John Godey - The Snake

"Yeah." Converse sighed. "That's how people feel about them. Not me. I like them."

"Because they're cute and cuddly?"

He looked at her sharply. Maybe there was some mischief there, after all. "Because I understand them. And maybe because I'm for the underdog."

"What makes them underdogs?"

"They're seriously disadvantaged animals. No limbs. No hearing. No true voice. No teeth for chewing, so that they're obliged to swallow their food whole. No lids or nictitating membrane-can't shut their eyes.

Coldblooded, meaning they're at the mercy of the environment for survival. No charm. The number-one villain of myth and legend, from the Bible onward. Underdogs, right?"

She looked up from her notebook. "That underdog in the park has killed two people."

"Accidents happen. Snakes don't bite people, people get bitten."

"And there are no muggers, just people who get mugged?"

He sighed again. "Look, I'll tell you something about snakes. They have three defensive attitudes, and they use them in this order when they're threatened: One, they try to hide. Two, if they can't hide, they try to run away. Three, if it's impossible to hide or run away, they defend themselves by biting. It's a last resort. Snakes are shy of people. They don't hunt them, don't hate them, don't eat them. It's the other way around."

"I read somewhere that those huge constrictors do eat people."

"That's crap. The very largest reticulate constrictors, which can manage to engorge a whole line of animals of quite surprising size, can't swallow a man, no matter what you7ve heard. The shoulders are too wide for them."

"It's a comforting thought. Unless. Her face was solemn, but there was a twitch at the corners of her lips. "Unless every constrictor has to find that out for himself?"

Converse saw several of the cops at the Command Post straighten up, salute, and move off. Eastman was still bent over the map.

"I spoke to the Museum of Natural History herpetologist yesterday," Holly Markham said. "He doesn't think the snake is a cobra."

"It probably isn't. According to the news stories, the perforations are very clean and precisely defined. Injection-type bites, in and out quickly. Cobras have a tendency to hang on and chew, so the perforations usually aren't all that neat."

"Do you have any idea of what kind of snake it might be?"

He shook his head. "I just know what it isn't. American snakes like rattlers or copperheads or moccasins distill a hemotoxic venom. The eastern coral snake, the only other poisonous snake in the States, does secrete a neurotoxic venom, like the venom that killed those two people.

But the coral is a chewer like the cobra, and not all that deadly."

"What makes it so important to know what kind of snake it is?" She looked up at him and said quickly, "I guess that's a dumb question."

He nodded, and listened to a loudspeaker: "All police personnel, attention.

All police personnel, take up your positions. Follow your sergeants.

Sergeants, all sergeants, move them out to their assigned positions."

The sudden movement, in response to shouted instructions from cops wearing sergeant's stripes, was like a mob scene. Everyone seemed in a harry now, and there was a great deal of muttering. But Converse could see that out of the shifting and milling of bodies, the near collisions, a sort of purposive order was evolving.

"They're going to form a single line abreast," Holly Markham said, walk the way from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue, and sweep across the park from end to end."

Converse was shaking his head in wonderment. "They'll never find it that way."

She tilted her head inquisitively. "Why not?"

"How many cops have they got out here?"

"Five hundred."

"That's why. Too many. Four hundred and ninety-nine too many." Eastman was sitting on an edge of the campaign table, watching him. Their eyes met, and Eastman beckoned to him. "I have to go now." He pointed toward Eastman.

"Nice talking to you, Markham."

"Too bad. It was just beginning to get interesting." She tapped her teeth with her pen and looked at him appraisingly. "Just in case this thing fizzles, how do I get in touch with you?"

He told her his phone number and she wrote it down. He walked over to Eastman, who said, "Sorry to keep you waiting. But I hoped you might get here earlier so we could have had a talk."

"Yeah, well, I kind of got stuck."

The tall officer with the oak leaves moved over to join them. Eastman introduced him as Deputy Inspector Scott. Converse put out his hand. The DI, his arms folded across his chest, merely nodded. Eastman said, "Do you have any suggestions, Mr. Converse?"

Sure, Converse thought, call off your cops. He said, "I might, if I knew what kind of snake it was."

The DI, his lip curling, said, "We find it, we'll know what kind of snake it is."

Eastman said, "He's the snake expert I told you about, Chief. That found the rattlesnake in that apartment building in Washington Heights?"

The mass of policemen was fragmented now, attenuating, spreading toward the east and west ends of the park. Those close by were already in place, waiting for those on the distant flanks to get in position. Sergeants were busy dressing up their lines.

The DI said, "A park is a hell of a lot different from an apartment house.

It's eight hundred and forty goddamn miles."

"Acres," Eastman said cautiously. Ile DI shrugged the correction off, and moved away.

Converse said, "I've never seen this many cops in one place."

"Neither have L" Eastman said. "It tells you something about how bad we want that snake."

"Well, I hate to tell you this, captain, but it's the wrong way to find it.

The loudspeakers blared, directing vehicles to "move into position." A dozen squad cars and two emergency service trucks wheeled in through the Artist's Gate past the statues of San Martin, Simon Bolivar, Josh Marti, all of them worked in bronze, all of them on horseback, as befitted Latin-American liberators. They spread out to the right and left down the walkways, behind the waiting line of cops.

Eastman said, "I asked for suggestions, not conclusions." His blue eyes were bleak. "I would appreciate any help you could give us in finding and killing this snake."

"What do you want to kill it for? It's no harder to capture it than it is to kill it."

"It's a murderer," Eastman said, "and I believe in capital punishment."

Converse shook his head. "It has to be caught before somebody else is hurt, but it's a fact that a snake doesn't attack out of malice. Whenever it bites something it can't eat it's because it felt threatened."

Eastman smiled, but his eyes were blue ice. "Whose side are you on-ours or the snake's?"

As it happens, Converse thought, I'm playing both sides at the same time.

I want to prevent anybody else from being bitten and I want to save the snake if I can. But it would be best to leave Eastman's question unanswered. He waved toward the line of cops. "You can beat an area and drive a tiger out into the open, but not a snake. Snakes hide. They're among the most accomplished hiders in the animal kingdom."

The loudspeakers were blaring again, and their echoes rolled back. They were urging speed on the flanks. "Shake it, find your places, get on the stick, shake it…"

"Poor bastards," Eastman said, "I'm shedding fat just sitting here in the shade. Imagine what it's like out there in the sun? They're going to be dropping like flies."

"Once, in my office at the zoo," Converse said, "and it was just a little cubbyhole, mind you, I misplaced a two-foot-long snake, and it was missing for three weeks. I turned the place upside down and couldn't find it.

Eventually, it turned up in a desk drawer."

"We're going to toss the whole friggin park," Eastman said, "and not overlook any desk drawers. Every last inch of it, excluding nothing except water…" He stopped abruptly. "Christ. Do snakes swim?"