The Snake

Thirteen

Within thirty-six hours after Jeff's well-publicized death, the mood of the public had taken a sour turn-from ruefully amused acceptance of the snake as an appropriate symbol of their city's magnetic genius for attracting disaster to something approaching mass neurosis. Much of it was hysterical and self-hypnotic. People began to talk about "that crawly feeling in the legs." Some, before sitting down in a restaurant, would lift a tablecloth to look under the table; others would leave a play or concert or film before it was finished because they kept imagining snakes crawling around their feet in the darkness. The worst were those who began to suspect their own apartments, hesitating to enter a dark room for fear a snake might be lurking there, looking under their beds, shaking out their blankets. Some conjured up snakes curled up on the floorboards under their feet when they drove their cars. Some went so far as to check their pockets or handbags before venturing in for a handkerchief or a coin. All over the city, people took to sitting in chairs with their feet tucked under them.

The new mood was nourished by the almost daily occurrence of what the newspapers took to calling "snake associated" deaths. These events dulled all but the most insatiable appetites for sensation.

The first of these incidents took place in an apartment on Third Avenue, in the Seventies. A man, returning home in the evening, tiptoed toward his balcony, where his wife was watering her plants, and tossed a large kapok-filled novelty snake at her feet, at the same time screaming a warning. The woman whirled around, saw the snake almost under her foot, and recoiled from it in a spasm of revulsion. She struck the guard rail of the balcony with both feet off the ground, and with such force that she somersaulted backward, and fell to the street twenty floors below.

Another man planted a similar snake in his wife's bed. She got under the cover, felt something odd, and turned on her bed lamp. (Many suggestible people, these nights, were turning on their bed lamps, only to discover that the "snake" was their own sweat trickling down their legs.) The woman leaped out of bed when she saw the snake, screamed, staggered toward the bedroom door, and fell dead of heart failure.

In a crowded movie house near Bloomingdale's, a voice (whether female or a male screaming in falsetto was never established) called out, "Snake! The snake is here!" A few people rose reflexively, and then the entire audience was on its feet. In the panicky rush toward the exits people were injured badly enough to be hospitalized, and a young man who was trampled underfoot died when fragments of his shattered eyeglasses were driven into his brain.

After the theater was emptied the police searched the house but found no snake.

In the incident at Macy's department store, two people died, and more than a hundred and fifty were injured. This time, there was a live snake involved. It appeared suddenly in the aisles on the main floor, one of the busiest and most crowded in the huge store. Several women saw it at the same time and uttered piercing screams. The snake scudded over the floor in a panic of its own, then disappeared behind a counter. It was a long snake with a slender body and a small head. When it was found, after the entire floor had been cleared, and the casualties had been taken away in ambulances, it was identified by a Museum of Natural History herpetologist as a black racer, a thoroughly harmless snake but one which superficially resembled a black mamba. This suggested that the release of the racer in the store was the work of a sophisticated and sinister intelligence. The perpetrator was never found, although the police checked patiently and doggedly into the stories of several witnesses who claimed to have seen a shifty-eyed man carrying a wicker basket.

On a Friday, at a few minutes past three o'clock in the morning, two couples-well-dressed, in their early forties, suburbanites, as it turned out, winding up a night on the town-emerged from a nightclub in the East Fifties. While the doorman went off to find a cab, the two couples, almost anachronistically dressed in evening clothes, waited under the lighted marquee. At that hour, the rest of the street was dark.

Suddenly, one of the women let out a prolonged, piercing scream of terror.

The others, shocked and startled, followed her pointing finger to a snake crawling toward them out of the darkness. The men pushed the women, both of them now screaming, toward the door of the nightclub. The second man, a burly six-footer, stood his ground, and, as the snake came close to him, leaped into the air and landed on it with both feet. The man jumped back. He heard wild laughter somewhere in the darkness up the street, and realized that the snake was made of metal, covered by plastic painted to simulate a snake's skin; it moved on a tread that gave it both its forward thrust and its articulated serpentine motion.

The bulky man began to run up the street, shouting, toward the continuing sound of laughter. The other man and the two women came out of the club.

They heard the pounding footsteps and shouts of the bulky man diminishing. Then the footsteps stopped, and they heard a scuffling sound. There were more shouts, a series of thuds, a cry of pain. The second man shook himself out of his daze and ran up the street after his friend.

He found his friend stamping repeatedly on the already bloody and mashed face of another man, and it took all his strength to pull his friend away, meanwhile shouting, "Charlie, that's enough, you'll kill him.

Charlie, for God's sake, you're killing him."

In the event, it turned out that the trickster, who, as the autopsy later showed, had been drinking heavily, was already dead, his neck broken before the stomping had begun. When the police arrived, they were noncommittal, but at least three people among the crowd that had gathered on the scene said, with almost the identical phrasing, "There ain't a jury in the whole city that would convict him."

By the end of the third day, Converse had covered about sixty percent of the area between 97th Street and the north end of the park. He had divided the area into quadrants on an imaginary perpendicular drawn from 102nd Street east to west, bisected by another perpendicular drawn from the midway point of the 97th Street transverse to the Farmers Gate at Cathedral Parkway. For no particular reason except that he had to start somewhere, he began his search in the southwest quadrant, which took in the North Meadow, the Pool, the Cascade and a promising sector near the Springbanks Arch. Then he moved on to the southeast quadrant, which went fairly quickly because much of it was taken up by a portion of the North Meadow and the whole of the East Meadow.

