John Godey - The Snake

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."