The Snake

Four

This evening's performance at the Delacorte Theatre was to be Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal. All 2,200-odd free tickets had been distributed by seven o'clock.

At least half the ticket-holders picnicked in the park, mainly in the areas adjacent to the Delacorte: up by the Belvedere Castle, on the banks of the small oblong Belvedere Lake, by the Shakespeare Gardens, and, in the hundreds, on the burnt-out grass of the Great Lawn. The grass was barely visible for the blankets that covered it, on which people sat or reclined or spread their picnic food and drink.

A certain segment of the crowd, notably the older people among them, were festive and uneasy in equal parts. As New Yorkers, trained in the ways of survival in the perilous city, they held it as an article of faith that one didn't enter the park after, or even approaching, dark. And so there was a heady, nervous pleasure in being here now, a sense of willful violation of common sense, like teasing a bull in an open field. They were aware that there was no real danger, of course, since they Were part of a vast throng, and since there was a reassuringly sizable police detail on hand. Nevertheless, it was an adventure of sorts.

When the performance began at eight o'clock, it was not quite dark. The buildings to the east lay in dusk, and their windows were already sparkling with lights; to the west, the sky was hazily luminous with the setting sun. In a few moments that light would die away, and darkness would fall. Sitting on their wooden fold-down seats in the circular theater, the crowd was dressed for the stilling heat in light summer shirts and blouses, trousers and skirts and halters, and even, here and there, bikini bathing suits and bare chests. The house lights dimmed, and the audience prepared for its pleasure, knowing that, whatever standard terrors would surely transpire in the more remote regions of the park, here it was cozy and secure.

The snake crept swiftly through the darkness, its slender length always in direct contact with the ground, curved into a continuous flowing S-movement, each part of its body following precisely in the path of the part preceding it.

The snake's movement was by horizontal undulation, a series of gentle curves, with the body forced against the substrate at each curve. This method of locomotion was made possible by the hundreds of vertebrae that constituted its backbone. The scales of its lower surface were enlarged, forming transverse overlapping plates whose free edge was directed backwards, and to each of which was attached a pair of movable ribs. When the ribs moved forward they carried the plate, or scute, with them. Since the scute was smooth, and its leading edge was protected by the one over it, it slipped comfortably over any irregularity in the surface. There was one disadvantage: when the scute was moved backward, its free rear edge snagged. Thus, to all practical purposes, the snake could move in only one direction: forward.

Although it had no awareness of it, the snake was, in part, retracing its movements of the night before, after it had escaped from the box. It passed within a few feet of the place on the pavement where Matt Olssen had died, where it had bitten Torres. Its path took it across a segment of the Great Lawn. If the grass, burnt dry and tanned by the sun, was a familiar environment to the snake, nevertheless many of the doors its tongue carried to the Jacobson's organ were alien to it.

It glided over the edge of the grass, crossed a walkway, and slid toward the Belvedere Lake. It veered to the left, away from the great upward fling of light from the Delacorte Theatre, and then crawled down to the water's edge.

As it drank, a great shout of laughter rose from the theater. The snake didn't hear it. It lacked an external ear, an ear drum, a tympanic cavity, and eustachian tubes. It was deaf.

Roddy Bamberger leaned toward the girl and whispered, "Let's duck out of here and go to my place and turn on the air conditioner and bring out the fine sherry wine and…" He brushed her cheek with his lips. "… and anything else your heart desires."

Somebody in the row above shushed him. The girl herself didn't answer, didn't even seem to have heard him. She was sitting forward eagerly in her chair, seemingly transported by what was occurring on the lighted stage. Roddy groaned inwardly. Transported, for Godssake, by a bunch of inept emoters without the foggiest notion of how to speak the witty cadences of the great Irish-what else? — master of the English comedy of manners. Some of the speech was as flat as street talk, some of it so badly imitative of flutey mid-Atlantic English that it verged on parody.

He had seen college dramatic society versions that were better. And, Christ, in London he had been privileged to be present at a National Theatre performance of School for Scandal. After that, this thing was sacrilege!

Looking at the girt, still gazing at the stage with idiot rapture, he couldn't imagine how he had ever thought that profile interesting. What had at first seemed to be an enchanting kind of delicacy was really more aptly describable as simpering. He was an ass to have been beguiled by a profile and a set of agreeable small breasts he had permitted himself to fantasize about in various pleasingly diverting ways.

