by John Godey
Tomorrow morning—a new, unsullied day—he would go to the park, descend into that hollow, and catch that damn snake once and for all. It was, he thought, quite a snake, even for a black mamba. How many had it killed already—four, five? He had heard of a black mamba in Africa that had killed some eleven people before it was taken. The herpetologist who had told him about it had characterized it as a “rogue.” Well, he was inclined to give the snake in the park the benefit of the doubt. Irritable, yes, but with good reason, what with being in an alien terrain and under the constant strain of being threatened. But whether it was a rogue or simply a snake instinctively defending itself, it was sure as hell an aggressive individual of an aggressive species.
He heard the cat spitting, and turned around. The python was crawling toward the cat, which stood its ground, back humped, eyes glowing. He grabbed up the python an instant before the cat leaped. The snake coiled around his arm. He unwound it and put it into its glass cage. He turned on the air conditioner and placated the cat with a bowl of milk. Then he evened matters out by feeding the python a live mouse.
He went back to the window to see how the couple was making out with their cooking. Hibachi, hot coals, and steak were lying in the dust, and the obvious culprit, a red setter, was groveling with guilt. On any ordinary day, the scene would have been good for a laugh. But not on a bad day. With masochistic zeal, he totted up the disasters: helicopter, DI squeezing neck, getting fired, Holly’s clay feet, and—why had he put it out of mind?—the biting of the Purie. If he had gone down into the hollow after the helicopter incident, instead of screaming at Eastman like a piqued adolescent, he would have deprived the Purie of the opportunity of getting bitten. It had never once occurred to him that someone else would find the snake’s hiding place.
“Converse,” he said aloud, “you’re a murderer and a shit.”
The self-accusation was exaggerated. The Purie was alive, thank God. Nevertheless, he had behaved badly. And so, as he did whenever he was forced to admit that he was somewhat less than perfect, he became extremely drowsy. He watched moodily as the python began to ingest its mouse, then fell into bed and went to sleep.
He woke with the ringing of the doorbell. He got out of bed and felt his way through the darkness to the living room. Without bothering to ask who was there—that basic first line of defense against intruders—he opened the door. Holly. She was wearing tailored yellow slacks and some kind of a slip-over blouse. He was wearing artfully ragged denim shorts.
He said, “Sorry, no comment. I’m not talking to the press today.”
She said, “I went to the Blue Griffin first, thinking you might still be there. Can I come in?”
“Don’t waste your time—my lips are sealed.”
“Please?”
He stepped aside to let her in. She walked halfway across the dim room. He stood near the door and watched. She turned to face him.
She said, “You could use some light in this room. Can I have a drink?”
“I don’t give drinks to reporters.” He heard his own voice with a feeling of surprise. It was small and pinched.
She said, “I do believe you care,” and walked back across the room toward him, smiling.
***
Captain Eastman lay on the damp sheets of the cot in the office of the Commander of the Two-two, and slept intermittently and poorly. Earlier, he had attended a meeting at the Borough Commander’s office on East 21st Street. The Borough Commander had said that there was no doubt that the Puries knew the whereabouts of the snake, and that they would go after it tomorrow, as their Reverend had promised. Therefore, the park would be saturated with police beginning an hour before dawn. Just to be on the safe side, there were augmented patrols out tonight, with orders to pick up anybody on foot and run them out of the park.
There was no question, the Borough Commander said, but that the Puries were cooking up something. Their headquarters were under surveillance, and dozens of Puries had been coming and going ever since the Reverend’s return from the hospital. They would stay for an hour or so and then leave.
“They all look alike. Cleancut kids, short hair, neat clothing. I never thought I would put down white, short-haired, cleanly dressed kids, but they make me sweat more than any black militant or bearded desperado I ever saw.”
Eastman dozed briefly and woke, remembering his telephone conversation with Holly Markham, who wanted to know why Converse had been told off. He had tried double-talking, but she kept pressing him, and finally, in a mood of exasperation he went beyond the scope of her questions and blurted out that he was pissed off because Converse knew where the snake was hiding. But when she kept after him, insisting that he ought to tell her what evidence he had to back up his statement, he retreated and said that there wasn’t any evidence, that it was just a hunch.
“How do you know that in Converse’s case it isn’t just a hunch, too?”
He recognized, as much from the tone of her voice as what she had said, that she had suddenly changed her tack; that she had stopped being a newspaper woman and become an advocate. He had felt a deep pang of envy for Converse, for his youth, for the pretty, desirable girl who had sprung to his defense….
But he knew that he was right, that Converse did know. And the longer he thought of it, tossing on the lumpy mattress, the angrier he became. What I should do, he said, half aloud, is go down there and beat on him until he tells me where it is.
Outside, there was a sudden gust of laughter, and Eastman glared at the shut door, thinking, It’s not funny, nothing is funny anymore.
***
Converse said, “I want to pay you a compliment. I hope you won’t take it the wrong way and get your feminist hackles up.”
She shook her head from side to side on the pillow and smiled.
