The Snake

by John Godey

  “I know it, I know it. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  But it was a half hour before he even got out of bed. He kissed the girl chastely, and told her that she was wonderful and that he would call her sometime. He dressed quickly in jeans and a T-shirt imprinted with the legend Duchy of Liechtenstein All Stars, and ran down the steps into Charles Street. He went around to Seventh Avenue and bought a couple of papers. The Daily News front page, under a headline that read SNAKE, SLAYER OF TWO, STILL AT LARGE, showed an aerial view of Manhattan being constricted by a giant boid. The Times was predictably more circumspect. Its picture was also an aerial view of the park. The caption under the photo said, in effect, try to find the handful of searchers in this vast expanse. The three-column, three-line headline read, POLICE SEARCH OF PARK FAILS IN EFFORT TO FIND SNAKE; TWO ARE DEAD OF BITES.

  Converse found a cab cruising southward on Seventh. It picked him up and took Charles Street to Hudson, where it turned north. The driver slid back his safety panel. “The snake in Central Park?”

  Converse said, “Yeah.” He was trying to read his papers.

  “What’ll they think of next?” The driver shook his head. “Tell the truth, it actually don’t surprise me.”

  “Well, it surprises me,” Converse said.

  The driver gave him a pitying look. “Come on, Chrisesake. This city?”

  ***

  An agglomeration of fifteen or twenty police vehicles, massed along Central Park South, clogged the Artist’s Gate where Sixth Avenue ran into the park. Close by, just inside the park, were three huge television trucks and a few private cars with PRESS placards on their windshields.

  The area was swarming with cops. Converse had never seen them in such numbers, barring the St. Patrick’s Day parade. They stood in stolid groups, looking as if they wanted to smoke. Their short-sleeved uniform shirts were already soaked by sweat, darkened to a deep blue. Their waistlines, laden with equipment—revolver, manacles, keys, nightstick, cartridges—gave them the appearance of some modified two-legged beast of burden. A number of them were wearing thigh-high wading boots. Some were armed with shotguns, others with cans of Mace. A few carried crowbars.

  Barriers had been put up on the south side of Central Park South, and a dozen policemen wearing the distinctive blue and white helmet of the Tactical Patrol Unit were trying to keep a crowd of spectators from overflowing the curb. Sixth Avenue had been closed off at Fifty-seventh Street, and traffic diverted to the east and west. A dozen radios were droning from the open windows of squad cars. Inside and outside the park, loudspeakers were urging the crowd to go about their business, or, if they must stay, to remain behind the barriers.

  “We request the cooperation of all citizens, for your own safety and so that the police can perform their duty without obstruction….”

  Converse started into the park, but his way was barred by a TPU cop. He told the cop that Captain Eastman was expecting him. The cop eyed him with ritual suspicion. “He’s waiting for me,” Converse said. The cop hesitated for another moment, then guided him through a small mob—cops, deeply tanned men wearing the green livery of the Parks Department, television and still cameramen, newspaper reporters carrying notebooks or folded copy paper—to what he said was the Command Post. Its center was a large folding campaign table with a map of Central Park pinned to it. A half-dozen policemen were bent over the table, their faces obscured by the bills of their caps.

  The TPU cop spoke to a tall dark officer wearing silver oak leaves on his collar and yellow braid on the bill of his cap. “This fella says Captain Eastman wants to see him, sir.”

  “My name is Converse. I’m the herpetologist.”

  “You say?” The officer stared at Converse’s T-shirt with distaste, then called out, “Eastman, the ologist-something is here.”

  A face turned up out of the heads bent over the map. It was broad, pink, sweating. Converse didn’t recognize it. “Yeah, well,” Eastman said, “tell him to wait a minute.”

  “Stay put right here,” the dark officer said, and scowled at him before moving off a few paces, folding his arms across his chest, and gazing around him dourly. The cops in his immediate area fell silent.

  Eastman’s head was bent to the map again. Converse yawned. He wasn’t sleepy, exactly, just played out. Behind him, someone tapped his shoulder. It was a young woman. She was holding a shorthand pad and a ballpoint pen.

