The box was two feet long, a foot and a half wide, and a foot and a half deep. Its outside was plywood, its inside a lining of burlap stitched into cardboard. There were air holes drilled into the top and sides. Together with its contents, the box weighed sixteen pounds. For anyone less than Matt Olssen's size it would have been an unwieldy burden, but Matt carried it comfortably under his long arm.

Even so, a few times along the way it became a drag, and he was tempted to walk away from it. Once, without meaning to, he had actually forgotten it. By the time he got back to where he had left it, two characters had hefted it up onto the bar and were struggling with the knot in the blond sisal twine looped around its width. He had been half inclined to let them get a look at what was inside the box, but he had been warned that, although it would probably be lethargic, he wasn't to count on it; it might come out of the box like a shot. So he kicked ass, picked up the box, and moved along.

He had taken it-box and animal together-from some Greek or other in a poker game in Lourengo Marques (Maputo, they called it now, a no-class name) in exchange for a handful of markers in Malawi dollars, which was the funny-money they were playing for. The Greek claimed it was a rare specimen that he had bought at a bargain price from some nigger cop in Elisabethville who was said to have confiscated it in the bush country from another nigger, who had staked it out as a booby trap on a dark path in front of his brother-in-law's house, with intent to kill. It hadn't worked out. The brother-in-law had a flashlight and spotted it in time, and then hollered for the cops. Matt had accepted it, as an alternative to beating up on the Greek, with the notion of turning it loose in the downtown area of the city for laughs. But later, sobering up, he decided instead to bring it back to the States and try to sell it to a zoo. He stowed the box away under the bunk in his cabin, and aside from sprinkling some water through the air holes a few times, paid no attention to it on the ten-day voyage back from Africa.

His ship had docked in Brooklyn in early morning. By the time he had finished supervising the off-loading it was noon, and 92 degrees, and he was nearly dehydrated. He cleaned up, put the box under his arm, and staggered to a waterfront joint a block away from the ship's berth. It wasn't until three o'clock that he remembered to phone his wife.

"Betty? It's me."

"Oh, Christ."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, you come and go, don't you?"

So it was going to be an uphill fight. Tuning his voice up to a little boy's sweet upper register, he said, "Baby, your little Mattsie is dying to see your beautiful face. You know?"

"Look, you bastard, don't come on with that cutie-pie act. You ask me if I know? I know."

"Hey, baby, be nice to me. I been six months at sea-?'

"Six? I haven't heard from you in over a year."

"— and every single night when I turned in I dreamed about my beautiful Betty."

She snorted. "Well, dream on. I'm hanging up."

"Wait, no, I have to tell you something."

In the steaming phone booth he was pouring sweat and booze vapours. He glanced through the glass of the door at the box, standing on end near his bar stool. Nobody was paying any attention to it; he had promised to break the nose of any man who went near it.

"What you said about not hearing from me?" He wiped a rill of sweat off the side of his face with the phone. "I swear to Jesus Christ God I wrote you once a month like clockwork. Don't tell me you didn't get my letters."

"You lying bastard, I'm hanging up on you."

"You can't hang up on me. I'm your husband."

"In name only. I'm hanging up."

"I have to see you, Betty. God, how I missed you."

"I'm busy. I have to go now."

"No. Listen. I know the way to your heart, you bitch, and to everything else, too. "I got something for you. A present."

She paused for a moment. "Well, if it's another dumb statue like last time, you know what you can do with it."

"Every port we made I worked my butt off, so I didn't even have time to buy you something." He smiled slyly into the transmitter. "So I'm just gonna have to give you cash instead. You mind, baby?"

Her voice came alive. "You're gonna give me money? How much?"

"Ah, don't let's spoil the surprise. But I'll give you a little hint. It's in the four figures."

"I could certainly use some money. You got no idea what it's like, just keeping up the apartment, and buy a few clothes once in a while."

"I would have mailed you money, like I promised, but these crummy ports, they would steal it right out of the envelope in the post office. I'll be over in an hour or two, soon as we're finished unloading the ship. Okay, sweetheart?"

"Well, okay. But don't get rolled or anything. I really have to have the money."

"See you in an hour, baby. Wear a see-through, will ya?"

Ten hours later he had drunk better than a quart and a half of whiskey, spent almost three hundred dollars, and had two or three causeless fights.

He had moved from joint to joint on a course that led in slow stages generally northward through Brooklyn, across the East River into Manhattan, and on up the West Side to Columbus Avenue in the Seventies. Now he was the last remaining customer in the dump, and the bartender had just shut off the air conditioner to chase him.

"You want me to go, tell me man-to-man to go, and I'll go," Matt said. "But don't he the air conditioner broke down, you crumb."

"I don't want no more trouble with you," the bartender said. His right hand was under the bar, and he gave Matt a glimpse of a fat sawed-off bat.

"Whyn't you just call it a night, sailor?"

"You crumb, if I felt like staying here I would make you turn it on again."

He was pouring sweat again even though the air conditioner hadn't been off more than a couple of minutes. "But my dear little wife is waiting for me, and man, I got a terrific load saved up for her."

He heaved the box up on the bar, paid his bill, and threw the bartender a ten-dollar tip. The bartender mumbled his thanks and then, as if to underline his gratitude, pretended to be curious about the box. "What you really got in there, sailor?"

It was a question that had been put to him often during the long hours since he had left the docks. Depending on the variable temperature of his mood, his answer had been either "a little pussycat" or none of your fucking business." In all cases he had made it evident, by virtue of his size and attitude and general air of recklessness, that the subject was closed. In the only instance when a questioner had persisted, Matt had grabbed him by the collar and run him out the door.

Now he simply winked at the bartender, hiked the box up under his arm, and went out into Columbus Avenue. The September heat had hardly relented since sundown, trapped by pavement and steel and concrete. Considering that it was nearly 2 A.M., there were a surprising number of people on the streets. In front of him, a couple slouched along with their arms clasped limply around each other's waist. Across the street, a man and two women were standing at the curb singing. Before him, a young man, bare-chested, wearing floppy shorts, bore down toward him on a collision course but sheered off at the last moment. A few cars were heading south, their headlights bouncing on the ragged road. Here and there, above the street, people leaned out of darkened windows, their arms and elbows cradled on pillows on the sills, trying to distil some refreshment out of the hot moist air.

He turned east toward Central Park, his gait rolling, part swagger, part stagger. The street was dark, with almost every other one of its lamppost lights shattered. The curbs were lined with garbage, some in plastic bags, some simply strewn. A few windows were dimly lit, and there were sounds of voices or music drifting into the street. Near the end of the block, a cluster of Hispanics sitting on a stoop, wearing shorts and nightgowns, laughed at him and called out insults. He stopped, and challenged them to come down off the stoop and fight, the whole lot of them, men, women, children, and knives. They laughed, and saluted him with their beer cans.

He told them that they were a bunch of dirty cabrones, putas, and hastardos, and when they applauded his command of their language, he bowed to them and moved on. He wasn't ignorant of the streets of New York-and of Rio and Genoa and Marseilles and a hundred other ports — but they held no terrors for him. He knew that his size was intimidating; and if it failed to intimidate, he was ready to fight, confidently and with enjoyment.

At Central Park West he checked the street sign and looked at the building on the comer in bafflement. From the lobby, a uniformed doorman looked out at him cautiously. He checked the street sign and the building number again. Dumb ass. She lived east, the other side of the park. He set the box down near the curb and waved his arms wildly at an approaching cab. The cab slowed and stopped, then suddenly shot off. Matt took a wild swing at the trunk of the car as it went by. In the next five minutes two more cabs passed him up.

Five minutes after the start of his panicky flight, Torres stopped running long enough to rub the surface of his revolver with his shirt, and drop it into a trash basket. Then he began to run again.

He had been running headlong, as fast and hard as he could, from the moment the snake had crawled across the sailor's body toward him. For a while, he kept turning his head to see if it was chasing him, though he knew that no snake could possibly travel at that speed. From time to time he reached down to touch the place on his thigh where he had been bitten. It wasn't swollen and it didn't hurt-just the little pinsand-needles feeling-and he took comfort from that. Maybe the goddamn mile-long whore of a snake wasn't even poisonous.

But he began to feel lightheaded, like he had been drinking too much wine, and he was having some trouble breathing. Also, it was taking him too long to get out of the park. He had stayed on the winding footpaths except for once, when he tried to take a shortcut through an uphill bushy area, and he had lost his bearings and almost gotten hysterical until he found his way back to the paths. He always thought he knew the park as well as he knew his own asshole, but now he couldn't seem to find the way out.

After he found the paths again he felt played out and had to take a rest.

So he just sat down on the pavement, facing in the direction he thought he had come from, so he could see the snake coming if it was still following him. Estupido! He had lost it a long time ago. But the fucking animal had scared him shitless, and he couldn't free his mind of the way it kept sliding out of that box, and the way it bit him so fast that he couldn't hardly see it move.

Sitting down and resting didn't seem to do much good. If anything, his breathing was getting worse, and his mouth was filling up with some sticky kind of crap. He couldn't spit the stuff out and had to try getting rid of it with his fingers. He got scared all over again, and he knew he better get to a hospital fast, but he had a hard time standing up. His legs felt weak, and fie was starting to feel sleepy. But he finally pulled himself up and took off again, though he was staggering more than running, and he couldn't breathe good, and the gummy stuff in his mouth was dribbling down his chin now.

He began to sob, and tried to beg some saints to help him, but he couldn't think of any of their names. He was sucking for air, and his arms and hands felt so heavy that he could hardly move them. At last he remembered his name saint, but when he tried calling out to him he couldn't talk, only make sounds like a frog.

He couldn't feel his legs at all now, just saw them going up and down like in slow motion. The pins and needles were spreading upward in his body, and his head kept falling down until his chin bobbed against his chest. After a while it got too hard to try lifting his head, so he just let it hang down. He didn't feel like running no more, either. All he wanted was to lay down and go to sleep. But he kept going, and a little bit later he saw an exit out of the park onto Fifth Avenue. It puzzled him that he was way down near 64th Street, when he should have come out in the high Seventies.

He stumbled through the exit, but couldn't stop himself at the curb. Ms momentum carried him into the middle of the street, where he collapsed.

Through his closed eyelids he saw the brightness of headlights coming toward him, but he didn't try to move. He knew his legs wouldn't work, no part of his body would work. He heard the bad noises he was making when he tried to breathe, and he knew he was gonna die, right there, laying down in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Patrolman John Nebbia, driving sector car Boy-3, saw the figure stagger out of the park and into the street, where it collapsed.

"See that?" he said to his partner, Patrolman Frank Finnerty.

Finnerty nodded. "Look at the cars. They go right around him, like dodging a pothole. Nobody stops."

"Who stops and gets out of his car at three-thirty in the morning? I'm not crazy about it myself."

Nebbia sped up a bit until he reached the figure sprawled in the street.

There he made a short U-turn that brought the car around in front of the figure, setting up a barrier to protect it from the oncoming southbound traffic. Finnerty was out the door before the emergency brakes were set.

Nebbia turned on his revolving roof light before he got out.

Finnerty was down on one knee, leaning over the man. "What's the matter, feller?"

Nebbia watched the man's brown eyes open and stare upward. He was having trouble breathing, and a heavy gluey mucous discharge glistened on his lips and chin.

"OD'd," Nebbia said. "One more I-Espanic OD. I'll call for an ambulance."

"He can hardly breathe," Finnerty said. "See how blue his face is? Probably a heart attack."

"Me, I diagnose it overdose," Nebbia said. "He's too young for a heart attack. I'll call an ambulance." He straightened up, but instead of going back to the car, yelled at a driver who had stopped alongside them, with his window turned down, to watch the scene. "Move along, move along, chrisesake. You got no home to go to?"

"He looks like he might go out any second, John," Finnerty said. "Let's put him in the car and take him ourself."

"I don't know," Nebbia said.

"What don't you know? He could go any second."

"That's what I don't know," Nebbia said. "You know as well as me that if he dies on us we have to hang around and wait for the M.E., and Christ alone knows how long it takes the wagon to get here, and then we have to inventory his possessions…" He paused, and assessed the tightening of Finnerty's spare Irish face, and shrugged. "Okay, okay, we'll take him ourself."

They carried him to the car. Finnerty got into the back seat with him.

Nebbia spoke into his microphone. "Nineteenth Precinct sector car Eighteen-twenty to Central. K."

In the back seat, looking down at the slumped figure beside him, Finnerty heard Nebbia inform Central that they were transporting a serious OD to East Side Hospital. After Central acknowledged, Nebbia. turned his siren on.

Not OD, Finnerty said to himself, not OD but a heart attack. He tried to remember the emergency procedure he was trained to follow. The only thing he could think of right now was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. and he wasn't sure he could bring himself to do it with all that crap that was clogging the victim's mouth and oozing down over his chin.

"Move it," he said to Nebbia. "Will you move it?"

As the snake headed into heavy brush, a squirrel fled before its approach. The snake was hungry, and it might have taken the squirrel, but its primal impulse was to seek a place of safety. It crawled deeper into the brush, constantly probing with its deeply forked black tongue. It paused at the base of a tree, erected its head on the taut anterior portion of its body, and looked upward. Then it began to crawl up the trunk of the tree, winding around it swiftly and smoothly, using its prehensile tail for leverage.

It stopped two-thirds of the way up the tree in an area of heavy foliage, and draped itself over the branches in a seemingly patternless arrangement of loose random loops that were designed to distribute its weight evenly.

The snake was eleven feet, two inches long, and slender. Its head was coffin-sided and comparatively small for the length of its body. Its eyes, dark brown and round, were wide open. It was unable to shut its eyes because it had neither eyelids nor nictitating membrane.

The snake was asleep.

With the exception of weekend nights, when the traffic was heavy and continuous until dawn, the emergency ward of East Side Hospital was normally at its busiest between 4 P.m. and midnight. Those were the hours when most of the patients flocked to emergency for nonemergency treatment they would normally have sought in the clinic, which closed at four o'clock.

Now, at 3:45 A.M., the reception room was empty except for a sleeping wino with a stiffly bandaged forefinger. He had been treated more than an hour ago, but showed no disposition to leave. Probably, Nurse Rosamund Johnson thought, glancing at him from behind the reception desk, because of the air conditioning. Well, he was peaceful enough, poor old bum, so let him hang around.

She was working on a sheaf of Blue Cross claim sheets when two cops came in with a patient. His feet were dragging, his head lolling, and he seemed to be semicomatose.

"Found this on Fifth Avenue," one of the cops said. "He's got the blue face."

Nurse Johnson punched a key on her intercom and said, "Billy, bring out a stretcher, stat," then punched another key and, after a moment, said, "Dr. Papalco, we have a patient in a cyanosed condition who's having trouble breathing. Come immediately, please." She listened for a moment and then said sharply, "Look, doctor, you better come immediately, Stat."

"Overdose," one of the cops said. "I seen hundreds of them."

The nurse, grimacing at the intercom, said, "How's he ever gonna be a doctor if he don't learn how to wake up?"

"He can't breathe," the other cop said. "My opinion, it's heart attack."

An attendant came through an inner door rolling a stretcher.

"Put the patient in Room D, Billy," Nurse Johnson said. "Dr. Papaleo is on his way."

The two cops strained, helping the attendant lift their burden onto the stretcher. "Dead weight," one of them said, arching an eyebrow. "If you know what I mean."

Nurse Johnson said, "Can you fellows hang around a few minutes in case the doctor wants to ask some questions? There's a coffee machine around the comer."

One of the cops nodded, and the other one said, "I'll call it in."

Dr. Charles Papaleo disliked the emergency ward almost as much as he disliked the surgery, which, in turn, he disliked more than obstetrics and less than medicine. He recognized that in terms of gross experience emergency ward service was invaluable for a first-year intern, but that didn't change his view of it. His problem was that he was abnormally shy, and had trouble in his dealings with people. Left to himself, he would have chosen another profession, something reclusive, no doubt, but his father and brother, both of whom were physicians, wouldn't hear of it, and they were overwhelming. Nevertheless, he had prevailed in making his own choice of a specialty-radiology. As a radiologist he would rarely have to face a patient from one year to the next, just his shadow imprinted on a sheet of film negative.

The patient on the table in Room D, Papaleo thought wryly, posed no problems in the personal sense. He was obtunded, semicomatose. On the other hand, his inability to respond to questions that might provide helpful signposts into the diagnostic process did pose medical problems. Looking down at the man, Papaleo thought, Overdose, I'll bet it's good old overdose. But he put the notion out of mind. Physicians were expected to follow form, especially first-year intems, who were discouraged from making snap judgments. "Even if you turn out to be correct," one of his professors was fond of saying, "the lightning-flash diagnosis in fledgling doctors-the Kildare syndrome-is either brilliance or dumb luck. Our science is based on neither brilliance nor dumb luck but knowledge."

So-attend to the symptoms. Cyanotic. Marked hypoventilation-the patient was breathing poorly, although he didn't seem to be fighting desperately for air, as people usually did who couldn't breathe. Meaningful? Maybe, but file it away for the moment. Meanwhile, the airway receives first attention. Oxygen. He found a nasal catheter and inserted it. Nostrils filled with heavy mucus-have to check to see that it didn't clog the catheter.

A nurse came into the room. Kelly, an old hand. It figured. They liked to have someone around to keep an eye on the first-year interns, and if no doctor was available, an experienced nurse was next best.

Without looking at her, Papaleo said, "Blood pressure cuff, please."

He opened the patient's mouth-slimy, thick mucous discharge, like the nose-and checked the tongue. No falling back of tongue-takes care of that.

Didn't seem to be any obstruction, either. He sniffed the patient's breath.

No alcohol smell, just a strong bouquet of… what? Chili peppers.

Nurse Kelly was winding the blood pressure cuff around the patient's arm, her movements deft, practiced. Papaleo said, "Never mind that for a moment.

The airway is more important. Will you get the suction apparatus, please?"

Kelly nodded and moved off briskly. Papaleo, suddenly remembering the old yam about the green intern who had diagnosed a day's growth of blue-black beard as cyanosis, examined the patient's fingernails, lips, and tongue.

All blue. Cyanosis, not need of a shave.

Nurse Kelly came back with the suction apparatus: a vacuum to suck up the mucus via a tube running into a clear bottle so the matter could be examined. Kelly maneuvered the tube in the patient's mouth with her right hand, and with her left wiped up the mess on his chin and lips.

Papaleo, his forehead ridged, fitted his stethoscope into his ears, opened a few buttons of the patient's shirt, and listened to the heartbeat. Fast but fairly regular. The speed was nothing like tachycardia, exertion could even account for it. He picked up the man's wrist and counted his pulse.

Fifteen seconds on the sweep hand of his watch: twenty-four or twenty-five.

Call it an even hundred. He finished winding the blood pressure cuff around the patient's arm and pumped up the auto-valve bulb. He released the bulb, and took the systole and diastole reading. A hundred over forty. Combined with the pulse rate, it was slightly under normal, and it failed to suggest anything of substance to him.

"The oxygen doesn't seem to be helping his breathing any, doctor," Nurse Kelly said.

"Yes, well…" She was right. No answer for her. He frowned and said, "Let's give it a chance to take."

Nurse Kelly was silent for a moment before saying primly, "Shall I check the catheter to see if it's clogged?"

"Yes. Will you please do that, nurse?"

He waited until Kelly had removed the catheter. She stepped back from the table and began to clean it. Silently disapproving. Mustn't let her bother me, Papaleo thought. What now? Neurological check.

"Neurological check," he said aloud, and stepped back to allow Kelly to reinsert the nasal catheter.

Okay. Test for sensation-pinch and poke and press. Knee reflexes, okay.

Bang the tendons-okay. Response to pain, okay. Check head for trauma: lots of black hair, wavy, but can't feel anything amiss. Okay. Shine flashlight into eyes-pupils normal size and contract under stimulus of light. Heroin out.

The patient's hand rose feebly, reaching for the mouth. Trying to clear it of mucus. But Kelly had vacuumed most of the mouth clean. She was looking at him sidelong now, and fidgeting. She opened her mouth to say something, but Papaleo intercepted her. "Lungs. Help me to get him into a sitting position."

He started unbuttoning the rest of the man's shirt. Unbutton? He remembered what another professor had said: "Don't waste time with buttons, cut the garment off or rip it off-the moral being that saving a shirt is no substitute for saving a life." Balls. All he had to do was push the shirt up over the patient's back. Two birds with one stone-save the life and the shirt. Maybe.

