John Godey - The Snake

The picture had been enlarged to five by nine, and it was still wet. It had been placed on a table in an empty room in the emergency ward, and Captain Eastman was studying it from a distance, with a mingled expression of revulsion and fascination. The picture was surprisingly sharp and well defined, considering the meager light it had been shot in. The anterior portion of the snake was curled upward on the stick, and its mouth was gaped wide open over Jeff's arm, whether a moment before biting or just afterwards, Eastman couldn't tell. The snake's posterior section trailed off at the bottom of the stick, long and tensile, strongly curved, as if to brace itself against the pavement for the drive up the stick.

The phone rang. The receptionist said that Converse had arrived.

"Send him right in." He went out into the corridor and beckoned to Converse when he came through the door. Converse ran toward him. "Thanks for getting here so quick." He led the way into the room.

"How is the patient?" Converse said.

"Not too bad. He's young and strong, so…

Converse had spotted the picture and brushed by him. He bent over the table and let out a low whistle.

"You recognize it?" Eastman said.

"It's a black mamba." Converse leaned over the picture for another look. He straightened up and said, almost reverently, "God, it's beautiful…Converse was on the telephone, trying to raise a night man at the Bronx Zoo.

He told Eastman that, although the black mamba was of the genus Dendroaspis, which was covered by the polyvalent antivenin, the zoo had a specific black mamba serum in the refrigerator in the reptile house; he would ask to have it rushed down to the hospital.

Eastman said, "I'll find another phone and call the precinct up in that area, I think it's the Four-eight, and ask them to shoot the stuff down in a squad car. After that, I'd like you to come out to the menagerie with me."

"Okay. But don't bet that it's hanging around there. Black mambas are very wide-ranging snakes, and they move like something shot out of a gun. It could be a couple of miles away from the menagerie by now."

Eastman went out into the corridor to look for a telephone. He paused by the open door of Room D, where the Code Blue team was working on Jeff.

"Oh, Christ."

The team of a half-dozen doctors and nurses was gone. There were only two figures beside the table. One was Dr. Shapiro, with a cigarette in his mouth. The other was a nurse. Shapiro, with his hands at his sides, was looking down at the patient. The nurse was attaching a tag to the patient's big toe.

Eastman went into the room. "What happened?" he said to Shapiro. The figure on the table was very still.

"We lost him," Shapiro said. He didn't look at Eastman. "We thought he was going to make it, and then he just went out, he simply blinked out on us."

"Damn," Eastman said.

"When he began to go out it took us by surprise. We had thought he was going to pull out of it. Somebody got the bright idea of turning him over, and we saw the hives on his back." Shapiro struck his thigh with his fist.

"If they had appeared on the front of him, as they usually do, we'd have been able to shoot some adrenalin into him."

"What did the hives mean?"

"Anaphylactic shock. Antivenin is extracted from the blood sera of horses that have been injected with dosages of snake poison. There's a class of people who are profoundly allergic to horse serum and go into anaphylactic: shock if they're given it. It can be fatal if it's not treated."

Eastman nodded. "I've heard of that. But I thought there was a way of testing it beforehand."

"There is." Shapiro's voice was weighted with fatigue, and Eastman thought, Everybody is bone tired, all the good guys are weary, and only the snake is full of energy. "But you don't stop to test for allergic reaction when somebody is dying of snakebite. You have to hurry. In other circumstances we'd have recognized the symptoms of anaphylactic shock right off the bat.

The trouble is, they're very similar to the symptoms of neurotoxic poisoning from snakebite, so we couldn't tell." Cigarette smoke was curling up around his eyes, and he blinked. "The hives were something else, but they were on his back and we didn't see them until it was too late." He turned to face Eastman fully for the first time. "I'm getting disgusted with people being killed by that snake."

Eastman said, "I thought doctors didn't smoke."

Shapiro looked at the cigarette in his hand. "I thought so myself. It's that damn snake. It has me doing things I don't do."

"Yeah," Eastman said. "Can you spare one of those?"

Shapiro gave him the cigarette. "Take this one. I don't smoke."

Eastman took a deep puff. The filter end was wet. "Has anybody told that girl out there yet?"

"I'm going right out there to tell her."

"I'll do it. I'm used to it."

"Well, if it comes to that, I'm used to it, too."

Eastman started toward the door. "I'm sorry, doc."

"Tell it to him." Shapiro inclined his head toward the figure on the table.

As Eastman left the room he saw Converse turn out into the corridor.

"I got through to the zoo," Converse said. "You got hold of the police up there?"

"Not yet."

Converse frowned. "Let's go, captain, that serum could make a big difference."

"Not really," Eastman said.

Converse said, "The name of the snake is black mamba."

A reporter in the front row said, "Maraba? That's a dance, isn't it?"

"Mamba," Converse said, "from the Kaffir word &mamba. The black mamba is the largest poisonous snake in Africa and the deadliest."

It was 8:30, and Jeff had been dead for almost two hours. Converse was sitting behind a scarred oak desk in the shooting range of the Central Park Precinct, flanked by Captain Eastman at his right and Deputy Inspector Scott at his left. The press was facing him, sitting in chairs that had been hastily collected from various offices in the precinct. The desk was cluttered with radio and television microphones. TV cameramen roamed the long room with hand-held cameras. There were no special lights; the DI had refused to allow them to be brought in. A trace of cordite lingered in the air.

Everyone smelled of coffee except the D1, who smelled of anger and frustration.

They had driven from East Side Hospital to the precinct in the DI's car.

The DI had spoken only once: "Haven't you got anything else to wear but that stupid shirt?"

"Sorry," Converse said, "my tails are at the cleaners."

Eastman gave him a warning look. The DI curled his upper lip in an expressive sneer. Later, while they were waiting for the press to assemble, the DI, in a voice resonant with passion, had declared that he despised newsmen, that they were "parasites living off the carrion of tragedy." The unexpectedly dramatic turn of phrase made Converse aware, for the first time, that the DI, with his hollow, attenuated face and the dark, brooding intensity of his eyes, presented the classic image, bordering on travesty, of an old-fashioned Shakespearian actor.

The DI had opened the press conference with a flat announcement to the effect that the perpetrator had been identified, and that Whatsisname would provide background information and answer questions.

Holly Markham was sitting halfway back in the row of chairs. She looked up from her notebook and smiled. Converse frowned and said, "The black mamba is not actually black at all, but dark olive on top and whitish underneath.

But in bright sunlight it has the appearance of being black, hence the name."

He was surprised to see how many reporters had shown up; after all, there were only three daily papers in the city. But, besides the radio and TV people, there was representation from the wire services, New Jersey, Connecticut, and suburban New York papers, and a few stringers from metropolitan newspapers as far away as California.