The Council of Ten

by Jon Land

  He heard the footsteps to his rear an instant before they were upon him. Lantos felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as he pressed the button. The three daggers, spaced inches apart, leaped out. From there he wasted no time, turning and swinging the now deadly weapon up in the same motion, the object being to take the assailant utterly by surprise.

  But the assailant was already gone, a blur whirling by with something shiny in his band, a shape more than a person. Lantos swung his deadly briefcase in a wide arc. It swished through the air, again finding nothing as a big arm grasped him from behind and yanked backward. The knife bit into his back and made a neat slice straight into his heart. Lantos was dead instantly, even his grip on the cherished briefcase relinquished in the end.

  The shape stooped to retrieve it and walked away into the night.

  Doris Kaplan felt that Wednesday was going to be a bad day even before the phone call came. She had retired early Tuesday night, but by three A.M. had given up fighting to sleep and switched on the cable news channel. She watched it mindlessly until the sky showed its first brightness beyond the blinds, finally drifting off into an uneasy slumber with the words of the anchorman forming her dreams.

  Awakening alone, in the darkness of her bedroom, was far more frightening than not being able to sleep at all, and it had been Sophie, of all people, who had advised her in this regard: Always sleep with a glass of water on your night table. Drinking water, Sophie said, was the best way to settle yourself down once coming awake in the black loneliness. Doris had found that the water worked exactly as Sophie had promised. She stored her red life pills next to the glass on the distant chance that they might be needed some night as well.

  The phone’s chiming shook her awake, stiff and cold in her chair, just after nine. Joints rebelling, she stumbled to the phone at her bedside.

  “Hello?”

  “Doris.” The voice was soft between what sounded like sobs.

  “Who—Sylvia, is that you? What’s wrong?”

  “She’s dead, Doris,” Sylvia moaned. “Sophie’s dead… .”

  The police were already there when Doris arrived at Sophie’s home on Embassy Drive in West Palm. Sylvia, seated in the living room, was being comforted by a police officer. Didn’t she remember that Sophie never used the living room? When company came over, they sat in the kitchen or den, never here. Otherwise there’d just be another room for Sophie to clean.

  “Oh, Doris!” Sylvia shrieked and Doris hugged her, smelling the too sweet perfume she had loaded on even at this early hour. She and Sophie went for a walk every morning at nine sharp. It must have been then that she …

  “Mrs. Kaplan?”

  Doris turned to her left and saw an overweight man wearing a sports jacket with a badge pinned to his lapel.

  “I’m Sergeant Nickerson, Mrs. Kaplan. Mrs. Mehlman informed us you’d be coming.”

  Doris eased Sylvia away from her. When Sylvia tried to cling, Doris grasped her shoulders firmly. “I’ll be right back.” She moved to Sergeant Nickerson, not caring about the makeup she had neglected to put on, and sighed. “How did it happen?”

  “The doctors are with her now,” Nickerson reported. “We think it was a heart attack. We’re almost certain. Did she have a history of heart trouble?”

  “Can you name me a seventy-six-year-old woman who doesn’t? I’m sorry, Sergeant. Yes, she had a slight history. Nothing to speak of, though.”

  “It happened in her sleep, Mrs. Kaplan. She went quickly.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Well, Mrs.—”

  “I want to see her.”

  Sergeant Nickerson had started to object, but he silenced himself and nodded. “In the bedroom. Just as we found her.”

  There were no ropes or uniformed police anywhere on the stairs or on the way into Sophie’s bedroom. This was not a crime scene, after all. It was a simple investigation of a natural death. Doris reached the doorway of Sophie’s overly large bedroom and gazed in. The drapes were still drawn. Two men were hovering over the raised shape of her friend, who such a short time ago had claimed that the tarot cards predicted something terrible was going to happen. One man was taking notes while the other seemed to be performing some sort of perfunctory examination. Doris entered without announcing herself and moved to the foot of the bed where she could view her friend clearly.

  The sight made her grasp her own heart fearfully and realize that her life pills were back in her room next to her water glass. There was never anything pretty about death. Sophie’s eyes and mouth hung open in a twisted mask of frozen agony, her last instant of pain captured forever. Her eyes looked more sunken than Doris had ever seen them before. She had died lying on her back, most of her body under the covers. Doris caught the soft whirl of the air conditioner humming and smelled the sweet lavender that Sophie oversprayed throughout the room.

  “Was it a heart attack?” Doris asked.

  The men at Sophie’s bedside seemed to notice her for the first time.

  “Yes,” one of them said flatly, retrieving his medical bag from her night table.

