The Snake

by John Godey

  It glided fluidly down the rock and into its territory. It climbed into its tree and spread out amid dense foliage, which provided concealment and shelter from the rays of the sun.

  FIVE

  When Dr. Shapiro finished his morning rounds he went down to the hospital cafeteria for a second breakfast. Papaleo appeared beside his table.

  “Did you hear it?”

  Papaleo seemed pale and nervous. Shapiro sopped up runny egg with a piece of toast and washed it down with coffee. Then he looked up and said, “Hear what, Dr. Papaleo?”

  “On the radio? It came in less than five minutes ago.”

  “I don’t make rounds with a radio, doctor.”

  Papaleo grimaced, as if in admission of his own clumsiness, then said, “The radio, a flash, they said two people had been bitten by a snake in the park and died at East Side Hospital.”

  Shapiro put his fork down with a clatter. “The radio? What else did they say?”

  “That’s all. That two people had died of snakebite. It was one of those flashes. You know, ‘This just in,’ and ‘more on the story as it develops.’”

  “Did they say where the information came from?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Shapiro nodded and turned back to his eggs, but Papaleo lingered, fidgeting.

  “On the one I treated, tried to treat,” Papaleo said. “I have to tell you. There were perforations on the thigh. I guess they were fang marks.”

  Shapiro stared at him.

  Papaleo was sweating. “After you left, I cut the patient’s pants off and saw the marks. I actually thought of snakebite, but it didn’t make any sense.”

  “It was your duty to wake me and tell me.”

  “I know. But you had gone back to sleep, and….” Papaleo made a helpless, self-incriminating gesture, then said with some dignity, “I’m sorry, doctor.”

  My fault, Shapiro thought. He didn’t tell me because he was afraid I’d either ream him out or laugh at him. That tells me more about myself than it does about Papaleo. He said, “It’s my fault for not insisting on removing the patient’s pants.”

  “Oh.” Papaleo tried to smile, then said, “Well, anyway,” and hurried away.

  Shapiro finished his breakfast and then phoned the M.E.’s office. He asked for the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Torres and, after some phone switching, was connected with Dr. Borkowski.

  “How do you like that?” Borkowski seemed tickled. “Fatal snakebite in the middle of Manhattan—isn’t that terrific?”

  “I’ve been waiting for your phone call, Dr. Borkowski.”

  “I was on the verge of it. In fact, I had my hand on the phone when the phone rang and it was you. The phone rang just as I was picking up the phone.”

  “Yeah, sure, it’s a thrilling coincidence,” Shapiro said. “I don’t mind your making hay with the media, but you might have done me the courtesy—”

  “I resent the implication, doctor.”

  “It wasn’t an implication, it was an accusation. And I don’t give a fuck whether you resent it or not.”

  Borkowski was silent a moment, then said stiffly, “The report will be on its way over. Meanwhile, to sum up my findings, the spectral analysis showed—”

  “Never mind. I’ll get it from the radio like the rest of the public.” He overrode Borkowski’s protest. “What about the second one?”

  “I’m working on it right now. Jesus, it hit him five times, and at least one of them must have caught a vein. What a hell of a shot!” Borkowski had recaptured his gusto. “I swear, a bull’s-eye. He was probably dead in fifteen or twenty minutes after he got stuck. Some shot!”

  “Your enthusiasm is infectious,” Shapiro said. “Look, doctor, I’d appreciate hearing from you as soon as you’ve finished with him. Me first, and then the media. I promise not to take too much of your time.”

  Borkowski said, “I resent the implication, doctor. Or the accusation, which is even worse. If you’re making an out-and-out accusation, I demand an apology.”

  Shapiro had been hearing a page for the last half-minute. He jiggled the phone, cutting Borkowski off, and asked the operator what she wanted.

  “There are some gentlemen here to see you,” the operator said. “From the press. And also…” her voice became breathy, “…from the television, too.”

  “Oh, shit,” Shapiro said.

