by John Godey
In the incident at Macy’s department store, two people died, and more than a hundred and fifty were injured. This time, there was a live snake involved. It appeared suddenly in the aisles on the main floor, one of the busiest and most crowded in the huge store. Several women saw it at the same time and uttered piercing screams. The snake scudded over the floor in a panic of its own, then disappeared behind a counter. It was a long snake with a slender body and a small head. When it was found, after the entire floor had been cleared, and the casualties had been taken away in ambulances, it was identified by a Museum of Natural History herpetologist as a black racer, a thoroughly harmless snake but one which superficially resembled a black mamba. This suggested that the release of the racer in the store was the work of a sophisticated and sinister intelligence. The perpetrator was never found, although the police checked patiently and doggedly into the stories of several witnesses who claimed to have seen a shifty-eyed man carrying a wicker basket.
On a Friday, at a few minutes past three o’clock in the morning, two couples—well-dressed, in their early forties, suburbanites, as it turned out, winding up a night on the town—emerged from a nightclub in the East Fifties. While the doorman went off to find a cab, the two couples, almost anachronistically dressed in evening clothes, waited under the lighted marquee. At that hour, the rest of the street was dark.
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 and 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 starting 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, he 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 choose 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 eat, 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 dialed 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 t
he Russias.”
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 Russias.”
“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 honorable, 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.
***
The snake no longer came out of its burrow during the daylight hours, except for a brief period each morning to bask on a nearby rock.
On this night, as it had on several previous nights, it drank from the Loch, lying midway between the East and West drives. On the way back to its burrow it surprised a squirrel on the ground. The squirrel leaped for the base of a tree and began to scramble up, but the snake, its head already reared high, launched an upward strike and sank its fangs into the squirrel’s haunch, just above its bushy tail. The squirrel squealed, and slipped back momentarily, but recovered and scampered upward.
The snake did not pursue the squirrel up the tree. It waited below, coiled, staring up into the shadowed branches. Its sharp eyes picked up the squirrel when it began to fall, and followed its descent to the ground. After eating the squirrel, the snake returned to its burrow. The process of digestion, already begun by the injection of venom, would take approximately six hours.
FOURTEEN
Holly showed her press card and a tall, muscular, aloofly courteous Purie wearing the armband of a member of Christ’s Cohorts led her down an aisle of the Tabernacle to the front row. The man sitting next to her was a city news reporter from the Associated Press. The rest of the row reserved for the press was empty.
The A.P. man said good morning, and in an ambiguous tone that mixed gallantry and resentment, complimented her on looking so fresh and dewy at the unearthly hour of 9:30 A.M.
She acknowledged with an ambiguous smile of her own. Was it her fault that it took a full week before she began to show the stigmata of fatigue? Well, not that it was any of the A.P. man’s business, but she had spent most of the night awake, agonizing over whether or not to rush downtown to Mark Converse’s place and cradle his head against her breast. Want, need, what was she, a blue-ribbon semanticist? But last night the distinction had seemed important, and so she had remained in her bed and paid for it with hours of sleeplessness.
The Reverend’s recruitment meeting had drawn a full house. Every seat in the Tabernacle was taken, and there were dozens of standees at the rear and against the side walls. The crowd, young, mostly in its early twenties, was hushed and expectant. Holly looked at the flyer she had been given at the door. It was an application form for membership in the Church of the Purification. No selling copy, no hype, just a chaste logo that read “Church of the Purification” and a few dotted lines for name, address, age, present religious affiliation.
“They’re getting members,” the A.P. man said. “According to our church news man, they’ve been signing up in droves, the usual white kids from good families.”
The Purie membership was overwhelmingly middle class, with access to money through their parents, no matter how much the parents were opposed to their joining. Whatever else you said about the Reverend, Holly thought, he was shrewd. He read the public mind—at least that segment of it that was likely to respond to his primitive appeal—with great accuracy. Latching on to the issue of the snake, however blatantly opportunistic it might seem to be, looked certain to pay off in enlarged membership and increased revenue to contribute to the support of his various real estate holdings, not to mention fuel for his gas-eating limousines, the cost of expensive red silk linings for his cloaks, the salary of his personal French chef….
The organ played a sudden monitory chord in a minor key. A dazzling white spotlight settled on a white door at the side of the stage. The organ repeated the chord, held it in a trembling vibrato. The door opened and the Reverend Sanctus Milanese strode toward the podium. The spotlight accompanied him, focusing on the brilliant scarlet of his calotte, leaving his face in shadows.