The patient was dead weight as they tried to sit him up. His head lolled forward against Papaleo's chest. Kelly held him steady and Papaleo leaned over him, placed his ear against the smooth brown skin and tapped.

Sounded all right, but what could he really tell with the patient unable to breathe deeply?

"Let's get him back down, nurse, shall we?"

"Doctor, I think we-"

He cut her off with a frown. Got to keep them in their place, especially the old-timers, mustn't let them get ahead of you.

He picked up the patient's arms and studied them. No needle tracks. Well, the normal pupils had told him that. Overdose of some kind of pill? A possibility. Do a gastric lavage? He realized that he was sweating profusely. He wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm. Kelly watched, her lips pursed.

He said, "Who brought him in?"

"The police. I think they're still around."

"I'll step outside for a second and talk to them." Should have thought of that earlier, dammit. He started away from the table, then returned.

"Maybe some kind of overdose, though the signs are absent. Still… get some Narcan, will you, please? Yes, and set up an I.V. with five percent dextrose and saline."

Nurse Kelly nodded her head and her lips softened. Good, Papaleo thought, I'm on the beam, Kelly approves.

"Oh yes, let's protect against an insulin overdose. Add fifty percent glucose."

He found the cops in the anteroom, drinking coffee and chatting with the security guard. They told him what they knew. No help.

"What about his movements. Was he jerking? You know-you've seen epileptics."

The cops agreed that although he had been staggering he hadn't appeared to be convulsed.

"It looks like overdose to me," one of the cops said. "A lot of Hispanics overdose these days."

Kelly maybe, but a dumb cop no. Papaleo returned through the reception room to Room D. Kelly had already hooked up the I.V. and she was back working with the suction apparatus, picking away at the mucus in the patient's mouth.

"Not alcohol," she said. "No odor."

"I'm well aware of that. I have a nose, too."

Kelly's lips tightened up again. Papalco looked down at the patient blankly. What else was there, chrisesakes? Take a blood sample, check for sugar? But it would take at least a half hour. Some kind of GI haemorrhage?

"Could be in apparent bleeding," he said aloud.

"Doctor," Kelly said, "I think we're in trouble."

He thought so himself, but the declaration would have to come from him, not from a nurse. What the devil could it be? He ticked off items in his mind. Alcohol, no. Overdose, none of the signs. Trauma, no. Stroke — who knows? He decided to listen to the heart again. There was some change, and it was for the worse-beat more rapid now, and weaker. The patient's chest barely seemed to be moving. Paralysis, some kind of paralysis?

Kelly said, "Doctor, I think we want a Code Blue."

Code Blue was the emergency call that mobilized a surgeon, an anaesthetist, the Chief Resident, extra nurses. It was clearly indicated, Papaleo thought, but suppose they all piled in and made a sure, quick, easy diagnosis? Christ! Better hold the Code Blue for another minute or two.

"Presently," he said to Nurse Kelly, and studied the patient hopelessly.

Why should he resist just because they might think he was a dunce? That's what everybody thought of first-year interns anyway. They would come in, fire questions at him with the same sort of hauteur he had used with the two cops outside… "Well, doctor?" Keily looked grim. "I think we're about to lose him!

Sweat was pouring down the sides of Papaleo's face. "Very well. Let's do a Code Blue."

Dr. Shapiro, the Chief Resident, was down in less than a minute. He ran his hands over the patient's chest, almost abstractedly, while Papaleo, earnest, sweating, filled him in. Shapiro's face was a mask. Before Papaleo was quite finished, Shapiro interrupted.

"Let's tube him," Shapiro said. "He needs air. Nurse, get hold of a respirator." Nurse Kelly, looking righteous, moved away from the table.

"He can't breathe because his muscles aren't functioning properly. We want a mechanical aid to help the chest muscles do their work."

Should have thought of it, Papaleo told himself, when I noticed that he didn't seem to be lighting for breath. Mechanical respirator: endo tracheal tube pushed into the windpipe, attached to a cock on wall that pumped oxygen directly into lungs.

Shapiro removed the nasal catheter when Kelly arrived with the respirator. He had some initial trouble incubating the patient, and Papaleo thought, Christ, if he has trouble, what would have happened to me? Other members of the Code Blue team had arrived, but there was nothing for them to do, as yet.

With the tube emplaced in the patient's trachea, Shapiro stepped back a pace and shook his head. "I don't know." He looked worried. Then, frowning, he stepped forward to the table again. "What's this, on his thigh?"

The light summer trousers were stained with a scuffing of grime, sweat, and a little blood. Papaleo hadn't noticed it before.

"He must have scraped it when he fell. The policemen who brought him in said he collapsed in the street."

"Hand me a scissors. We'll cut them off."

But, abruptly, Shapiro bent over the patient with his stethoscope.

"I swear," Papaleo said, "I can't figure out what's wrong with him," and then shut up because Shapiro was still auscultating.

Shapiro straightened up. "I can't raise a heartbeat. Let's get going."

The snake woke shortly before dawn. At once, its long tongue began to flick in and out through a rostra opening in the margin of its upper jaw that allowed it to emerge even when its mouth was shut.

The two tips of the forked tongue fitted into ducts communicating with the snake's Jacobson's organ, which lay in a depression in the roof of the mouth. The sensory epithelium of the Jacobson's organ responded to odour substances conveyed to it by the tongue, and interpreted them as a chemical computer might do, in terms of the quality of the atmosphere, of the presence of another animal, of prey.

The findings of the Jacobson's organ disquieted the snake. And so, when it slipped through the branches of the tree and down the trunk, it chose not to wander off in search of water. Instead, moving in slow ripples, it drank the dew from the grass. Then, despite its hunger, it did not go in search of food, but wound back up the tree until it found the place where it had been before.

It slept again.

At much the same moment, Arthur Bennett stumbled on a body. His first thought, when he saw it lying on the walk, was that it was some other wino sleeping it off. But when he saw its size, he decided that it was that big bastard who had beaten him up a month ago and damn near punched his eye out.

His immediate impulse was to cut out, but when he touched his eye, still scabbed in the process of healing, he got mad. Stepping forward a pace, he launched a thudding kick to the ribs. He was bringing his foot back for a second kick-although by now he had remembered that the bastard who had punched his eye was a black guy-when he saw the dark blood staining the front of the T-shirt and the linen jacket.

Bennett recoiled, then stepped forward again and looked at the body. The eyes were open and glassy. One arm was bent back underneath. The white captain's hat had fallen away and lay nearby, incongruously balanced on its rim. There was a good-looking box a little distance away. He looked dead, but to make sure, Bennett let him have a couple more kicks in the ribs.

He found the wallet, first try, sticking up from the breast pocket of the linen jacket. fie cackled with pleasure. He leafed through the wallet quickly and gasped with delight: bills a half-inch thick-twenties and fifties and even a few hundreds. He slipped the money into his pants pocket, and looked around him. Nothing in sight. He began to work feverishly, eager for what other wonders he might discover. In the jacket pockets he found a pack with half a dozen cigarettes in it, some keys, a crumpled dollar bill, two packages of matches, a disposable lighter, a packet of salted peanuts, a bloody crumpled handkerchief, some foreign coins. In the body's left-hand pants pocket he found a package of condoms, in the right a handful of U.S. coins. Everything went into his own pockets. When he had picked the body clean he put the sailor cap on his matted white hair, and giggled when it slid down over his ears. He picked up the box-the cover was busted, but it was still a fine box-and put it under his arm.

He decided to get out of the park real fast. He had entered on Fifth Avenue near the Metropolitan Museum, not too worried about walking through, because no self-respecting mugger would waste his time on an old wino bum (though some of the mean ones would hurt winos just for laughs), but now, with his loot, he felt different.

He pushed the hat to the back of his head so it wouldn't swamp him, tucked the box under his arm, and hurried along the path toward Central Park West.

The snake basked on the surface of a large black rock a short distance from the tree it had sheltered in, its eleven-foot length spread out to the sun in an extended sigmoidal flex. At 7:30 A.M. on the third day of the heat wave, the sun already burned relentlessly through the city haze.

The snake was poikilothermal-a cold-blooded animal. Its temperature was not constant, like that of most animals, but modulated with the temperature of its environment. Because cold exerts a narcotic, potentially killing effect, snakes predominate in the tropics and subtropics and thin out in number and species in the temperate regions moving toward the poles. Yet, a common viper is known to inhabit an area above the Arctic Circle and parts of Siberia.

Scarcely stirring, the snake warmed up its blood until some instinctive thermostatic reflex warned it that it had reached the optimum temperature. Then it slid away from its exposed position on the rock and into the shaded underbrush near its tree.

Matt Olssen's body was discovered a little after 8:30 in the morning by a Parks Department truck carrying grass-cutting equipment. The police were notified, and an RMP car was dispatched to the scene from the Central Park Precinct, located in the 85th Street transverse. The Medical Examiner's office sent out its death wagon to collect the remains, which were brought to the morgue on First Avenue, near Bellevue Hospital, and assigned a refrigerated drawer not too far removed from the remains of Ramon Torres.

Examination of Matt Olssen's effects, which had been stripped from him at the scene and placed in a transparent plastic bag, offered no clues to his identification. A label in the linen jacket indicated that it had been purchased in Hong Kong. The shoes were of French make. There were no labels on the T-shirt, the underpants, or the socks. The pockets were empty except for a few crumbs of food; there was not so much as a handkerchief in them. The only hint as to the victim's identity, if it could be called that, was a red and purple tattoo across one buttock, reading: BETTY.

But, later in the day, the corpse was identified by its fingerprints, which were on record as the result of a number of arrests over the past five years, all for aggravated assault. An address on the East Side was given for one Betty Parker Olssen, listed as the victim's wife.

Arthur Bennett locked himself in a booth in a washroom of the main branch of the N. Y. Public Library, and counted the money in the wallet he had taken from the dead sailor, whimpering with disbelief as he rolled off the numbers in a hoarse whisper. He stuffed the money (nine hundred and eighty-four dollars) into the pocket that held the coins, the disposable lighter, the keys, the salted peanuts, the matchbooks and the bloodstained handkerchief.

He left the library, bought and drank a pint of muscatel, and then wandered down to the Bowery, picking up eighty cents in handouts along the way.

He sold the peaked sailor hat for seventy-five cents, but couldn't dispose of the box, for which he was asking a dollar. When he became too persistent in pushing the sale of the box, someone became annoyed, grabbed it away from him, smashed it by jumping on it, and then threw the remnants into the street where, in time, passing cars splintered it further.

Near noon, two men cornered him in a doorway, beat him unconscious, and took his money.

The olive slate colour of the snake's top blended with the shadowed leaves of the tree, and the starling, lighting on a bough, did not see it.

The snake's vision was highly developed, with particular acuity to perception of movement, and, because of the placement of the eyes at the side of the head, commanding a large field of view. It had picked up the starling in flight and watched it flutter to its perch.

The bird was four feet from the snake's head and facing outward from the tree. The snake's darting tongue picked up the odour of prey. Unmoving, alert, tensed, the snake stared at the bird. Then, anchoring itself by its prehensile tail, mouth wide open, it shot forward in a blur of speed, and sank its fangs into the bird's body. The bird squawked and flew off. But before it had gone twenty feet its wings began to flutter erratically and it dropped to the ground.

The snake did not pursue. It stretched out on the tree, its head hanging downward, its eyes focused on the movements of the bird. Even when the bird struggled feebly into a patch of undergrowth and out of sight of the snake's vision, the snake did not follow. It waited patiently for perhaps five more minutes before it circled down the tree. On the ground it trailed the bird unerringly by means of the special scent left by an injected prey.

The snake's poison organ was a digestive juice in the form of a highly specialized proteiriacious saliva. Thus, the snake's venom, in addition to killing the prey, had at the same time begun the process of digesting it.

Ile starling was dead when the snake found it in the brush. The snake manoeuvred its length until the bird's head lay directly in front of its mouth. The bones supporting the snake's lower jaws moved in the skull, the elastic ligaments between the halves of the jaw stretched, and the mouth opened to an astounding width which would accommodate the swallowing of a prey far bigger than the starling, and even larger than the diameter of the snake itself.

Ile snake hooked the teeth of one side of its mouth into the bird's head.

Using this purchase as a fulcrum, it pushed the other side of the mouth forward a short distance, engaged the teeth (which were useless for chewing and hence required the snake to swallow its prey whole), then repeated the ratcheting process, opposite side after opposite side. The recurved shape of the teeth, acting as hooks, would have prevented a struggling prey from escaping once it had been engaged by the teeth.

The snake gradually ingested the starling, not so much swallowing it as drawing itself over it.

Around 4:30 in the afternoon, two policemen arrived at Betty Olssen's small apartment house to perform the uncomfortable duty of informing her that her husband had been killed. As always, in such instances, they sought the cooperation of a neighbour, on the theory that the involvement of a familiar face would somewhat cushion the shock. But of the first three people they found at home, one claimed not to know Betty Olssen, and two declined, on the basis that they didn't get along with her. One of these, the superintendent of the house, was quite emphatic in his refusal to help. The bitch was nothing but trouble, and, what's more, in the seven years she had lived in the house, had never tipped him so much as a thin dime, even at Christmas.

The policemen decided to proceed without assistance. They rang the widow's bell and, after an awkwardly oblique approach that she fathomed in the first seconds, broke the news of the discovery of her husband's body. They asked her to be so good as to accompany them to the morgue to complete the identification.

The widow, who was pretty, and wearing a revealing nightdress, took the news calmly, even with a certain grim satisfaction. "I knew the crazy sonofabitch would get himself killed sooner or later."

One of the cops was red in the face. Betty Olssen thought at first it was because of what she had said, but then realized from the way his eyes kept wandering away from her, that he was embarrassed by her near-nakedness.

"Wear a see-through, he told me," she said. "So I put on a see-through and I fell asleep in it. So it shouldn't entirely go to waste, officer, I wish you would take at least one good look at me."

Her face was stolid as she stood in the echoing room in the morgue and waited for the chilled drawer to be pulled out. Matt Olssen came out feet first, with a tag tied to his big toe. His hair was neatly combed. She looked down at his face with no emotion showing on her own, and simply said, "That's him," and then turned away.

When she asked about the contents of his pockets and was told that there were none, that he had obviously been shot in the course of a robbery, she nodded her head, as if in confirmation of some previously formed judgment.

She seemed surprised when the attendant told her that the Medical Examiner's office would perform an autopsy before releasing the remains.

"What for? He was shot, wasn't he?"

"It's required by law. Besides, we sometimes turn up clues that help the police with their investigation. For instance, what position he was in when he was shot, whether the perpetrator was left-handed, maybe what height the perpetrator was…" But the attendant saw that the widow wasn't the least bit interested. He rolled the body back into the refrigerated case.

"Okay, miss, tell me where you want the remains sent."

"Feed it to the cats."

Not because he was shocked-after twenty years on the job he had heard everything-but because he had a duty to perform, the attendant said, "You want to give him a decent Christian burial, don't you?"

"He wasn't a decent Christian, so why should he have a decent Christian burial?"

"Well, it's the usual thing…

"I'll tell you something." Her round face hardened to show some of its underlying bone structure. "The sonofabitch never gave me anything but misery, he starved me out, he spent his money on whores, and I never saw a penny of it except once in a while when he was bombed and, you know what I mean, wanted my favours. So if you think I'm going to spend any of my hard-earned money to bury him, forget it. You got potter's field, right?

That's where to bury him."

"Well, we don't call it that," the attendant said. "I can't force you to take the body, but if the city has to bury it, you'll get billed for the expense."

She shrugged.

Meaning, the attendant thought, that billing her is one thing, and collecting another. He said, "Look, he was a seaman, so there's probably a pretty good insurance policy, and union benefits too-right?"

She smiled. "It's the one good thing he ever did for me, and he couldn't help himself-the company took out the policy for him. I got that money coming to me, I deserve it, and I'm not gonna piss any of it away burying him."

"Aw, miss," the attendant said, "in the name of common decency-"

"Potter's field," Betty said. "He'll never know the difference."

This evening's performance at the Delacorte Theatre was to be Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal. All 2,200-odd free tickets had been distributed by seven o'clock.

At least half the ticket-holders picnicked in the park, mainly in the areas adjacent to the Delacorte: up by the Belvedere Castle, on the banks of the small oblong Belvedere Lake, by the Shakespeare Gardens, and, in the hundreds, on the burnt-out grass of the Great Lawn. The grass was barely visible for the blankets that covered it, on which people sat or reclined or spread their picnic food and drink.

A certain segment of the crowd, notably the older people among them, were festive and uneasy in equal parts. As New Yorkers, trained in the ways of survival in the perilous city, they held it as an article of faith that one didn't enter the park after, or even approaching, dark. And so there was a heady, nervous pleasure in being here now, a sense of willful violation of common sense, like teasing a bull in an open field. They were aware that there was no real danger, of course, since they Were part of a vast throng, and since there was a reassuringly sizable police detail on hand. Nevertheless, it was an adventure of sorts.

When the performance began at eight o'clock, it was not quite dark. The buildings to the east lay in dusk, and their windows were already sparkling with lights; to the west, the sky was hazily luminous with the setting sun. In a few moments that light would die away, and darkness would fall. Sitting on their wooden fold-down seats in the circular theater, the crowd was dressed for the stilling heat in light summer shirts and blouses, trousers and skirts and halters, and even, here and there, bikini bathing suits and bare chests. The house lights dimmed, and the audience prepared for its pleasure, knowing that, whatever standard terrors would surely transpire in the more remote regions of the park, here it was cozy and secure.

The snake crept swiftly through the darkness, its slender length always in direct contact with the ground, curved into a continuous flowing S-movement, each part of its body following precisely in the path of the part preceding it.

The snake's movement was by horizontal undulation, a series of gentle curves, with the body forced against the substrate at each curve. This method of locomotion was made possible by the hundreds of vertebrae that constituted its backbone. The scales of its lower surface were enlarged, forming transverse overlapping plates whose free edge was directed backwards, and to each of which was attached a pair of movable ribs. When the ribs moved forward they carried the plate, or scute, with them. Since the scute was smooth, and its leading edge was protected by the one over it, it slipped comfortably over any irregularity in the surface. There was one disadvantage: when the scute was moved backward, its free rear edge snagged. Thus, to all practical purposes, the snake could move in only one direction: forward.

Although it had no awareness of it, the snake was, in part, retracing its movements of the night before, after it had escaped from the box. It passed within a few feet of the place on the pavement where Matt Olssen had died, where it had bitten Torres. Its path took it across a segment of the Great Lawn. If the grass, burnt dry and tanned by the sun, was a familiar environment to the snake, nevertheless many of the doors its tongue carried to the Jacobson's organ were alien to it.

It glided over the edge of the grass, crossed a walkway, and slid toward the Belvedere Lake. It veered to the left, away from the great upward fling of light from the Delacorte Theatre, and then crawled down to the water's edge.

As it drank, a great shout of laughter rose from the theater. The snake didn't hear it. It lacked an external ear, an ear drum, a tympanic cavity, and eustachian tubes. It was deaf.

Roddy Bamberger leaned toward the girl and whispered, "Let's duck out of here and go to my place and turn on the air conditioner and bring out the fine sherry wine and…" He brushed her cheek with his lips. "… and anything else your heart desires."

Somebody in the row above shushed him. The girl herself didn't answer, didn't even seem to have heard him. She was sitting forward eagerly in her chair, seemingly transported by what was occurring on the lighted stage. Roddy groaned inwardly. Transported, for Godssake, by a bunch of inept emoters without the foggiest notion of how to speak the witty cadences of the great Irish-what else? — master of the English comedy of manners. Some of the speech was as flat as street talk, some of it so badly imitative of flutey mid-Atlantic English that it verged on parody.

He had seen college dramatic society versions that were better. And, Christ, in London he had been privileged to be present at a National Theatre performance of School for Scandal. After that, this thing was sacrilege!

Looking at the girt, still gazing at the stage with idiot rapture, he couldn't imagine how he had ever thought that profile interesting. What had at first seemed to be an enchanting kind of delicacy was really more aptly describable as simpering. He was an ass to have been beguiled by a profile and a set of agreeable small breasts he had permitted himself to fantasize about in various pleasingly diverting ways.