  She said, “Aren’t you that herpetologist from the Bronx Zoo? I’m sorry, I forgot your name.”

  “Mark Converse.”

  “I did a piece for my paper when you caught that rattlesnake last year. Holly Markham. I don’t suppose you remember?”

  “Hell, yes, I recognized you right away. How you doing?”

  She was pretty, but in that cool, self-contained way that usually turned him off. He preferred outwardness, even a suggestion of mischief in a woman’s face. But when she put out her hand and smiled, her face opened up. If it didn’t exactly suggest abandonment, it had become immediately charming. He smiled back at her and shook her hand. Her grip was firm and without coquetry, like her nonsmiling face.

  “Are you helping the police again, Mr. Converse?”

  He glanced toward the campaign table. “Captain Eastman phoned me. I’ll certainly help if I can.”

  She wrote his name down, and slanted her notebook toward him so that he could check the spelling. Except for his name, her notes were written in shorthand. She asked him to remind her of his title at the zoo.

  “Formerly assistant curator of herpetology. I’ve joined an expedition to Australia to bring back specimens. Australia has some terrific species of poisonous snakes.”

  She smiled and tilted her head and said, “How does someone get into anything as funny as snakes? You don’t mind my asking?”

  “Funny is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve been into snakes ever since I was a kid. I’m twenty-nine now, in case you’re wondering. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five, but I guess I didn’t have your advantages. Snakes make me crawl.”

  “Yeah.” Converse sighed. “That’s how people feel about them. Not me. I like them.”

  “Because they’re cute and cuddly?”

  He looked at her sharply. Maybe there was some mischief there, after all. “Because I understand them. And maybe because I’m for the underdog.”

  “What makes them underdogs?”

  “They’re seriously disadvantaged animals. No limbs. No hearing. No true voice. No teeth for chewing, so that they’re obliged to swallow their food whole. No lids or nictitating membrane—can’t shut their eyes. Coldblooded, meaning they’re at the mercy of the environment for survival. No charm. The number-one villain of myth and legend, from the Bible onward. Underdogs, right?”

  She looked up from her notebook. “That underdog in the park has killed two people.”

  “Accidents happen. Snakes don’t bite people, people get bitten.”

  “And there are no muggers, just people who get mugged?”

  He sighed again. “Look, I’ll tell you something about snakes. They have three defensive attitudes, and they use them in this order when they’re threatened. One, they try to hide. Two, if they can’t hide, they try to run away. Three, if it’s impossible to hide or run away, they defend themselves by biting. It’s a last resort. Snakes are shy of people. They don’t hunt them, don’t hate them, don’t eat them. It’s the other way around.”

  “I read somewhere that those huge constrictors do eat people.”

  “That’s crap. The very largest reticulate constrictors, which can manage to engorge a whole line of animals of quite surprising size, can’t swallow a man, no matter what you’ve heard. The shoulders are too wide for them.”

  “It’s a comforting thought. Unless…” Her face was solemn, but there was a twitch at the corners of her lips. “Unless every constrictor has to find that out for himself?”

  Converse saw several of the cops at the Command Post straighte
n up, salute, and move off. Eastman was still bent over the map.

  “I spoke to the Museum of Natural History herpetologist yesterday,” Holly Markham said. “He doesn’t think the snake is a cobra.”

  “It probably isn’t. According to the news stories, the perforations are very clean and precisely defined. Injection-type bites, in and out quickly. Cobras have a tendency to hang on and chew, so the perforations usually aren’t all that neat.”

  “Do you have any idea of what kind of snake it might be?”

  He shook his head. “I just know what it isn’t. American snakes like rattlers or copperheads or moccasins distill a hemotoxic venom. The eastern coral snake, the only other poisonous snake in the States, does secrete a neurotoxic venom, like the venom that killed those two people. But the coral is a chewer like the cobra, and not all that deadly.”

  “What makes it so important to know what kind of snake it is?” She looked up at him and said quickly, “I guess that’s a dumb question.”

