by John Godey
“In a nutshell,” the P.C. said, “we didn’t find the snake.”
“Nuts are in nutshells,” the mayor said. “I asked for a report.”
The P.C. shrugged. “That’s the good news, Mr. Mayor. The bad news is that there’s been an unsportsmanlike upsurge of crime in those areas of the city where we pulled out personnel to try to find this fucking pagan snake. That there have been twenty-odd fires of suspicious origin. That there are traffic snarls around bridge and tunnel areas that won’t be unsnarled until nine o’clock. That more than seventy-five cops ended up in the hospital, though all but a half-dozen were treated and released. That eight cops were hurt in scuffles in the park with citizens who refused to move out of the way of the police line when asked to do so. And that the PBA has threatened a job action because of what they call cruel and inhumane treatment of their membership.”
“You don’t have to say it with all that much relish,” the mayor said. “That’s the whole report?”
“The PBA is also going to demand my resignation.”
The mayor made a gesture of dismissal. Such a demand was an old story.
“They accuse me of having forgotten my humble beginnings, when I was a cop on the beat. That hurts. I may sit behind a desk now, and ride in an air-conditioned limousine, but I have never forgotten my humble beginnings, and never will.”
“Sit down, Francis,” the mayor said. He turned to the meeting at large. “Gentlemen, we gave it everything we have, today, and now we’re confronted with a very large problem—what to do for an encore?”
The staff, nodding, ad-libbed: “That’s right—what do we do for an encore?” “That’s certainly the problem.” “Gave it all we had.”
“I’m open for suggestions.” The mayor surveyed the room. Nobody met his eyes. Everybody was frowning and stroking his chin. “Francis?”
The P.C. looked grim. “I got a meeting scheduled for later on with Plans and Operations, maybe some of those great thinkers will come up with something. But I’ll tell you what we can’t do—we can’t mount another operation like today. I’ll have a mutiny on my hands.”
“Police work is no goddamn picnic,” the mayor shouted. “Did they think it would be a picnic when they signed on? Forget I said that. They’re the finest cops who ever trod a beat, and don’t anybody ever forget it.”
The mayor glared around the room. Everyone was still thinking hard and rubbing their chins. He could hear their whiskers rasping. The bearded young man who had addressed the crowd at City Hall in the morning was muttering.
“Speak up if you’ve got something to say,” the mayor said.
“Okay. In my opinion, we should deal with first things first. What do we say to the press?”
“Well, what do I say to the press?”
“You praise the devotion and courage of the police, cite some figures on how many of them were overcome by the heat, put in a good word for the P.C. After that, Your Honor, some bullshit about continuing to press the search relentlessly, every resource of the city thrown into the effort to apprehend the perpetrator—”
“We can do without your jokes,” the mayor said.
“—no further sweeps on the scale of today’s operation are under consideration at this time. Instead, stepped-up twenty-four-hour patrol of the park—”
He was interrupted by another aide. “Okay as far as it goes. But you know what the big question is going to be—are we planning to close the park?”
“Tell them it is still under intensive study.”
“How many times can we keep saying that?”
“As many as I have to,” the mayor said emphatically. “I’m never going to answer that question.”
“It’s a physical impossibility,” the P.C. said. “I couldn’t do it with ten thousand cops.”
A voice said, “Emphasize that the rules about behavior in the park will be strengthened and stringently enforced, and that any citizen who disobeys will face immediate arrest.”
“Careful, there,” the black-bearded aide said, “or you’ll have the Civil Liberties Union in the act.”
Another voice said, “They’re sure to quiz you about Milanese and his Puries.”
There was a sudden shout from the president of the City Council, sitting in the rear of the room: “Those fucking bastards! They ought to be exterminated, especially that charlatan, that hypnotist, that so-called fucking so-called reverend.”
The president of the City Council was a shattered man. His only son was a Purie. Several months before, in desperation, he had had his son forcibly seized as he strolled on the grounds of Eden Paradise, and borne away to the family summer home in Lake George, where he was kept under twenty-four-hour guard and visited daily by a psychologist who sought, in the boy’s words, to “brainwash” him. This virtual act of kidnapping was not the first such to be attempted by the distraught parent of a Purie, but it was the first by a prominent public figure. The incident had been widely publicized after the boy made a daring escape from the Lake George house and denounced his father as “a fascist member of a fascist regime.” He had topped off his performance by gazing adoringly into the effortfully benign face of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese and declaring, “This great and holy man is my true father.”
“Compose yourself, Larry,” the mayor said. The president of the Council nodded grimly and subsided in his seat. After a moment the mayor said to the meeting at large, “What the hell are they mixing in this thing for? What are they bothering us for?”
The bearded aide replied. “They’re looking for publicity. Their enrollment has been down lately, and they’re falling behind in their mortgage payments. This is a convenient opportunity to get exposure on the tube and in the papers, and attract new recruits and money. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” the mayor said.
“From the political point of view, it isn’t all negative,” the bearded aide said. “Automatically, anything the Puries are for, the recognized churches are against, so we’ll pick up a large sympathy vote.”