It was all a bloody mess. He should have had more sense than to have allowed himself to be conned into coming here in the first instance. Free theater-like free anything else-was bound to be lousy theater. What you got for nothing was nothing. Nor should he have deceived himself into thinking that the profile and the quivery little tits might lead to a relationship of lasting (or protractedly temporary) value. The girl was worth exactly one dinner, a little arty talk, the air-conditioned bedroom. A one-night stand, and then goodbye forever.

It was all a bloody mess: the play, the girl herself, the ridiculous heat, the chicken and oversweet domestic wine she had put up, and which they had eaten on the buggy Great Lawn surrounded by hundreds of others eating the same cold chicken and hot wine. He despised the crowd around him-the way it dressed, the way it talked, its manners, its uproarious laughter when Sheridan's wit called for a quiet, appreciative smile. Not to mention its collective smell-a blending of sweat, greasy chicken, and pot.

"Arline…" He breathed softly on her cheek, glancing downward at the tender curve of her breast, bra-less under green linen. She turned to him reluctantly, unhappy at being deflected from the play. "Arline." He tuned his voice to a persuasive whisper. "Let's go back to my place." Her eyes kept alternating between him and the stage. "I want to talk to you-seriously."

She made an abrupt gesture, stilling him so that she could catch the next line of the play. Above, somebody was shushing him again. He twisted around to glare back at an angry face covered by black beard.

He faced front, but refused to look at the stage. He fixed his gaze on his knees, sharply outlined by the silk of his trousers. He placed his hands on his knees and molded them, feeling the bone of the patella, the in dentation beneath, the hard bone running down his leg.

Okay. If he was reduced to feeling his own leg for excitement he had bought it. Chalk tip the evening as a disaster and cut his losses forth with. And, of course, take a solemn oath never again to be intrigued by a profile that was less than it seemed, a breast that might well be humid and clammy to the touch.

"I'm sorry, Arline, I'm feeling dreadfully sick."

He was already halfway to his feet. She looked at him in distress. For him, or for fear of having to leave the play? She glanced quickly at the stage before facing him again. The play's the thing! She started to say something to him, but he was already moving through the aisle, bumping knees, murmuring insincere apologies. At the end of the aisle he looked back. She was looking at him, discomposed, uncertain, but it was too late. Even if she were to chase after him, and offer to thrust those little tits into his mouth, he would have none of it.

It occurred to him, as he left the theater, that he would be walking through the park alone, but he wasn't overly nervous about it. There were lots of cops around, and, undoubtedly, the Muggers Benevolent Association had put out an advisory to its membership. The conceit amused him, and he smiled. A couple of cops, lounging on the brick walkway around the perimeter of the theater, smiled back at him.

He headed eastward between the Belvedere Lake and the Great Lawn, on a course that would take him in a direct line to Fifth Avenue. He walked alertly, his eyes moving actively from left to right and behind him-only a fool took anything for granted-but he still saw it an instant before he stepped on it. He saw it but didn't quite believe it, which was perhaps why, with his right foot on the way down to meet the pavement, his reflexes didn't react to compel the foot to step clear over it instead of coming down flatly on its tail.

The tail rolled under his foot (he felt its steely firmness through the thin leather of his sandal) and he no longer questioned the snake's real ity. Revulsion ran through his body from his foot to his brain, and in his effort to step free-though perhaps the writhing of the snake had something to do with it-he lost his balance and fell on it.

The snake whipped back on itself, coiling and twisting to free itself of the man's weight. Its head curved back, mouth wide, and it struck. Its fangs sank into flesh. It bit again. It launched a third strike, but the man was rolling away from it, so that, although one of its fangs penetrated, the other only grazed the target.

The snake lost its balance and fell toward the man. Writhing, its light underside visible, it forced its coils back against the man, and pushed itself away. Quickly, with powerful surging curves, it slithered off the walkway and into the grass.

The sense of unreality persisted.