It was all a bloody mess. He should have had more sense than to have allowed himself to be conned into coming here in the first instance. Free theater-like free anything else-was bound to be lousy theater. What you got for nothing was nothing. Nor should he have deceived himself into thinking that the profile and the quivery little tits might lead to a relationship of lasting (or protractedly temporary) value. The girl was worth exactly one dinner, a little arty talk, the air-conditioned bedroom. A one-night stand, and then goodbye forever.

It was all a bloody mess: the play, the girl herself, the ridiculous heat, the chicken and oversweet domestic wine she had put up, and which they had eaten on the buggy Great Lawn surrounded by hundreds of others eating the same cold chicken and hot wine. He despised the crowd around him-the way it dressed, the way it talked, its manners, its uproarious laughter when Sheridan's wit called for a quiet, appreciative smile. Not to mention its collective smell-a blending of sweat, greasy chicken, and pot.

"Arline…" He breathed softly on her cheek, glancing downward at the tender curve of her breast, bra-less under green linen. She turned to him reluctantly, unhappy at being deflected from the play. "Arline." He tuned his voice to a persuasive whisper. "Let's go back to my place." Her eyes kept alternating between him and the stage. "I want to talk to you-seriously."

She made an abrupt gesture, stilling him so that she could catch the next line of the play. Above, somebody was shushing him again. He twisted around to glare back at an angry face covered by black beard.

When Dr. Shapiro finished his morning rounds he went down to the hospital cafeteria for a second breakfast. Papaleo appeared beside his table.

"Did you hear it?"

Papaleo seemed pale and nervous. Shapiro sopped up runny egg with a piece of toast and washed it down with coffee. Then he looked up and said, "Hear what, Dr. Papaleo?"

"On the radio? It came in less than five minutes ago."

"I don't make rounds with a radio, doctor."

Papaleo grimaced, as if. In admission of his own clumsiness, then said, "The radio, a flash, they said two people had been bitten by a snake in the park and died at East Side Hospital."

Shapiro put his fork down with a clatter. "The radio? What else did they say?"

"That's all. That two people had died of snakebite. It was one of those flashes. You know, 'This just in,' and 'more on the story as it develops."'

"Did they say where the information came from?"

"I don't think so."

Shapiro nodded and turned back to his eggs, but Papaleo lingered, fidgeting.

"On the one I treated, tried to treat," Papaleo said. "I have to tell you. There were perforations on the thigh. I guess they were fang marks."

Shapiro stared at him.

Papaleo was sweating. "After you left, I cut the patient's pants off and saw the marks. I actually thought of snakebite, but it didn't make any sense."

"It was your duty to wake me and tell me."

"I know. But you had gone back to sleep, and. Papaleo made a helpless, self-incriminating gesture, then said with some dignity, "I'm sorry, doctor."

My fault, Shapiro thought. He didn't tell me because he was afraid I'd either ream him out or laugh at him. That tells me more about myself than it does about Papaleo. He said, "It's my fault for not insisting on removing the patient's pants."

"Oh." Papaleo tried to smile, then said, "Well, anyway," and hurried away.

Shapiro finished his breakfast and then phoned the M.E.'s office. He asked for the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Torres and, after some phone switching, was connected with Dr. Borkowski.

"How do you like that?" Borkowski seemed tickled. "Fatal snakebite in the middle of Manhattan-isn't that terrific?"

"I've been waiting for your phone call, Dr. Borkowski."

"I was on the verge of it. In fact, I had my hand on the phone when the phone rang and it was you. The phone rang just as I was picking up the phone."

"Yeah, sure, it's a thrilling coincidence," Shapiro said. "I don't mind your making hay with the media, but you might have done me the courtesy-"

"I resent the implication, doctor."

"It wasn't an implication, it was an accusation. And I don't give a fuck whether you resent it or not."

Borkowski was silent a moment, then said stiffly, "The report will be on its way over. Meanwhile, to sum up my findings, the spectral analysis showed-"

"Never mind. I'll get it from the radio like the rest of the public." He overrode Borkowski's protest. "What about the second one?"

"I'm working on it right now. Jesus, it hit him five times, and at least one of them must have caught a vein. What a hell of a shot!" Borkowski had recaptured his gusto. "I swear, a bull's-eye. He was probably dead in fifteen or twenty minutes after he got stuck. Some shot!"

"Your enthusiasm is infectious," Shapiro said. "Look, doctor, I'd appreciate hearing from you as soon as you've finished with him. Me first, and then the media. I promise not to take too much of your time."

Borkowski said, "I resent the implication, doctor. Or the accusation, which is even worse. If you're making an out-and-out accusation, I demand an apology."

Shapiro had been hearing a page for the last half-minute. He jiggled the phone, cutting Borkowski off, and asked the operator what she wanted.

"There are some gentlemen here to see you," the operator said. "From the press. And also. Her voice became breathy, from the television, too."

"Oh, shit," Shapiro said.

In the normal course of events, the Police Commissioner would have read about the snake in the morning report of overnight events prepared for him by his staff; and Hizzonner the Mayor would have been informed of it promptly by one of his young aides. But, instead of driving him to his office at No. 1 Police Plaza, the P.C.'s limousine had taken him directly to City Hall, where he was to help the mayor formulate an optimistic statement on recent crime statistics for presentation at a noontime news conference.

Hizzonner had issued a stem fiat against being disturbed for any reason whatsoever. His aides, mindful of his unpredictability in an election year, were prudently obedient, even though it was their consensus that the story of the snake just barely came under the umbrella of "whatsoever."

The purpose of the news conference was to announce a radical decrease in the homicide rate for the first six months of the year (down a whopping 1 Percent), thus more than offsetting a negligible rise in crimes of violence (19 percent) and felonies (14 percent). Hizzonner would also point with quiet pride to the absence of a major riot (and only one mini-riot) in the city's major ghettos — Harlem, Bedford, Stuyvesant, the South Bronx, and the East Harlem barrio-due to a forceful but understanding police presence, and it is high time that we fully appreciated the sterling professionalism of the city's cops, under the firm but sympathetic guidance of our sterling Police Commissioner. "Don't smile when I say that, Francis, and don't look modest, either. Just stare straight ahead into the camera."

At 11:30, terrified that the mayor might walk into his press conference unbriefed on the snake, one of Hizzonner's aides entered without apology, walked across the room with the early edition of the New York Post, and placed it on the desk beneath Hizzonner's eyes.

The mayor goggled. The news story on page three, to which the aide obligingly turned, was brief, and traced out with photographs and quotations from Dr. Shapiro, Dr. Mukerjee, Dr. Papaleo, and Dr. Borkowski.

There was a single-column cut of each, arranged in a circle around a picture of a semi-naked girl, the Maharani Santha Agnes Chowdhury, playing the flute to a swaying cobra in a Cincinnati nightclub.

A small inset box contained a few facts about Central Park. Acclaimed masterpiece of its justly celebrated architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. One of the great parks of the world, unsurpassed for beauty of conception and design. Its 843 acres larger than London's Hyde Park, Paris's Tuileries Gardens, Berlin's Tiergarten, Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens. Not as large as Rome's Villa Borghese or Vienna's Prater.

Purchased for $5.5 million in 1856, real estate market value today: untold billions.

The lead editorial, obviously a last-minute insertion, consisted of three sentences.

"Dirty pool," the aide said indignantly. "It's one thing for them to endorse your opponent, but-"

"The bastards," Hizzonner said. "I'll show 'ern what I'm doing about it.

I'm leaving no stone untumed, that's what I'm doing about it!"

He used the phrase, later, at his news conference, where it was greeted with a mixture of awe and muffled hilarity. He amplified on this declaration by telling his audience that the Central Park Precinct, which knew the park the way you gentlemen know your wife's, ah, face (laughter), were out in full saturation force, combing every nook and cranny for the interloper, with the able assistance of park personnel.

"Give'em the details, Francis," the mayor said to the P.C.

The P. C., who had only fifteen minutes earlier learned of the details himself by telephone, declared that the men of the Central Park Precinct were fine-combing the park in cars, on horseback, on scooters, and on foot, ably assisted by Parks Department gardeners and grounds men, as well as one of the justly famous Emergency Service Unit trucks.

"How many men is that, all told?" a reporter asked.

It was a good question, and the P.C., frowning in annoyance at being interrupted, ignored it. He knew that the total muster strength of the Central Park Precinct was in the neighbourhood of 120 men, which broke down to 40 per shift. Subtract from that number clerical personnel, special duty officers, anticrime detective units on stakeout detail, shop personnel, officers on vacation and sick call, and the Central Park Precinct probably had not more than 15 men available for fine-tooth combing the 840-odd acres of the park.

"Many of the cars are equipped with loudspeakers," the P.C. said, "instructing people to stay on the walkways and out of heavily brushed areas, to keep to the more frequented parts of the park, to be alert at all times, to make no attempt to deal with the snake if they spot it but to inform a police officer immediately…"

"Mr. Mayor," a reporter said, "are you considering closing the park for the citizens' safety until the snake is found?"

The mayor was too practiced a public performer to blink, but he did pause perceptibly before saying, "You may rest assured, gentlemen, the matter has been under intense study since early this morning."

After the news conference broke up, the mayor, alone with the P.C., permitted his emotions to show. "How'd you like that bastard asking me if I was going to close the park down? He knows the answer as well as I do.

Close the park in the middle of a heat wave when the worthy poor-as if his lousy rag gives a damn about them-are gasping for a breath of air?"

"You'd need a thousand cops to keep people out," the P.C. said, "and even then you couldn't do it. You know people in this city? Try to keep them out and they'd find a hundred ways to get in. Believe me, they'd try to get in."

"Believe me," the mayor said, "I believe you."

After a brief opening citation of the weather 'near record-breaking heat for September with no relief in sight"-the early evening news program on the mayor's favourite television network ("they're somewhat less bad than the others") devoted a whopping eight full minutes of airtime to the story of the snake, exclusive of commercial interruption.

The sequence opened with a panoramic sweep of the park from a circling helicopter ("the most valuable parcel of real estate in the civilized world"). The helicopter swooped low over the Sheep Meadow, headed northward toward the Lake, then rose again for another long shot of the park to its northern terminus at Cathedral Parkway. The whirr of its motor was damped down to accommodate the voice of the anchorman: "Somewhere in the more than eight hundred acres of famed Central Park there lurks an unwelcome visitor to the city-a venomous snake whose deadly bite has already claimed the lives of two victims."

The mayor watched the screen from an armchair in his bedroom on the second floor of Gracie Mansion. From time to time he groaned rhetorically.

The helicopter, now flying very low to the ground, swept swiftly back from north to south. Its camera focused fleetingly on a policeman on horseback or one riding a scooter. "From noontime on, cops from the Central Park Precinct have been scouring the park, thus far without result. Here's Bill Arthur, direct from the park." The scene shifted to ground level, picking up a cop emerging from heavy undergrowth, moving gingerly, beating out in front of him with his nightstick. The camera closed in when the cop reached the walkway.

"Any luck, officer?"

The cop was breathing hard, his face was tomato red, his light blue uniform shirt was darkened by sweat. He looked at the reporter with murder in his eyes. But then, remembering the presence of the camera, he reassembled his features into a mask.

"No sir."

"How long have you been searching?"

"Noon."

The camera shifted to the reporter, who was nodding his head sym pathetically. "Must be pretty hot work."

"Real hot."

The reporter studied the cop dispassionately for a moment, then gave up.

"Back to you, Jerry."

"The police search continues," the anchorman said. "It's hot work, and dangerous, too… Earlier today, reporter Bill Stevens was at East Side Hospital."

Dr. Papaleo, described as "the earnest young intern who treated the first victim of the snake, Ramon Torres," told reporter Bill Stevens how he had watched helplessly as the snake's first victim had died.

"At that time, you didn't know the cause?"

"Not at that time."

Dr. Mukerjee, soft-eyed and soft-spoken, reminded the reporter that his "brilliant snap diagnosis" of cobra-bite was as yet not proven. "It was a bite similar to that of a cobra, shall we say."

Dr. Shapiro, Chief Resident of the hospital, his eyes ringed with fatigue, his lips curling impatiently, answered questions brusquely and minimally.

When the reporter asked him what he would do if another snakebite victim was brought into the hospital, he opened the door of a refrigerator and took out a small cardboard box.

"This is a polyvalent, wide-spectrum antivenin. We received it from the curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo, as did all other hospitals in the area. If another snakebite victim is brought in he'll be injected with this serum intravenously."

"May I ask which snake this serum is effective against?"

Consulting the lid of the cardboard box, Dr. Shapiro said, "Bitis, naja, dendroaspis. Bitis covers various species of vipers and adders, naja is the cobra, dendroaspis are arboreal snakes, such as the mambas of Africa. If our snake is not one of these, the antivenin will be useless. If it is one of these, it may be effective. The most effective antivenins are the specific ones: cobra serum for cobra bite, gaboon viper serum for gaboon viper bite, and so forth. Identifying the snake in the park is still of paramount importance. If you'll excuse me, I must attend to a patient."

"From East Side Hospital, Bill Stevens."

"Where did the snake come from, and how did it get into the park?" The anchorman answered his own question: "Nobody knows." Zoos, pet shops, laboratories, exotic animal farms-all of these had been queried, none had reported a missing snake. Nor had any individuals who owned pet snakes come forward. Perhaps such an individual existed, who for obvious reasons didn't wish to make a self-incriminating admission? A plea from a Deputy Commissioner of the N.Y.P.D.: "If you are such an individual, and your snake has escaped, call anonymously. It is vital that we know exactly what kind of snake the death snake is, so that the proper antidote can be stocked." The Deputy Commissioner made an appeal to the public for information, and gave a special police number, which the camera flashed on the screen.

"Where did the snake come from, and how did it get into the park? Thus far, we do not know. And perhaps we shall never find out."

The anchorman's face faded, and a tinkle of music introduced a laundry detergent commercial. The mayor found it mildly interesting.

After the commercial, the news report continued, setting the mood with a brief shot of a cobra in its glass cage at the Staten Island Zoo, erect, hood spread, eyes glittering. Next came a close-up shot of the mayor "at this morning's news conference at City Hall." Hizzonner leaned forward in his chair and watched himself with a blend of professional detachment and affection. "… leave no stone unturned…" Hizzonner sat back again when the camera focused on the Police Commissioner's speech.

Hizzonner, speaking aloud, passed judgment on his performance. "The one thing you can say for me is that I know where the camera is every second.

It must be instinctive."

Special Operations Division (SOD), with headquarters in Flushing Meadows, Corona, consists of the following units: Emergency Service, Tactical Patrol, Street Crime, Auto Crime, Aviation, Harbour, and Mounted (known as Horse Soldiers). The most visible and widely publicized is the Emergency Service Unit, specialists in the oddball assignment. If there's a cat at the top of a pole, a smoke-out in the subway, a sniper to be dislodged, a bomb to be defused, a riot to be quelled, a building to be scaled, a finger stuck in a soda machine, someone trapped in an elevator, the ESU comes to the rescue. They are equipped for every conceivable emergency: oxygen masks and tanks, keys to the subway escape hatches, crampons, stun guns, floodlights, generators, jacks capable of lifting subway cars, rifles equipped with sniper scopes…

The man who was placed in charge of the field operation to find the snake in the park was Captain Thomas Eastman. As a younger man he had revelled in shinnying up poles, sliding down elevator cables, and carrying overcome victims out of subway tunnels, but now, with a bad knee, a general lack of fitness (weight, 240), and a recent melancholic awareness of his age (48), he directed the men in his command from the sidelines.

Captain Eastman was presented with his assignment by his boss, Deputy Inspector Vincent Scott, who had been the penultimate recipient of a buck that had begun with the mayor, passed to the Police Commissioner, and then descended in orderly steps to a Deputy Commissioner, the Chief of Operations, a Borough Commander, and the Deputy Chief in command of SOD. Eastman, who had left his office at 6 o'clock for his home in Hollis, was recalled by telephone. He arrived back at SOD Headquarters at 8:45.

"About the killer snake in the park," the DI said sourly. "You know which killer snake in which park I'm talking about?"

"Yessir."

"We just been given it."

"I thought we were already working on it."

"Just a couple of trucks and truck personnel helping out. Now we're running the show. You know anything about snakes?"

"Nothing special." Eastman pondered for a moment. "You're supposed to catch them behind the head with a long stick with a clamp at the end that closes up when you press a handle. Like the things grocers used to use years ago to bring packages down from a high shelf?"

"You don't have to catch it," the DI said. "Just get rid of it. Just get in the park and find this sonofabitch and kill it."

"That's what they were trying to do today, and didn't do it. The big problem is the size of the park. You know how big it is, Chief?"

"Certainly, I know how big it is. Fifth Avenue to Central Park West, 59th to 110th."

"Eight hundred and forty-some acres. I don't have any idea how to cover all that area."

"You don't need an idea, you need manpower. These days, everything is manpower." The DI shook his head. "You know how we killed snakes when I was a kid? We grabbed them by the tail and cracked the whip with 'em, just snapped their heads against a rock. Turn up a rock, grab them by the tail, and crack the whip…"

The DI's eyes were inturned, wandering in a distant and undoubtedly more agreeable past. Eastman curbed his impatience and waited for nostalgia to run its course. The DI's mood changed abruptly with a hardening of his eyes.

"You're getting manpower, as much as you need, and if you don't turn that snake up, it's your ass."

Somebody must be kicking his butt, Eastman thought, so he's kicking mine.

Definition of chain of command. He said cautiously, "You say I'm getting manpower? How much?"

"Five hundred." The DI paused to savour Eastman's astonishment. "They want that snake real bad."

Eastman's face was impassive again. "Yessir."

"Pulling them out of the high-crime areas, would you believe it? It's political. It's a red-hot item. You get my meaning? You better damn well turn it up."

"Yessir."

"Planning and Operations is putting the package together. You'll have the five hundred, or so they say, tomorrow morning. They're working late on it. You and me have a date to go down there." The DI's eyes gleamed with bitter amusement. "Not much sleep for you tonight, Thomas."

Who sleeps at night, anyway, Eastman thought, and said, "I wouldn't mind some technical help. There's a young fellow at the Bronx Zoo-"

"Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that's one thing." The DI shrugged. "People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that's serious. You hear the news this evening?"

Eastman nodded. "John Q. Public is bitching."

"Right. That's why you got a whole army of cops to play with. They want a big police presence in the park. You get the meaning?"

"About seven or eight months ago," Eastman said, "there was this rattlesnake some nut kept for a pet in a small apartment house in Washington Heights, I think it was. It escaped, and I went down with a detachment. That was before my knee. We had a couple of those snake catching sticks, I think. Anyway, we evacuated all the tenants, and we tossed that house. I mean really tossed it, cellar to roof, every nook and cranny.

We must have been four or five hours at it, walking on eggshells all the time, and we couldn't find it. Then this young guy from the zoo heard about it and came down with a stick and a bag, and inside of five minutes he found the snake curled up near the boiler in the cellar. He lifted it up on the stick, popped it into the bag, and took it off to the zoo."

"An apartment house," the DI said. "That can't compare to Central Park."

"What impressed me, Chief, was not only that he knew right away where to look for it, but he saw it. For some reason, it didn't rattle. I forgot to ask why." Eastman shrugged. "We checked out the boiler area several times, and it was there all the time, only we didn't see it. But he saw it right away."

"We already got one of these characters, herpa-something, from the Natural History Museum, he's supposed to be helping us."

"I saw him on the tube," Eastman said. "Maybe he's okay, but this young guy… well, he didn't fool around."

"Yeah. I know what you mean. The Museum character acted like a professor, like he did a lot of reading about snakes. Get hold of this kid, if you want to." The DI looked at his watch. "I hope you had something to eat, because we got to go downtown right this minute."

Molting was one of the imperatives that governed the snake's existence.

Unlike most animals, a snake never stopped growing from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Because it literally outgrew its horny outer skin, it was obliged to shed at regular intervals, three or four times a year.

For several days now the snake's skin had been darkening and dulling, and its eyes, sheltered behind transparent protective lenses, had begun to dim. It was time to molt.

