John Godey - The Snake

The mayor pressed his remote-control device and shut off the television set.

Hizzonner tracked the P.C. down at a Holy Name Society banquet, where he was guest of honour, and where, in his opening remarks, he made opportunistic reference to the absence of snakes in Ireland, thanks to good St. Paddy. Laughter and applause.

"When are you going to catch that snake?" the mayor said.

"I wish I knew," the P.C. said. "It'll be dark in a half hour, and we'll call off the search until tomorrow."

"And what are you going to do tomorrow?"

"More of the same. A diligent, quiet search."

"Forget quiet, Francis. Do it noisy. You get my meaning?"

Normally a quick study, and sensitive to innuendo, the P.C. was presently dulled by Irish whiskey. A further sign of his befuddlement was the surfacing of his brogue. "Whatever do ye mean, Sor?"

"It's war," the mayor said. "Two people have been slain. War has been declared. They're mobilizing. Everybody is blaming the snake on the mayor. They're going to be swarming around City Hall tomorrow by the thousands."

"So soon?"

"It's all the TV's fault. They make everything go faster. They make news by getting the public all worked up. They're provocateurs. Are you listening?"

"I am, Sor. They're going to want the park closed?"

"Half of them are. The other half are going to want it to be kept open.

The opposition is behind it, too. They're pushing it along to embarrass me. Who do you think is behind those people in Harlem?"

The P. C. made an effort to clear up his confusion. "What did you mean by noisy? We'll have police cars in the park with loudspeakers all night."

"Goddamit, Francis. The main issue is not the snake, per se, I can live with the snake. The main issue is going to be the closing of the park, and it's a no-win issue. I can't afford to say yes, and I can't afford to say no. I have to stand pat. Do you follow me, Francis?"

"Explicitly, Sor."

"Well, I'm not so sure." The mayor paused. "Follow me explicitly, Francis. One, the snake has become Topic A. Two, they're all putting the blame on the mayor, saying we're not doing enough. Your handful of cops was invisible in that big park. We have to make them visible, so they can see the mayor is working for them. That means a very big police presence, Francis. I want five hundred cops in that park tomorrow morning."

"Five hundred? Where am I going to get them?"

"Get them. I don't care if you have to bring off-duty cops back on emergency duty. Just get them, just get that five hundred."

"I don't dare. The PBA would crucify us."

"Then take them out of Harlem and Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx. I want the people of this city to see with their own eyes that the mayor is leaving no stone unturned."

"Sor, pulling the police presence out of them areas is an invitation to riot."

"No more excuses, Francis. I order you to put five hundred cops in the park tomorrow morning, and that's the bottom line. Good night, Francis."

The mayor hung up.

The special police number provided by the Deputy Commissioner on the news broadcast began to ring within minutes of the announcement. The prevailing tenor of the calls was established early in the evening. A woman's voice, dark with suspicion, said, "How come when you announced the special number you didn't say all calls would be kept confidential?"

"Okay, lady, your call will be kept confidential."

"That's all I want to know," the lady said, and hung up.

There was a predictable number of jokers.

"My old lady just saw the snake." "Where?" "When I unzipped my pants."

"The snake just got on a 65th Street cross town bus, and when it asked for a transfer the driver bit it."

"A couple of kids outside my house are using the snake for a jump rope."

It was a familiar story to the police, who had learned to practice patience as an art in these circumstances. Except for the most outlandish of them, they methodically logged every call that came in. There were calls from people who had spotted the snake in their apartment house elevator. Others bad seen it climbing up a traffic light stanchion, crawling through a subway tunnel, sunning itself on a neighbour’s terrace; in a restaurant, a branch library, a street excavation, a beach at Coney Island. A cab driver swore he had run over it in the street, and breathlessly gave the location of the incident. The snake turned out to be a cable stretched across the street to record the incidence of passing vehicles. A number of callers had heard it hissing in a room of their apartment and had fled to the street.

Several calls, all too obviously, came from shopkeepers who had spotted the snake in other shops, which invariably turned out to be those of their competitors. Several people denounced by name the culprit who had turned the snake loose in the park; in all cases the person they named was a neighbour who, as subsequent questioning brought out, happened to have children who urinated in the hallways, broke windows and cursed, or owned a dog that barked all night. Several individuals who preferred to remain anonymous, and a number of activist organizations which did not, claimed "credit" for introducing the snake into the park.

About 70 percent of the sightings were within the confines of Central Park.

The snake was observed drinking at the Pulitzer Fountain at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street; swimming in the Wading Pool, where it was capsizing the children's toy boats; twined around the 107th Regiment Monument; slithering through the grass of the Sheep Meadow; riding the Friedsam Memorial Carousel; sunning itself on Cherry Hill; communicating with the beards and the pot-smokers at the Bethesda Fountain; biting at oars on the Lake; climbing the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; at the top of the Obelisk; in the children's playgrounds near the Hunter's Gate at Central Park West and 81st Street, and the All Saints Gate at West 96th Street; running around the Frederick Douglass Circle at Cathedral Parkway; at the entrance to the Conservatory Garden, where it was preventing people from entering or leaving; on top of the Great Hill; near the Block House, the Harlem Meer, the Huddlestone Bridge, Nutter's Battery, Fort Clinton, The Dene, Bow Bridge, Belvedere Castle, the Shakespeare Garden, and, just beyond the northernmost perimeter of the park, on Lenox Avenue, where it was chasing pimps and whores.

The police checked out as many of the plausible reports as they could, given the limitations of their manpower. They knew that, as in branches of police work, from burglary to homicide, there were a thousand false leads to a single authentic one; but the thousand-and-first might crack the case.

Special Operations Division (SOD), with headquarters in Flushing Meadows, Corona, consists of the following units: Emergency Service, Tactical Patrol, Street Crime, Auto Crime, Aviation, Harbour, and Mounted (known as Horse Soldiers). The most visible and widely publicized is the Emergency Service Unit, specialists in the oddball assignment. If there's a cat at the top of a pole, a smoke-out in the subway, a sniper to be dislodged, a bomb to be defused, a riot to be quelled, a building to be scaled, a finger stuck in a soda machine, someone trapped in an elevator, the ESU comes to the rescue. They are equipped for every conceivable emergency: oxygen masks and tanks, keys to the subway escape hatches, crampons, stun guns, floodlights, generators, jacks capable of lifting subway cars, rifles equipped with sniper scopes…

The man who was placed in charge of the field operation to find the snake in the park was Captain Thomas Eastman. As a younger man he had revelled in shinnying up poles, sliding down elevator cables, and carrying overcome victims out of subway tunnels, but now, with a bad knee, a general lack of fitness (weight, 240), and a recent melancholic awareness of his age (48), he directed the men in his command from the sidelines.