Roddy Bamberger lay still on the pavement after the snake had gone, as one did in the aftermath of a nightmare, waiting for logic to return, to dislodge fantasy, to re-establish a sense of time and place. Naturally, the details were vivid: the irrecoverable instant when he might have withheld his step, the horrible feel of the snake rolling under his foot, the contortions of those writhing coils, the savagery of the gaping mouth and the head poised to strike…

It was real, it had happened. There would be no waking to thankful relief.

The snake had bitten him. It was a real snake and it had actually bitten him. He recalled the incredibly long, swift strike, the impact of the fangs, not really all that painful, however. He had been bitten on the back of the thigh, not far below the first swell of the buttocks.

He eased his hand fearfully down to his thigh. Some blood, not much.

Suddenly, he felt awful. He was having some trouble breathing God, was he going to have a heart attack? He rolled over and with a good deal of effort got to his feet. He felt lightheaded, dizzy, and his legs were wobbly. He was weak, drowsy, and wanted to lie down. But he resisted the impulse because it filled him with revulsion to think of lying down where the snake had been, where it had left a trail of slime. But that wasn't true. Snakes were not slimy but dry…

He began to run back toward the halo of light that marked the Delacorte Theatre. He ran poorly, stumblingly: his legs were trembling, he couldn't seem to draw a decent breath, his mouth was choked with saliva. But he kept on, driven by terror and the incomprehensible but dread certainty that he was dying.

He collapsed a hundred feet from the theater, and might have lain there until the performance ended if a cop, strolling down the walk for a smoke, had not seen him. He tried to tell the cop about the snake, but he was unable to talk. He was only barely conscious.

There was not even time to call a Code Blue; the patient died thirty seconds after being wheeled in. Dr. Pranay Mukerjee saw the breathing stop, although, in his stethoscope, the heart continued to beat for a measurable time afterwards, perhaps thirty or forty beats. It could not be started up again.

Dr. Mukerjee was an experienced physician. He had served his residency in the Philippines, and was now pursuing his specialty, rheumatoid diseases, at a hospital in Brooklyn. Nevertheless, several times a week he did Emergency Ward duty for the fees, which he dutifully passed on to his family in Calcutta.

He was folding his stethoscope away in the pocket of his white jacket when a nurse carlic hurrying in. "He's dead," Dr. Mukerjee said. "Will you inform the Medical Examiner's office, please?"

Almost for the first time, Dr. Mukerjee looked at the man on the table as a person. In his mid-thirties, well-nourished, extremely well dressed.

A rictus of fright on the face. As noted before, an unsightly dribble of thick mucus in the mouth, on the lips and chin. Dr. Mukerjee lifted the corpse's hand, looked at the fingernails and dropped it. Cyanotic. What was the cause of death? Respiratory failure. According to the police who had brought him in he had collapsed in the park. Drug overdose? Not likely. The heartbeat had been fast and thready, but not abnormally so.

The pupils were not dilated.

Dr. Mukerjee's eye was caught by a small smear of blood on the table. But no wound was visible. Beneath him, perhaps? He turned the corpse over and saw it at once: a slight bloodiness on the trousers, high up on the inside of the left thigh. Doesn't look much, Dr. Mukerjee thought, yet-shall we see?

He cut the left leg of the man's trousers away from the cuff to the belt, spread the material apart and bent low over the thigh. After a moment, he straightened up. Shaking his head, smiling, he said aloud, first in Bengali, and then in precise English translation, "Ah, no, it is not possible, is it?"

The nurse, who had just finished her call, said, "Did you say something, doctor?"

"Yes, nurse. Some alcohol, please."

He swabbed the thigh clean of blood, and studied the affected area intently. There were two pairs of perforations, and a third perforation by itself. No, not quite by itself-in company with a light surface scratch. Below each perforation he could make out a series of tiny in dentations, dropping down in a straight vertical from the perforations.

"Quite possible, indeed," he said aloud. He was still smiling when he addressed the nurse, but his voice had an edge of urgency. "Please find Dr. Shapiro for me."

"You want to talk to Dr. Shapiro on the phone?"

"Ask him to come to Emergency, please. Stat, please."

The encounter with the man had left the snake irritable, so that, when a small garter snake crossed its path, it took a striking position and hissed. In a different mood it would have recognized that the garter snake was no threat, and ignored it. But now it bit. It remained in striking position, head high, mouth open, and watched the garter snake writhe and twist in agony.

