by John Godey
“You were intimating that you would continue to come to the park in spite of the snake.”
“Where are my alternatives? I won’t turn my son into a hothouse flower. Besides, can a snake be any worse than the winos that hang around here and drink and spit and curse and ogle and generally carry on like an eyesore?”
A middle-aged couple, coming up out of an Independent subway station. The woman: “Maybe the snake will eat up some muggers. If that’s the case, they should have one on every street.” Her husband: “Sylvia, it’s nothing to laugh at!” Woman: “Do you see me laughing?” Husband: “Sylvia!”
Another man coming out of the subway, hot, disheveled, in a hurry, forcing the reporter to trot to keep up with him. The man: “It’s a pure cover-up.” Reporter: “A cover-up? For what?” Man: “For everything.”
So far, Hizzonner thought, mostly comedy. But his intuition told him there was more substantive matter to come, and presently he was proved right.
On Central Park West and 73rd Street, the spokeswoman for an angry group of mothers, surrounded by milling children: “They must close the park. That mayor, he’s trifling with human lives.”
In front of his storefront headquarters, an activist state legislator: “Tomorrow morning, I shall lead a delegation of justifiably indignant citizens to City Hall to confront the mayor and demand that he close the park forthwith, and keep it closed until such time as the snake is apprehended. And we will also demand an all-out effort to apprehend it, instead of this transparent half-hearted effort.” Applause from the legislator’s constituents.
On Cathedral Parkway, a clot of several dozen women, black and Hispanic, many dark resentful eyes. The spokeswoman, a large forceful black woman: “He close that park over our dead body. We stifling in our apartments, even the rats gasping. Where else we got to go to beat the heat? He close that park and he hear from us come election time.” Flashing eyes in the circle around her, clenched fists, shouts of “Right on! Arriba!”
A man getting out of a taxi in front of an imposing apartment building on Fifth Avenue: “They’ve got a handful of cops in the park. It’s pitiful. They don’t stand a chance in hell. What’s called for is the mounting of a supreme effort. They’re just not trying. What I’d like to know is where our tax money goes.” Reporter: “Where do you think it’s going?” Man, over his shoulder, as he hurries toward the building entrance: “It’s lining certain pockets.” Reporter: “Whose pockets, sir?” Man: “Don’t ask me. Ask our mayor.”
The final clip was light in tone, as if to leaven the antecedent bitterness. Three teen-aged girls, giggling. One of them says, “It’s kicky.” Reporter: “Kicky? What do you mean by kicky?” The girl: “Kicky? It means, well, like a groove.” She and her companions burst into laughter and run off down the street. Reporter, shaking his head and smiling: “I’m kicking it back to you, Jerry.”
Jerry, the anchorman, smiling, “You’re in the groove, fella.” He pauses, adjusts his face to appropriate sobriety, and says, “To recapitulate, a deadly venomous snake, origin unknown, suspected to be a cobra, is at large in Central Park. Two men have already succumbed to its fatal poison. The city has the jitters….”
The mayor pressed his remote-control device and shut off the television set.
***
Hizzonner tracked the P.C. down at a Holy Name Society banquet, where he was guest of honor, and where, in his opening remarks, he made opportunistic reference to the absence of snakes in Ireland, thanks to good St. Paddy. Laughter and applause.
“When are you going to catch that snake?” the mayor said.
“I wish I knew,” the P.C. said. “It’ll be dark in a half hour, and we’ll call off the search until tomorrow.”
“And what are you going to do tomorrow?”
“More of the same. A diligent, quiet search.”
“Forget quiet, Francis. Do it noisy. You get my meaning?”
Normally a quick study, and sensitive to innuendo, the P.C. was presently dulled by Irish whiskey. A further sign of his befuddlement was the surfacing of his brogue. “Whatever do ye mean, Sor?”
“It’s war,” the mayor said. “Two people have been slain. War has been declared. They’re mobilizing. Everybody is blaming the snake on the mayor. They’re going to be swarming around City Hall tomorrow by the thousands.”