  “Aren’t you going to close her eyes?”

  “I’m sorry?” said the other.

  “Her eyes. Aren’t you going to close them?”

  The two doctors looked at each other and shrugged. One of them leaned over and shut Sophie’s eyelids.

  Doris was embarrassed with herself for meddling, for insisting that her friend not be left there with her eyes open. As if it mattered. It just seemed wrong. Everything seemed wrong, but it wasn’t until a few minutes after a pair of ambulance drivers covered Sophie atop a dolly and wheeled her from the house that Doris realized what was most wrong of all.

  There had been no glass of water on Sophie’s night table.

  Doris spent most of the drive to Fannie’s house in North Palm Beach in a daze. She was a slow driver to begin with, at her age unable to fathom having to replace her ancient Mercedes due to accident, and today only the honking of horns behind her kept her speed near thirty.

  No glass of water on Sophie’s night table ….

  So what? Doris had never actually seen one there before, now had she? All she was going on were Sophie’s assertions that she never slept without such a glass within reach. Maybe one of the cops had clumsily spilled it and then returned the glass to the bathroom. He wasn’t exactly disturbing evidence since this was hardly a murder investigation.

  It had been just three days before on the plane that Sophie had looked into the tarot cards and had seen death. Doris felt awful for having brushed her off without a word, not that it would have changed things.

  She had called Sylvia’s doctor before leaving for Fannie’s. She could have also used the phone to break the news to Fannie, but that wasn’t the way friends treated each other, especially friends who had grown to depend on each other for so much.

  Fannie lived in North Palm in yet another booming residential district of the famed Palm Beaches. Houses had been constructed virtually on top of each other, and all Fannie’s neighbors were young, uniformly hated by her for their loud parties, pain-in-the-ass kids, and wild dogs who, according to Fannie, “shit up a storm” on her lawn.

  By the time Doris swung onto Fannie’s street, she was calmer, almost composed. The signs had been there. Sophie had given up, had seen what was coming and done nothing to avoid it, playing with the tarot cards long enough to hear what she expected them to say. Doris felt herself relax.

  The police cars lining Fannie’s street with their lights still flashing changed all that.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go in there, ma’am. Ma’am!” said the uniformed officer blocking the entrance to Fannie’s house.

  Doris tried to shoulder past him. “She’s my friend. Get out of my way.”

  Beyond the policeman, Doris could see a horde of men in Fannie’s living room snapping pictures, taking notes, and dropping a powdery substance all over her furniture. In the center of it all lay a huge shape on the
rug covered by a sheet. Fannie.

  “Let her in,” came the voice of a man from the hallway, and the policeman permitted her to pass.

  Doris charged forward only to be cut off by a tall man wearing a too-warm tweed sport coat.

  “I’m Lieutenant Melrose,” he said, holding her back. “You said you’re—you were a friend of Mrs. Karp?”

  Doris struggled to see beyond his shoulder. “Yes. What … what happened?”

  “As near as we can tell, early this morning she must have surprised a burglar in the act and he panicked.”

  Melrose moved to the side enough for Doris to see clearly into the living room. The dreaded pounding returned to her chest with a vengeance. The room was a shambles. Nothing was where it should have been. Pieces of furniture were scattered everywhere, the chairs overturned, bookcases spilled over. Shattered porcelain from Fannie’s prized collection lay randomly on the rug and a stiff wind poured in through a gaping hole in the bay window. The mess alone would have been enough to kill Fannie, a woman who once vowed to stay up all night long to stake out her lawn in vain pursuit of the pooch who’d been leaving piles everywhere. Doris remembered that Fannie had ended up falling asleep in the flower bed.

  “This is just the way we found the room,” Melrose was saying.

  A pair of detectives brushed by Doris holding clear plastic bags packed with evidence. Evidence of what? Something was wrong here. Yes, Fannie would have used every last inch of her bulk to defend herself if necessary. But why would she have come downstairs to face the burglar instead of calling the police? Even given that she had chosen not to, Doris knew Fannie well enough to be sure she could never have mustered the kind of strength required for such a violent, prolonged struggle. It made no sense… . that is, unless the real damage had been done after Fannie was already dead, to create the illusion that a struggle had occurred. In which case there had been no burglar, just a murderer.

  And there was no water glass at Sophie’s bedside.

  “They killed them,” Doris muttered, her words almost swallowed by the trembling that seized her.

  The next thing she knew she was being led from the house by a patrolman, who helped her into the backseat of his car. Doris wanted to ask him what they were going to do about her beloved Mercedes, wanted to tell him not to bother calling Dr. Morris Kornbloom because today was Wednesday and God only knew what golf course he could be found on. But the words lagged hopelessly behind her thoughts to a point where Doris wondered if she would ever be able to speak again.

