad Kim Brockmann, whom I’d met several months earlier when she began showing up at our weekly Zoology Journal Club. After one such meeting I had inquired if anyone might be interested in volunteering to help me maintain some vampire bats that I hoped to bring back from Trinidad. Kim’s hand shot up without hesitation. Now, bundled up against the predawn chill, she was clutching six large plastic bottles and a spaghetti strainer, and I wondered if this is what she’d had in mind.

    In Trinidad, obtaining blood on a daily basis hadn’t been much of a problem, basically because Farouk Muradali, and more recently, his right-hand man, Keith Joseph, had been maintaining colonies of the common and white-winged vampires on and off for twenty-five years. During my first visit to Farouk’s lab at the National Animal Disease Center, I was actually rather bowled over at their success in keeping the white-winged vampire,
Diaemus youngi,
alive in captivity. Several references I’d previously read (including one coauthored by my friend Arthur Greenhall) stated that these bats could not be kept in captivity for any length of time.
    â€œYes, we know all about those references,” Farouk said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They’re one of the reasons why so little is known about
Diaemus.”
    I bent over to examine a cluster of shapes that were gathered in the upper far corner of a spacious rectangular cage. All of the bats were asleep, except one, and he was watching me—mouth slightly open, sharp triangular teeth—strikingly white.
Desmodus rotundus
had black, beady eyes and an unmistakable air of intelligence. It was a look that Kim and I would become extremely familiar with over the next three years, one that always gave me the impression that the bats were waiting for me to make a mistake—the kind that would result in either their escape from captivity or the infliction of a savagely deep bite.
    Farouk nodded toward the cage and continued.
“Desmodus
is not a picky eater. If you capture one tonight and put out cow blood for it tomorrow night—it will