Because it was defenseless during molting, the snake sought the shelter of the topmost branches of its tree. It stretched its sinuous length out almost to its full extent, and began to rub its face against a branch of the tree. When the skin around its lips broke away, the process of molting was under way. Squirming vigorously over the next few hours, the snake advanced laboriously, like a finger being pulled out of a tight glove, until it had worked itself completely out of the old skin, which ended up at the tail, inside out.

The new skin was bright, the colours fresh and attractive. The snake was at its handsomest. Its eyesight was keen behind its new transparent lens.

The old skin, feathery, translucent, dropped a few feet after it had been discarded, and then caught and held fast in a net of twigs, undetectable from ground level.

As always after molting, the snake was hungry. In the darkness, it coiled down the tree and sped away in search of food.

Hizzonner was not awake for the eleven o'clock television news. It was just as well; it contained little that might have comforted him. The program opened with a sequence showing the cops who had been sweeping the park leaving as darkness came on: hot, dispirited, out-of-sorts, a beaten army executing a strategic withdrawal.

"Some of these policemen were on the verge of collapse, and those who criticized the effort-or lack of it-were on the whole sympathetic to the frustrated policemen themselves. Mostly, their barbs were directed at the mayor."

The mayoral candidate of the opposition party, wearing a white shirt and tie, his sparse hair ruffled by the breeze from the air conditioner in his elegant living room: "… sorry for this pitiful handful of sincere, dedicated men. The niggardly number of police assigned to hunt down the snake is only too typical of the halfway measures that have characterized this administration for the past four years. The hard-pressed people of our city deserve better. Their God-given right to enjoy the beauty of their park in safety and with peace of mind has been flouted by a mayor who…"

A former mayor, said to be grooming himself for a run for the governorship: "I don't want to come down too hard on the mayor, but if I was still in office I would mount the most comprehensive dragnet ever seen in this city."

From Washington, a member of the New York congressional delegation: "The good people of my district are being bitten to death by this deadly snake, and it has got to stop. If the mayor is unwilling or unable to do the job, then I say let's get someone on the job who can do the job. I have been trying to reach the governor in Albany, requesting him to send reinforcements, whether it be the National Guard or a contingent of state troopers, or both. My constituency must be protected."

A half-dozen new groups pledge their support for the march on City Hall in the morning. Shots of militant women, clamouring for the attention of camera and microphone. Following a commercial, the telecast continues with a shot of the same cobra that had been seen on the 6 o'clock news, then of a giant anaconda being held in the air by six men, then of a sidewinder rattlesnake slithering across desert sands in California.

Finally, a close-up of a Russell's viper being milked at a snake farm in Brazil. "Not all snake poison is malign. The venom being taken from this Russell's viper will be used as a coagulant for persons suffering from haemophilia."

An interview with the curator of reptiles of a Midwest zoo, filmed in front of the glass cage of a puff adder that had bitten him six months ago. The curator assures his interrogator that he harbours no in feelings toward the snake. "I made him irritable, you see." Touching a scar on his forearm. "Fortunately, with the prompt administration of antivenin, I recovered without any lasting ill effects."

In her modest but thoughtfully furnished apartment, responding to a hushed and commiserative reporter, Ms. Arline Simpkin, friend of Roddy Bamberger, second victim of the snake in the park: "Although it was only our first date, I realized that he was a rare type of person warm, cultivated, and so in tune with life." Large eyes brimming with tears.

"And to be struck down in the full flush of virile manhood." She pauses, ponders, seems to wonder if her remark is open to sexual interpretation, and flushes. "It isn't fair. It just isn't fair."

The anchorman: "Ms. Simpkin's statement provided the police with their first clue as to the possible whereabouts of the snake. It is, or was, in the environs of the Delacorte Theatre."

— hi a cluttered kitchen, with two small, solemn-eyed children wandering in and out of camera range, Mrs. Carmen Torres, mother of the deceased Ramon Torres, pretty, plump, wearing her hair in a towering beehive, rattles away in animated Spanish that is translated by a tall lean man with a scarred face and deep black eyes. The interpreter says, "She say her Ramon is a good boy." Mrs. Torres rattles on. "Once or twice he is arrested and the police try to frame him because he is Puerto Rican, but God is just, and he is sprung." Mrs. Torres waits impatiently for him to finish his translation, regarding him with a glittering, wary eye. She spouts Spanish again. "He was the sole support of herself and his three little brothers and one sister. And now that he is gone, who is to pay the rent and for the food? She wishes to know this."

The reporter asks the interpreter what Ramon was doing in the park at 3 o'clock in the morning. The interpreter puts the question to Mrs. Torres, who answers indignantly. He translates: "She say he is in the park to cool off, and because it remind him of the verdure of his beloved Puerto Rico.

So he stroll in the park, never expecting to be stung by a snake." Wrapping up, the reporter asks the interpreter if he is a member of the Torres family. "I am Roberto Ortiz, lawyer. I represent Mrs. Torres in this matter. We are filing a suit in the morning against the city for negligence. One million dollars for depriving this fine lady of her sole support and darling son." Mrs. Torres says in English, "Wuh mee-yun dolls."

The anchorman presses his earphone with a finger, listening. "We're going to take you to Columbus Circle for an on-the-spot report, live, from Marcia Brooks."

"This is Marcia Brooks, live, from Columbus Circle, where, as you can see, there is plenty going on."

The camera pans over a crowd milling around near the Merchant's Gate entrance to the park and clustered around the marble Maine Monument.

Standing out among dark complexions, bare chests, shorts, is a group of young, well-scrubbed, neatly dressed young men and women who seem to be haranguing the crowd, or any part of it that will listen. They are jeered at, laughed at, mocked, but they seem impervious to it.

Marcia Brooks whispers into her microphone, "These self-contained young people are Puries, members of the Church of the Purification, followers of the well-known religious sect led by the Reverend Sanctus Milanese. Let's listen."

She insinuates her microphone near a pale intense young man in a white, open-collared shirt, who is speaking to a young black man wearing a colourful bandanna around his head and an earring in his nose. "The snake is Satan, or rather Satan's messenger, who has taken the form of a serpent. It has been sent here to earth by the devil to subvert and proselytize and recruit sinners for the legions of hell."

The young black man: "Man, you full of…" His bad word is alertly blipped. "Onliest thing it recruit so far is two stiffs."

The crowd cheers, laughs, slaps thighs. The young black man grins and takes a bow.

Nearby, a young woman wearing a light blue, crisp dirndl, her eyes flashing, says, "You are deluded if you think it is funny. The snake is truly Satan's messenger. It is wily, it is evil incarnate and it will easily elude the police. It fears only the pure in heart and spirit, the army of Christ."

Marcia Brooks has edged toward the young woman, but before she can question her there is a commotion. The black man in the bandanna has suddenly become threatening. He is shouting, raging. He takes a boxer's stance, dances, draws back his fist. But before he can throw his punch, he is seized around the neck by a tall young man dressed in a dark suit, and hurled to the ground. The crowd surges backward, then forward, there is a flash of fists, some shoving, but by now six cops are there, pushing the crowd apart, breaking it open.

Marcia Brooks backs away from the fray. Somewhat breathlessly, she says that the Puries appear to be out in force, not only here in Columbus Circle but near the Pulitzer Fountain at Fifth Avenue and 59th, as well as at other locations on the perimeter of the park. It is her impression that the tall man who threw the man in the bandanna to the ground is a member of the Purie security squad, who call themselves Christ's Cohorts, but whom some people have bluntly characterized as a strong-arm squad.

Behind her, the police seem to have quelled the outburst. "The Puries took to the streets about ten o'clock this evening, and these ardent young followers of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese have been spreading the word that the snake has been sent to earth from, well, I guess from below, to…" She pauses, listens to the voice in her earphone. She nods, then says quickly, "I asked one of the Puries if they would be among those represented at City Hall tomorrow morning. I was told that they would not, definitely not, because, and I quote, 'we do not seek intercession from mortal man, but only from God Himself, Who speaks to us with the voice of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese.' That from a Purie-"

She is cut off. In the studio, the anchorman says hurriedly, "Thank you, Marcia. We take you now, live, to Purity House, the Fifth Avenue mansion of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese."

A tall blond man wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, stands in the opening of a high, carved, gleaming doorway, facing a thicket of microphones. He says expressionlessly, "The Reverend Milanese is not available. He is at prayer." Reporters shout out questions. He responds, "Yes, I believe he will make a statement." "When?" "When God instructs him to."

The door is shut firmly. The camera holds on its polished elegance for a moment, then fades back to the studio.

"A final note, just in," the anchorman says. "Police cars will continue into the night to patrol the park with loudspeakers, urging the public to stay away." He consults a slip of paper. "We are informed that the Central Park Precinct has received over twenty calls from residents of the buildings rimming the park, on Fifth Avenue, Central Park South and Central Park West, complaining that the blaring of the loudspeakers is interfering with their sleep and, in some cases, the audibility of their television."

Frozen in that extraordinary fossil like quality of total immobility peculiar to reptiles, the snake watched the rat move along the base of the wall. The rat, which might have been intent on some prey of its own, failed to see the snake until the very last moment before it struck, and then it was too late.

The rat reacted immediately to the venom. Its brown hair stood up spikily, its body curled in on itself in an agonized spasm, and it bit frantically at the site of the bite. It turned away from the snake in terror, and with erratic movement retreated along the base of the stone wall. The snake, driven by its post-sloughing hunger, followed swiftly.

It overtook the rat, its head low to the ground now, its mouth gaped, but it did not strike again. It curled in front of the stumbling rat and faced it. The rat made an effort to retreat, but its legs gave out and it collapsed. It lay quietly, its teeth bared in a rictus, its eyes half shut. Although the snake customarily waited until its prey was dead, it did not do so now. It opened its mouth wide and took the feebly struggling rat between its teeth. With one side of its mouth hooked firmly into the rat's head, the snake pushed the teeth of the other side forward a short distance and engaged them. It did not take notice of the shudder that preceded the rat's death, but continued to push forward by alternate investment of its teeth until the rat was completely swallowed.

When Mark Converse opened his eyes, the python was in the direct line of his vision and appeared to be staring at him.

The python was under four feet long, just a baby, but lately it had taken to having notions about the cat. A few days ago it had curled down the lamp standard and begun to constrict the cat. The cat had raked a claw across its ventral area before bounding away, leaving a bloody streak on the python's body, but it could just as well have taken out an eye with the same effort. Eventually, Converse knew, one of them would have to go.

Probably the python, considering the expense involved in keeping it fed with mice and rats and small snakes. The cat could make do with a can of something off the supermarket shelf.

Wait a minute. He'd have to dispose of both of them, wouldn't he, when he went to Australia? Dunce. Better start thinking about it. He could probably farm out the cat, but who would take a python? So it would doubtless go to the zoo. Meanwhile, it had made a nice pet, and even seemed to show some affection, or at least tolerance, for him.

It was sprawled on the bottom of its glass cage, still with the appearance of staring at him, though he was sure it was asleep. The air conditioning was on, and the cold made it lethargic. Normally, out of the cage, it would have found a sunny place on the floor to bask. That was another thing: it was a nuisance having to cage it every time he had a girl around. He hadn't found a woman yet who liked snakes, and that included his ex-wife and both of his serious ex-relationships. Maybe, if he ever found a girl who liked snakes, he might marry again. Jesus, not again.

He bounded up off the pillow and looked at the clock. Quarter of seven.

In the morning, most likely, though you couldn't tell one way or another with the dark-green, light-tight window shades drawn.

The telephone rang. Must be evening. Nobody would phone him at quarter of seven in the morning. The phone rang a second time, and he reached for it across the red-gold head on the other pillow. She was buried to the nose under the blanket, and she hadn't stirred. She has earned her rest, he thought tenderly, and picked up the phone as it rang for a third time.

"This is Captain Eastman of the New York Police Department. Excuse me for calling you at this hour of the morning. I hope I didn't wake you."

Morning. Okay, morning. His heart began to thump. "Who?"

He meant who has died, which of my distant parents has had a fatal heart attack. But his caller misinterpreted his question. "Captain Eastman, NYPD. Emergency Service Unit. Remember me? That rattlesnake up in Washington Heights last year? I guess I was still a lieutenant then."

Converse breathed out in relief. "Oh, sure." He didn't remember any Eastman, captain or lieutenant, only a faceless lot of jittery, blundering cops. "Got another snake?"

There was a very long pause, during which Converse thought he heard Eastman muttering to himself. But when he spoke it was still in an apologetic tone. "I got your home number from the night man at the zoo.

He said you're not with the zoo anymore?"

"Yeah, I quit a few weeks ago. I'm supposed to be going off to Australia with an expedition, to bring back specimens… " Autobiography at seven in the morning? Forget it. The head on the other pillow was stirring. Converse said, "Where's this one?"

There was another protracted silence, and now Eastman spoke very slowly and with exaggerated clarity. "I guess I must have woken you from a pretty deep sleep. I'm sorry. I'm talking about the snake in Central Park, Mr. Converse."

"There's a snake in Central Park?" The girl was turning toward him. Her eyes were circled, She was smiling, showing her small white teeth. "On the loose? Another rattler?"

Eastman's voice became suddenly edgy. "Are you putting me on, Mr. Converse?"

Converse reacted to Eastman's tone. He said peevishly, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Eastman said, "Chris sake," and then, with wonder in his voice, "Where the hell have you been since twelve noon yesterday?"

"In the sack. Is there a law against it?"

"In the sack for twenty hours? You're some hell of a sleeper."

"Well, it hasn't been all sleep." The girl's hand was moving slowly toward him under the sheet. "I mean, we got up and… I got up and had something to eat every once in a while. You know, it wasn't all sleep."

"Be damned," Eastman said. "Still, didn't you turn on the TV or the radio or see a newspaper?"

"Well, you know, there wasn't time." Converse reached under the sheet and captured the girl's hand, stopping its movement. "You mean this snake has been on the radio and TV? Honestly, I didn't know."

"Look," Eastman said, "I haven't got time to fill you in on everything you've missed, except to tell you that this particular snake has bitten two citizens and they're both dead."

"You're kidding." It wasn't at all what Converse had meant to say, or what the occasion seemed to call for, but he felt stupefied. He released the girl's hand in order to gesture. "Killed two people? Are you sure it's a snake? In Central Park? Christ-what kind of a snake is it?"

"We don't know. It's a snake, all right, and it's still at large. The reason I'm calling-I remember how quickly you found that rattlesnake, and I'd like you to help us out again."

"Christ, yes." The girl had turned toward him. The sheet had slipped down, or she had helped it slip down, baring her breasts. He faced away from her, and felt the soft warmth of her breasts against his back. "In Central Park?

That's all you know about its whereabouts?"

"We think it's in the area of the Delacorte Theatre. At least, that's where it was when it bit one of the victims. So far as I know, it could be anywhere."

"Anywhere." The girl's arm had fallen over his hip and her fingers were trailing lazily over his stomach. "Do you know how big the park is?"

"Eight hundred and forty acres," Eastman said wearily. "That's the reason we need all the help we can get."

"It's incredible," Converse said. The girl's fingernails were nipping at his thighs now, and he was having difficulty concentrating. "It's absolutely unbelievable."

"Only if you've been in the sack for the last twenty-four hours," Eastman said. "The rest of us don't have any trouble believing it."

There he goes again, Converse thought. Since when is it anybody's affair how much time a citizen spends in bed? He started to ask the captain if he thought he was in fucking Russia or something, but the girl's fingers had grasped him, and all that came out of his mouth was a groan.

"I'm sorry, that was out of line." Eastman sounded more tired than contrite. "The point is-can you help us?"

"Of course." The girl had kicked the sheet off, and, looking down, Converse could see her fingers moving upward in slow, mischievous circles. "Look, can I call you back? I'll call you back in a couple of minutes. Okay?"

Eastman let his breath out in controlled exasperation. "To be perfectly frank, there isn't that much time. We've got a big search operation set up at nine o'clock. I'd like a chance to talk to you before we begin. But if you can't…"

"I can. I can. Ali." Converse bit his shoulder to muffle a groan. "Where are you, where can I meet you?"

"I'm phoning from police headquarters, but I'm leaving directly for the park. Do you know where all those statues of Latin American liberators are, at the Sixth Avenue entrance?"

"I know it, I know it. I'll be there in half an hour."

But it was a half hour before he even got out of bed. He kissed the girl chastely, and told her that she was wonderful and that he would call her sometime. He dressed quickly in jeans and a T-shirt imprinted with the legend Duchy of Liechtenstein All Stars, and ran down the steps into Charles Street. He went around to Seventh Avenue and bought a couple of papers. The Daily News front page, under a headline that read SNAKE, SLAYER OF TWO, STILL AT LARGE, showed an aerial view of Manhattan being constricted by a giant boa. The Times was predictably more circumspect.

Its picture was also an aerial view of the park. The caption under the photo said, in effect, try to find the handful of searchers in this vast expanse. The three-column, three-line headline read, POLICE SEARCH OF PARK FAILS IN EFFORT TO FIND SNAKE; TWO ARE DEAD OF BITES.

The turnout at City Hall, doubtless because of the heat, was considerably smaller than expected, to the relief of the police guard, which was dangerously thin and might have been overwhelmed by a large aggressive mob.

The operation at the park had strained police manpower to an unacceptable limit.

The demonstrators who did appear-the police estimate of their number was 150-were highly vociferous and reasonably energetic in waving their home-made banners and placards. There were a few clashes between bodies representing diametrically opposed viewpoints, a rough division between those who wanted the park closed (mainly white and middle class) and those who wanted it to remain open (predominantly black and Hispanic). No blood was drawn. Among the sectarian splinter groups present were the Schweitzerites, animal lovers who felt that the snake, as one of God's creatures, should not be hunted down but given free run of the park; a group of environmentalists petitioning for the razing of outlying slum areas for the purpose of creating a green belt; and a faction of welfare recipients demanding an immediate increase in their monthly payments.

The mayor, who had been known to venture out onto the steps of City Hall to address other assemblages on other occasions, did not make an appearance.

Instead, he sent forth one of his young assistants, a man with a curly black beard and, although he was a graduate of an Ivy League college, a demotic New York accent that disarmed all but the most intransigent of crowds. Speaking with impeccable timing in the troughs between waves of boos and catcalls, he told the demonstrators that Hizzonner was unable to talk to them, much as he wished to, because he was on the phone to the president to ask for increased federal assistance to the city; he had made his connection and was on hold. The bearded man reminded the complainants that the police were at this very moment sweeping the park in force, under the stem instructions of the mayor to "find the snake, or I'll know the reason why." He shouted to them to "have faith," and then ran up the steps and into the building. People began drifting away. Others surrounded three pushcart vendors selling soft drinks and ice cream. A hard core, obviously the creatures of the opposition candidate, continued to call for the appearance of the mayor, but their ranks kept thinning. The demonstration was, to all intents and purposes, finished.

At 10: 30 the police removed the barriers.

If I wanted to die of thirst, Police Officer Fleming told himself, I would've joined the French Foreign Legion.

The only thing that was keeping him going was the promise of a lunch break once they had finished sweeping the area between the 79th and 85th Street transverses. He had been pouring sweat ever since the start. His uniform was soaked, his eyes smarted, his tongue felt like a slab of wood. So much sweat had run down into his shoes that he squished at every step. Still, he seemed to be holding up a lot better than most of the overweight cops.

Funny, you'd think the fat ones had more schmaltz to bum, but it was the wiry types like himself who were doing the best.

He trudged on, thankful for small things, like not having to circumscribe the Belvedere Lake, like a lot of the others did, because of their position in the line. By now, Fleming was just more or less going through the paces.

He kept his eyes on the ground, but mostly because it was too much trouble to keep his head up. As for looking up into trees, he had quit doing that when he had heard a Parks Department gardener say that there were over 100,000 trees in the park. Even with 500 cops that figured out to better than 200 trees per man!

By now, Fleming didn't give a shit whether they caught the snake or not. In fact, he was positive it was hopeless. He had stopped having that crawly feeling that started somewhere down in his sweating toes and worked itself up to the scrotum. Not that he was any less queasy about snakes but that he was just plain numb.

Nobody was talking to each other anymore. Earlier there had been a lot of fooling around and joking, but now nobody had the spirit for it. The mood had become sullen, morose, and Fleming was willing to bet that, in his thoughts, everybody was planning early retirement. How many had collapsed and been dragged off to the hospital with heat prostration or heat stroke? That stuff was dangerous, life threatening. A few times already he had contemplated faking heat prostration so he could get off the line. He was sorry he hadn't done it, though now there was no point to it. Twenty minutes or so and they'd have their lunch break, and he was pretty sure they didn't serve beer in a hospital.