  ***

  In the normal course of events, the Police Commissioner would have read about the snake in the morning report of overnight events prepared for him by his staff; and Hizzonner the Mayor would have been informed of it promptly by one of his young aides. But, instead of driving him to his office at No. 1 Police Plaza, the P.C.’s limousine had taken him directly to City Hall, where he was to help the mayor formulate an optimistic statement on recent crime statistics for presentation at a noontime news conference.

  Hizzonner had issued a stern fiat against being disturbed for any reason whatsoever. His aides, mindful of his unpredictability in an election year, were prudently obedient, even though it was their consensus that the story of the snake just barely came under the umbrella of “whatsoever.”

  The purpose of the news conference was to announce a radical decrease in the homicide rate for the first six months of the year (down a whopping 1 percent), thus more than offsetting a negligible rise in crimes of violence (19 percent) and felonies (14 percent). Hizzonner would also point with quiet pride to the absence of a major riot (and only one mini-riot) in the city’s major ghettos—Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx, and the East Harlem barrio—due to a forceful but understanding police presence, and it is high time that we fully appreciated the sterling professionalism of the city’s cops, under the firm but sympathetic guidance of our sterling Police Commissioner. “Don’t smile when I say that, Francis, and don’t look modest, either. Just stare straight ahead into the camera.”

  At 11:30, terrified that the mayor might walk into his press conference unbriefed on the snake, one of Hizzonner’s aides entered without apology, walked across the room with the early edition of the New York Post, and placed it on the desk beneath Hizzonner’s eyes.

  KILLER SNAKE SLAYS TWO IN PARK

  The mayor goggled. The news story on page three, to which the aide obligingly turned, was brief, and tricked out with photographs and quotations from Dr. Shapiro, Dr. Mukerjee, Dr. Papaleo, and Dr. Borkowski. There was a single-column cut of each, arranged in a circle around a picture of a semi-naked girl, the Maharani Santha Agnes Chowdhury, playing the flute to a swaying cobra in a Cincinnati nightclub.

  A small inset box contained a few facts about Central Park. Acclaimed masterpiece of its justly celebrated architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. One of the great parks of the world, unsurpassed for beauty of conception and design. Its 843 acres larger than London’s Hyde Park, Paris’s Tuileries Gardens, Berlin’s Tiergarten, Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. Not as large as Rome’s Villa Borghese or Vienna’s Prater. Purchased for $5.5 million in 1856, real estate market value today: untold billions.

  The lead editorial, obviously a last-minute insertion, consisted of three sentences.

  THERE IS A SNAKE IN CENTRAL PARK.

  IT IS KILLING PEOPLE.

  WHAT IS THE MAYOR DOING ABOUT IT?

  “Dirty pool,” the aide said indignantly. “It’s one thing for them to endorse your opponent, but—”

  “The bastards,” Hizzonner said. “I’ll show ’em what I’m doing about it. I’m leaving no stone unturned, that’s what I’m doing about it!”

  He used the phrase, later, at his news conference, where it was greeted with a mixture of awe and muffled hilarity. He amplified on this declaration by telling his audience that the Central Park Precinct, which knew the park the way you gentlemen know your wife’s, ah, face (laughter), were out in full saturation force, combing every nook and cranny for the interloper, with the able assistance of park personnel.

  “Give ’em the details, Fran
cis,” the mayor said to the P.C.

  The P.C., who had only fifteen minutes earlier learned of the details himself by telephone, declared that the men of the Central Park Precinct were fine-combing the park in cars, on horseback, on scooters, and on foot, ably assisted by Parks Department gardeners and groundsmen, as well as one of the justly famous Emergency Service Unit trucks.

  “How many men is that, all told?” a reporter asked.

  It was a good question, and the P.C., frowning in annoyance at being interrupted, ignored it. He knew that the total muster strength of the Central Park Precinct was in the neighborhood of 120 men, which broke down to 40 per shift. Subtract from that number clerical personnel, special duty officers, anticrime detective units on stakeout detail, shop personnel, officers on vacation and sick call, and the Central Park Precinct probably had not more than 15 men available for fine-tooth-combing the 840-odd acres of the park.