The mayor looked pleasantly surprised. The remainder of the meeting was desultory. There were, Hizzonner said, other matters of moment to occupy them besides a lousy snake. Would anybody advance the claim, for instance, that dealing with those momsers in Washington and Albany wasn’t of more moment than a lousy snake? Nobody advanced such a claim. The mayor, satisfied, adjourned the meeting and motioned to the bearded aide, who got up and went to the dais.
“Stick around, Seymour, and help out with the questions about the Puries, okay?” The bearded aide nodded. The mayor, sighing as he watched the reporters begin to file in, said, “Any other city, Seymour, if somebody got bitten by a snake, the public would blame the snake. Here they blame the mayor. Sometimes I wish the goddamn island would break loose and float down the river and out to sea, and attach itself to, let’s say, the Azores or like that.”
“Who can tell,” the bearded aide said. “Maybe if you loosen it up at the bridges and the tunnels, it might happen. Shall I get my monkey wrench?”
NINE
The Central Park Precinct, formerly known as the 22nd, or Two-two, is located midway through the 85th Street transverse, on the south side of the road. Its appearance is far and away the most anomalous and distinctive of any police precinct in the city. It doesn’t look like a police precinct (either the old fortresslike ones or the new, functionally modern ones), but a stable, which it was when it was built in 1871. It is an official landmark building, jealously protected against demolition; jealously protected also, as its officers suggest, against air conditioning.
The Central Park Precinct complex consists of a series of very low, two-storied, handsomely weathered red brick buildings built in a horseshoe shape around a central courtyard. The visitor who can close his eyes to the presence of police vehicles streaming in and out can readily imagine that he is in a charming old English mews.
Despite the serenity of its appearance, the Central Park
Precinct is a functioning police station much like any other in the city. Its quaint brick buildings house a main precinct area, a shooting range, garages, an anti-crime unit, a fingerprint unit, a detective squad, administrative offices, a lab, a medical unit, a roll-call room, lockers, showers, an Old Records room containing blotters going back to the 1880s, and all the other facilities and appurtenances of a police station, including a detention cell on the ground floor near the entrance to the main precinct, a gloomy, dusty little room as grim as a medieval oubliette.
The Central Park Precinct is a unit of Manhattan North Task Force. Its jurisdiction is Central Park, “wall to wall,” although one exigency or another does require it to wander out into the streets peripheral to the park. It is located in what is known, sometimes laughingly, as a “low crime area.”
***
The taxi pulled off the transverse road and dropped Converse at the entrance to the precinct courtyard. A cop leaning out of a squad car window directed him to the main precinct entrance. Inside, fans moved hot air around, and there was a smell of age and, perhaps, of long dead horses. A heavily sweating policeman behind a long counter directed him down a narrow corridor lined with offices to the last room on the park side of the building. Converse knocked on the door and went in. Captain Eastman sat behind a desk in a round-shouldered slump.
“I thought your headquarters were in Flushing,” Converse said.
“They are, but I’m on detached duty at this precinct for the duration. This is the office of the commander of the Two-two. He’s on vacation, the lucky dog. Sit down.”
The office of the commander of the Two-two was tiny and cramped, and, although its window faced south, would be sunless on even the brightest of days. A fan buzzed away ineffectually at the window. Converse stood the Pilstrom tongs against the wall, and placed the pillowcase on the desk.
“It isn’t much,” Eastman said, “but it does have a bathroom and a locker room, and there’s a cot stored away behind that door.”
His voice was thin, leeched of energy. He looked terrible, Converse thought. His face was dragged down in folds by fatigue, and his blue eyes were dull, their conjunctivas rimmed with red. He swiveled toward the window, then faced back again, and his face seemed to firm up, as though, Converse thought, in relief at his having dispensed with the small talk.
“I was a little fresh this morning,” Converse said. “I’m sorry. But I knew you wouldn’t find it, and it struck me as a pure waste of manpower.”
Eastman’s lids fluttered tiredly. “How old are you?”
Converse was surprised. “Twenty-nine. Why?”
“I’m forty-eight. If I learned any one thing since I was your age, it was never to be sure about anything. There was always a chance, wasn’t there?”
“What’s more, I think you knew you wouldn’t find it.”
“Another thing I learned is that being incorruptible isn’t necessarily a virtue. We had to sweep the park today, whether we found the snake or not. We’re dealing with people and their anxieties, you know, not a set of cold abstractions.”
“You underestimate people, like all bureaucrats do. Why don’t you, just once, try telling people the truth?”
“Because they detest the sound of it as much as we dislike telling it. Every man is his own little bureaucrat. Can you imagine the reaction if we told the public the operation would probably fail?”
“The truth never hurts,” Converse said doggedly.
“It does. Just take that on trust from an older man.” Eastman’s eyes darkened. “Yes, we put on a show, and it cost us. Aside from the cops that had to be treated for heat prostration, everybody else is all whacked out. A lot of them will be calling in to the sick desk tomorrow.”
“You’re not planning on doing the same thing tomorrow, I hope.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. Maybe you’ll find the snake for us tonight, so we don’t have to worry about tomorrow.”
Converse shook his head. “In one night? It isn’t likely.”