“So soon?”
“It’s all the TV’s fault. They make everything go faster. They make news by getting the public all worked up. They’re provocateurs. Are you listening?”
“I am, Sor. They’re going to want the park closed?”
“Half of them are. The other half are going to want it to be kept open. The opposition is behind it, too. They’re pushing it along to embarrass me. Who do you think is behind those people in Harlem?”
The P.C. made an effort to clear up his confusion. “What did you mean by noisy? We’ll have police cars in the park with loudspeakers all night.”
“Goddamit, Francis. The main issue is not the snake, per se, I can live with the snake. The main issue is going to be the closing of the park, and it’s a no-win issue. I can’t afford to say yes, and I can’t afford to say no. I have to stand pat. Do you follow me, Francis?”
“Explicitly, Sor.”
“Well, I’m not so sure.” The mayor paused. “Follow me explicitly, Francis. One, the snake has become Topic A. Two, they’re all putting the blame on the mayor, saying we’re not doing enough. Your handful of cops was invisible in that big park. We have to make them visible, so they can see the mayor is working for them. That means a very big police presence, Francis. I want five hundred cops in that park tomorrow morning.”
“Five hundred? Where am I going to get them?”
“Get them. I don’t care if you have to bring off-duty cops back on emergency duty. Just get them, just get that five hundred.”
“I don’t dare. The PBA would crucify us.”
“Then take them out of Harlem and Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx. I want the people of this city to see with their own eyes that the mayor is leaving no stone unturned.”
“Sor, pulling the police presence out of them areas is an invitation to riot.”
“No more excuses, Francis. I order you to put five hundred cops in the park tomorrow morning, and that’s the bottom line. Good night, Francis.”
The mayor hung up.
***
The special police number provided by the Deputy Commissioner on the news broadcast began to ring within minutes of the announcement. The prevailing tenor of the calls was established early in the evening. A woman’s voice, dark with suspicion, said, “How come when you announced the special number you didn’t say all calls would be kept confidential?”
“Okay, lady, your call will be kept confidential.”
“That’s all I want to know,” the lady said, and hung up.
There was a predictable number of jokers.
“My old lady just saw the snake.” “Where?” “When I unzipped my pants.”
“The snake just got on a 65th Street crosstown bus, and when it asked for a transfer the driver bit it.”.
“A couple of kids outside my house are using the snake for a jump rope.”
It was a familiar story to the police, who had learned to practice patience as an art in these circumstances. Except for the most outlandish of them, they methodically logged every call that came in. There were calls from people who had spotted the snake in their apartment house elevator. Others had seen it climbing up a traffic light stanchion, crawling through a subway tunnel, sunning itself on a neighbor’s terrace; in a restaurant, a branch library, a street excavation, a beach at Coney Island. A cab driver swore he had run over it in the street, and breathlessly gave the location of the incident. The snake turned out to be a cable stretched across the street to record the incidence of passing vehicles. A number of callers had heard it hissing in a room of their apartment and had fled to the street.
Several calls, all too obviously, came from sh
opkeepers who had spotted the snake in other shops, which invariably turned out to be those of their competitors. Several people denounced by name the culprit who had turned the snake loose in the park; in all cases the person they named was a neighbor who, as subsequent questioning brought out, happened to have children who urinated in the hallways, broke windows and cursed, or owned a dog that barked all night. Several individuals who preferred to remain anonymous, and a number of activist organizations which did not, claimed “credit” for introducing the snake into the park.
