The Snake

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 fortress like ones or the new, functionally modem 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 horse shoe 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 swivelled 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 1, 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 hoaxer. 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 venoin."

"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 Eke 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."

"Look," Eastman said, "you're the expert and I have a lot of confidence in you. But it didn't take those two guys who got bitten any week to turn it up, did it? Both of them found it inside of twenty-four hours of each other."

"Yeah, well," Converse said, "they were just lucky. It was pure dumb luck."

Converse decided to stake out the Belvedere Lake because it was there, or near there, that Roddy Bamberger had been bitten. For all anyone knew, the snake might have been going to or coming from a drink when Bamberger had run across it.

"But it could have drunk in a lot of places." He tapped his fingers on Eastman's police department map of the park. "The Lake to the south, the Conservatory Water to the southeast, or even here…" With a broad sweep of his palm he covered the Receiving Reservoir that ran almost the entire width of the park between the 85th and 97th Street transverses.

"It's long odds," Eastman said. "Why don't we use some manpower and stake out all of the possible watering holes?"

"Because there's only one of me," Converse said, "and your cops would probably miss it or else step on it in the dark and get bitten."

Eastman said, "We'd better go back over your contract and include a breach of modesty clause." He covered a yawn with his hand. "We know the snake was around the Belvedere Lake a couple of nights ago. Is it their custom to hang around in one place?"

"Again, it depends on the species. As a rule, snakes aren't all that territorial except when they're breeding, so it could be anywhere in the park. But at least it's a starting place."

"We're not going to find it, right?"

"It isn't likely," Converse said. "We need time."

"We haven't got any," Eastman said.

They left the precinct around nine in a squad car driven by a patrolman who took them out of the park into Central Park West, then brought them back in again at the Hunter's Gate and drove on the pedestrian walks past the Swedish Schoolhouse, the Shakespeare Garden, and the darkened Delacorte Theatre. Except for one group of half a dozen young men and women whom they took to be Puries, there was no evidence that citizens were still at large in the park searching for the snake.

"At least I hope that's the case," Eastman said. "Muggers don't take kindly to having crowds of people wandering around in their park after dark."

The police car pulled over to one side of the walkway and parked.

Converse and Eastman got out and walked down the embankment to the lake.

"This is as good as anyplace else. We might as well sit down."

"Suppose it comes along," Eastman said. "I mean, sitting down, we'd be sitting ducks, wouldn't we?"

"Of course, if it comes down for a drink on the other side of the lake we won't see it. But it was near here that that fellow was bitten."

"You're sure it's okay to sit down?"

"Sure. That way there's no chance of our stepping on it."

"If you say so." Eastman touched the Pilstrom tongs. "I know what this stick is for. The pillowcase-I remember you putting that rattlesnake into some kind of a yellow bag."

"It was a yellow pillowcase. Listen, captain, it would be better if we didn't talk. Okay?"

"I thought snakes were deaf."

"They are. I'm not. I want to be able to hear it if it comes."

Eastman fell silent. Behind them, the driver had turned off the car's motor and lights. Converse could see him behind the wheel. Above them, the sky seemed to be pressing down, as if it bore a tangible weight of clouds. It was the color of lead, except where it was tinged with red from the puffing of neons in the center of the city. The oppressiveness of the heat seemed worse than ever. The park was quiet in the still air, except for the occasional sound of an auto horn or a noisy transmission as a car accelerated.

Eastman was sitting motionless with his head bowed, his hands clasped on the grass between his legs. He was probably terrific on stakeouts, Converse thought, a man who knew how to do that most difficult of things, wait. If the snake came along, Eastman wouldn't give them away. Not that there was much chance of it. Even if it was still in the area, even if it did come to the lake for a drink, it would be next to impossible to detect unless it practically ran into them.

He shifted his position slightly and dabbed at his sweaty face with a comer of the pillowcase. Eastman hadn't moved, not even to scratch his nose or mop up sweat. His breathing was regular, and Converse realized that he was asleep. He smiled in the darkness, and settled himself into a more comfortable position. But he kept his head raised, peering through the gloom for something that might never come and, if it did, might come and go unseen and unheard. He felt something on the back of his hand. A raindrop.

The snake curved in its flowing S-movement, propelling its great length forward swiftly toward the water it had drunk from on the previous nights. From time to time it paused to taste the air with its darting tongue. When it felt the first drops of rain it stopped. It raised its head high, tongue testing. Then the rain came down in a sudden torrent.

The snake slid into a coil as the downpour pelted it. It lowered its head to within an inch or two of the ground, and moved from side to side in an almost dancelike rhythm.

The downpour beat against its body, colder than it liked. The rain was so heavy it bounced off the parched ground, and quickly formed puddles.

The snake uncoiled and slid forward again toward the lake.

Then it stopped, dipped its head, and drank from a puddle. Afterwards, it returned to its tree.

After the first warning drop or two the rain fell out of the sky in sheets. In a few seconds, Converse was soaked to the skin. Nevertheless, Eastman continued to sleep through it. Converse shook him awake.

"Christ," Eastman said. "Where did this come from?"

"Let's go."

Converse held out his hand, and Eastman came to his feet awkwardly and with some effort. With the rain soaking him he looked old and bedraggled.

They ran to the squad car and jammed into the front seat beside the driver.

"Now what?" Eastman said.

"Maybe it'll cool off the weather," the driver said.

"Now we can go home," Converse said.

"Can't we sit here and watch from the car?"

Converse shook his head. "It won't come tonight, not now."