She had an infinite variety of smiles, all bewitching; this one was a half-smile, and it was at the same time mysterious and tender. The sheet they had covered themselves with in an initial shyness was crumpled beneath her. Her slender thighs and long legs were beautifully shaped. So were her breasts, so was her chin. As though in self-defense, he searched for a flaw, and could find none.
He said, “You’re even better-looking naked than with your clothes on.”
She frowned.
“That’s just a sudden thought that occurred to me. It isn’t a compliment. The compliment is that you’re the brightest girl I ever had.”
“Had?”
“I guess I have trouble expressing myself. Well, you know, fucked.”
Her frown deepened, then smoothed away in laughter. She drew his head down and kissed him lightly. They exchanged playful kisses until suddenly the pressure of her hands on his back turned urgent. With some effort, he resisted the pressure.
He said, “When I said on the phone that you were a dumb bitch, it was because I thought you cared more about your lousy scoop than you did about me.”
“Scoop. We don’t allow scoops on my paper.” Her hand trailed lightly down his chest. “My friend, there’s a time for talking and a time for fucking. You know what I mean?”
Her legs parted, and she pulled him down and into her. Later, with the sheet drawn up to their waists, they slept a little. When she woke he was faced toward her, and speaking seriously, even anxiously.
“Eastman?” She tried to wake herself to his question. “Eastman. He said you blew your stack about the helicopter this morning, and his boss walked in….” She trailed off, shrugging, and her breasts quivered beguilingly. “He’s been looking for another herp.”
Converse nodded. “There are some good ones in town. Very good ones.” He looked away from her. “But a new herp won’t know where the snake is.”
“But you do. Eastman said you did.”
“I could have caught it this morning, even after the helicopter, but I didn’t. So that Purie found it and got bitten. I’m responsible for him getting bitten. Is that what Eastman said?”
“He wouldn’t go any further, for attr
ibution, than that he had a hunch you knew where it was.”
“Did you write it up—what he said?”
“I tried to get him to come out and state it flatly. It’s my job, Mark, you know. But he wouldn’t, so I couldn’t use it.”
“Well, I’m telling you. I know exactly where that black mamba is.”
“Okay, thanks. But it’s a hard-and-fast rule of mine that anything I hear in bed is off the record.”
“That’s nice to know.”
She assessed the tension in his voice and laughed and kissed him. “I just made that up. I’ve never been to bed with a news source before.”
“It was wrong not to have picked the snake up this morning—right?”
She hesitated before saying, “Right, it was wrong.”
“And the Puries are going after it tomorrow, and someone else might get bitten, maybe even tonight. Right?”
“Mark, I can’t help you assess your guilt, you’ve got to do that by yourself. But not now, darling.”
He rolled out of bed. He seemed to disappear in the darkness, but then she saw him straighten up from the floor. He started to pull on his jeans.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to catch the black mamba. Before it bites anybody else.”
“Oh no. Don’t go now. Please?”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and slipped on his shoes.
He wants to expiate his sin of omission, she thought. “Mark, I don’t want you to leave me, I really don’t. Besides, it’s dangerous at night, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “Listen, come here a minute.” He started to pull a T-shirt on, and when his head emerged he shook it again. She whispered, “Come back to bed. I want you. Right this second.”
In the other room a buzzer sounded. Converse said, “Chrisesake.” He went out to the living room and opened the window and looked out. He said, “Chrisesake” again, and called out, “I’ll be right down.” He shut the window and returned to the bedroom. “It’s Eastman.”
Her body gleamed whitely through the darkness as she got out of bed. “I’ll be dressed in two minutes. I’m going along.”
“No way.”
She turned on a bed lamp. “If you’re going to act like a herp, you can’t stop me from acting like a reporter, can you?”
***
She was a lovely girl, Eastman thought, and she glowed with youth and fulfillment. She was in love with Converse—or whatever word they used for love these days. He felt the bite of regret and envy, and mourned for his own irrecoverable youth.
Converse, who was carrying his snake-catching stick, a pillowcase, and a large flashlight, looked at the waiting taxi in surprise. “How did you know I would come? After all, your boss gave me the boot this morning.”
Eastman said gravely, “Well, I’m a pretty good judge of character, you know.”
“I really behaved like a shit this morning,” Converse said.
They got in the cab and Eastman said to Holly, “Where can we drop you?”
She shook her head. “I’m going with you.”
Eastman started to protest. Converse said, “Save your breath, captain. I tried.”
“She might get hurt.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll see to it.”
The driver was looking back at them through his protective glass. Eastman said, “Where do I tell him to go?”
“The Boys Gate, 100th Street and Central Park West,” Converse said. The snake’s territory was somewhat closer to the east side, but he was more familiar with the approach from the west. “Then into the park, and I’ll tell him where to let us out.”
“Police business,” Eastman said. “Make time.”
The driver’s shoulders shook with laughter. Eastman thought, The Hawaiian shirt never fooled him, he had me made all the time. The taxi sped up Eighth Avenue, cheating on all the red lights. Converse and the girl were holding hands. Eastman tried to remember the last time he had held hands with a woman, including his wife.
