John Godey - The Snake

"You don't have to say it with all that much relish," the mayor said.

"That's the whole report?"

"The PBA is also going to demand my resignation."

The mayor made a gesture of dismissal. Such a demand was an old story.

"They accuse me of having forgotten my humble beginnings, when I was a cop on the beat. That hurts. I may sit behind a desk now, and ride in an air-conditioned limousine, but I have never forgotten my humble beginnings, and never will."

"Sit down, Francis," the mayor said. He turned to the meeting at large.

"Gentlemen, we gave it everything we have, today, and now we're confronted with a very large problem-what to do for an encore?"

The staff, nodding, ad-libbed: "That's right-what do we do for an encore?"

"That's certainly the problem." "Gave it all we had."

"I'm open for suggestions." The mayor surveyed the room. Nobody met his eyes. Everybody was frowning and stroking his chin. "Francis?"

The P. C. looked grim. "I've got a meeting scheduled for later on with Plans and Operations, maybe some of those great thinkers will come up with something. But I'll tell you what we can't do-we can't mount another operation like today. I'll have a mutiny on my hands."

"Police work is no goddamn picnic," the mayor shouted. "Did they think it would be a picnic when they signed on? Forget I said that. They're the finest cops who ever trod a beat, and don't anybody ever forget it."

The mayor glared around the room. Everyone was still thinking hard and rubbing their chins. He could hear their whiskers rasping. The bearded young man who had addressed the crowd at City Hall in the morning was muttering.

"Speak up if you've got something to say," the mayor said.

"Okay. In my opinion, we should deal with first things first. What do we say to the press?"

"Well, what do I say to the press?"

"You praise the devotion and courage of the police, cite some figures on how many of them were overcome by the heat, put in a good word for the P.C.

After that, Your Honour, some bullshit about continuing to press the search relentlessly, every resource of the city thrown into the effort to apprehend the perpetrator-"

"We can do without your jokes," the mayor said.

No further sweeps on the scale of today's operation are under consideration at this time. Instead, stepped-up twenty-four-hour patrol of the park-"

He was interrupted by another aide. "Okay as far as it goes. But you know what the big question is going to be-are we planning to close the park?"

"Tell them it is still under intensive study."

"How many times can we keep saying that?"

"As many as I have to," the mayor said emphatically. "I'm never going to answer that question."

"It's a physical impossibility," the P.C. said. "I couldn't do it with ten thousand cops."

A voice said, "U'raphasize that the rules about behaviour in the park will be strengthened and stringently enforced, and that any citizen who disobeys will face immediate arrest."

"Careful, there," the black-bearded aide said, "or you'll have the Civil Liberties Union in the act."

Another voice said, "They're sure to quiz you about Milanese and his Puries."

There was a sudden shout from the president of the City Council, sitting in the rear of the room: "Those fucking bastards! They ought to be exterminated, especially that charlatan, that hypnotist, that so-called fucking so-called reverend."

The president of the City Council was a shattered man. His only son was a Purie. Several months before, in desperation, he had had his son forcibly seized as he strolled on the grounds of Eden Paradise, and borne away to the family summer home in Lake George, where he was kept under twenty-four-hour guard and visited daily by a psychologist who sought, in the boy's words, to "brainwash" him. This virtual act of kidnapping was not the first such to be attempted by the distraught parent of a Purie, but it was the first by a prominent public figure. The incident had been widely publicized after the boy made a daring escape from the Lake George house and denounced his father as "a fascist member of a fascist regime." He had topped off his performance by gazing adoringly into the effortfully benign face of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese and declaring, "This great and holy man is my true father."

"Compose yourself, Larry," the mayor said. The president of the Council nodded grimly and subsided in his seat. After a moment the mayor said to the meeting at large, "What the hell are they mixing in this thing for?

What are they bothering us for?"

The bearded aide replied. "They're looking for publicity. Their enrolment has been down lately, and they're falling behind in their mort gage payments. This is a convenient opportunity to get exposure on the tube and in the papers, and attract new recruits and money. That's what it's all about."

"Well, I don't like it," the mayor said.

"From the political point of view, it isn't all negative," the bearded aide said. "Automatically, anything the Puries are for, the recognized churches are against, so we'll pick up a large sympathy vote."

The mayor looked pleasantly surprised. The remainder of the meeting was desultory. 'I here were, Hizzonner said, other matters of moment to occupy theni besides a lousy snake. Would anybody advance the claim, for instarlee, that dealing with those montsers in Washington and Albany wasn't of more moment than a lousy snake? Nobody advanced such a claim. The mayor, satisfied, adjourned the meeting and motioned to the bearded aide, who got up and went to the dais.

"Stick around, Seymour, and help out with the questions about the Puries, okay?" The bearded aide nodded. The mayor, sighing as he watched the reporters begin to file in, said, "Any other city, Seymour, if somebody got bitten by a snake, the public would blame the snake. Here they blame the mayor. Sometimes I wish the goddamn island would break loose and float down the river and out to sea, and attach itself to, let's say, the Azores or like that."

"Who can tell," the bearded aide said. "Maybe if you loosen it up at the bridges and the tunnels, it might happen. Shall I get my monkey wrench?"

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."