John Godey - The Snake

That's it, Holly thought, that's the kernel of news in the shell of bombast. He's giving the police advance notice that he will defy them.

A reporter said, "City officials have warned the public not to search for the snake. Will you disregard this warning?"

The Reverend gave the speaker a pitying smile.

"Follow-up to an earlier question, Reverend. Will God tell you exactly where the snake is hiding?"

The Reverend Sanctus Milanese appeared pained by the crudity of the question. "Even disbelievers must understand that He moves in mysterious ways. He will not say, Here, go to this or that place. Instead, He will take the hand of one of us and lead us there."

"When will He do this-before or after somebody else is bitten?"

Cohorts give speaker death-ray looks.

"When, in His infinite wisdom, He sees fit."

"Your people will be taking chances. Suppose one of them gets bitten?"

"Then it is the Lord's will."

The Reverend Sanctus Milanese turned abruptly, with a theatrical swirl of his cape that displayed its scarlet lining, and strode on a direct collision course toward the massive, ornately carved door of his house. At the last moment the door opened from the inside, and he passed through it.

He makes a classy exit, Holly wrote, and shut her notebook.

Sweating copiously, Converse passed the afternoon in fitful catnaps and short, angry dreams. He had shut the air conditioner off on behalf of the python, and let it out of its cage so that it could crawl into the living room and bask in the patches of sunshine that came in through the south windows.

His dreams consisted of a series of tenuously connected situations in which he tongue-lashed the redhead cruelly, bringing her to the point of tears.

The underlying theme was her duplicity; she had breached an honourable agreement by leaving a note behind her which contained her phone number and the message "Call me. Clare." Clare. He hadn't even known her name until he read it on the note.

He had picked her up at the Brentano's on University Place. Her husband was abroad on a business trip, and she had what she called an end-of-summer itch for a fugitive affair with an attractive partner. Strictly a one-night stand, and then goodbye. She happened to love her husband, or, at least, like him an awful lot. Besides, she could never be serious about an affair with a pickup, especially a man who went in for T-shirts with comic inscriptions. Her attitude had suited Converse perfectly, and they had made a compact which, besides being congenial to both of them, added a little erotic spice to the adventure: Like ships that passed in the night they would never see each other again, and, in fact, wouldn't even exchange names.

Her note had wantonly ruined a foolproof arrangement in which the danger of involvement would be taken out of his hands. It was his nature to be insanely susceptible to falling in love with the women he met. It was partially in an effort to cure himself of his affliction that he had quit his job at the zoo, which he liked very much, and signed on to hunt snakes in Australia. The Outback would offer few temptations. But the expedition had been delayed by a series of bureaucratic snags, and he had been left with almost two months with nothing to do. He had recognized his idleness as fallow ground for the forming of a liaison, and so, in self-defence, had imposed an iron celibacy upon himself. The noni dentification pact with Clare had seemed ideal, and then she had gone ahead and spoiled it, damn her.

He slept again, and a new and alarming component invaded his dreams.

Clare's body wore Holly Markham's head. Waking, he mocked his dream.

Holly, the girl with the calm, unassertively confident face? No sweat.

Not his type. Nothing there to tempt him. Then why had he looked for her in the crowd of reporters before he left the park? No sweat. Just a reflex; he turned toward good-looking women like a flower turning toward the sun. Just a meaningless tropism. Pretty? Not really, except when her face opened up in its transforming smile.

As for Clare, forget it, he had torn up her note, hadn't he? Well, actually, he had just crumpled it and tossed it into the wastebasket.

Should have ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. That's what he would do, next time he got out of bed.

He fell asleep again and dreamed that Holly was kissing him. He forced himself to wake up. He thought of Captain Eastman. Why had he been tactless and made Eastman sore at him? Had he wanted to alienate him so he could go out and catch the snake himself, for reasons of vanity (succeed singlehandedly where an army of cops had failed) or reasons of humaneness (save an innocent snake's life)?

The cat was spitting. Converse raised himself on an elbow and saw the python twining up the lamp standard, where the cat was perching, back humped. The cat wasn't showing any disposition to escape by jumping down to the floor. It looked determined to settle the python's hash once and for all. Converse got out of bed, picked up the python behind the head, and tossed it wriggling into its cage.

He turned on the air conditioning, made himself a drink, and switched on the television set in time for the evening news. Almost immediately, Eastman's face appeared, like a bad conscience. He was admitting to a smoothly persistent reporter that the sweep had failed and that he didn't know-"at this time"-what the next move would be. His face was eroded by fatigue and frustration, and he looked a great deal older than he had in the morning.

Converse got up from his chair and dug in the wastebasket until he found Clare's note. He smoothed out the sheet of paper and reread the note, then tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. When he came back, the herpetologist from the Museum of Natural History was on camera. Converse didn't hear what he was saying. He was listening to his own inner voice: If I burry, I can run downstairs, open up a manhole, get into the sewer, catch the bits of paper…

The phone rang. The bitch, he thought, she wasn't taking any chances, she wrote down my phone number. He picked up the telephone. It was Captain Eastman.

The police operation ended officially at 5:45, although its failure had been conceded long before the last few exhausted cops straggled out of the park into Cathedral Parkway. The mayor, who was known-and liked being known-as a "fighter," refused to acknowledge defeat until he had heard from the Police Commissioner himself, who phoned from his limousine, which was speeding southward to take him to the mayor's meeting.

The mayor, his staff, and several high officials of the city administration were gathered in the conference room. The mayor sat on the dais, between the colors of the United States and the orange and blue flag of the City of New York. Outside the room, the news media were waiting to be admitted for a promised press conference. With the arrival of the Police Commissioner, the mayor opened the meeting of what, depending on his varying mood, he referred to as "my official family" or "this pack of lazy, backbiting schleppers." He called upon the P.C. to report.

"In a nutshell," the P.C. said, "we didn't find the snake."

"Nuts are in nutshells," the mayor said. "I asked for a report."

The P. C. shrugged. "That's the good news, Mr. Mayor. The bad news is that there's been an unsportsmanlike upsurge of crime in those areas of the city where we pulled out personnel to try to find this fucking pagan snake. That there have been twenty-odd fires of suspicious origin. That there are traffic snarls around bridge and tunnel areas that won't be unsnarled until nine o'clock. That more than seventy-five cops ended up in the hospital, though all but a half-dozen were treated and released. That eight cops were hurt in scuffles in the park with citizens who refused to move out of the way of the police line when asked to do so. And that the PBA has threatened a job action because of what they call cruel and inhumane treatment of their membership."