About 70 percent of the sightings were within the confines of Central Park. The snake was observed drinking at the Pulitzer Fountain at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street; swimming in the Wading Pool, where it was capsizing the children’s toy boats; twined around the 107th Regiment Monument; slithering through the grass of the Sheep Meadow; riding the Friedsam Memorial Carousel; sunning itself on Cherry Hill; communicating with the beards and the pot-smokers at the Bethesda Fountain; biting at oars on the Lake; climbing the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; at the top of the Obelisk; in the children’s playgrounds near the Hunter’s Gate at Central Park West and 81st Street, and the All Saints Gate at West 96th Street; running around the Frederick Douglass Circle at Cathedral Parkway; at the entrance to the Conservatory Garden, where it was preventing people from entering or leaving; on top of the Great Hill; near the Block House, the Harlem Meer, the Huddlestone Bridge, Nutter’s Battery, Fort Clinton, The Dene, Bow Bridge, Belvedere Castle, the Shakespeare Garden, and, just beyond the northernmost perimeter of the park, on Lenox Avenue, where it was chasing pimps and whores.
The police checked out as many of the plausible reports as they could, given the limitations of their manpower. They knew that, as in all branches of police work, from burglary to homicide, there were a thousand false leads to a single authentic one; but the thousand-and-first might crack the case.
SIX
Special Operations Division (SOD), with headquarters in Flushing Meadows, Corona, consists of the following units: Emergency Service, Tactical Patrol, Street Crime, Auto Crime, Aviation, Harbor, and Mounted (known as Horse Soldiers). The most visible and widely publicized is the Emergency Service Unit, specialists in the oddball assignment. If there’s a cat at the top of a pole, a smoke-out in the subway, a sniper to be dislodged, a bomb to be defused, a riot to be quelled, a building to be scaled, a finger stuck in a soda machine, someone trapped in an elevator, the ESU comes to the rescue. They are equipped for every conceivable emergency: oxygen masks and tanks, keys to the subway escape hatches, crampons, stun guns, floodlights, generators, jacks capable of lifting subway cars, rifles equipped with sniperscopes….
The man who was placed in charge of the field operation to find the snake in the park was Captain Thomas Eastman. As a younger man he had reveled in shinnying up poles, sliding down elevator cables, and carrying overcome victims out of subway tunnels, but now, with a bad knee, a general lack of fitness (weight, 240), and a recent melancholic awareness of his age (48), he directed the men in his command from the sidelines.
Captain Eastman was presented with his assignment by his boss, Deputy Inspector Vincent Scott, who had been the penultimate recipient of a buck that had begun with the mayor, passed to the Police Commissioner, and then descended in orderly steps to a Deputy Commissioner, the Chief of Operations, a Borough Commander, and the Deputy Chief in command of SOD. Eastman, who had left his office at 6 o’clock for his home in Hollis, was recalled by telephone. He arrived back at SOD Headquarters at 8:45.
“About the killer snake in the park,” the DI said sourly. “You know which killer snake in which park I’m talking about?”
“Yessir.”
“We just been given it.”
“I thought we were already working on it.”
“Just a couple of trucks and truck personnel helping out. Now we’re running the show. You know anything about snakes?”
“Nothing special.” Eastman pondered for a moment. “You’re supposed to catch them behind the head with a long stick with a clamp at the end that closes up when you press a handle. Like the things grocers used to use years ago to bring packages down from a high shelf?”
“You don’t have to catch it,” the DI said. “Just get rid of it. Just get in the park and find this sonofabitch and kill it.”
“That’s what they were trying to do today, and didn’t do it. The big problem is the size of the park. You know how big it is, Chief?”
“Certainly, I know how big it is. Fifth Avenue to Central Park West, 59th to 110th.”
“Eight hundred and forty-some acres. I don’t have any idea how to cover all that area.”
“You don’t need an idea, you need manpower. These days, everything is manpower.” The DI shook his head. “You know how we killed snakes when I was a kid? We grabbed them by the tail and cracked the whip with ’em, just snapped their heads against a rock. Turn up a rock, grab them by the tail, and crack the whip….”
The DI’s eyes were inturned, wandering in a distant and undoubtedly more agreeable past. Eastman curbed his impatience and waited for nostalgia to run its course. The DI’s mood changed abruptly with a hardening of his eyes.
“You’re getting manpower, as much as you need, and if you don’t turn that snake up, it’s your ass.”