The cab made good time until it reached 86th Street, and then it began to crawl and, finally, stop at the tail end of a long line of stalled traffic.
“What’s this all about?” Eastman said to the driver. “Can you see anything?”
“Fya rengines,” the driver said. “Fya rengines and cop cars.”
Eastman rolled down his window and heard a clangorous, dissonant blend of emergency sounds: sirens, bells, wailers, hooters. A brightness caught at the tail of his eye. He pushed the door open and ducked his head out beneath the cab’s roof.
“Christ Almighty,” he said, “the whole goddamn park is on fire.”
EIGHTEEN
Operation Pillar of Fire had begun at the first tick of midnight; thus, the night had technically become “tomorrow,” and none would be able to accuse the Reverend Sanctus Milanese of having borne false witness.
Approximately sixty Puries took part in Operation Pillar of Fire. They were divided into eight squads of equal size and a larger ninth. The eight “diversionary” squads were designated by consecutive letters of the alphabet, A through H. The ninth went by the letter S for Serpent. There was at least one young woman in each of the eight squads A to H, but none in squad S. All, men and women alike, were dressed uniformly in black trousers or slacks, black polo shirts, and black socks and shoes. Squads A to H carried three five-gallon drums of gasoline. Squad S carried five drums, and was armed with shovels, axes, hoes, rakes, baseball bats, and roughly hewn forked sticks; many of the axes, shovels, hoes, and rakes were so recently purchased that they still bore the manufacturers’ bright labels on their hafts.
Because they were aware of the police surveillance of the Tabernacle and the Reverend’s mansion, the members of Operation Pillar of Fire assembled at widely dispersed points. They entered in cars (one each for squads A to H, two for squad S) through nine different gates, ranging the length and width of the park. Several of them passed patrolling police cars, but there were no incidents; they were indistinguishable from any other cars driving through the park. The squads were dropped off as near as possible to their assigned destinations, after which the cars drove away.
The “diversionary” sites were spread throughout the park, and away from the prime target area. The two southernmost locations were slightly to the west of the menagerie and along the Bridle Path near the Dalehead Arch. The northernmost sites were located in the Conservatory Garden to the east, near the Vanderbilt Gate, and on the Great Hill, almost directly across the width of the park to the west. One group penetrated to a wild area among the twining paths of the Ramble, another was on the opposite side of the Lake from the Ramble at Cherry Hill. A seventh group was at the King Jagiello monument a slight way from the 79th Street transverse, and an eighth in the center of the East Meadow.
Later, many people were to express astonishment that a plan of such detail and complexity could have been mounted in the four hours since the Reverend had returned from the East Side Hospital. But that was not at all the case. The operation, in a different form, had already been drilled meticulously for the past three days. At its inception, without prior knowledge of the actual hiding place of the black mamba, Operation Pillar of Fire had been a scattershot affair, in which more than twenty-five of the most promising wild areas of the park were to be set on fire, in the hope that the snake would be driven from cover. It was to have involved almost two hundred Puries.
Although he had given his sanction to the plan, and authorized intensive training of personnel, the Reverend Milanese had been aware of its quixotic, hit-and-miss nature, and might never have allowed it to become operational. But when Graham Black had pinpointed on a Parks Department map the precise location of the snake, everything changed. Immediately, eight of the original squads were activated as diversionary units, and a ninth formed around a nucleus of Christ’s Cohorts.
Operation Pillar of Fire was under the overall command of its architect and field general, Buckley (Buck) Pell, a former Marine Corps sergeant and ve
teran of the fighting in Southeast Asia. After his expulsion from the Corps with a less-than-honorable discharge for, in the words of his commanding officer, “undue savagery,” Buck Pell had undergone a sea change, repented of his massively godless past, and joined the Church of the Purification. He became one of the organizers and leaders of Christ’s Cohorts.
Buck Pell had trained his squads to concert pitch, and their performance was exemplary. Each squad, A to H, arrived at its target area no later than five minutes past midnight. They proceeded without delay to saturate the ground, the bushes, and the lower branches of trees with gasoline. The leader of the squad, meanwhile, had laid a trailer, a ten-foot length of fast-burning fuse leading outward from the target area. With the exception of the leader, the squad then withdrew approximately fifty feet from the critical area. At exactly 12:15, the leader—and each of the other leaders of squads A to H—lit the end of the trailer fuse.
Although there had been extensive safety drills, a few minor accidents occurred, mostly when squad members stumbled on rough ground or collided with each other in the darkness. There was one serious incident. It involved a Purie girl whose clothing, carelessly wetted by gasoline, had caught fire. Although the press was later to speak of her as becoming “a human torch,” in the event she had been quickly rescued by her companions, who rolled her in a blanket and extinguished the flames. She suffered only minor burns.
***
After they piled out of the cab, the driver yelled, “Hey, who’s gonna pay?” and Eastman knew that he was elected. Partially because he was an honest cop, but mostly because he was the only one left. Converse had taken off like a shot, with Holly right behind him.