  He nodded, and listened to a loudspeaker: “All police personnel, attention. All police personnel, take up your positions. Follow your sergeants. Sergeants, all sergeants, move them out to their assigned positions.”

  The sudden movement, in response to shouted instructions from cops wearing sergeant’s stripes, was like a mob scene. Everyone seemed in a hurry now, and there was a great deal of muttering. But Converse could see that out of the shifting and milling of bodies, the near collisions, a sort of purposive order was evolving.

  “They’re going to form a single line abreast,” Holly Markham said, “all the way from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue, and sweep across the park from end to end.”

  Converse was shaking his head in wonderment. “They’ll never find it that way.”

  She tilted her head inquisitively. “Why not?”

  “How many cops have they got out here?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “That’s why. Too many. Four hundred and ninety-nine too many.” Eastman was sitting on an edge of the campaign table, watching him. Their eyes met, and Eastman beckoned to him. “I have to go now.” He pointed toward Eastman. “Nice talking to you, Markham.”

  “Too bad. It was just beginning to get interesting.” She tapped her teeth with her pen and looked at him appraisingly. “Just in case this thing fizzles, how do I get in touch with you?”

  He told her his phone number and she wrote it down. He walked over to Eastman, who said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. But I hoped you might get here earlier so we could have had a talk.”

  “Yeah, well, I kind of got stuck.”

  The tall officer with the oak leaves moved over to join them. Eastman introduced him as Deputy Inspector Scott. Converse put out his hand. The DI, his arms folded across his chest, merely nodded. Eastman said, “Do you have any suggestions, Mr. Converse?”

  Sure, Converse thought, call off your cops. He said, “I might, if I knew what kind of snake it was.”

  The DI, his lip curling, said, “We find it, we’ll know what kind of snake it is.”

  Eastman said, “He’s the snake expert I told you about, Chief. That found the rattlesnake in that apartment building in Washington Heights?”

  The mass of policemen was fragmented now, attenuating, spreading toward the east and west ends of the park. Those close by were already in place, waiting for those on the distant flanks to get in position. Sergeants were busy dressing up their lines.

  The DI said, “A park is a hell of a lot different from an apartment house. It’s eight hundred and forty goddamn miles.”

  “Acres,” Eastman said cautiously. The DI shrugged the correction off, and moved away.

  Converse said, “I’ve never seen this many cops in one place.”

  “Neither have I,” Eastman said. “It tells you something about how bad we want that snake.”

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, captain, but it’s the wrong way to find it.”

  The loudspeakers blared, directing vehicles to “move into position.” A dozen squad cars and two emergency service trucks wheeled in through the Artist’s Gate past the statues of San Martin, Simon Bolívar, José Martí, all of them worked in bronze, all of them on horseback, as befitted Latin-American liberators. They spread out to the right and left down the walkways, behind the waiting line of cops.

  Eastman said, “I asked for suggestions, not conclusions.” His blue eyes were bleak. “I would appreciate any help you could give us in finding and killing this snake.”

  “What do you want to kill it for? It’s no harder to capture it than it is to kill it.”

  “It’s a murderer,” Eastman said, “and I believe in capital punishment.”

  Converse shook his head. “It has to be caught before somebody else is hurt, but it’s a fact that a snake doesn’t attack out of malice. Whenever it bites something it can’t eat it’s because it felt threatened.”

  Eastman smiled, but his eyes were blue ice. “Whose side are you on—ours or the snake’s?”

  As it happens, Converse thought, I’m playing both sides at the same time. I want to prevent anybody else from being bitten and I want to save the snake if I can. But it would be best to leave Eastman’s question unanswered. He waved toward the line of cops. “You can beat an area and drive a tiger out into the open, but not a snake. Snakes hide. They’re among the most accomplished hiders in the animal kingdom.”

  The loudspeakers were blaring again, and their echoes rolled back. They were urging speed on the flanks. “Shake it, find your places, get on the stick, shake it….”

  “Poor bastards,” Eastman said, “I’m shedding fat just sitting here in the shade. Imagine what it’s like out there in the sun? They’re going to be dropping like flies.”