He would arrive at the park before dawn, and position himself where he could watch a likely rock. When he had convinced himself that the snake was not going to appear, he would try a second rock. By that time the sun would have been up for a couple of hours, and the snake, wherever it was, would have been finished basking. He would then start checking out trees, top to bottom, foot by foot, and then back again until he was satisfied that the snake was not there; its olive coloration would make it difficult to spot in the shadow-dappled foliage. He would finish up by wading through heavily overgrown patches, with particular attention to places where the black mamba might have found a burrow.

By ten o'clock, exhausted, lie would call it quits. By then, anyway, there were too many people around amateur herpetologists (averaging about fourteen years of age), uniformed officers and detectives of the Central Park Precinct, Emergency Service Unit cops, and, of course, the omnipresent Puries. Eastman had accompanied him on the second morning, drawn with fatigue, coughing uncontrollably in the sodden predawn air.

Eastman had wanted to know why he chose to stake out one particular rock of a number that seemed equally promising, and he had replied that he had a "feeling" about it. Shortly after 8:30 Eastman had returned to the precinct house.

This morning, when Converse walked into the office of the Commander of the Two-two, Eastman looked alert, as though he had caught up on some sleep. But his face sagged wearily when he saw the empty pillowcase.

"No headway," Eastman said. It was not a question but a flat statement.

"I didn't find the black mamba," Converse said primly, "but I've eliminated another sector, and the way I look at it, that's progress."

"Yeah, I guess so, I guess you could call it progress."

"Count your blessings, captain. Since that fellow was bitten in the menagerie, nobody else has been bitten. Maybe it's dead."

"You believe that?"

Converse shook his head. "No."

"It hasn't bitten anybody else, but it's still a threat to bite somebody.

Anyway, even if it is dead, that won't be the end of it unless we can prove it. You been reading the papers? You know how many people have died because of that snake?"

Converse nodded. "They're all crazy in this city. They're killing each other. That's not the snake's fault." He got to his feet. "Maybe I'll find it tomorrow."

"Sure."

"I'll find it," Converse said.

Eastman said, "Well, let's hope it's real soon, so that our citizens can go back to killing each other for conventional reasons, and we can get that fucking Reverend off our backs, and that fucking DI off my back, and so the fucking mayor can win the fucking election and stop bugging the P.C., who bugs his deputy, who bugs… and the bug stops here."

Converse went out of the office. He felt depressed.

And he was still depressed hours later, after he had slept, and eaten, and watched the television set-not the news, but a police drama in which all the undercover cops looked exactly like the members of the anticrime squad of the Two-two, right down to their stylized moustaches and beards.

The depression remained. He felt awful.

At 11:30 he phoned Holly Markham. He had decided to call her at 8:30, though he didn't admit it to himself. All he really wanted to do was satisfy a purely idle curiosity about where she lived. He looked her up in the Manhattan phone directory. She lived on East 85th Street. He shut the phone book. He watched some more television, had something to cat, played with the python, played with the cat, damn near played with himself. He took a cold shower, chilled himself thoroughly, and decided to go to sleep. He got into bed, got out, drank water, peed, got into bed again, got up, drank a straight shot of bourbon, got into bed, got out, put on the light, and dialled her number from memory.

"Yes?" Her voice was tentative, wary.

He said, "I'm sorry. This is Mark Converse."

"Why are you calling at this hour?"

Her voice had changed. He couldn't tell whether she was glad to hear from him or just relieved that she didn't have to cope with a heavy breather.

He said, "I'm calling because I'm Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and you're Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russia’s."

He heard her make a little sound of surprise, and then she said, "Listen, I have to get to sleep."

He said, "I have a very strong feeling for you."

"Well, I have a very strong feeling for you, too, but that's no reason to call up in the middle of the night, not a little thing like that."

"Tell me to go away, okay. But don't make a joke out of it."

"I'm not joking, Mark. That's the joke, you know, I'm not joking. Yours truly, Catherine, Empress of all the Russia’s."

"You're not joking?"

"No, I'm not." 'There was apprehension in her voice, it quavered.

"Oh, Christ. Look, I've got to see you. I can't stand it. I need you very badly. Can I come to your place? Will you come down here?"

After a long silence she said, "What you really mean is that you want me.

That's honourable, but it's different from needing me. If you ever need me, really need me, call me and I'll come right over. Okay?"

He hung up the phone without answering. He went to bed, and lay on his back with his head resting on his folded arms, and ran the conversation over and over again in his mind, the way one did with a misplayed poker hand, haunted by nuance and regret. In the end, he vowed never to call her again, and to stop loving her at once.

The snake no longer came out of its burrow during the daylight hours, except for a brief period each morning to bask on a nearby rock.

On this night, as it had on several previous nights, it drank from the Loch, lying midway between the East and West drives. On the way back to its burrow it surprised a squirrel on the ground. The squirrel leaped for the base of a tree and began to scramble up, but the snake, its head already reared high, launched an upward strike and sank its fangs into the squirrel's haunch, just above its bushy tail. The squirrel squealed, and slipped back momentarily, but recovered and scampered upward.

The snake did not pursue the squirrel up the tree. It waited below, coiled, staring up into the shadowed branches. Its sharp eyes picked up the squirrel when it began to fall, and followed its descent to the ground. After eating the squirrel, the snake returned to its burrow. The process of digestion, already begun by the injection of venom, would take approximately six hours.