There were plenty of people in the park, some of them lying in the sun (dumbheads!) or playing ball (dumbheads!) and they moved slowly out of the way of the sweep when they bothered to move at all. Earlier, some Puries had scuffled with cops and been detained, but it was too much trouble to pull them in, so they had been turned loose and told to get the hell out of the park. Phony, snotty bunch of kids they called that a religion? Now the cops weren't even bothering anymore. If somebody was laying down on the Great Lawn, let him be, it was a cinch he wasn't laying on top of the snake.

A loudspeaker blared, and the comfortable sonofabitch in the car said, "Okay, boys, we're finishing up this part of the park, and then its lunch and all the beer you can drink-if you can afford it, ha-haha…

Ha-ha-ha. Jerk. Fleming took a deep breath, put his head down, and ploughed upward into an area full of trees and thick brush. It was the kind of terrain which, earlier, they had entered with great caution and checked with the utmost thoroughness. A low-hanging branch snapped across his face, and damn near gave him a fit. He wiped irrationally at his mouth as if the snake itself had brushed across his face. Christ, if this wasn't over soon he was gonna start screaming.

The snake was lying near the top of its tree when it first saw the approaching figure. As the figure came closer, the snake lost sight of it. The figure moved toward the tree and came into the snake's view again. The snake slithered downward, silent, swift, its fresh skin blending with the background of leaves and branches. Its flicking tongue picked up odour substances.

When the figure was directly below the tree it disturbed a low-hanging branch. The snake anchored itself by its tail as the figure paused. It retracted the anterior portion of its body, mouth gaping, and tensed to strike downward.

The figure moved on.

The snake held its threatening posture, hissing softly, until the figure disappeared from sight. Then it climbed back up to the topmost branches.

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."

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."

"I guess not." Eastman's fleeting expression of hope disappeared. "You want to get started?"

"Might as well. There are two things we can try. We can shine a powerful flashlight beam around, and if the animal is nearby, the light bounces off its retina and you pick up the eye-shine. Trouble is, it's a local effect. You can't shine a light in the snake's eye if it's a block away" Eastman grunted. "What's the other thing?"

"Stake out a watering place. Snakes are mostly, though not exclusively, nocturnal animals. If it wants a drink, it'll probably come out for it at night."

"You know how much water there is in the park?"

"You told me this morning about a hundred and fifty acres. It's a very long shot, but there isn't much choice. The odds might be a little better tomorrow morning. Snakes are coldblooded, and have to lie in the sun to warm themselves up for an hour or so. Maybe less than that in this kind of weather, because they don't lose too much heat during the night. They like to bask early in the morning, and they Eke lying on a rock if there's one around."

"You know how many rocks there are in the park?"

"It's a problem. But if you give me a week or so, I'll guarantee to turn it UP."

"Look," Eastman said, "you're the expert and I have a lot of confidence in you. But it didn't take those two guys who got bitten any week to turn it up, did it? Both of them found it inside of twenty-four hours of each other."

"Yeah, well," Converse said, "they were just lucky. It was pure dumb luck."

Converse decided to stake out the Belvedere Lake because it was there, or near there, that Roddy Bamberger had been bitten. For all anyone knew, the snake might have been going to or coming from a drink when Bamberger had run across it.

"But it could have drunk in a lot of places." He tapped his fingers on Eastman's police department map of the park. "The Lake to the south, the Conservatory Water to the southeast, or even here…" With a broad sweep of his palm he covered the Receiving Reservoir that ran almost the entire width of the park between the 85th and 97th Street transverses.

"It's long odds," Eastman said. "Why don't we use some manpower and stake out all of the possible watering holes?"

"Because there's only one of me," Converse said, "and your cops would probably miss it or else step on it in the dark and get bitten."

Eastman said, "We'd better go back over your contract and include a breach of modesty clause." He covered a yawn with his hand. "We know the snake was around the Belvedere Lake a couple of nights ago. Is it their custom to hang around in one place?"

"Again, it depends on the species. As a rule, snakes aren't all that territorial except when they're breeding, so it could be anywhere in the park. But at least it's a starting place."

"We're not going to find it, right?"

"It isn't likely," Converse said. "We need time."

"We haven't got any," Eastman said.

They left the precinct around nine in a squad car driven by a patrolman who took them out of the park into Central Park West, then brought them back in again at the Hunter's Gate and drove on the pedestrian walks past the Swedish Schoolhouse, the Shakespeare Garden, and the darkened Delacorte Theatre. Except for one group of half a dozen young men and women whom they took to be Puries, there was no evidence that citizens were still at large in the park searching for the snake.

"At least I hope that's the case," Eastman said. "Muggers don't take kindly to having crowds of people wandering around in their park after dark."

The police car pulled over to one side of the walkway and parked.

Converse and Eastman got out and walked down the embankment to the lake.

"This is as good as anyplace else. We might as well sit down."

"Suppose it comes along," Eastman said. "I mean, sitting down, we'd be sitting ducks, wouldn't we?"

"Of course, if it comes down for a drink on the other side of the lake we won't see it. But it was near here that that fellow was bitten."

"You're sure it's okay to sit down?"

"Sure. That way there's no chance of our stepping on it."

"If you say so." Eastman touched the Pilstrom tongs. "I know what this stick is for. The pillowcase-I remember you putting that rattlesnake into some kind of a yellow bag."

"It was a yellow pillowcase. Listen, captain, it would be better if we didn't talk. Okay?"

"I thought snakes were deaf."

"They are. I'm not. I want to be able to hear it if it comes."

Eastman fell silent. Behind them, the driver had turned off the car's motor and lights. Converse could see him behind the wheel. Above them, the sky seemed to be pressing down, as if it bore a tangible weight of clouds. It was the color of lead, except where it was tinged with red from the puffing of neons in the center of the city. The oppressiveness of the heat seemed worse than ever. The park was quiet in the still air, except for the occasional sound of an auto horn or a noisy transmission as a car accelerated.

Eastman was sitting motionless with his head bowed, his hands clasped on the grass between his legs. He was probably terrific on stakeouts, Converse thought, a man who knew how to do that most difficult of things, wait. If the snake came along, Eastman wouldn't give them away. Not that there was much chance of it. Even if it was still in the area, even if it did come to the lake for a drink, it would be next to impossible to detect unless it practically ran into them.

He shifted his position slightly and dabbed at his sweaty face with a comer of the pillowcase. Eastman hadn't moved, not even to scratch his nose or mop up sweat. His breathing was regular, and Converse realized that he was asleep. He smiled in the darkness, and settled himself into a more comfortable position. But he kept his head raised, peering through the gloom for something that might never come and, if it did, might come and go unseen and unheard. He felt something on the back of his hand. A raindrop.

The snake curved in its flowing S-movement, propelling its great length forward swiftly toward the water it had drunk from on the previous nights. From time to time it paused to taste the air with its darting tongue. When it felt the first drops of rain it stopped. It raised its head high, tongue testing. Then the rain came down in a sudden torrent.

The snake slid into a coil as the downpour pelted it. It lowered its head to within an inch or two of the ground, and moved from side to side in an almost dancelike rhythm.

The downpour beat against its body, colder than it liked. The rain was so heavy it bounced off the parched ground, and quickly formed puddles.

The snake uncoiled and slid forward again toward the lake.

Then it stopped, dipped its head, and drank from a puddle. Afterwards, it returned to its tree.

After the first warning drop or two the rain fell out of the sky in sheets. In a few seconds, Converse was soaked to the skin. Nevertheless, Eastman continued to sleep through it. Converse shook him awake.

"Christ," Eastman said. "Where did this come from?"

"Let's go."

Converse held out his hand, and Eastman came to his feet awkwardly and with some effort. With the rain soaking him he looked old and bedraggled.

They ran to the squad car and jammed into the front seat beside the driver.

"Now what?" Eastman said.

"Maybe it'll cool off the weather," the driver said.

"Now we can go home," Converse said.

"Can't we sit here and watch from the car?"

Converse shook his head. "It won't come tonight, not now."

His technique was deplorable, but his stamina was prodigious, and he was sweet in a dumb kind of way. Stamina and sweetness normally ranked well down on Jane Redpath's scale of masculine virtues, so it remained an open question in her mind as to whether or not she would have gone to bed with him if he hadn't offered to go to the menagerie with her. At this point the matter was purely academic.

"This point" was 3:30 in the morning. The alarm clock was clamoring, and here he was again, looming over her, undepleted and eager, broaching her sore pussy with a miraculous erection. She opened to him, halfway between weariness and helplessness, and wondered if she couldn't catch a catnap in the few minutes until he was done. But instead she responded with enthusiasm to his thrust, and finished up squealing with pain and delight.

While she was showering, he parted the curtain and stepped in with her.

She felt him against her, and realized, incredible as it might seem, that he was prepared for another assault, so she turned on the cold water full force, and even his Phoenix-like member wasn't up to coping with such a deterrent. He dwindled, and then she had to put up only with his cavorting and hollering and pounding his chest and spitting streams of water and a few other locker-room antics. Finally she turned off the water and jumped out of the shower stall, and before he could rouse himself again, without bothering to dry herself thoroughly, put on her jeans and T-shirt. He tried to take them off again, but she fended him off and chivvied him into getting dressed. She diverted him while they drank coffee by praising him for his courage in offering to accompany her to the park. She told him that he was the balmiest man in the sense of being gutsy; she added quickly-she had ever met. His chest-and nothing else, she noted thankfully-swelled with pride.

It was probably true, she thought, as he sipped his hot coffee and made a thoroughly unconvincing disclaimer of his bravery. He was not only one of the bravest men she had ever known, but incontestably the stupidest. The stupidest girl she had ever met was Jane Redpath.

They prepared to leave. She gathered up her tripod and slung her Hasselblad over her shoulder. Jeff stuck a hefty tire iron in his belt, picked up a forked wooden stick and a burlap bag, and they were ready. She thought the tire iron was a pretty good idea, but she wasn't so sure about the forked stick and bag. They reminded her that there was a snake in the park. She had given it some thought earlier, but rationalized her fears in terms of the enormous size of the park. Still, the knowledge of the snake's presence had made her squirm, and she might very well have postponed the expedition if her paper hadn't already been badly overdue.

She warned Jeff that she didn't want him to do anything silly like going off on his own to hunt for the snake. He said the stick was just a precaution, and relax, baby, relax.

In the taxi that took them downtown through deserted streets, he groped her, naturally, and she tried to divert him by being serious and unsexy.

She went on about her photographic project, which was to constitute the thesis for her Physiology M. A., but it didn't slow him down.

"God, I love your apples," he said fervently, with his hand inside her T-shirt.

"Whenever people think of sleep problems," she said in what she hoped was a pedantic, sedative voice, "they tend to think exclusively in terms of human beings. But it's obvious that we can learn much from animals…"

He was nuzzling her neck with his handsomely broken athlete's nose. The cab driver, who drove with his left hand extended through the window, as if to cool his fingers, kept turning his head around at intervals to check the activity in the back of the car.

"Jeff," she whispered. "Stop it, everybody's looking at us."

He placed his hand between her legs. "I can't get enough. You know?"

"How could I not know?" She tried to pin his hand down, but realized that he would take it as a playful test of strength, so she stopped. "Look, in case we meet that snake… I mean, it's not too likely and all, but… I'm scared, Jeff."

It was a fresh effort to distract him, and it succeeded. He didn't remove his hand, nothing as definitive as that, but he stopped trying to poke into her.

"No sweat, baby. If we ran across it, we'll just catch it, and that’s that."

She gave him an only partly feigned shiver. "It's dangerous. I'm so scared.

How are you going to catch it?"

He had already told her how, in detail. He had spent the previous summer in the Southwest on some kind of archaeological dig, and in the evenings, in his free time, had gone out catching rattlers with his colleagues. "Great sport" was how he had described it. But he didn't mind repeating himself.

"It's simple. All you need is a forked stick. You spear them just behind the head with the stick, then you grab them there with your hand — behind the head, so they can't nip you-and just pop 'em. in a bag. Nothing to it.

I hope we run into the one in the park so I can show you.

"But it isn't a rattler. They think it might be a cobra."

"No difference. A snake is a snake. What you have to keep in mind is that snakes have a very low I.Q. When they're threatened, and can't run away, they attack. Well, they have this low intelligence rating, and all they can think of is that they have to bite something. So you give them the stick, and they bite that."

In his enthusiasm he removed his hand from her crotch to gesture, and forgot to put it back. For this relief, much thanks. "They bite the stick?"

She tried to put an enormous amount of curiosity and wonderment in her voice. "And then what?"

"Then you shake them off the stick and pin them down. It's easy."

"Easy." She strove for a tone combining scepticism and admiration.

"Anything's easy, if you really know what you're doing."

He prattled on with earnest enthusiasm as the driver entered the 97th Street transverse and headed eastward through the park. All she had to do was keep him going for another five minutes. The trip back was another matter, but maybe she would be able to think of something.

The snake glided onto the pavement, dry again since the cloudburst. It moved slowly, cautiously, as its tongue brought in the mingled odour substances of many animals.

Once or twice it lifted its head high and peered into a cage. Even when the cages were empty, the odour-substances were strong.

In one cage, two lions were asleep; their powerful smell was familiar to the snake and disturbing. One of the lions twitched uneasily in its sleep before the snake moved on.

The cab driver dropped them at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street. They entered the park through the Children's Gate, and walked toward the Arsenal, ivy-covered red brick, where the park's administrative offices were housed. It was dark, except for a modest floodlight over the steps, and a faint reflection at a downstairs window from lights somewhere in the interior of the building.

Now that they were actually here, Jane felt nervous. If Jeff had any fears or qualms, he didn't show them. Well, that was the wrong way to put it. He didn't show them because he hadn't any. He was fully tooled up for the venture: tire iron in his belt for disposing of muggers, forked stick over his shoulder to deal with snakes. And if there was a night watchman, he would undoubtedly disarm him with sheer ebullience.

They skirted the Arsenal to the left, walking softly on their sneakered feet, circled to their right, and came into the menagerie. It was still an hour or so before dawn, and the menagerie was dark and shadowy except for the thin spread of light from the spaced lampposts. Behind them, on Fifth Avenue, the buildings loomed blackly, except for an isolated light at a window here and there, where, she thought, some despairing soul waited for the dawn or the resolution needed to end his life.

"Okay," Jeff said. "Where do we start?"

He spoke in his normal voice, and in the night-time hush it echoed like a gunshot.

"Shsh. Quiet. You'll wake everything up."

He surprised her by lowering his voice to a creditable whisper. "You're gonna wake them all up anyway with your flash."

"I'm not using a flash. I'm doing a time exposure with a very fast film.

ASA 400, It should work with the light from the streetlamps."

Something was moving to her right. She turned quickly and saw two points of light. She gasped, and clung to Jeff, and then realized that an animal was watching her through the bars of its cage. It was a shadowy gray bulk, and she couldn't make out what it was.

"Jesus!" Trembling, she rested her head on his chest. "It scared the shit out of me."

"Relax, you're with Jeff, okay?" His voice was soft, he was a terrific whisperer, an ace, better than she was herself, and he was patting her ass caressingly. "I like these apples, too."

"Please, not in front of the animals." She pushed him away, took a deep breath, and decided that she had herself together again. "Let's go to work."

She moved on to the next cage. The plaque read: BARBARY SHEEP. She peered inside. At first the cage seemed to be empty, but when her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she could make out the sheep. There were two of them, lying toward the back of the cage, tan animals with strongly curved horns. Both were motionless, asleep.

"I'm going to get these. Please keep quiet."

He watched as she opened the telescoped metal legs of the tripod and fitted the Hasselblad to it. She adjusted the settings, sighted through the finder, then decided to make an adjustment. Behind her, Jeff gave a tiny cluck of impatience and breathed heavily on the back of her neck.

She sensed that he was about to pat her ass again, too.

She said, "You're making me nervous. Go take a walk, okay?" He grunted and looked surly; he didn't like being dismissed. He didn't like standing around and doing nothing, either. He needed something to do, even if it was nothing more than a brush with a mugger. "What I mean — check out the other cages, see what I can shoot next. Okay?"

"Okay."

He strode off to the south end of the line of cages. She sighted on the sheep and felt for the shutter release. Before she could press it there was a sudden outcry, shrill, panicky (or so it seemed to her), and then pandemonium. From nearby cages and from within the animal houses she could hear the roar of big cats, the chatter of monkeys, indefinable screams, whines, snarls, even the barking of the seals in their pool.

Through the finder she saw the sheep bound to their feet, bleating. He's done it, she thought, the clumsy oaf somehow startled them and woke up the whole fucking zoo. She whirled, catching up the camera and tripod, and started toward him angrily. Then she stopped dead. He was crouched, his back to her, facing a snake, the longest and lithest looking she had ever seen or even imagined. Its head was high off the ground, its mouth was agape.

She let out a cry of terror, and knew in that instant that her reaction was no different from that of the other animals. The urge to turn away and run was overwhelming, but she knew she couldn't desert Jeff. The snake horrified her, but there was something thrilling in the way Jeff faced it-in the knotted back muscles standing out against his damp T shirt, the alertness of his posture, the athlete's grace and self-confidence.

He was moving the forked stick toward the snake and whispering softly, encouragingly, laughing a little at himself: "Toro. Ho, toro, make your move."

The snake was erect, tensed, threatening, hissing hollowly. Its body seemed incredibly long and slender, the neck swelling on a vertical aids, the eyes wide and menacing. Barely aware of what she was doing, she planted the tripod and put her eye to the finder. She placed her finger on the shutter release. Peering through the finder, holding her breath, she saw Jeff extend the stick at full length. She pressed the shutter release almost by reflex, and it seemed to trigger off movement. The picture in the finder became unfrozen. The snake and the stick seemed to meet, and then Jeff dropped the stick with a clatter. He cried out. She shut her eyes, shaking with fear. Jeff's voice came from directly in front of her. "The bugger ran up the stick and bit me."

She opened her eyes. His left hand was clasped over his right forearm and he seemed flushed, but he was calm. "Oh my God!"

"It's okay," Jeff said. "It's gone. It ran away."

He lifted his left hand from his arm and she saw two small spots of oozing blood an inch below the crook of his elbow.

"Oh, Jeff, Jeff, what can we do? We have to get you to a hospital."

He slipped his belt out of his trousers, looped it around his arm just below the biceps, and pulled it very tight. "The thing of it is," he said quietly, "the thing is to keep calm, because if you get excited the heart pumps quicker and the poison circulates that much faster. So everybody concerned has to relax, okay?"

Behind her, a voice called out roughly, and she turned, her heart thumping. A figure was moving toward them hulkingly out of the shadows.

A brilliant light came on and blinded her.

For a brief time, Jane Redpath had company in the waiting room, a middle-aged black man with a deep laceration under his right eye that seeped sluggishly into his bloody handkerchief. He was naked to the waist above a pair of blue jeans and bed slippers, and he chatted amiably while he waited to be tended to. He had actually been on his way into the emergency room when they had come in-she and Jeff and the two cops-but he held no resentment at being superseded. The cops had been called by the menagerie night watchman, the man who had flashed his light at them after Jeff was bitten. At first he had been more concerned with their trespassing than with getting help, but he had moved quickly when Jane had screamed at him in a hysterical rage. Jeff had quieted her, and apologized to the watchman.

The police car had responded quickly, and driven them to East Side Hospital, where Jeff was rushed into the emergency ward at once. They had not allowed her to accompany him. He had walked in under his own power, smiling at her and telling her not to worry, and to go home and catch some sleep. He'd give her a ring later on.

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.

Someone asked, "What part of Africa does this mamba come from?"

"It's distributed throughout most of Africa, coast to coast, except for the northernmost parts. Incidentally, it's misleading to call it just 'mamba.'

There are three different kinds of mambas-the black; green, which is found in savannah country and riverine forests and is exclusively arboreal; and Jameson's, which is a rain forest snake. All three are slender, with a small, coffin sided head and a prehensile tail."

"From the picture, how big do you judge our snake to be?"

"At least ten feet, maybe as much as eleven. It's a superb specimen."

The DI muttered impatiently. Converse looked at him questioningly, then went on.