  “Once, in my office at the zoo,” Converse said, “and it was just a little cubbyhole, mind you, I misplaced a two-foot-long snake, and it was missing for three weeks. I turned the place upside down and couldn’t find it. Eventually, it turned up in a desk drawer.”

  “We’re going to toss the whole friggin park,” Eastman said, “and not overlook any desk drawers. Every last inch of it, excluding nothing except water….” He stopped abruptly. “Christ. Do snakes swim?”

  “They sure can. In fact their motion, in which they push against the substrate, is essentially the same as the way a fish curves back against water. But this one obviously isn’t a water snake, so you can skip the water.”

  “Thank God. There’s a hundred and fifty acres of water, and we would have had to bring in divers.”

  “How many trees are there?”

  Eastman groaned. “They hide in trees? Sure, now that you mention it, I’ve seen it in the movies.”

  “All snakes can climb trees. Some of them live in trees and never come down to the ground. Others are strictly terrestrial. Still others are both arboreal and terrestrial. And some of those also live underground in burrows.”

  “Trees and burrows.” Eastman shook his head uneasily. “Anything else I ought to know?”

  “Snakes live by stealth, and they have to be caught by stealth. As it happens, snakes are deaf, but they’re sensitive to vibrations of the substrate. Five hundred heavy-footed cops are going to sound like an earthquake to that snake out there. It’ll hide, and that’s that. You don’t need five hundred men, just one man who knows what he’s doing.”

  Eastman barked a short unamused laugh. “One modest man, right?”

  “Look, captain, I was walking along a downtown street with a cop I know one day. An ordinary street on an ordinary day, quiet and peaceful. But all of a sudden the cop tensed up and said, ‘That character up the block, he’s going to pull something.’ The man he was talking about was casual, well-dressed, strolling, nothing suspicious about him. But in the next ten seconds, this guy turned into a jewelry store with a gun in his hand. Okay. Turn it around—you and I, we can both look at an innocent meadow, and if there’s a snake in it I’ll know it and you won’t.”

  “Okay. I get you
r point. Come along and give us the benefit of your knowledge.”

  A series of loudspeakers burst into sound, all along the police line from the west to the east limits of the park. “Attention, all sergeants, attention. We’re moving out. Remember your instructions. Walk as straight a line as you can, keep the line dressed up, eyes down to the ground, concentrate on the wild and heavily brushed areas….”

  “Eyes down,” Converse said, “and they won’t look up in the trees.”

  “…everything is included—playgrounds, ball fields, walks, buildings, inside everything, behind everything…. Move on out. Move out.”

  Nearby, a sergeant shouted an order, and the line began to move forward. Converse said, “The guy on the street didn’t know a cop had his eye on him. If there were five hundred cops, he’d have known about it and just kept walking.”

  The loudspeakers were addressing themselves to people in the park, visible in the near distance: “Folks, please keep back. For your own safety and the success of the operation, please keep back and do not impede the officers. If you do not have business in the park at this time, we ask you to please leave the park….”

  Eastman stood up. “I’d better put that dope about the trees into the loudspeakers. Come along?”

  Converse shook his head. “No sense to it. After this is over and the dust settles, I’ll come back here.”

  “I apologize for waking you up. You can go back to bed now.”

  Eastman turned abruptly and walked away. Converse watched the police line at his right mass together and start to flow around the Pond. A group of winos and addicts sitting on the nearby benches gave them a cheer. Eastman had stopped to speak to the DI. Together, they hurried toward a communications truck.

  ***

  Converse walked out of the park. There was a group of reporters at the exit, surrounding the Police Commissioner and four uniformed cops with yellow braid on their caps and stars on the shoulders of their uniforms. He wondered if Holly Markham was among them. She wasn’t.

  EIGHT

  The turnout at City Hall, doubtless because of the heat, was considerably smaller than expected, to the relief of the police guard, which was dangerously thin and might have been overwhelmed by a large aggressive mob. The operation at the park had strained police manpower to an unacceptable limit.