  “Many of the cars are equipped with loudspeakers,” the P.C. said, “instructing people to stay on the walkways and out of heavily brushed areas, to keep to the more frequented parts of the park, to be alert at all times, to make no attempt to deal with the snake if they spot it but to inform a police officer immediately….”

  “Mr. Mayor,” a reporter said, “are you considering closing the park for the citizens’ safety until the snake is found?”

  The mayor was too practiced a public performer to blink, but he did pause perceptibly before saying, “You may rest assured, gentlemen, the matter has been under intense study since early this morning.”

  After the news conference broke up, the mayor, alone with the P.C., permitted his emotions to show. “How’d you like that bastard asking me if I was going to close the park down? He knows the answer as well as I do. Close the park in the middle of a heat wave when the worthy poor—as if his lousy rag gives a damn about them—are gasping for a breath of air?”

  “You’d need a thousand cops to keep people out,” the P.C. said, “and even then you couldn’t do it. You know people in this city? Try to keep them out and they’d find a hundred ways to get in. Believe me, they’d try to get in.”

  “Believe me,” the mayor said, “I believe you.”

  ***

  After a brief opening citation of the weather—“near record-breaking heat for September with no relief in sight”—the early evening news program on the mayor’s favorite television network (“they’re somewhat less bad than the others”) devoted a whopping eight full minutes of airtime to the story of the snake, exclusive of commercial interruption.

  The sequence opened with a panoramic sweep of the park from a circling helicopter (“the most valuable parcel of real estate in the civilized world”). The helicopter swooped low over the Sheep Meadow, headed northward toward the Lake, then rose again for another long shot of the park to its northern terminus at Cathedral Parkway. The whirr of its motor was damped down to accommodate the voice of the anchorman: “Somewhere in the more than eight hundred acres of famed Central Park there lurks an unwelcome visitor to the city—a venomous snake whose deadly bite has already claimed the lives of two victims.”

  The mayor watched the screen from an armchair in his bedroom on the second floor of Gracie Mansion. From time to time he groaned rhetorically.

  The helicopter, now flying very low to the ground, swept swiftly back from north to south. Its camera focused fleetingly on a policeman on horseback or one riding a scooter. “From noontime on, cops from the Central Park Precinct have been scouring the park, thus far without result. Here’s Bill Arthur, direct from the park.” The scene shifted to ground level, picking up a cop emerging from heavy undergrowth, moving gingerly, beating out in front of him with his nightstick. The camera closed in when the cop reached the walkway.

  “Any luck, officer?”

  The cop was breathing hard, his face was tomato red, his light blue uniform shirt was darkened by sweat. He looked at the reporter with murder in his eyes. But then, remembering the presence of the camera, he reassembled his features into a mask.

  “No sir.”

  “How long have you been searching?”

  “Noon.”

  The camera shifted to the reporter, who was nodding his head sympathetically. “Must be pretty hot work.”

  “Real hot.”

  The reporter studied the cop dispassionately for a moment, then gave up. “Back to you, Jerry.”

  “The police search continues,” the anchorman said. “It’s hot work, and dangerous, too…. Earlier today, reporter Bill Stevens was at East Side Hospital.”

  Dr. Papaleo, described as “the earnest young intern who treated the first victim of the snake, Ramon Torres,” told reporter Bill Stevens how he had watched helplessly as the snake’s first victim had died.

  “At that time, you didn’t know the cause?”

  “Not at that time.”

  Dr. Mukerjee, soft-eyed and soft-spoken, reminded the reporter that his “brilliant snap diagnosis” of cobra-bite was as yet not proven. “It was a bite similar to that of a cobra, shall we say.”

  Dr. Shapiro, Chief Resident of the hospital, his eyes ringed with fatigue, his lips curling impatiently, answered questions brusquely and minimally. When the reporter asked him what he would do if another snakebite victim was brought into the hospital, he opened the door of a refrigerator and took out a small cardboard box.

  “This is a polyvalent, wide-spectrum antivenin. We received it from the curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo, as did all other hospitals in the area. If another snakebite victim is brought in he’ll be injected with this serum intravenously.”

