Thomas Harris - Black Sunday

“They’re playing our song,” a resigned voice said.

A yawning security guard opened the glass doors. “ID cards, ladies, let’s see ‘em.”

Grumbling, the women rummaged their purses and held up their identification—building passes for the staff nurses, lime green State University of New York ID cards for the private nurses. This was the only special security measure they would encounter.

The guard swept the upheld cards with a glance as though he were polling a class. He waved the nurses on and they scattered toward their duty stations in the big building. One of them entered the women’s restroom opposite the elevator bank on the ground floor. The room was dark, as she had expected.

She switched on the light and looked in the mirror. The blond wig was a flawless fit and the effect of bleaching her eyebrows had been well worth the effort. With cotton pads filling out her cheeks and the glasses with fancy frames altering the proportions of her face, it was difficult to recognize Dahlia Iyad.

She hung her coat inside the toilet stall and took from its inside pocket a small tray. She placed two bottles, a thermometer, a plastic tongue depressor, and a paper pill cup on the tray and covered them with a cloth. The tray was a prop. The important piece of equipment was in her uniform pocket. It was a hypodermic syringe filled with potassium chloride, enough to cause cardiac arrest in a robust ox.

She put the crisp nurse’s cap on her head and secured it carefully with hairpins. She gave her appearance a final check in the mirror. The loose-fitting nurse’s uniform did her figure no justice, but it concealed the flat Beretta automatic stuffed into the top of her panty hose. She was satisfied.

The ground-floor hall containing the administrative offices was dim and deserted, lighting cut to a minimum in the energy shortage. She ticked off the signs as she passed along the hall. Accounting, Records, there it was—Patient Information. The inquiry window with its round conversation hole was dark.

A simple snap lock secured the door. Thirty seconds’ work with the tongue depressor forced back the beveled bolt and the door swung open. She had given considerable thought to her next move, and though it went against her instinctive wish to be hidden, she turned on the office lights instead of using the flashlight. One by one the banks of fluorescent lights buzzed and lit up.

She went to the large ledger on the inquiry desk and flipped it open. K. No Kabakov. Now she would have to go from door to door checking the nurses’ stations, watching out for guards, risking exposure. Wait. The television news had pronounced it Kabov. The papers had spelled it Kabov. Bottom of the page, here it was. Kabov, D. No address. All inquiries to be directed to the hospital administrator. Inquiries in person reported to administrator, hospital security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, LE 5-7700. He was in Room 327.

Dahlia took a deep breath and closed the book.

“How did you get in there?”

Dahlia in a double reflex nearly jumped, did not jump, looked up calmly at the security guard peering at her through the inquiry window. “Hey, you want to make yourself useful,” she said, “you could take this book up to the night administrator and I won’t have to go all the way back upstairs. It weighs ten pounds.”

“How did you get in there?”

“The night administrator’s key.” If he asked to see the key, she would kill him.

“Nobody is supposed to be in here at night.”

“Look, you want to call upstairs and tell them they have to have your permission, that’s fine with me. I was just told to come bring it, that’s all.” If he tried to call, she would kill him. “What, should I check in with you if they send me down here? I would have done that, but I didn’t know.”

“I’m responsible for this, see. I have to know who is here. I see this light, I don’t know who’s here. I have to leave the door to find out. What if somebody is waiting at the front to come in? Then they’re mad at me, see, because I’m not at the door. You check with me when you come down here, all right?”

“All right, sure. I’m sorry.”

“Be sure you lock this up and turn out the light, all right?”

“Sure.”

He nodded and walked slowly down the hall.

Room 327 was quiet and dark. Only the streetlights below shone through the venetian blinds, casting faint bars of light on the ceiling. Eyes accustomed to the dark could make out the bed, fitted with its aluminum frame to hold the covers up off the patient. In the bed, Dotty Hirschburg slept the deep sleep of childhood, the tip of her thumb just touching the roof of her mouth, fingers spread on the pillow. She had watched the playground from the window of her new room all afternoon, and she had tired herself out. She was accustomed by now to the comings and goings of the night nurses and she did not stir when the door slowly opened. A column of light widened on the opposite wall, was blotted by a shadow, and then narrowed again as the door quietly closed.

Dahlia Iyad stood with her back against the door, waiting for her pupils to dilate. The light from the hall had shown her that the room was empty except for the patient, the cushions of the chair still deeply dented from Moshevsky’s vigil. Dahlia opened her mouth and throat to silence her breathing. She could hear other breathing in the darkness. Nurse’s footsteps in the hall behind her, pausing, entering the room across the hall.

Dahlia moved silently to the foot of the tentlike bed. She set her tray down on the rolling bed table and took the hypodermic from her pocket. She removed the cap from the long needle and depressed the plunger until she could feel a tiny bead of the fluid at the tip of the needle.

Anywhere would do. The carotid then. Very quick. She moved up beside the bed in the dark and felt gently for the neck, touched hair and then the skin. It felt soft. Where was the pulse? There. Too soft. She felt with thumb and fingers around the neck. Too small. The hair too soft, the skin too soft, the neck too small. She put the hypo in her pocket and switched on her penlight.

“Hello,” said Dotty Hirschburg, blinking against the light. Dahlia’s fingers rested cool on her throat.

“Hello,” Dahlia said.

“The light hurts my eyes. Do I have to have a shot?” She looked up anxiously at Dahlia’s face, lighted from beneath. The hand moved to her cheek.

“No. No, you don’t have to have a shot. Are you all right? Do you want anything?”

“Do you go around and see if everybody is asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you wake them up then?”

“To make sure they’re all right. You go back to sleep now.”

“It seems pretty silly to me. Waking people up to see if they’re asleep.”

“When did you move in here?”

“Today. Mr. Kabakov had this room. My mother asked for it so I can see the playground.”

“Where is Mr. Kabakov?”

“He went away.”

“Was he very sick, did they take him away covered up?”

“You mean dead? Heck no, but they shaved a place on his head. We watched the ballgame together yesterday. The lady doctor took him away. Maybe he went home.”

Dahlia hesitated in the hall. She knew she should not push it now. She should leave the hospital. She should fail. She pushed it. At the icemaker behind the nurses’ station, she spent several minutes packing a pitcher with cubes. The head nurse, all starch and spectacles and iron gray hair, was talking with a nurse’s aide in one of those listless conversations that drift on through the night with no beginning or end. At last the head nurse rose and marched down the hall in response to a call from a floor nurse.

Dahlia was at her desk in a second, flipping through the alphabetical index. No Kabakov. No Kabov. The nurse’s aide watched her. Dahlia turned to the woman.