It was not tempted to eat the garter snake. Unlike many other species, which would eat other snakes, it preferred a diet of warm-blooded animals.

The snake went around the dying garter snake and into its adopted territory. It climbed the tree, spread itself loosely on a net of high branches, and went to sleep.

Dr. Mukerjee apologized to Dr. Shapiro for disturbing him, and then described the symptoms of the dead man lying on the table.

Dr. Shapiro looked startled. "We had one like that last night. Early this morning, rather." He walked to the table and frowned down at the body.

"It is thoroughly outlandish, of course," Dr. Mukerjee said, smiling, "but the clinical symptoms are remarkably consistent."

"Consistent with what?"

"I direct your attention to these perforations," Mukerjee said. "This pair here, and this second pair…" His long brown finger touched the white skin. "And this single one here, a seeming anomaly which I will presently explain. You will also notice, please, the series of tiny indentations below each puncture, some of which have begun to fade-"

"Yes, yes," Shapiro said. "Do you know what those punctures are, Dr. Mukerjee?"

"I believe they are fang marks."

"Of what sort of animal?" Shapiro spoke sharply. He was very quick and direct himself, and he suspected Mukerjee of milking the suspense.

"Of a poisonous snake, doctor," Mukerjee said.

Shapiro made an ambiguous gesture, then said, "I've never seen snakebite.

I presume you have?"

"Yes"

"What about the single perforation?" It was not an immediately pertinent question, and Shapiro was aware of it. He was temporizing, to allow his mind to catch up with the exotic diagnosis.

"I believe the snake struck twice successfully, and a third time inaccurately, so that only one of its fangs penetrated. The tiny small indentations are the impression of the animal's back teeth, which have no attack function."

"Okay," Shapiro said with a strained smile. "Somewhere in Manhattan there is a rattlesnake at large."

"Oh, no," Mukerjee said. "Rattlesnakes secrete a hemotoxic venom. In that case the flesh in the area around the punctures would be heavily swollen, discoloured, and quite painful. From the condition of these-the cleanliness, if you will-and, of course, the patient's symptoms and probable cause of death, this would be a neurotoxin venom. If I am to venture a guess as to the identity of the animal, I would say Naja Naja, doctor."

You're something of a pedant, Dr. Mukerjee, Shapiro thought irritably.

He said, "What is Naja Naja?"

"I have seen a number of the victims of its bites at home in India. It is the cobra." Dr. Mukerjee smiled. "Our national snake, as it were."

"A cobra? We're a long way from India, aren't we, doctor?"

"Outlandish, as I stated at the outset." Mukerjee's finger tapped the corpse's thigh. "The inner thigh is of course a rich vascular area. It is even possible that one of the fangs might have injected directly into a vein. Awfully bad luck. He could have died twenty minutes after being bitten."

"Outlandish is right," Shapiro said. "You're certain of your diagnosis, Dr. Mukerjee?"

"If I were in India, I would say yes, flat out. Here, I will simply say that the indications strongly suggest the bite of a snake distilling a powerful neurotoxin poison."

"Yes, well…" Shapiro looked at Mukerjee sharply. "Caution is certainly indicated in such an unusual diagnosis, and it does you credit.

This is not, as you say, India."

"Most assuredly it is not," Mukerjee said. He paused. "Did you not mention seeing a somewhat similar case last night?"

"Paralysis of the chest muscles. Semicornatose, so he couldn't tell us anything. He died on us."

"Ah," Mukerjee said. "Fang marks, too?"

"No, there weren't any…" Shapiro's voice faltered as he remembered the bloodstains on the patient's trousers. Damn that Papaleo! Mukerjee was looking at him politely, waiting for an answer. Well, he wasn't about to bad-mouth one of his interns to another physician. What he would say to Papaleo was something else again. "Not to my knowledge. We're waiting on the M.E.'s report. If that one and this-" He tilted his head toward the corpse. "Meanwhile, professional caution to one side, you're really convinced, aren't you?"

"I wouldn't stake my entire reputation on it, dont you know, but…"

Mukerjee shrugged.

"Yes, yes," Shapiro said impatiently. "The question is this-shall I tell the police about it?"

"I should do so," Mukerjee said.

