His mission was accomplished, with God's help he had found out the serpent. But the snake's wide stare was compelling, hypnotic, and he lingered. Then, just as he turned to leave, the snake began to move toward him, gliding over the leaves and brushy debris, and its speed was terrifying. But he remembered being told that a snake only rarely pursued a man and that, in the event that it did, a man could easily outdistance it.
He put his back to the advancing snake and, lifting his feet high to clear the underbrush, began to run. The play of his muscles and his surefootedness exhilarated him. When he began to climb upward from the hollow toward the rock, he turned for a look over his shoulder, certain that the serpent would be far behind him, if it had not abandoned the chase altogether. But it was still pursuing, and it had closed the gap between them, its head high on a forward slant, the long slender body curving behind.
Graham Black did not look behind him again, straining as he pushed upward toward the rock, and he had almost reached it when he felt a blow against the calf of his right leg.
Captain Eastman arrived at East Side Hospital in a dead heat with the television crews. A reporter wearing a backpack pushed a microphone in his face. He brushed it aside and went into the reception room. It was heavy with smoke and crowded with reporters. His I.D. got him past the security man guarding the entrance to the emergency ward, but no farther. The guard posted at the door of the room where the Code Blue team was working on the victim wouldn't budge.
Eastman lost his temper and tried to force his way past the guard and got into an undignified shouting and pushing match with him. The door opened and Dr. Shapiro came out, looking angry.
"What the hell is going on out here?" He stared at Eastman. "What are you trying to do, captain?"
"I'm sorry." Eastman made a gesture of apology to the guard. "How is he, doc?"
"You ought to know better, captain." Shapiro frowned and hesitated and then said, "He's responding to the antivenin. We think he's going to make it.
Thank God."
"Thank God," Eastman said. "He can tell us where the snake is. Can I go in and talk to him?"
Shapiro shook his head. "No. Anyway, he won't talk to you."
"He's able to talk?"
"Yes. But he won't even talk to us. He flatly refuses to say a word to anybody but the Reverend Sanctus Milanese."
The Reverend Milanese's gleaming black Rolls-Royce (custom built at a cost of $125,000) turned into the Emergency Ward driveway, and was surrounded by reporters before it had come to a full stop. The press of bodies made it impossible for the doors to be opened. Cameras focused through the windows on the back seat of the car, where the Reverend Milanese's saturnine face, shrouded in the stiff collar of his cloak, could barely be discerned.
The stalemate was ended when a second car, a more modest Mercedes-Benz, pulled in behind the limousine. Four Christ's Cohorts got out, formed a wedge, and opened a path to the Rolls-Royce, roughly displacing the reporters. The rear door opened, and the Reverend Milanese emerged with a flash of scarlet cape lining. Another three Christ's Cohorts got out, and, with the four from the Mercedes, formed another wedge.
With the Reverend Milanese in their center, using their shoulders and elbows, they pushed through the crowd to the entrance. Inside, they swept on into the emergency ward, carrying the protesting security guard with them.
Presently, those in the reception room heard shouts and the sound of scuffling through the door. Later, the guard posted in front of the room where Graham Black was being treated told the reporters that the Puries had forced their way into the room and roughed him up in the process. He exhibited a welt on his right cheekbone, and said that he would bring suit against the Church of the Purification for aggravated assault.
In the hospital cafeteria, Captain Eastman drank his coffee, grimacing, as though it was medicine. Which, in a way, it was-an antisleep potion. Yet more than once, in the past week, it had occurred to him that he couldn't have made less headway in the search for the snake if he had just allowed himself to drift off to sleep. He looked at the phone sitting at the cashier's elbow. Dr. Shapiro had promised to call him as soon as the Reverend arrived, the estimable, fucking, phony Reverend Sanctus Milanese.
He had no patience for the Puries or their religion, with its arrogant insistence that God was their God. But didn't his own religion make the same claim of being specially chosen? And the Jews and the Moslems and what-all-not? One God, but everybody had an exclusive on Him. He thought of the Purie lying upstairs in the emergency room. He was glad he was going to recover, but it was inevitable, the way the Puries had been roaming through the park, that one of them would get bitten.
And now what? If they had been a pain in the ass before, what would they be like now? There was a real fanaticism about those clean necked young people, and wheresoever’s their Reverend led they would follow. What idiocy would the Reverend dream up to harass an already overworked police force?
Manpower was being stretched to the limits as it was, especially in problem areas like Harlem and Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx, where people were exacerbated by the heat and demanding blood in arguments which, in cooler weather, would have ended with just a blow or even a few angry words.
When the telephone rang he reached across the counter and took it out from under the cashier's hand. The Reverend Milanese had just left the emergency room…
Eastman yelled, "Left?" and slammed the phone down furiously. He ran up the stairs to the reception room. The Reverend, surrounded by his bodyguard, stood in the center of a clot of newsmen, his face turned upward, his eyes shut, his sallow lips moving. The reporters were shouting questions at him: "Did you speak to him?" "What did he tell you?" "Do you know where the snake is?"
The Reverend lowered his head. He held his hand out, palm up, for silence.
"I have seen Graham Black and I have prayed with him."
Eastman had to restrain himself from joining the chorus of questions.
Inwardly, he framed one of his own: "You mean you wasted your time praying when you could have asked him where it happened?"
"Is that all? Didn't he say anything about the snake?" The Reverend faced the speaker. "Graham Black beseeched me to carry on the task that God has imposed upon us, namely, to exterminate the messenger of Satan and so purify the tainted city. Needless to say, I rededicated myself to the effort in the name of the Lord God, and pledged new initiatives to destroy the wicked serpent."
A voice, louder than the other, caught the Reverend's attention. "Did he tell you where to look?"
The Reverend's black eyes glittered. "What I said to him, and he to me, was the private conversation of priest and communicant. Would you wish me to violate that confidentiality?"
A few voices shouted, "Yes, yes," and the Reverend's lip curled. There was a volley of questions: "You spoke of new initiatives. What are they? Be specific, Reverend." "Will you tell the police what you were told by Graham Black?" "Are you going to defy the Police Commissioner's warning about vigilante actions?"
"'The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire.' We shall do God's bidding in the way that He prescribes. We obey His laws, not the Police Commissioner's."
The Reverend nodded to his guards, who began to push against the crowd toward the exit. The reporters followed, still shouting questions. A TV newsman reached in with his microphone. "Reverend, tell us how soon we can expect this new initiative of yours to start."
Ile Reverend, after a moment's hesitation, said, "Armageddon is tomorrow.
Tomorrow, the emissary of the devil will be extirpated."
The Reverend's guard swept through the door into the courtyard, and the reporters piled out after them. Eastman crossed the almost empty reception room and went into the emergency ward. Shapiro was in the corridor, sitting on a stretcher, his legs dangling.