John Godey - The Snake

Suddenly, one of the women let out a prolonged, piercing scream of terror.

The others, shocked and startled, followed her pointing finger to a snake crawling toward them out of the darkness. The men pushed the women, both of them now screaming, toward the door of the nightclub. The second man, a burly six-footer, stood his ground, and, as the snake came close to him, leaped into the air and landed on it with both feet. The man jumped back. He heard wild laughter somewhere in the darkness up the street, and realized that the snake was made of metal, covered by plastic painted to simulate a snake's skin; it moved on a tread that gave it both its forward thrust and its articulated serpentine motion.

The bulky man began to run up the street, shouting, toward the continuing sound of laughter. The other man and the two women came out of the club.

They heard the pounding footsteps and shouts of the bulky man diminishing. Then the footsteps stopped, and they heard a scuffling sound. There were more shouts, a series of thuds, a cry of pain. The second man shook himself out of his daze and ran up the street after his friend.

He found his friend stamping repeatedly on the already bloody and mashed face of another man, and it took all his strength to pull his friend away, meanwhile shouting, "Charlie, that's enough, you'll kill him.

Charlie, for God's sake, you're killing him."

In the event, it turned out that the trickster, who, as the autopsy later showed, had been drinking heavily, was already dead, his neck broken before the stomping had begun. When the police arrived, they were noncommittal, but at least three people among the crowd that had gathered on the scene said, with almost the identical phrasing, "There ain't a jury in the whole city that would convict him."

By the end of the third day, Converse had covered about sixty percent of the area between 97th Street and the north end of the park. He had divided the area into quadrants on an imaginary perpendicular drawn from 102nd Street east to west, bisected by another perpendicular drawn from the midway point of the 97th Street transverse to the Farmers Gate at Cathedral Parkway. For no particular reason except that he had to start somewhere, he began his search in the southwest quadrant, which took in the North Meadow, the Pool, the Cascade and a promising sector near the Springbanks Arch. Then he moved on to the southeast quadrant, which went fairly quickly because much of it was taken up by a portion of the North Meadow and the whole of the East Meadow.

He would arrive at the park before dawn, and position himself where he could watch a likely rock. When he had convinced himself that the snake was not going to appear, he would try a second rock. By that time the sun would have been up for a couple of hours, and the snake, wherever it was, would have been finished basking. He would then start checking out trees, top to bottom, foot by foot, and then back again until he was satisfied that the snake was not there; its olive coloration would make it difficult to spot in the shadow-dappled foliage. He would finish up by wading through heavily overgrown patches, with particular attention to places where the black mamba might have found a burrow.

By ten o'clock, exhausted, lie would call it quits. By then, anyway, there were too many people around amateur herpetologists (averaging about fourteen years of age), uniformed officers and detectives of the Central Park Precinct, Emergency Service Unit cops, and, of course, the omnipresent Puries. Eastman had accompanied him on the second morning, drawn with fatigue, coughing uncontrollably in the sodden predawn air.

Eastman had wanted to know why he chose to stake out one particular rock of a number that seemed equally promising, and he had replied that he had a "feeling" about it. Shortly after 8:30 Eastman had returned to the precinct house.

This morning, when Converse walked into the office of the Commander of the Two-two, Eastman looked alert, as though he had caught up on some sleep. But his face sagged wearily when he saw the empty pillowcase.

"No headway," Eastman said. It was not a question but a flat statement.

"I didn't find the black mamba," Converse said primly, "but I've eliminated another sector, and the way I look at it, that's progress."

"Yeah, I guess so, I guess you could call it progress."

"Count your blessings, captain. Since that fellow was bitten in the menagerie, nobody else has been bitten. Maybe it's dead."

"You believe that?"

Converse shook his head. "No."

"It hasn't bitten anybody else, but it's still a threat to bite somebody.

Anyway, even if it is dead, that won't be the end of it unless we can prove it. You been reading the papers? You know how many people have died because of that snake?"

Converse nodded. "They're all crazy in this city. They're killing each other. That's not the snake's fault." He got to his feet. "Maybe I'll find it tomorrow."

"Sure."

"I'll find it," Converse said.

Eastman said, "Well, let's hope it's real soon, so that our citizens can go back to killing each other for conventional reasons, and we can get that fucking Reverend off our backs, and that fucking DI off my back, and so the fucking mayor can win the fucking election and stop bugging the P.C., who bugs his deputy, who bugs… and the bug stops here."

Converse went out of the office. He felt depressed.

And he was still depressed hours later, after he had slept, and eaten, and watched the television set-not the news, but a police drama in which all the undercover cops looked exactly like the members of the anticrime squad of the Two-two, right down to their stylized moustaches and beards.

The depression remained. He felt awful.

At 11:30 he phoned Holly Markham. He had decided to call her at 8:30, though he didn't admit it to himself. All he really wanted to do was satisfy a purely idle curiosity about where she lived. He looked her up in the Manhattan phone directory. She lived on East 85th Street. He shut the phone book. He watched some more television, had something to cat, played with the python, played with the cat, damn near played with himself. He took a cold shower, chilled himself thoroughly, and decided to go to sleep. He got into bed, got out, drank water, peed, got into bed again, got up, drank a straight shot of bourbon, got into bed, got out, put on the light, and dialled her number from memory.

"Yes?" Her voice was tentative, wary.

He said, "I'm sorry. This is Mark Converse."

"Why are you calling at this hour?"

Her voice had changed. He couldn't tell whether she was glad to hear from him or just relieved that she didn't have to cope with a heavy breather.

He said, "I'm calling because I'm Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and you're Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russia’s."

He heard her make a little sound of surprise, and then she said, "Listen, I have to get to sleep."

He said, "I have a very strong feeling for you."

"Well, I have a very strong feeling for you, too, but that's no reason to call up in the middle of the night, not a little thing like that."

"Tell me to go away, okay. But don't make a joke out of it."

"I'm not joking, Mark. That's the joke, you know, I'm not joking. Yours truly, Catherine, Empress of all the Russia’s."

"You're not joking?"

"No, I'm not." 'There was apprehension in her voice, it quavered.

"Oh, Christ. Look, I've got to see you. I can't stand it. I need you very badly. Can I come to your place? Will you come down here?"

After a long silence she said, "What you really mean is that you want me.

That's honourable, but it's different from needing me. If you ever need me, really need me, call me and I'll come right over. Okay?"

He hung up the phone without answering. He went to bed, and lay on his back with his head resting on his folded arms, and ran the conversation over and over again in his mind, the way one did with a misplayed poker hand, haunted by nuance and regret. In the end, he vowed never to call her again, and to stop loving her at once.