Dr. Shapiro returned to his room and phoned the police, who said they would send someone around to see him. He phoned the Medical Examiner's office and requested a rush report on Torres, Ramon, and a second cadaver, Bamberger, Roderick, soon to arrive at the morgue; suspected injection of neurotoxic venom by snakebite. He tried to get hold of Dr. Papaleo but was told that he was not in the house, it was his night off.

It would be, Shapiro thought. He picked his copy of Beeson and McDermott out of his bookshelves and began to read up on snakebites and their treatment. Before he had gotten very far he was summoned to the main reception room of the hospital, where a stocky, hard-faced man wearing a flowered shirt and peg-bottom chino pants introduced himself as Detective Robert Dark.

Shapiro said, "Good evening."

"About this alleged snake?"

"Yes. We haven't established as an absolute fact that it is a snake, but from indications-"

"That was the squeal, doc, that somebody got bitten by a snake. You aren't sure?"

"That was my squeal, well, phone call, but I said we suspected snakebite."

"You're a doctor," Dark said. "You oughta know."

Shapiro felt himself growing annoyed. Dark's tone was peevish, even challenging. Tough guy. Or maybe, to be charitable, his precinct house wasn't air-conditioned. He said, "Detective Dark, two men have died of respiratory arrest that suggests paralysis due to injection of a neurotoxic substance. One occurred early this morning, the second less than an hour ago. On the body of the second one we found perforations that might have been inflicted by a snake's fangs."

"What about the first one? Did he have the perforations?"

Everybody asks the right questions, Shapiro thought drily. He said, "Because of certain factors, we haven't determined that yet." Certain factors: a first-year intern's failure to take off a pair of pants.

Dark shrugged. "These perforations. That means like holes. You think of overdose?"

"Overdose is contraindicated. The diagnosis of snakebite was made by an Indian doctor who is familiar with cobra bite."

"A cobra snake?" Dark almost smiled. "I can see why you're not standing on that diagnosis, doc."

"We're standing on it, officer, unless we're contradicted by the autopsy report. I phoned the M.E. and asked them to expedite a report. The soonest they can get around to it is early tomorrow morning." He smiled sourly. "They say they're very busy."

"Everybody's very busy," Dark said. "So what do you want me to do, doc?"

"Hell," Shapiro said, "that's your business. How do I know? Check out the various zoos, pet shops…

"This time of the night? When we don't even know for sure that there's a snake, which I personally doubt it's a snake? Tell you what I would do, doc-wait for the autopsy report. How long does it take them to do an autopsy?"

"Who knows? Some of those fellows can dawdle over their work for hours.

It's like looking up a word in the dictionary and being waylaid by a dozen other words on the page that you get curious about. You know?"

"Well, doc. Dark put away his notebook, in which he had hardly made an entry. "I honestly think we ought to wait for the morning. There ain't a thing we can do right now, anyway."

"Two men have been bitten in the park-allegedly bitten, as you say, I'll accept that-and who is to say that by morning there won't be a third?"

"I tell you, doe, anybody who goes into that park at night is likely to get killed one way or another. If he doesn't get bit by a cobra snake, he's gonna get himself killed some other way. Fact, we had a guy shot dead in the park just last night around three in the morning."

Shapiro sighed. "Well, I'm just trying to do what I think is best."

"Me too," Dark said.

The snake lay on the black rock under the sun, its length spread out in gentle curves.

During the night, lying in its tree, the snake had lost its fangs, but new fangs had already moved up into position.

The snake's upper jaw contained only two teeth, the poison fangs, enclosed to the inside of the jawbone. The fangs were connected to the poison gland, and conducted venom from it through a canal. The fangs of a poisonous snake were subjected too much wear, and had to be replaced from time to time. Sometimes, they broke off prematurely. But substitute fangs, always growing just behind the functioning ones, would move up to take the place of the lost fangs. This cycle of loss and re placement continued throughout the snake's life.

Because of the continuing heat wave-now in its fourth day-the snake had lost little of its body heat during the night. Now, in the fierceness of the morning sun, it basked for only a brief time.

It glided fluidly down the rock and into its territory. It climbed into its tree and spread out amid dense foliage, which provided concealment and shelter from the rays of the sun.