CHAPTER 12
The IRT Express train rumbled under the East River and stopped in the Boro Hall station near Long Island College Hospital. Eleven nurses, due to report at 11:30 P.M. for the overnight shift, got off the train. By the time they had climbed the stairs to the street, they numbered an even dozen. The women moved in a tight group along the dark Brooklyn sidewalk, turning their heads only slightly to scan the shadows with the keen survival instincts of city women. A wino was the only other person visible. He swayed toward them. The nurses had sized him up from 25 yards away and, pocketbooks shifted to their inboard arms, they skirted him and passed on, leaving in the air a pleasant scent of toothpaste and hairspray that he could not appreciate because his nose was stopped up. Most of the hospital windows were dark. An ambulance siren wailed and wailed again, louder this time.
"'They're playing our song," a resigned voice said.
A yawning security guard opened the glass doors. "ID cards, ladies, let's see 'um."
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 blonde 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 pantyhose. 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.
"What happened to the patient in 327?"
"Who?"
"The man in 327."
"I can't keep up with them. I haven't seen you before, have I?"
"No, I've been at St. Vincent's." This was true---she had stolen her credentials at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan during the afternoon shift change. Dahlia had to hurry this up, even if she aroused the woman's suspicions. "If he was moved, there would be a record, right?"
"It would be downstairs locked up. If he's not in the file, he's not on this floor, and if he's not on this floor he's most likely not in this hospital."
"The girls were saying there was such a flap when he came in."
"There's a flap all the time, honey. Woman doctor come in here yesterday morning about 3 A.M. wanting to see his X-rays. Had to go upstairs and open up radiology. They must have moved him in the daytime after I left."
"Who was the doctor?"
"I don't know. Nothing would do but she was going have those X-rays."
"Did she sign for them?"
"Up in radiology she had to sign them out, just like everybody signs them out."
The head nurse was coming. Quickly now. "Is radiology on four?"
"Five."
The head nurse and the aide were talking as Dahlia entered the elevator. The doors closed. She did not see the aide nod toward the elevator, did not see the head nurse's expression change as she remembered instructions from the night before, did not see her reach for the telephone fast.
In the emergency room Policeman John Sullivan's belt beeper sounded. "Now shut your mouth!" he said to the cursing, bloody drunk his partner was holding. Sullivan unclipped his walkie-talkie and responded to the call.
"Complainant third-floor head nurse Emma Ryan reports a suspicious person, white female, blonde, about five-seven, late twenties, nurse's uniform, possibly in radiology on the fifth floor," the precinct dispatcher told Sullivan. "Security guard will meet you at the elevators. Unit seven-one is on the way."
"Ten-four," Sullivan said, switching off. "Jack, cuff this bastard to the bench and cover the stairs until seven-one gets here. I'm going up."
The security guard was waiting with a bunch of keys.
"Freeze all the elevators except the first one," Sullivan said. "Let's go."
Dahlia had no trouble with the lock on the radiology lab. She closed the door behind her. In a moment she made out the bulk of the X-ray table, the vertical slab of the fluoroscope. She rolled one of the heavy leaded screens in front of the frosted glass door and turned on her penlight. The small beam played over the coiled barium hose, the goggles and gloves hanging beside the fluoroscope. Faintly a siren. An ambulance? Police? Looking around quickly. This door---a dark-room. An alcove lined with big filing cabinets. Drawer opening on loud rollers---X-rays in envelopes. Here a small office, a desk, and a book. Footsteps in the hall. A circle of light on the pages. Flip, flip. Yesterday's date. A page of signatures and case numbers. It had to be a woman's name. Go by the time in the left column---4 A.M., case number, no patient's name, X-ray signed out to Dr. Rachel Bauman. Not signed back in.
The footsteps stopping at the door. A tinkle of keys. The first one didn't work. Throw the wig behind the cabinet, glasses with it. Door bumping against the leaded screen. A bulky policeman and a security guard coming in.
Dahlia Iyad was standing before an illuminated X-ray viewer. A chest X-ray was clamped over the lighted screen of the viewer, ribs projecting bars of light and shadow on her uniform. The shadows of the bones moved over her face as she turned her head toward the men. The policeman's gun was out.
"Yes, officer?" Pretending to notice the gun for the first time. "My goodness, is something wrong?"
"Stand right there, ma'am." With his free hand, Sullivan fumbled for the light switch and found it. The room lit up, Dahlia seeing details of the office she had not noticed in the darkness. The policeman looked over the room with quick snaps of his head.
"What are you doing in here?"
"Examining an X-ray, obviously."
"Is anyone else in here?"
"Not now. There was a nurse a few minutes ago."
"Blonde, about your height?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Where did she go?"
"I have no idea. What's happening?"
"We're finding out."
The security guard looked in the other rooms adjoining the X-ray lab and returned, shaking his head. The policeman stared at Dahlia. Something about her did not seem quite right to him but he couldn't identify it. He should search her and take her downstairs to the complainant. He should secure the floor. He should radio his partner. Nurses make the air white around them. He did not want to put his hands on the white uniform. He did not want to offend a nurse. He did not want to appear a fool, handcuffing a nurse.