"The black mamba has a legendary reputation in Africa. It's feared, respected, in fact it's held in awe, much as a tiger or lion might be. Some of the stories you hear about it are exaggerations, especially its speed on the ground. For example, there's a persistent claim that it can overtake a galloping horse."

"Can it?"

"It's unlikely. Estimates of its speed vary between seven and twenty miles per hour. MN guess would be about ten miles an hour."

One of the reporters sounded disappointed. "That's all?"

"It's a hell of a lot if you're crawling on your belly. It's undoubtedly the swiftest snake in the world. I saw a few black mambas in Africa when I was a student. I can tell you that it's a genuinely intimidating sight to see an irritated black mamba, racing across the ground with its head a foot and a half in the air and its mouth gaped wide open. A rabbit doing ten miles an hour is one thing. Being chased by an extremely venomous and aggressive snake at that speed is the stuff nightmares are made of."

The man who had made the joke about mamba being a dance made derisive sounds. Converse recognized the professional sceptic. Every audience he had ever addressed had one, varying only in degree of belligerency. Except for kids, of course. This one didn't look like a fire-eater-a thin gray-blond man wearing gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

The man spoke up. "Whether I could outrun your snake or not is beside the point. It's pure myth that snakes chase people."

"For the most part that's true," Converse said equably. "But some snakes-the king cobra or hamadryads, the black mamba, some others will sometimes take out after somebody, usually on their breeding grounds during the mating season, but often on other occasions when they're highly irritated. And if a black mamba was chasing you, sir, I'd bet on the snake."

The DI gave him a black look. Eastman cleared his throat, a sound of warning.

"You'd probably cheer the slimy thing on, too." The man's nondescript face had a capability for scowling.

"As most educated people know by now," Converse said mildly, "snakes aren't the least bit slimy, they're dry and rather pleasant to the touch."

The man screwed his features into an exaggerated expression of disgust.

"Slitheriness to one side, how do you feel about the fact that they poison people, sometimes fatally?"

"A great many more snakes are poisoned by man than the other way around.

Smokestacks, auto emissions, industrial wastes, insect control poisons-"

"Fine," the man said. "Exterminate them. They're not good for anything, anyway."

"Then how come man eats them, turns them into leather goods, exhibits them in zoos, exploits them in various forms of entertainment? If you're looking for a villain, blame the man who turned that black mamba. Loose in the park. He's the one to hate, not the snake."

The man waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. Holly Markham stood up.

"Will it help you to find the snake now that you've identified it?"

Her question was to the point, and the assemblage, which had been tense during the exchange with the previous speaker, relaxed. Converse said, "It defines the problem without simplifying it. So far as its habits go, the black mamba is an all-purpose snake. Its arboreal part of the time-it likes to lie in the low branches of trees or even in bushes to take birds, and it may bask on a treetop, too, though, like most snakes, it likes a rock better. But most of the time it's terrestrial. It hides in bushes, in thickets, under rocks, in hollow trees, and very often in a well-concealed burrow."

After an interlude of note-taking, a TV reporter asked if the black mamba was as dangerous as a cobra.

"In my opinion, much more so. It's a lot more aggressive, and it doesn't have to go into a set striking posture before it bites. In fact, it can strike with extreme effectiveness in any direction while it's running at top speed. The cobra strikes inaccurately in daylight. The black mamba is equally deadly by day or night. Taking everything into account, I'm inclined to think it's the most dangerous snake in the world."

"You mean the most poisonous?"

"It's not the most poisonous, although two tiny drops are sufficient to kill a man in as little as twenty minutes." He paused. The DI was examining his fingernails with undisguised boredom. Eastman's expression was studiedly neutral. The rest of the audience seemed impressed. "There are three elements that make a snake dangerous: the potency of its venom, the position of its fangs, and its aggressiveness or disposition to bite.

The black mamba rates high on all counts."

Someone called out, "What do you mean by the position of the fangs?"

"Some species have fangs that are situated at the rear of the mouth. So it's harder for them to bite accurately and efficiently. The venom of the boor slang of Africa, for example, is terrifically potent, but because it's rear-fanged it doesn't deliver its venom as effectively as the black mamba, whose fangs are in the front, practically under the animal's nose."

A small man with a wisp of white hair asked what the most poisonous snake known was.

"The king cobra, the largest of all poisonous snakes, can kill in fifteen minutes. The Australian death adder and taipan, the Asiatic sawscaled viper, the South American cascabel-they're all about equal, and probably slightly more potent than the black mamba. But after a while, in highly venomous snakes, the exact degree of potency doesn't make much difference. They all kill, and kill very quickly if antivenin isn't ad ministered in a short time after the bite. Incidentally, the cobra and the black mamba are both of the family Elapidae, and are related. The black mamba also spreads a hood when it's irritated, but vertically rather than laterally as the cobra does, and nothing like as showy."

Holly spoke up, asking him to define aggressiveness more fully.

"In simplest terms, willingness to bite when threatened or irritated.

There are some deadly snakes which just won't bite at all, except for food. The green mamba, for example. In Africa, boys shinny up palm trees for coconuts even though the trees are swarming with green mambas. The greens just get out of the way. Sea snakes are among the most poisonous known to man, but when fishermen bring them in, in their nets, they just pick them up and throw them back into the water, and rarely seem to get bitten…"

The DI was stirring restlessly. Converse, warming to his subject, ignored him.

"There's a very poisonous snake called the blue-banded krait. It's absolutely deadly at night, but simply can't be made to bite during the daylight hours. Children play with them, manhandle them, in the villages.

People have been known to beat them with a stick, nail them to a board, subject them to torture-even to the point of death-without being bitten."

He paused for a flurry of note-taking, and observed that even the DI seemed mildly interested. Holly Markham was wearing a yellow silk blouse that went beautifully with her black hair. Big deal, black goes with yellow-so what?

Someone called out, asking what the black mamba ate, and with what frequency.

"Small mammals," Converse said. "Mainly rodents. As to frequency, snakes are erratic eaters. They can go for long periods, months, without eating.

It's largely a matter of opportunity, if food is around they'll eat fairly often."

The joker in the gold-rimmed eyeglasses said, "What was this snake in the menagerie for-to eat an elephant?"

Converse said, "It's possible it chased a rodent into the area."

"Doesn't that mean that its lair, or whatever you call it, is somewhere in the neighbourhood of the menagerie?"

"Not necessarily. Black mambas range over a very wide area. They cover ground at a tremendous speed, don't forget."

A hand rose in the rear of the room. "Why is this snake biting all these people? Why doesn't it just run away and hide, the way snakes are supposed to do?"

"In the first two deaths, I can only make a guess. Somehow, whether they knew it or not, these people posed a threat to the snake. Maybe, in the dark, they stepped on it. Step on a snake and it will bite." He shrugged.

"In the latest case, the provocation is obvious. The guy was trying to catch it. A black mamba that's cornered will attack without hesitation."

A television reporter specializing in violent city news, a semi-famous face, said, "What about the old wives' We about snakes not dying until sundown?"

"There's a fair amount of truth to it. Chop a snake's head off, and the body will continue to writhe for several hours. And a poisonous snake can inflict a fatal bite up to forty minutes after its head has been severed from the body."

There were exclamations all around the room, ranging from horror to wonderment, and a good deal of note-taking. That's what they want, Converse thought, the exotic, sensational details. They don't give a damn about what makes snakes tick.

"Young man?" The speaker was a middle-aged man with a white moustache.

"How many more people is this snake of yours going to bite before you kill it?"

"Why kill it? Why not capture it and put it in a zoo?"

The DI was on his feet. Unmindful of the microphones, he shouted, "Zoo, my ass. We're going to kill the shit out of that fucking snake. Okay, Whatsyername, move over."

The DI motioned imperiously. Converse changed seats with him. Eastman hitched his chair closer to the DI's. Together, they began to grapple with questions about the police search of the menagerie area (no luck, task force withdrawn), whether another sweep of the park in force was contemplated (not at this time), what additional steps would be taken to protect the public (the Commissioner's office is working on the problem), whether or not these steps might include closing the park (we're just working cops, we don't make that kind of decision)…

Converse sat erect in his chair so that he could see Holly. He caught her eye and she gave him a quick smile before she turned her attention back to the DI and Eastman. He continued to stare at her, compelling her to look at him. She did. She stared back. Their eyes locked and held.

Liberated woman, giving back as good as she got from male chauvinist? But there was no defiance in her gaze. Eyes uplooking. He felt lightheaded, giddy. Their eyes remained locked. An indefinable (but familiar) sensation began in his legs, paused at his groin, swept upward to his head, and made him giddier than before.

Suddenly, he remembered a movie he had seen at the Museum of Modem Art a few months before. It was about Catherine the Great, a very old flick, made about two hundred years ago. Elisabeth Bergner was Catherine, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was some kind of duke or other. Their eyes met across a large candlelit room filled with courtiers. They stared at each other. No expression on their faces, but presently the flame on the candle in front of each of them began to waver slightly as their breathing became shallower and quicker. They kept staring. The candle flames began to waver with increased speed, more strongly, then faster still, more intensely, orgasmically…

Groaning, he forced his eyes away from Holly. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Godssake, he must be as old as the picture, two hundred give or take a decade. His gaze, out of control, turned back to her and coupled. He listened to his breathing. Fast and shallow, would make a candle flame dance with passion. And he was getting lighter headed all the time. Rest of the room blurring, voices fading. Knowing his weakness, he knew himself to be in serious trouble.

Captain Eastman's voice, coming as from a great distance, tugged at his attention. "… unless Mr. Converse has anything else to add?"

He looked at Eastman. Thank God for Eastman, the evil spell broken. He shook his head. Eastman adjourned the press conference. Get out of the room fast, Converse told himself, eyes to the front, full speed ahead.

He threaded his way between the rows of chairs with swaying hips, like a broken field runner, making for the door. From the comer of his eye he saw Holly getting to her feet. He stopped abruptly. "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

Each time the frown appeared on the woman's face she would read on another sentence or two before raising her eyes from her paperback book.

Then she would say, "Peggy, remember what I said about staying on the pavement," or "That's far enough, come back here now."

The child ignored her within the permissible limits she had established in her twenty-two-month-old mind. She was sitting on the pavement and crooning softly and pleasurably to herself. She was plump, with long silky brown hair and violet eyes.

The woman would continue to watch the child for a brief time, then return to her book, the frown erased except for a barely perceptible remnant, some external tic of anxiety. In another minute or two the frown would reappear and she would look at the child again.

She was sitting on a bench in the shade, a short distance inside the park from the Boys Gate at Central Park West and 100th Street. The snake in the park was not the proximate cause of her frown, although it did contribute to her alertness. Her more immediate, and ongoing, concern was the large number of Hispanics who frequented the park in this area (but what was she to do, if she lived at 96th Street?). The snake was an exotic peril, distanced by its prominence in the media; the Hispanics-with their boisterous voices and passions throbbing just below the surface-were a familiar threat that existed right under one's nose.

"Peggy, I don't want you lying on the dirty pavement and getting yourself all filthy. Get up at once."

The child paid no attention to her. Her cheek brushed the pavement as she bent forward from her sitting position in that miraculous boneless way of small children. She was following the progress of a tiny ant that was climbing over her tanned leg. It tickled her skin and made her laugh.

The mother said, "Peggy," and, sighing, turned back to her book.

The ant descended from the child's leg. Effortlessly, the child rocked up onto her knees, and crawled after the ant. She found it, and cupped her hand over it. The ant crept out from under her hand and ran off. The child chased after it, crawling rapidly on her hands and knees. Near the edge of the pavement she lost it. She stopped, her eyes close to the ground. When she lifted her head she saw the snake. It was on the far side of the railing that edged the pavement, its head visible through a tangle of brush. The child clapped her hands together in surprise and delight.

The snake watched the child, hissing softly. Its tongue probed the air. The child was not moving, it was not an imminent threat, but the snake was wary. The child clapped her hands again, and crawled closer to the railing.

The snake tensed. Its hissing became harsher, it opened its mouth wide.

The mother looked up. "Peggy, what are you doing there? Get back here at once!"

The child paused, looked at her mother, then crawled forward again.

"Peggy! Damn that child."

She put her book down on the bench and got up and started down the walkway toward the child, her mouth thinned with annoyance, her frown settled deeply between her eyes.

The snake's length was concealed by the brush. Only its head and the erect portion of its anterior were visible. When the child stood up and moved forward, its eyes were almost on exactly the same level as the snake's. The snake hissed harshly, its mouth gaped widely.

When it felt the vibrations of the woman's footsteps in the substrate, it turned away from the child. The appearance of this fast-moving new threat confused it momentarily, and then it turned its attention back to the child, who was now well within striking distance.

The policeman at the desk in the Central Park Precinct recognized Converse and waved him on toward the Commander's office at the end of the corridor.

Captain Eastman, stripped to his shorts, was lying on his back on a cot.

There was no ease in his sleep, Converse thought. He lay heavily on the thin mattress, as if at the mercy of the downward pull of gravity, or his problems, or perhaps his age. The hair on his chest was white, matted with sweat.

Converse shut the door softly and went back through the corridor. In a small office opposite the desk, four hoods were polluting the air with cigarette smoke. They were dressed in dirty jeans, wisps of shirts that exposed their chests, studded leather belts, beards, gunfighter moustaches, long unkempt hair. They were a part of the Central Park Precinct's anticrime unit.

Converse stopped. "You guys know the park," he said. "Where's the best place to hide? The least people, the most wild areas?"

Three of the detectives turned to the fourth, and one of them said, "Ask Sergeant Paschik. He's our first whip, and he's been here at the Two-two a little over a hundred years."

Sergeant Paschik was in his forties but, with his unshaven face and drooping, two-toned, gray-and-black mandarin moustache, he looked no less raffish than his younger colleagues.

"Sergeant?" Converse said.

"Uptown. North of 96th Street. It's a fact that about ninety percent of the people use the park below 85th Street. The Receiving Reservoir takes up most of the space between 86th and 96th, so I would concentrate on the area north of 96th."

"Is it less manicured up there?"

Paschik nodded. "It's real wild up there. You could get lost in some parts if you didn't know your way around."

"Or don't speak Spanish," one of the detectives said.

Paschik said, "It's a fact that above 96th the population, east side and west side both, is mostly Spanish. Naturally, they use the park near their own neighbourhood. So it's a fact that it's not as safe there as in the southern part."

One of the detectives said, "I thought the snake was biting people around 80th, around there."

"Was," Converse said. "But its instinct would be to find a wilder and less frequented territory."

He thanked the anticrime squad, and they wished him luck. He went home, fed the python and the cat, and went to bed to catch up on his sleep. He dreamed of Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias.

The handout from the office of Hizzonner the mayor read: "I profoundly regret the tragic death of this fine young man to whose athletic prowess we thrilled so many times in the past." Jeff had been a secondstring pulling guard on the Columbia football team. "Yet, even in this moment of tragedy, I cannot pass up the observation that he was foolhardy. If he had not tried to catch the snake, but had merely retreated, no harm would have befallen him.

"And so I take this opportunity once again to urge the public, with all my heart, to exercise the utmost caution. Above all, do not attempt to take matters into your own hands. The police, with the help of experts, are redoubling their efforts. Do not hinder or hamper them in their work. Do not endanger your own life. Please cooperate."

The Reverend Sanctus Milanese, the solicitation of whose views had by now become a regular item on the itinerary of the media, said: "The members of the Church of the Purification are conscripted in the army of God to destroy the personification of evil. Can soldiers sit on the sidelines while this messenger of Satan crushes the city in its oily toils? The police are powerless, for it is not given to a temporal force to overcome the Devil. Only the Godly are sanctioned for this work, for only they are blessed by Divine guidance. They shall prevail who are pure."

"You're going to continue to search for the snake in defiance of the orders of the police and the mayor's instructions?"

"We respond to only one Authority, and His name is God. We will continue our search as before, and there may be new initiatives as God proposes them."

The Police Commissioner, told about the Reverend's statement, said that the police would not tolerate vigilantism in any form or for any reason.

Whoever disobeyed the police directives would be dealt with sternly.

Jane Redpath refused to be interviewed for television. She said, "I know how much you bastards like to have people weep on camera for the entertainment of your audience, and I realize I'm being unsporting, but you can all go fuck yourselves."

With Jeff's death, the city turned a corner. It became euphoric. The snake in the park became a jewel in the crown of the city's obsession with its own eccentricity. The public reasserted its prideful conviction that it inhabited the most put-upon city in the whole world. When bigger and better and more unendurable disasters were contrived, they were visited justly upon the city that matched them in stature; which was to say, the city that was superlatively dirty, declining, expensive, crime-ridden, unmanageable, and glamorously unlivable beyond any other city in the world. By lunchtime, gallows humour jokes were already epidemic. And never mind that most of them were retreads of stale ethnic jokes; they worked surprisingly well with the mere substitution of the word "snake" for "Italian" or "Polish."

Manufacturers of novelties, famous for their opportunism and dazzling speed of production, succeeded by late afternoon in flooding the city with snake buttons, snake decals for auto bumpers, stuffed snakes of many lengths, designs, and colors. Not long afterward, strikingly realistic, battery-powered snakes of great technical sophistication were to appear.

There was a run on canned rattlesnake fillets in gourmet specialty stores, and the brave people who ate them inevitably compared their taste to that of chicken, only better.

Four Hollywood film companies filed notice of intent to make a movie about a snake in Central Park; by nightfall, one of them had brought a lawsuit against another, charging infringement of its title, "Black Mamba." The news division of all three television networks patched together half-hour films about snakes for presentation following the eleven o'clock news, with full commercial sponsorship. A porno film, in which a young woman performed the sex act with a squirming and unhappy snake, was revived and did turn away business at the box office. A nightclub introduced a snake-charming act: a man in a turban playing a flute for a cobra so lethargic from being refrigerated that it could barely spread its hood. Educational paperback books dealing with reptiles flooded the newsstands and bookstores. Herpetologists and zoo curators were at a premium for guest appearances on television talk shows.

Snakeskin shoes, jackets, handbags, ties, and belts were snapped up in clothing and department stores. Sheets, pillowcases, and window drapes with a serpentine motif appeared almost overnight.

Comedians on television, at hotels, in nightclubs, and even in a Broadway show here and there, introduced snake jokes. These ranged from the innocent and simpleminded ("Goodness snakes alive!", "It's me, Snake, I mean Jake") to the dirty and simpleminded ("What's eleven feet long and stands up when it's irritated? Sorry to disappoint you, baby, it's a black mamba").

The reptile houses at the Bronx and Staten Island zoos were so packed with spectators that it was almost impossible for any but those in the front ranks to see the exhibits. When a man visiting the Staten Island Zoo used a hammer to smash the glass of a cage containing a sand viper and then attacked the snake with a breadknife, the police were called in to clear the snake house for the rest of the day. The next morning, crowds were kept back five feet from the cages by barriers, and special guards were on hand to protect the snakes from further assassination attempts.

A well-known showman made the front page of two of the city's three daily newspapers with his offer of $20,000 for the snake in the park, alive.

Throughout the day, alternating between the claustrophobic office of the Commander of the Two-two and the desk up front, where he hovered nervously around the teletype, Captain Eastman had been logging reports from the park. Good news and bad news. Good: there were many fewer people in the park than the day before, whether because they were paying heed to the mayor's plea or simply because of the heat, which had touched 99 degrees at three o'clock, there was no way of telling. Bad: lots of Puries out, neatly dressed, barely seeming to sweat (maybe they did have an in with God, Eastman thought), methodically checking out likely areas where the snake might be hiding. There had been several minor scuffles with the police who ordered them back onto the walkways, and one serious one. Two members of Christ's Cohorts, the Purie security guard, had engaged in a slugging match with a cop. It was only with the arrival of reinforcements that the Puries had been subdued. They had been booked at the Two-two and been held in detention for several hours before it was time to take them to night court, where they were charged with disorderly conduct, assault, and resisting arrest.

The cop who had fought with the Christ's Cohorts had lost a tooth. What had impressed him, aside from the fact that they were handy with their fists, was their lack of emotion. "I've never seen guys fight like that," he had told Eastman. "No swearing, no hollering, not even a mad expression on their face. I swear, it gave me the creeps."

Technically, Eastman was "coordinating" the police effort in the park.