  “May I ask which snake this serum is effective against?”

  Consulting the lid of the cardboard box, Dr. Shapiro said, “Bitis, naja, dendroaspis. Bitis covers various species of vipers and adders, naja is the cobra, dendroaspis are arboreal snakes, such as the mambas of Africa. If our snake is not one of these, the antivenin will be useless. If it is one of these, it may be effective. The most effective antivenins are the specific ones: cobra serum for cobra bite, gaboon viper serum for gaboon viper bite, and so forth. Identifying the snake in the park is still of paramount importance. If you’ll excuse me, I must attend to a patient.”

  “From East Side Hospital, Bill Stevens.”

  “Where did the snake come from, and how did it get into the park?” The anchorman answered his own question: “Nobody knows.” Zoos, pet shops, laboratories, exotic animal farms—all of these had been queried, none had reported a missing snake. Nor had any individuals who owned pet snakes come forward. Perhaps such an individual existed, who for obvious reasons didn’t wish to make a self-incriminating admission? A plea from a Deputy Commissioner of the N.Y.P.D.: “If you are such an individual, and your snake has escaped, call anonymously. It is vital that we know exactly what kind of snake the death snake is, so that the proper antidote can be stocked.” The Deputy Commissioner made an appeal to the public for information, and gave a special police number, which the camera flashed on the screen.

  “Where did the snake come from, and how did it get into the park? Thus far, we do not know. And perhaps we shall never find out.”

  The anchorman’s face faded, and a tinkle of music introduced a laundry detergent commercial. The mayor found it mildly interesting.

  After the commercial, the news report continued, setting the mood with a brief shot of a cobra in its glass cage at the Staten Island Zoo, erect, hood spread, eyes glittering. Next came a close-up shot of the mayor “at this morning’s news conference at City Hall.” Hizzonner leaned forward in his chair and watched himself with a blend of professional detachment and affection. “…leave no stone unturned….” Hizzonner sat back again when the camera focused on the Police Commissioner’s speech.

  Hizzonner, speaking aloud, passed judgment on his performance. “The one thing you can say for me is that I know where the camera is every second. It must be instinctive.”

  From City Hall, the scene shifted to the American Museum
of Natural History, where a herpetologist, holding a jar containing a tiny snake no thicker than a pencil, which he seemed to be using as a hand prop, since he made no mention of it, declared that a drastic sudden turn in the weather, a rapidly falling thermometer, was highly desirable. This would cause the snake to become lethargic, disoriented, thus sharply decreasing the danger of anyone else being bitten. Meanwhile, some general advice: Stay out of the underbrush. Watch where you set your feet down if you’re walking in tall grass. Although many snakes could strike with incredible speed, they could not locomote swiftly: the average human could easily outrun just about any snake in the world. Don’t worry (smiling) about the snake chasing you. Except in very rare instances, such as during the breeding season, or in protection of their eggs, snakes would not pursue a man.

  The herpetologist offered advice on what to do in case of snakebite: avoid strenuous activity, alcohol, panic—all of these speed up the heartbeat and circulate the venom more quickly through the body. Lie down, apply a tourniquet above the wound in the direction of the heart, inject antivenin as quickly as possible. As to incising and sucking out the venom, it goes in and out of fashion with the regularity of (smiling) breast-feeding. If you do suck the venom, make sure there are no lesions in your mouth or lips.

  Hizzonner paid little attention to the herpetologist. He was waiting for the inevitable man-on-the-street interviews, which, idiotic as they might seem, must be read seriously by the politician, for, however cracked and inarticulate, they were truly the voice of the people.

  The first interview took place in the children’s playground at Central Park West and 81st Street, near the Hunter’s Gate. A young woman in a halter and shorts, filmed against a background of antic swings and seesaws, and the penetrating screams of toddlers, speaks aggrievedly: “Where do I go if I don’t come to the park with my child—the French Riveria?” She turns her back to the camera and screams: “Mervyn! Don’t just stand there when he hits you. Hit him back.” She faces the reporter. “Self-reliance. Young as he is, I keep drumming it into him. Where was I?”