“You sounded a lot cockier this morning.” Eastman pointed to the Pilstrom tongs. “Still, you brought your snake-catching gear along.” Eastman’s voice became urgent. “Mr. Converse, I’d like to find that snake before it bites anybody else.”
So would I, Converse thought, but I have a problem: I can see this thing from all sides. Nobody else realizes that the snake is just as much a victim of circumstances as the people it bites. It had to be brought to the park, by somebody acting out of malice or ignorance or God knows what. Okay, but I mustn’t let my feelings about snakes—do me something, I’m fond of them—get out of hand. The first priority is to save human lives. Death by snakebite is a horrible way to die. We can’t have anybody else bitten, no matter what happens to the snake. But still, it keeps coming back to this, it’s perfectly possible to save human lives without killing the snake. That’s the truth of the matter, but Eastman would hit the ceiling if I said so. Not that I have to say it. Eastman is smart, he reads me very well.
He said, “You know, captain, it won’t bite anybody who doesn’t bother it.”
Eastman’s laugh was a bitter exhalation. “We keep getting reports from our patrols that the park is lousy with citizens hunting for the snake. In the dark, mind you, in the dangerous park after dark. Armed with forked sticks and crowbars and axes, and God knows what else. We’re pulling some of them in to discourage them.”
“Can you hold them legally?”
“No,” Eastman said flatly. “It helps to scare them off. We escort them out of the park and warn them, and some go home, but others come right back in again through a different entrance, and take up where they left off, poking their sticks into bushes. They’re all over the park.”
“Well,” Converse said, “they’re going to make it so much harder for us to find the animal. It’s going to be scared to come out.”
“It hasn’t struck me as being all that scary,” Eastman said. He sighed. “We’ve also had our first hoaxter. Some jerk from Westchester drove in with a snake in a wicker basket. He was going to turn it loose in the park as a joke. Some joke.”
“What kind of a snake?”
“A big long blacksnake. Harmless. Even I recognize that kind of a snake. A cop caught the guy about an hour ago just as he was about to turn it loose. We’ve got him in the detention cell and we’re looking into seeing if there’s some kind of charge we can prefer against him.”
“Stupid bastard.”
“Yes, well, that’s what happens. There’s going to be a lot more craziness, one kind or another, before we’re finished.” Eastman straightened up in his chair and made an effort at briskness. “Well, what are you going to do for us?”
“Try to find the snake. I wish to hell I knew what it was.”
“Yeah, well, as the DI put it, you’ll know when you find it. You don’t think it’s a cobra?”
“It’s possible, of course, but I doubt it. Cobras chew when they bite. This one just makes a couple of neat little puncture holes. It’s confident about how poisonous it is, so all it has to do is inject its venom.”
“Do you know any snakes like that?”
“I know quite a few of them, but it’s pointless trying to guess. There are twenty-five hundred different species of snakes, and maybe half of them are poisonous. In this case, we can eliminate those that secrete a hemotoxic venom, and those that are neurotoxic but whose venom is not so powerful, and those that are rear-fanged, and those that are small, since as a general rule large snakes distill a more powerful venom than small ones….” He spread his hands. “And even when you rule out the ones that aren’t aggressive it still leaves an awful lot of snakes.”
Eastman nodded vaguely. He isn’t interested in details, Converse thought. All he cares about is catching it, he doesn’t care how the trick is done.
“Somebody said something about a mongoose,” Eastman said without much conviction. “I saw one killing a snake in a nature film, once. Anything to it?�
�
“A mongoose can kill a snake, most times, and so can a hedgehog. Both of them are resistant to snake venom. But they’re not natural enemies, and their tendency is to avoid each other. The fights you see are always staged. Men pit them and they fight to the death and the snake usually loses. Actually, the most efficient snake-killing animal is an African bird called the secretary bird. It’s about four feet high with long taloned legs that it uses to stomp and gash a snake to death. In South Africa people sometimes tame them and keep them around the house for protection against snakes.” He glanced across the desk at Eastman and laughed. “No, it isn’t practical to put a secretary bird in Central Park.”
“I guess not.” Eastman’s fleeting expression of hope disappeared. “You want to get started?”
“Might as well. There are two things we can try. We can shine a powerful flashlight beam around, and if the animal is nearby, the light bounces off its retina and you pick up the eye-shine. Trouble is, it’s a local effect. You can’t shine a light in the snake’s eye if it’s a block away.”
Eastman grunted. “What’s the other thing?”
“Stake out a watering place. Snakes are mostly, though not exclusively, nocturnal animals. If it wants a drink, it’ll probably come out for it at night.”
“You know how much water there is in the park?”
“You told me this morning—about a hundred and fifty acres. It’s a very long shot, but there isn’t much choice. The odds might be a little better tomorrow morning. Snakes are coldblooded, and have to lie in the sun to warm themselves up for an hour or so. Maybe less than that in this kind of weather, because they don’t lose too much heat during the night. They like to bask early in the morning, and they like lying on a rock if there’s one around.”
“You know how many rocks there are in the park?”
“It’s a problem. But if you give me a week or so, I’ll guarantee to turn it up.”