Although he had been desk-bound for several years, he had never really become accustomed to it. He thought of it as "sitting on his ass," when he should be "doing something." He would have much preferred being out in the field with one of the ESU trucks. Near ten o'clock there was a bit of gruesome comic relief. A grinning cop reported that he and his partner had come upon a Purie wandering through the park, dazed, battered, completely naked, and had taken him to West Side Hospital. He had been snake hunting in the Ramble, according to his story, when he had been set upon and beaten by a half-dozen men. The cop, winking, describing the Purie as "one of them," said that he had obviously been gang-shagged.

Converse arrived with his stick and pillowcase, looking so refreshed and rested that Eastman almost hated him for it. Youth. But the prospect of getting out of the precinct house and "doing something" palliated his sourness.

"Godssake," Converse said. "It looks like a mob scene."

The driver had taken them into the park through the Engineer's Gate at 90th and Fifth Avenue, and was following the East Drive around the perimeter of the Receiving Reservoir. The park seemed to be twinkling with lights, and they could make out shadowy figures, some of whom must have been police personnel, others, Puries. Driving, they were almost blinded by the brilliant sweeping floodlight of an ESU truck.

"Where do you want to stop?" Eastman said.

"Noplace," Converse said. "What black mamba in its right mind would turn up with all this going on? Those lights? Those people clumping around everywhere? Forget it. it's going to hole up and stay hidden until everybody goes away."

Eastman's definition of "doing something" did not include riding around in a police car. "How the bell can you hope to find it if you don't get out and look for it?"

"No way," Converse said. "If I knew all this crap was going on I would have stayed home. Remember what I told you about a snake having to be found by stealth?"

"Certainly I remember," Eastman said. "I make it a point never to forget anything you tell me. Then what the hell are we going to do?"

"It's hopeless," Converse said, "and there's no sense getting sore, captain. You want to get out, I'll keep you company. But it's a pure waste of time."

Eastman was silent. He sat hunched against the window of the car, glowering.

Converse said, "Anyway, our best chance is to catch it basking. It's one of the few times a snake stays put. I'll be out here tomorrow morning just before first light."

The car rode on between the huge North Meadow at their left and the small East Meadow to the right. The driver slowed down. "What do we do, captain?"

"Shit, I don't know. It's a lovely night for a spin around the park. What do you say, Hortense?"

Converse shrugged. "I'm sorry, captain."

Eastman sighed. "I guess you're right. Tomorrow morning-you going to pick me up?"

"I could," Converse said. "But. His voice trailed off.

"But you'd rather not?"

Converse nodded. "It's really a one man job. You'd simply be trailing along."

He's probably right, Eastman thought, and I can use the sleep. Then a suspicion stirred in his mind. "Look, are you afraid I'll shoot it or something?"

"If I find it," Converse said with a grin, "I'll turn it over to the Lost Property Clerk."

Eastman told the driver to find someplace where he could turnaround.

"Get a fix on one of the floodlights and drop me off by one of the ESU trucks. Then take Mr. Converse here to someplace where he can catch a bus home."

Converse said, "Don't waste your time, captain."

"Waste of time or not, I'll be doing something."

"Instead," Converse said, "let me buy you a beer."

"I don't drink on duty."

"When are you off duty?"

"That's it," Eastman said. "Never."

Near 115th Street, a rat jumped out of an overturned garbage can. It stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at him. It was an ugly old bastard, with a scrunch-up face and a long wormy tail and red eyes. Its fur was a mangy gray, same like the color of morning before the sun over the East River would get high enough to clear the tenements and throw a little light around.

Alvis Parkins said softly, "Shitface, I'm gonna waste you."

The rat was watching. It was a smart old rat, and Alvis knew that if he made a sudden move it would take off. So, smiling and talking sweet to it, he began to ruffle up the bottom of his shirt, slow and easy. Gently do it. Slip the piece out quiet, cock it, level it, and then boom, blow old rat away.

He had the piece in his hand when the rat suddenly took off, scuttering off the curb and racing for the other side of the street. Alvis steadied the piece with both hands, squinting down the short barrel, tracking old rat until he had it right where he wanted it. But he didn't pull the trigger. He lowered the gun abruptly, shoved it back under his belt, and pulled his shirt over it.

Dumb shit, he thought, watching the rat disappear in an alley between two buildings, dumb shit, you came near fucking up. Dumb nigger shit, all you need was make a gunshot noise so somebody call the cops and they pick you up for just being in the streets this time of morning, and they spread you up against a wall and find the piece on you. What make it worse, that piece wouldn't never have shoot straight enough to hit something, especially a old gray running rat. Maybe couldn't even hit it with a professional piece, a hundred- two-hundred dollar piece, so how was he ever gonna hit it with a little old twelve dollar hunk of junk iron.

Forget it. Besides, why should he go exterminate a rat in Spanish Harlem?

Let the spics kill they own goddamn rats.

The good feeling he got when he first spotted the rat went away and he began to feel sour again. Walking on south, he swore out loud whenever a car or truck went by on Seventh Avenue. Mean as he felt, better not let nobody fuck around with him. One bad look and he would bum somebody.

Saturday Night Special couldn't hit no rat halfway across the street, but point blank up against somebody it would blow half their ugly face off.

The sun was lighting up the sky, though it was still gray down below as he crossed Cathedral Parkway, sauntering, ignoring a couple of trucks, making them blow their horns at him, making them hit their brakes. Screw them. Street belong to me every much as it do to them. He went into the park through the Warriors Gate. Still pretty cool, though in a few minutes the sun would start hotting it up. Remembering the heat and stink of the apartment, he was glad he had that ruckus with his aunt, it give him a good excuse to split. Get away from heat and old Uncle Tom aunt at one and the same time.

Silly old bitch didn't know the score. Thought dope was bad, thought chicks was bad, thought school was good, thought church was good, Knew he had the gun, she would probably call the cops in. Mostly he didn't pay no attention to her, but tonight she was waiting up for him, and her jaw just go Eke a express train-fifteen-year-old boy have no call to come in four-thirty in the morning, and et cetera. He sassed her and sassed her, and finally old auntie get mad and take a swing at him. When he like to fall down laughing at her, she come on with the big black skillet, and could have bust his arm if it land. So he dodge around the kitchen, and finally get around back of her and take it away and smash the table with it, and then run out the door.

Have to get something going for hisself and split for good. Too old for living with old auntie and the rest of the kids. Needed a pad anyway, tired of balling chicks on rooftops. Come to think of it, in his whole life never had no chick in a bed. High time. Have to promote hisself some bread. Meanwhile, shit, what he doing in this dumb park? What he care about grass and trees and such shit? And don't forget old snake. Old black mamba. Old nigger mamba. Didn't scare him. Old snake come dancing along, he pull his piece and blow old snake's head away. He laughed at the image of a headless snake.

He ran up a hill, and looked down the Meer to the east, with sun on the water now, and straight ahead of him the long stretch of the North Meadow. He raced down the far side of the hill, sliding on his sneakered feet, grabbing at branches as he went. His momentum carried him down onto a walkway, and he had to put on the brakes or run right into the railing and bust his balls.

At the West Drive, a car came along, with its headlights still on. As it went by, a red face under a hard hat poked out and shouted jeeringly at him.

"Honkies," he shouted back, "motherfuckers, shit-eaters."

The car slowed, and a muscular arm hung out of the window, feeling for the door handle. Alvis's heart began to thump. He reached under his shirt for the hard blunt shape of the piece. If they got out of the car he would gun the mothers down! The car picked up speed and went on. The beefy red face was hanging out the window, mouthing words that were lost in the sound of the accelerating car. Alvis shouted, "Pinkface!

Shit-face! Motherfucker!"

The car disappeared around a curve.

He grinned, and crossed the roadway jauntily, forcing another car to squeal its brakes. He smiled, feeling good, and ignored the shouts that drifted back from the car.

At the Reservoir, the early-bird joggers were out, most of them dressed in white shorts and T-shirts and expensive sneakers. Dudes were soaked in sweat, red in the face, and sucking air like they was gonna die very next step. One was a pretty young chick with silky blond hair flying behind her and little tits that bounced like crazy under her Tshirt.

"Hey baby," he yelled at her, "how you like some real exercise?"

After that, he started jiving most of the joggers. "Look, dads, you too old, you gonna have a heart attack." "Hey, man, you look like a busted-down hoss." "Look at the great tits on you, mister." A young black man came sailing along, slim and high-kicking, barechested, wearing a yellow sweat band around his forehead. "Show them honkies how to do it, brother," Alvis yelled.

Alvis decided to run, and he began to breeze past the joggers, giving them a little grin as be went by. But after one circuit he quit. Too hot, man. He started back to the north, going off the walkways and climbing up a hill whenever he saw one. It was a good feeling being up high. He liked it even better when there was also a lot of trees and bushes, like being hid out in a jungle. He hacked his way out of a jungle, came down into the open, and then ran at a big steep sloping rock. Hey, man, watch this move, up the rock like a fly climb a wall. His sneakers gripped and his momentum carried him to the top. And there, stretched out about a mile long, was a big mother of a snake.

The stone struck the rock in front of the snake, and skittered away. The snake's long body stirred into movement at once, gliding over the rock, taking up its own slack. Its head rose upward on a taut column, and its tongue flicked out. When a second stone landed just in front of it it recoiled for a moment, and then its head rose higher. Its eyes picked up the flight of the third stone while it was still in the air. The stone fell, and almost hit the snake in the arc of its bounce. The snake turned and crawled down the slope of the rock, its scutes pushing back against the irregularities, pressing the long body forward in a powerful twisting movement off the face of the rock and into the underbrush.

Alvis could hardly believe the speed of the snake. It moved like it had a revved-up engine. With a yell, he came out of concealment and ran up the side of the rock. He stopped for a second and took out his piece, then ran down the outer side of the rock in the path the snake had taken.

He stopped again at the bottom and peered into the tangle of brush.

At first he didn't see anything, and then he picked up the snake's movement, and saw it wriggling down under the brush. Got me these great eyes, he thought. He leveled the piece downward at the snake, but it was too tough a shot. Still, it felt good, pointing the piece, and it kept him from getting seared. He tracked the snake with the piece, and then, suddenly, it disappeared. He stared at the brush where he had last seen it.

Not there. Nor was any of the brush moving.

"Be fucked."

He picked up a stone and tossed it down where he had last seen the snake, in a mess of dead branches, vines, last year's brown leaves, the trunk of a rotten tree. The stone landed where he wanted it to, and he watched good, but there wasn't no movement.

"Be fucked."

He thought about it for a second, then edged forward real easy into the brush, moving sidewards, so that if old snake came at him he could swivel around and hightail it for the rock. He had this funny feeling in his feet, but he wasn't gonna let no snake bluff him out. He held the piece pointed downward, with his finger on the trigger. He took a little jump onto the fallen tree trunk. He hunkered down on the tree for a good look all around, but he couldn't see no sign of the snake. Then, just when he was about to stand up, he spotted the hole. It was under the tree, and twigs and like that all around it. No wonder nobody could find old snake. Well, he thought proudly, they don't none of them have the good eyes like Alvis. He laughed gleefully, then clapped his hand over his mouth. Didn't want snake to hear him.

"Gonna ice you, snake."

He stepped down from the tree trunk, one foot at a time, slow, not making a sound. Then he crouched to one side of the hole, and slowly reached around with the piece, curving his arm so the muzzle was pointing right into the hole. He felt real cool, but playing it safe in case old snake decided to pop out suddenly. Laughing softly to himself, he steadied the piece and slowly flexed his finger against the resistance of the trigger.

In the hole, the snake hissed harshly as the light at the entrance to the burrow darkened. Its tongue brought in a strong odour of threat. It pushed forward in a sudden powerful thrust, and surged out through the exit hole.

It struck twice, in rapid succession.

The piece fired into the hole and recoiled, and at the same moment Alvis felt a sharp sting on his neck, and then another sting, and the second time he saw the snake, the head up tall and the mouth wide open. He jumped up and ran backwards a few steps. The snake was watching him, hissing and swaying. He clapped his hand to his neck, and saw there was a little smear of blood on it. Sonofabitch had done bit him, crept out through another hole and done bit him. Motherfucking snake! Shouting, swearing, Alvis backed up a few more feet, raised his piece, and fired twice before the piece jammed. He saw the slugs hit the ground and raise dust and bits of leaves, and he knew he had missed. The snake started to crawl toward him, coming like an express train. He wheeled around and ran for the rock, and he went up it like a fly up a wall. No time to put no fancy moves on. Just keep running or he would get catched up.

The snake pursued as far as the rock and stopped. It held its posture of threat for a while after the figure disappeared over the top of the rock.

Then it returned to the burrow. Its tongue at the opening brought in a disquieting smell, sharp and acrid. The snake didn't enter until the smell grew lighter. It went in cautiously, and didn't relax its tension for a long time.

Got to get me to a hospital, Alvis thought, but not to no honky hospital.

You black, they treat you like shit in them places. One time, some kid on the block OD'd, and they kept him waiting so long that when they got around to him the poor fucker was dead. Uptown, the patients were black, and so were some of the doctors.

So he ran northward through the park, sometimes touching his neck, and feeling okay because it wasn't bleeding no more.

He wasn't running real good, feeling some tired, but he reckoned he wasn't gonna die because he was young, not old like them other ones. He wasn't breathing too good, but shit, you wanna feel great if you bitten by a mile-long crawler?

He stuck to the walkways. They wound around a lot, but it was easier to run on the flat surface. Chest felt funny, and legs going heavy, but he kept running, kept putting 'em down one after another. He could hear the sound of his sneakers slapping down on the pavement. Old sun was up hot now. He felt sleepy and like to lay down. He ran around the Cliff, and tried to turn on more speed. Almost out now. Then the wall was coming up in front of him. He had some trouble getting over it. Legs heavy, heavy.

But finally he cleared it, and was out of the park.

He started to cross Cathedral Parkway and began to stagger. Car coming down at him, have to turn on the speed. But his legs was folding up under him. He heard the car screeching its brakes, coming on big as a house.

At the last second he tried to put on a move, but his legs was no place, and the car hit him and tossed him, and he was dead when he came down.

Converse stood in the center of the North Meadow, facing east. The invisible presence of the sun, hidden beneath the rooftops of Fifth Avenue, backlit the buildings and turned them into cut-out silhouettes. On the Meadow, the parched grass looked gray. Above, the sky was a mottled gray; to the west, it was still dark.

The approach of daylight was reassuring, and it evaporated the remnants of uneasiness Converse had felt when he had entered the park from Central Park West and begun to walk along the eerily deserted walkways. Although he wasn't a particularly scary type, he was aware of the city's legendary perils, and he kept his nerve up kiddingly by imagining himself making a nice move with the Pilstrom tongs, ringing a mugger around the throat, and popping him into the pillowcase. Being careful, of course, not to get bitten.

The tongs and pillowcase were well on the optimistic side, considering the intimidating size of the area he had to cover. Already, in his short walk, he had seen half a dozen heavily overgrown sites that might suit a black mamba as a hiding place. The question was where to start. At the moment, with the rim of the sun just beginning to appear over the buildings, he simply didn't know. The vastness of the park made it all seem hopeless.

No. He shook his head, as if to reprove himself. He was a good her petologist, he knew snakes, and he would turn up the black mamba no matter how much territory he had to scour. The real problem was that everyone was in such a bloody hurry. Well, there wasn't any way to do it in a hurry. The watchword was patience.

The sun was a whitish watery semicircle above the rooftops, and already he was beginning to feel its heat. And so would the black mamba. At this very moment it might be moving, in its swift elegant glide, toward the rock it would bask on. Maybe. In this alien terrain it might feel safer climbing into the top branches of a tall tree, basking, and then swinging back down to shade in the thick foliage below. The green mambas did that as a matter of course, and so did the blacks when they were so inclined.

He hoped its inclination would be otherwise; it would be very difficult to spot in a tree. As a general rule, black mambas weren't all that shy. They were secure in the knowledge of their speed and the potency of their bite, and since this one was obviously a highly aggressive specimen, it was reasonable to expect that it would choose to bask on a luxurious rock.

Okay, Converse told himself firmly, so much for pure reason. Let's get organized. No point trying to check out any rocks today, too random, not likely to produce any results. The sun was already up, and climbing fast.

The snake wouldn't require much exposure; in this heat it wouldn't lose much body temperature through the night. Best idea would be to explore the whole northern sector, cast to west, from the 97th Street transverse to the end of the park, marking out likely places for closer examination.

There were lots of likely places-wild, untended areas with heavy tangled brush, fallen trees, piles of leaves and dead branches. More of the city's poverty; no money available to the Parks Department to hire enough grounds men to prune and chop and clear and haul away. He moved slowly and methodically, resisting the impulse to look at this or that rock, to plunge into an inviting thicket.

When he heard a patter of footsteps he was taken by surprise. It was a black kid, running-the first human being he had seen since he had entered the park. Soon there would be others. He watched the kid for a moment.

He himself was a jogger and, compared to his own stride, this kid's was sloppy and disjointed. He watched until the kid disappeared behind a rise, heading toward the north end of the park.

Aside from a single crumpled dollar bill, a few coins, a pack of cigarettes, and a condom tucked away in a packet of book matches, Alvis Parkins's pockets were empty. There was nothing to identify him.

Together with his effects, he was taken to the morgue, where he was tagged and assigned to a chilled drawer. Among other injuries, his neck was broken and badly lacerated, and the fang marks were obliterated. Not that anyone would have looked for them on the body of the victim of an auto accident.

The police began a routine effort to find his survivors. But there were no fingerprints on record, and nobody made a missing persons inquiry. His aunt, the only one who might have done so, was accustomed to the boy being absent for days at a time. Eventually, the Medical Examiner's post-mortem examination would turn up evidence that Alvis had been bitten by the snake in the park, but it would be ten days before the autopsy was performed, due to a heavy work load and the fact that several autopsists were on vacation. Since the cause of his death seemed clearly evident, Alvis Parkins was a low-priority case.

Within thirty-six hours after Jeff's well-publicized death, the mood of the public had taken a sour turn-from ruefully amused acceptance of the snake as an appropriate symbol of their city's magnetic genius for attracting disaster to something approaching mass neurosis. Much of it was hysterical and self-hypnotic. People began to talk about "that crawly feeling in the legs." Some, before sitting down in a restaurant, would lift a tablecloth to look under the table; others would leave a play or concert or film before it was finished because they kept imagining snakes crawling around their feet in the darkness. The worst were those who began to suspect their own apartments, hesitating to enter a dark room for fear a snake might be lurking there, looking under their beds, shaking out their blankets. Some conjured up snakes curled up on the floorboards under their feet when they drove their cars. Some went so far as to check their pockets or handbags before venturing in for a handkerchief or a coin. All over the city, people took to sitting in chairs with their feet tucked under them.

The new mood was nourished by the almost daily occurrence of what the newspapers took to calling "snake associated" deaths. These events dulled all but the most insatiable appetites for sensation.

The first of these incidents took place in an apartment on Third Avenue, in the Seventies. A man, returning home in the evening, tiptoed toward his balcony, where his wife was watering her plants, and tossed a large kapok-filled novelty snake at her feet, at the same time screaming a warning. The woman whirled around, saw the snake almost under her foot, and recoiled from it in a spasm of revulsion. She struck the guard rail of the balcony with both feet off the ground, and with such force that she somersaulted backward, and fell to the street twenty floors below.

Another man planted a similar snake in his wife's bed. She got under the cover, felt something odd, and turned on her bed lamp. (Many suggestible people, these nights, were turning on their bed lamps, only to discover that the "snake" was their own sweat trickling down their legs.) The woman leaped out of bed when she saw the snake, screamed, staggered toward the bedroom door, and fell dead of heart failure.

In a crowded movie house near Bloomingdale's, a voice (whether female or a male screaming in falsetto was never established) called out, "Snake! The snake is here!" A few people rose reflexively, and then the entire audience was on its feet. In the panicky rush toward the exits people were injured badly enough to be hospitalized, and a young man who was trampled underfoot died when fragments of his shattered eyeglasses were driven into his brain.

After the theater was emptied the police searched the house but found no snake.

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 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?"

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 shushed 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 Russia’s. 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.

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."'

When Mrs. Campbell's remarks were brought to the attention of a police official, he said, "The law doesn't make any distinction between dogs that are deliberately set free and dogs that become free by accident. All owners of dogs that are off the leash will receive summonses."