Somebody must be kicking his butt, Eastman thought, so he’s kicking mine. Definition of chain of command. He said cautiously, “You say I’m getting manpower? How much?”
“Five hundred.” The DI paused to savor Eastman’s astonishment. “They want that snake real bad.”
Eastman’s face was impassive again. “Yessir.”
“Pulling them out of the high-crime areas, would you believe it? It’s political. It’s a red-hot item. You get my meaning? You better damn well turn it up.”
“Yessir.”
“Planning and Operations is putting the package together. You’ll have the five hundred, or so they say, tomorrow morning. They’re working late on it. You and me have a date to go down there.” The DI’s eyes gleamed with bitter amusement. “Not much sleep for you tonight, Thomas.”
Who sleeps at night, anyway, Eastman thought, and said, “I wouldn’t mind some technical help. There’s a young fellow at the Bronx Zoo—”
“Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that’s one thing.” The DI shrugged. “People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that’s serious. Your hear the news this evening?”
Eastman nodded. “John Q. Public is bitching.”
“Right. That’s why you got a whole army of cops to play with. They want a big police presence in the park. You get the meaning?”
“About seven or eight months ago,” Eastman said, “there was this rattlesnake some nut kept for a pet in a small apartment house in Washington Heights, I think it was. It escaped, and I went down with a detachment. That was before my knee. We had a couple of those snake-catching sticks, I think. Anyway, we evacuated all the tenants, and we tossed that house. I mean really tossed it, cellar to roof, every nook and cranny. We must have been four or five hours at it, walking on eggshells all the time, and we couldn’t find it. Then this young guy from the zoo heard about it and came down with a stick and a bag, and inside of five minutes he found the snake curled up near the boiler in the cellar. He lifted it up on the stick, popped it into the bag, and took it off to the zoo.”
“An apartment house,” the DI said. “That can’t compare to Central Park.”
“What impressed me, Chief, was not only that he knew right away where to look for it, but he saw it. For some reason, it didn’t rattle. I forgot to ask why.” Eastman shrugged. “We checked out the boiler area several times, and it was there all the time, only we didn’t see it. But he saw it right away.”
“We already got one of these characters, herpa-something, from the Natural History Museum, he’s supposed to be helping us.”
“I saw him on the tube,” Eastman said. “Maybe he’s okay, but this young guy… we
ll, he didn’t fool around.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. The Museum character acted like a professor, like he did a lot of reading about snakes. Get hold of this kid, if you want to.” The DI looked at his watch. “I hope you had something to eat, because we got to go downtown right this minute.”
***
Molting was one of the imperatives that governed the snake’s existence. Unlike most animals, a snake never stopped growing from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Because it literally outgrew its horny outer skin, it was obliged to shed at regular intervals, three or four times a year.
For several days now the snake’s skin had been darkening and dulling, and its eyes, sheltered behind transparent protective lenses, had begun to dim. It was time to molt.
Because it was defenseless during molting, the snake sought the shelter of the topmost branches of its tree. It stretched its sinuous length out almost to its full extent, and began to rub its face against a branch of the tree. When the skin around its lips broke away, the process of molting was under way. Squirming vigorously over the next few hours, the snake advanced laboriously, like a finger being pulled out of a tight glove, until it had worked itself completely out of the old skin, which ended up at the tail, inside out.
The new skin was bright, the colors fresh and attractive. The snake was at its handsomest. Its eyesight was keen behind its new transparent lens. The old skin, feathery, translucent, dropped a few feet after it had been discarded, and then caught and held fast in a net of twigs, undetectable from ground level.
As always after molting, the snake was hungry. In the darkness, it coiled down the tree and sped away in search of food.
***
Hizzoner was not awake for the eleven o’clock television news. It was just as well; it contained little that might have comforted him. The program opened with a sequence showing the cops who had been sweeping the park leaving as darkness came on: hot, dispirited, out-of-sorts, a beaten army executing a strategic withdrawal.