“The footlights are dimmed, the curtain is up, the star has appeared,” the A.P. man said, “and that magical moment before the performance begins is at hand. I hope to hell it’s a good show.”
But it wasn’t really, Holly thought. Not that it was bad, either, just that it wasn’t new. Her notes read: Star in fine fettle, but material old hat. Usual burning eyes, evangelical tones, well-timed swirl of cape to show red lining, for which I would willingly become Purie if he would give me a bolt so I could make a seductive housecoat. Rings same old changes on established theme. Snake is Satan’s messenger. Can be captured only by the pure in heart—guess who? The location of the lair in which the evil serpent lurks will soon be vouchsafed to us by Him. All in good time, however, for He moves in mysterious ways His miracles, etc. Drama trite, leading man terrific. Give it one star.
Nevertheless, the audience was eating it up. Not a muscle twitching, barely breathing, eyes glued to the figure on the dais.
The A.P. man whispered, “Same old crap.” He was obviously disappointed—as she herself was—that the meeting was not producing any dramatic news.
The Reverend was expounding on the villainous role the snake had played throughout the history of man and religion. The symbol of Evil from time immemorial. Ever the servant of the Devil, eager to do his most heinous bidding. From time im-mem-morial. The serpent in the Garden of Eden, traducer of Eve…. Now if he had said seducer, Holly thought, we might have had a flashy bit of revisionist theology.
The A.P. man said, “I was half hoping he would come up with something wild—like the Chinese thing.”
A year earlier, for some fancied slight, he had had his adherents try to set fire to the Chinese Consulate on 65th Street.
Somebody behind them shshed the A.P. man. They didn’t want to miss a word of the Reverend’s wisdom. Well, it was their privilege. Holly let the sound of his voice wash over her. She had really been glad that Mark Converse had phoned her, and not terribly surprised, either. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the Empress of all the Russias. She had really wanted to go to him, and only the intervention of her guardian angel, who checked in whenever she became too susceptible to her emotions, had prevented it. Right on, guardian angel, mustn’t be all that biddable, chaps lose respect for a girl who’s that available. Right? Bullshit. Better to follow where the heart—and loins—led.
The Reverend was driving hard into his peroration, making his pitch for recruits. Come to us, come to Purity, offer God a sign that you long to be purified, enlist in the legions of the pure, who shall inherit the earth more surely than the meek, step forward in purity into the presence of the Lord….
With an operatic swirl of his cape, red and black mingling richly, the Reverend walked off attended by the faithful white spotlight.
Holly said goodbye to the A.P. man and started up the aisle. At the door, a wooden box was beginning to overflow with membership applications. The Reverend was on the beam, Holly thought, he was riding the snake’s tail to glory.<
br />
***
The event that came to be known as the Day of the Dog was inspired by a “name withheld” letter to the Daily News suggesting that dogs, which were constantly turning up snakes (often when they were least wanted), were better equipped to sniff out the snake in the park than cops with a degenerated human smelling apparatus. The writer added that, if the police refused to employ the Department’s own dogs for this purpose, individual dog owners should organize their own posse.
The idea became an instant success. Before the day was over, hundreds of dog owners began to bombard the special police line; others, accompanied by their pets, picketed police stations. What was a more or less spontaneous, unorganized movement suddenly solidified with the fortuitous ascendancy of a Mrs. Reginald Campbell, who, finding herself singled out by a television interviewer at the scene of a picketing, announced that there was no time to lose, that the very next day was none too soon. She exhorted all dog lovers within the sound of her voice to appear at the park tomorrow in the forenoon with their animals, which would then be unleashed and, having located the snake, bark loudly and reveal its hiding place.
Thereupon, a police lieutenant who had come out of the precinct to watch the proceedings issued a warning to the effect that the city ordinance pertaining to unleashed dogs, and the fine appertaining thereto, would be strictly enforced.
He was barely heard over the roars of approval for Mrs. Reginald Campbell and the barking of the assembled dogs.
But Mrs. Campbell herself responded to this threat later in the evening when she was interviewed for television at her home. Photographed in her living room, surrounded by her standard poodle, her Airedale, her two German shepherds, and her miniature schnauzer, she offered the following stratagem: “If a policeman attempts to hand you a summons, simply say, ‘Sorry, officer, my dog accidentally slipped its leash.’”