The following day, at eleven o'clock in the morning, some four hundred people and six hundred dogs of the most diverse breeds had gathered at the Bowling Greens. Holding her standard poodle, her Airedale, her two German shepherds, and her miniature schnauzer on a fiveleashed rein, lifting her voice above a concerted din of barking, whining, snarling, snorting, and whimpering dogs, Mrs. Campbell offered her salutatory address.

"Welcome, dog lovers of the City of New York. I am deeply touched by this tremendous response to my television appeal. I know that you share with me the conviction that our beloved pets, left to their own devices, will generously ferret out the slimy creature which has made our beloved park an unsafe haven in this most trying time for all of us…

She paused as a phalanx of policemen, led by a lieutenant, pushed their way toward her through the crowd. The lieutenant spoke to her, but his words were inaudible because of the booing of the crowd, which also served to incite a fresh outburst from the dogs. The lieutenant addressed the crowd, which overrode his voice with even louder booing. The lieutenant spoke to Mrs. Campbell, who nodded graciously and held up her hand to the crowd, which presently fell quiet.

West Side Hospital, although it was accustomed to the presence of the police, had never known such a convocation of high brass as it now had in its waiting room. It was 5:30 in the morning, and such was the haste with which the group had gathered that most were unshaved and wearing yesterday's shirt. Captain Eastman had convened the meeting, or, rather, made the call that set it in motion. As soon as the report came in, he had phoned the DI, who had in his turn called the Deputy Chief in charge of SOD, parent organization of the Emergency Service Unit. The Deputy Chief had phoned the Borough Commander, and so it had gone, upward through the ranks, to the Commissioner himself. No one had objected to being wakened in view of the gravity of the occurrence, and only the P.C., who was being murdered by a hangover, failed to show up at West Side Hospital.

Inside, in the emergency ward, an augmented Emercrit Group (West Side's equivalent of East Side's Code Blue Team) was working to save the lives of Webster McPeek, his wife Emily, and the two McPeek children, Webster Junior, nine years old, and Charlene, six. Only ten-month-old Parker McPeek, who had slept through everything in his crib, had not been bitten. The victims had been administered black mamba antivenin immediately upon arrival at West Side but their present condition varied.

The two males seemed to be responding well, but Mrs. McPeek and young Charlene were, in the words of one of the Emercrit Group, "touch-and-go."

The police brass, centered about a Deputy Commissioner at one end of the waiting room, were deep in conference. DI Scott and Captain Eastman, the two lowest ranks, had not been invited to join. They stood a little way off, smoking. Presently, the Deputy Chief in charge of SOD separated himself from the group, and beckoned DI Scott to one side.

"The heat's on," the DC said. "You've been given forty-eight hours to get that snake. When it starts biting people outside the park, it's going too far. You know who those people are?"

"What people, sir?"

"The family that got bitten. They're from Trinidad. She's a social worker, and he works as a warehouse man for a supermarket chain in the daytime and goes to law school at night. These aren't any of your welfare blacks, but a fine wonderful family. You get the point?"

"Yes sir. There's going to be a public outcry."

The DC nodded. "Your ass is on the line, Vincent. You've got forty eight hours to get the snake. After that, you'll be reassigned to someplace dirty. Nobody's fooling around, now. This comes straight from the top.)

The DC went back to join his peers, and DI Scott gave Eastman the gist of his conversation with the DC. "No question about it, this is a bullet straight from the P.C., bless his aching head. I'm telling you flat out, Tom, that if I go to Siberia you're coming with me."

"Look," Eastman said patiently, "we've been doing our best, robbing men from everywhere to put them in the park, even some old desk-duty cops who are practically crippled by arthritis. Our ESU trucks and personnel are out there all day long. And Converse has been going out every morning, like I told you, trying to find it sunning itself-"

"He hasn't produced any results," the DI said flatly.

"Maybe not. But he knows what he's doing. Sure, the brass shoots an ultimatum at us, but it's still going to take time. It's a process of elimination."

"Well," the DI said, "our asses are on the line, and I think I just thought of a process that will eliminate the whole process of elimination."

As the DI finished speaking to Eastman, Converse's alarm clock went off. He sipped a cup of instant coffee while he shaved and dressed, and turned off the air conditioner before he left. He found a cab cruising on Hudson Street. Its driver was a kid with a beard who confessed that he was lost in the Village and would welcome guidance. He took notice of the Pilstrom tongs.

"You gonna take a chance at catching that snake?"

Converse nodded.

"I don't believe in killing things," the driver said earnestly. "Like Schweitzer? I mean, the snake has a right to life. It's part of the ecology."

Eighth Avenue was dark and squalid. In a half hour, Converse thought, it would be light and squalid.

"You know," the driver said, "Schweitzer would go out of his way to avoid stepping on an ant?"

"Some snakes eat ants."

"Ah," the driver said, "eating is different from killing. Eating is ecology."

Converse got out at 100th Street and Central Park West, near the Boys Gate.

There were only a few cars going by on the street, mostly cabs with the off-duty signs lit. To the east, the sky was lightening, but the sun was not yet up. It was the eleventh or twelfth day of the heat wave-he had lost count-and this was going to be another ninety-plus day. He shifted the Pilstrom tongs to his shoulder and headed into the park.

He ambled eastward along the walkways, dreaming about Holly Markham, Empress of all the Russias, and it wasn't until a ray of sunlight struck his eyes that he realized that he had been dawdling. He began to trot, holding the tongs in front of him now, like a soldier on a bayonet charge.

By the time he reached his first target area of the day, not far from the short road (CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC-POLICE ONLY) that connects the East and West drives, the sun, white and aqueous, was starting to clear the buildings on Fifth Avenue.

The site was a hollow in a heavily wooded, overrun area, dense with undergrowth, fallen leaves, a tangle of bushes, ground creeper, weeds, a couple of fallen trees; and, above it, a large flat plateau of rock. It was a beautifully convenient rock, Converse thought, in the perfect neigh borhood for a black mamba's home. But that had been the case, to be sure, in a dozen previous sites he had checked out.

Moving cautiously, he edged toward a position that would bring him up to eye level with the table of the rock. He inched forward, careful to avoid making vibrations that a snake might "hear," and took cover behind a thick bush where, if he didn't move about unduly, he wouldn't be likely to be spotted by a snake's sharp eyes.

A long bar of sunlight appeared on a margin of the rock, toning its color down to a warm gray; as Converse watched, the strip broadened visibly. In a few minutes it would cover the entire surface and provide an irresistible basking place for a black mamba. He shut his eyes against the brightness, and when he next opened them, the rock was bathed in sunshine. He shaded his eyes with his palm and stared outward at the rock.

When he first heard the sound-or thought he heard it; it might have been wishful thinking-he pushed his head forward, straining. Nothing. Silence.

Then he heard it again, a mere whisper of sound, but continuous now, and his heartbeat accelerated with an almost painful abruptness. Not daring to move, he listened with terrific intensity, and presently he was sure of it, certain that it was the sound he had been waiting to hear for all those long mornings in the park.

It wasn't much of a sound, and an untrained person might not have heard it at all, or, hearing it, might have dismissed it as of no consequence.

But to a herpetologist it was unique and unmistakable-an innocent-enough rustle, much like the sound of a jump rope being drawn through the grass.

His heart was thumping so hard that for a moment he entertained the ludicrous notion that it was straining the thin material of his T-shirt.

As the sound came perceptibly closer beneath the rock, he thought joyously, My God, Converse, you're a lucky man, then shook his head as if to rebuke himself. Not luck; it wasn't luck at all, but a reward. He had been doing all the right things, he had been patient and painstaking, and sooner or later it was inevitable that he would find it.

The sound had become louder and more distinct. Converse, tingling with excitement, looked out unblinkingly over the flat sunbathed surface of the rock and knew that in just another short moment he would see it: a small head would appear over the rim of the rock, swaying on a sinuous neck, a tongue would flick in and out, in and out, alert dark eyes would probe for danger, and finally, the black mamba would insinuate its great curving length up onto the rock.

The rope-dragging sound intensified, and Converse braced himself for his first sight of the snake.

Then the sound stopped.

The snake felt the vibrations first at a distance. It paused below the rock and raised its head warily. It could see nothing threatening. But the vibrations continued, and they were disturbing. It darted its tongue and swivelled its eyes. Then, all at once, the ground became active, it began to shake, leaves and small stones flew, and there was a great wind.

The snake whipped around in a swift turn and slithered into the brush.

Even here, down below, leaves were blowing about, fragments of twigs were stinging its flanks. It broached the entrance to the burrow, pushed past the debris which had piled up around the entrance, and slid inside to safety.

The Lord is my shepherd.

Graham Black stood on the flat rock and stared down into the tangled thickets of the hollow. It was deeply shadowed with the dark of evening and the overhanging miasma of evil. The Lord is my shepherd, and He has led me.

Down there lurked the beast, the messenger of Satan, upon whom the beloved Reverend Sanctus Milanese had declared holy war. And under his inspired generalship 1, Graham Black, humble soldier in the army of the Church of the Purification, have been directed to the lair of the enemy. Thank you, Lord.

If Graham Black had been capable of detachment, he might have recognized that his afflatus was familiar, that he experienced it anew each day, each time he explored another possible hiding place; and that the litany of faith had never altered or wavered in all the days he had spent scouring his assigned sector of the park. But Graham Black did not question himself.

He knew only certainty. Why else was he returning to a place he had already searched thoroughly once before? Was that not a Sign in itself?

The Lord is my shepherd.

The revelation had come earlier in the day, and, dizzy with joy, he had wanted to rush to the evil place, but God had blessed him with caution as well as wisdom. There were many police in the area, and they would have beset him and hindered him in doing the Lord's work. So he had waited until the approach of darkness, when the police had given up and gone away. And then he had come straight to this place.

If a day that started out badly kept on getting worse, it could turn out to be memorable. When Holly still hadn't shown up by 7:45 for a 7:00 date, Converse knew that the day-which had begun with the helicopter, and gone on with his being fired by the DI and having his neck squeezed, and had continued with his waking up sour and out of sorts from an afternoon nap-was going to be one of those red-staffed calamities that one could look back on in the future with awe and a sort of inverse pride.

For a while, he was sure he was going to turn the day around. He had phoned Holly at her newspaper, where three people, speaking brusquely against a background of clacking typewriters, had asked him to hold on. When he heard her voice he said, "This is Mark Converse. Can I see you tonight?"

"Yes, of course."

"I don't think you could classify it as a case of actual need. I just want to see you."

"I want to see you, too."

She had named the time and the place. The place was a five-minute walk from his apartment on Charles Street, and was called, for no reason of decor, or anything else that he could fathom, the Blue Griffin. Earlier, before she was forty-five minutes late, he had sat at the bar and amused himself by trying to think of more appropriate names. The one that seemed most successful was The First Person Singular. lt fit the clientele a lot better than the Blue Griffin.

Operation Pillar of Fire had begun at the first tick of midnight; thus, the night had technically become "tomorrow," and none would be able to accuse the Reverend Sanctus Milanese of having borne false witness.

Approximately sixty Puries took part in Operation Pillar of Fire. They were divided into eight squads of equal size and a larger ninth. The eight "diversionary" squads were designated by consecutive letters of the alphabet, A through H. The ninth went by the letter S for Serpent. There was at least one young woman in each of the eight squads A to H, but none in squad S. All, men and women alike, were dressed uniformly in black trousers or slacks, black polo shirts, and black socks and shoes. Squads A to H carried three five-gallon drams of gasoline. Squad S carried five drums, and was armed with shovels, axes, hoes, rakes, baseball bats, and roughly hewn forked sticks; many of the axes, shovels, hoes, and rakes were so recently purchased that they still bore the manufacturers' bright labels on their hafts.

Because they were aware of the police surveillance of the Tabernacle and the Reverend's mansion, the members of Operation Pillar of Fire assembled at widely dispersed points. They entered in cars (one each for squads A to H, two for squad S) through nine different gates, ranging the length and width of the park. Several of them passed patrolling police cars, but there were no incidents; they were indistinguishable from any other cars driving through the park. The squads were dropped off as near as possible to their assigned destinations, after which the cars drove away.

Once, before he pulled so far ahead that Eastman had trouble seeing him, Converse turned and looked back. He wants to make sure he's losing me, Eastman thought, the treacherous bastard, so he can play Good Samaritan to that stinking snake. He tried to turn on an extra burst of speed, but just then a squad car pulled up onto the curb and cut him off. Both doors fanned open and two cops came running toward him.

One of them yelled, "Freeze!" and put his hand on the butt of his revolver.

"Freeze, you!"

For an instant, Eastman considered ramming into the cop and knocking him ass over teakettle. But the guy's partner was running up, and he already had his gun in his hand.

Panting, sucking air, Eastman yelled, "On the job," and started to reach for his I.D.

"Freeze," both cops yelled at once, and the second cop crouched and brought his piece to bear, holding it in that terrific two-handed grip he had picked up from television. "Don't make a move!"

"Shit," Eastman said.

There were so many police vehicles on the scene that they were forced to compete with each other for access to the park. Once inside, they streamed onto the main auto routes and walkways, searching for suspects.

The Puries, squads A to H, had left the areas of their fires once they were certain they were burning satisfactorily, but they did not flee. They walked through the park in formation, singing hymns. They offered no uniform resistance to being gathered in by the police, although there were a few minor clashes. The net also swept up a few innocent muggers.

All of the detainees were piled into squad cars and then transferred to patrol wagons with a capacity of twenty persons. They were taken to the Central Park Precinct, where they were booked, charged, investigated, and fingerprinted. Because the Central Park Precinct had no lodging facilities, the suspects were dispersed for the rest of the night to the Two-oh, the Two-three, and the Two-four. The females were sent to Midtown North.

As he rounded into the park, Converse saw flames and black smoke boiling upward almost directly to the east, and he knew that the Puries had ignited the snake's territory. Bastards, they would roast it! But he ran on, though he was certain there was no way he could save the snake now.

Even supposing it had not died in the flames, but had been driven out into the open, were the Puries going to stand by and allow him to bag it?

Still, the snake might foot them. In Africa, during the seasonal burning of the dried grass, black mambas frequently survived by remaining in a burrow under a dead tree or a disused ant heap. Since it was natural to the species and would help explain how it had escaped detection for so long, it was reasonable to suppose that the snake in the park had found such a burrow.

A few hundred yards short of the snake's territory, Converse heard excited voices. He stopped. The voices came closer, and then they came into view, black-clad Puries running, waving their improvised weapons.

He watched as they streamed past him in a loose formation that he remembered vaguely from his ROTC days as an infantryman's extended order drill. From their purposiveness, it seemed certain that they had flushed the snake and were on its trail. From the way they were running they seemed to think the snake would move ahead in a straight line. But, of course, it would zigzag to take advantage of natural concealment, and it might even double back, although the flames would prevent it from returning to its territory. On the other hand, the Puries might actually be on its trail.

Converse hesitated, indecisive, then, on instinct, ran after the Puries.

One of the cops handed Eastman's I.D. back to him and said, "Sorry, captain, but you know how it is."

"No," Eastman said. "Tell me how it is. And put that gun away."

Both cops returned their revolvers to their holsters. The second cop said, "Well, we sure are sorry, captain."

"Tell me how it is," Eastman said to the first cop. His voice was shaking with anger. "Go ahead, tell me how it is."

"Well, we see this guy running-"

"Which guy running are you talking about?" Eastman said. "Me?"

"Yeah. You're running, going like hell, and I spot you, and I says to Joe, my partner-"

"There were fifty goddamn people running," Eastman said. "Why me?"

The cops looked at each other, and after a moment the first one said, "Well, sure there was all these other people running, but we spotted you and we said, we both said, Hey, that big guy, he looks big and tough, you know, well, you know, captain, what I mean, you should of seen what you looked like, what you look like…"

"You dumb sonofabitch," Eastman said, "I know exactly what I look like. I look like a cop." He glared at the first cop. "Don't I"

"Yeah, come to think of it…"

"Don't I" Eastman said to the second cop.

"You sure do, captain."

"Now that we got that straightened out," Eastman said, "I'm commandeering your car. Let's get moving."

"I don't know, captain," the first cop said, "we got our orders from the sergeant, we gotta-

"Get in that car, you pair of shitheads," Eastman yelled, reaching under his shirt, "or I swear I'll shoot you both dead right in your fucking tracks."

Because the fires were dispersed over so wide an area, six fire companies were eventually brought into the park. By the time the firemen reached some of the fires the gasoline vapours had already burned off and the color of the flames had changed from black to a dirty brown.

The spread of the individual fires varied, depending on the contiguity of trees and bushes in the surrounding terrain, but none, fortunately, posed a threat to any of the park's structures. Since hydrants were unavailable in most of the affected areas (hydrants were emplaced only on the East and West Drives, in the transverses, and adjacent to buildings), the firemen were obliged to use pumpers for their source of water. In the case of the most difficult of the fires, the pumpers of two companies emptied booster tanks as well as their regular tanks, and were faced with the alternative of running a stretch to the nearest hydrant or using a hard-suction hose, a device which, dropped into a lake or pond, would suck up water rapidly and impel it at the nozzle with force.

In the event, pumpers from other companies responded to the emergency with untapped tanks. Presently, the smoke from even the most stubborn of the fires changed from brown to white, and at this indication of abatement, the firemen breathed easier.

But even after the fires were well under control, it would be a long night for the firemen. In most of the areas where the fires were ignited, the vegetation had been compacted and dried for years, and would continue to smoulder with the persistence of peat. For hours after the flames had died, the firemen would be overhauling the areas, raking and chopping until no spark remained.

"What do you think they put sirens in these things for?" Eastman yelled.

"Turn it on. Turn it on."

But the wailing of the siren was just another instrument in the orchestra of official noises, and progress was slow. Eastman knew he could make better time running, but he needed the respite for the sake of his thumping heart and heaving chest. Both sides of Central Park West were jammed with spectators. Through a gap in the crowd Eastman caught a glimpse of Holly Markham. She was sitting on a bench, her head slumped toward her breast, her fists pressed hard into her diaphragm. Stitch in the side, Eastman guessed, and thought, If that splendid girl was my girl, I'm damned if I'd let any lousy snake keep me from giving her comfort.

The squad car found an opening and ploughed ahead to the Boys Gate. Eastman directed the car to the West Drive, and then realized that he didn't know where to go. To the left, a group of Puries ran by, brandishing shovels and axes. A moment later he recognized Converse. Eastman screamed at the cop driving the squad car to stop, but the cop's reaction was slow. By the time he got out, the Puries and Converse were both out of sight. He took three deep breaths, slowly, and then ran after them.

The snake crawled into a thicket and rested, its eyes fixed on the bobbing lights that had been clinging to it in pursuit. Suddenly, a light shone directly into its eyes, and behind the light the snake could make out a shadowy figure.

Bill Hextall, at the extreme right Hank of squad S, saw the snake when his flashlight beam reflected in its eyes. The snake, except for its head and neck, was hidden in brush. Hextall stared at the snake in fascination, then, as its head withdrew, let out a hoarse shout.

Eastman watched a squad of blue-helmeted TPU cops form a wedge and start to bull their way through the crowd. If they were going to try to collar the Puries, they were in for serious trouble. Maybe the crowd would allow them to take some names, but that was the limit. Never mind that the Puries had burned up Central Park-they had killed the killer, hadn't they? They were the heroes of the hour, weren't they? He shrugged. Maybe the cops would have sense enough to act prudently.

The crowd murmured ominously and offered resistance to the passage of the TPU wedge. Walk away from it, Eastman told himself, you're just an Emergency Service cop on special assignment whose job is now finished, even if somebody else did it for you. Fade out of the picture, you're too old to brawl with an aroused citizenry.

He saw someone burst out of the crowd like a cork popped from a bottle, elbows flailing, face dark and scowling. It was Converse, still carrying his snake catching stick. For a moment they came face to face.

Eastman started to speak, but Converse muttered, "So long" and moved on.

Sore loser, Eastman thought. He listened to the voice of the crowd. It was swelling to a roar, peppered with obscenities. He saw fists being formed.

He sighed, and began to push his way through the crowd, toward the stalled TPU wedge. "Police. Make way. Police officer."

A hand reached out from somewhere and ripped his Hawaiian shirt down the front.