  Much to Doris’s surprise, Morris Kornbloom arrived twenty minutes after the police located him at his health club.

  “My God, what a day you’ve had,” he said with a sigh. “All this shock. It’s a wonder you’ve held up this well, my girl.”

  He always called her that and she hated it, she admitted, because more than once she had wondered hopefully if Kornbloom, a fifty-seven-year-old widower, might not have considered asking her out. The difference in their ages was offset by the fact that his sunken face and thin white hair made him appear older than he was.

  Now Kornbloom the doctor went about checking her blood pressure and pulse, then probed his stethoscope all around her chest.

  “Everything seems fine,” he reported. “But I’m going to leave you these pills to be on the safe side. Take one every four hours and two before bed.” And he set down a small bottle of white pills on her night table next to her red life ones.

  “What about Sylvia?” Doris asked hesitantly.

  Kornbloom returned his instruments to his black bag. “She’s been hospitalized just as a precaution. The shock of finding her friend—your friend—was very hard on her. She’s under observation. Just overnight, you understand. Give it a few hours and you can visit her. Late this afternoon would be my suggestion.” He paused. “I’m not leaving until I see you take one of those pills. They’ll help you relax.”

  Morris Kornbloom gazed at her with honest feeling, and in that moment Doris longed to tell him about the missing glass of water and the struggle at Fannie’s that hadn’t been a struggle at all. But to draw a link between these apparently random occurrences would mean having to tell him about the Business, because that was the only possible connection, and to accept that was to accept responsibility for the death of her friends, thanks to a conscience that after five years had decided to make itself heard. Help for her might have been a phone call away, but it hurt too much to admit that the circumstances indicated she should place it.

  “Well, Morris,” she began, fighting to hide her fear, “get me a glass of water so I can swallow all the pills you want me to.”

  Doris took a cab to the hospital, arriving at four o’clock. She had called ahead at three, so Sylvia would be expecting her. Nothing would be mentioned about Fannie until tomorrow; nothing, either, about the possible connection to the Business.

  Sylvie had a private room on the third floor of Good Samaritan Hospital, which was located in West Palm. The menu featured an international fare and the luxurious private rooms overlooked the ocean. If you had to get sick, it was probably the best place of any to come to, but Doris hated it, as she hated all hospitals. Hated the smell of them, the feel—everything. Other than the tests she’d taken, which resulted in a prescription for her red life pills, she had never spent a night in one and wasn’t about to start now. Unless Sylvie wanted her to. Sylvie came first, and if she didn’t want to be alone, Doris would have a cot wheeled in, would even pay the daily rate if necessary.

  The elevator opened directly before the third floor nurse’s station and Doris was surprised to see Morris Kornbloom standing there next to a man she recognized as Sylvia’s doctor.

  “Morris, what are you—”

  His face was a mask of stone, providing her answer before the question was even completed.

  “No, Morris, no!” she wailed above her own faintness.

  “Respiratory failure, Doris,” he said, exchanging a glance with Sylvie’s doctor. “It happened very suddenly. There was nothing—”

  “Oh, God,” Doris heard herself break in. “They killed her, too. Right here in the hospital and they still found a way!”

  “Doris—”

  But it was too late. She was already sliding down the wall her shoulders had found, never feeling the floor when she struck it.

  Chapter 3

  SABRINA COULDN’T REALLY remember when she had first considered killing the courier. It probably went all the way back to the first time she had noticed him undressing her with his eyes while hers were locked just as seductively on the briefcase gripped in his right hand. She thought of the stacks of crisp bills hidden inside. She was just a courier as well, passing on nothing but an envelope containing his drop point instructions. The pay was fine, but nothing compared to the contents of the briefcase during a single run. Kill him and it was hers.

  She had killed before. The first time had been ten years ago, when she was barely halfway through her teens. Her victim had purchased her from a white slavery ring when she was twelve and brought her to America to make money for him. Sabrina hadn’t found it hard to live with that. What was impossible to live with was his own vile body being forced on her every night, big and smelly. He would thrust himself into her until she ached, sometimes bled, and one night Sabrina jabbed a steak knife into his belly just when he was ready to come. His blood drenched her and his foul-smelling frame pinned her to the bed as he wretched and spasmed. By the time Sabrina pulled herself free, he was dead.

  There had been others since, always set up over a long period of time and always judiciously. Men were weak creatures, her huge breasts and sultry features a greater weapon than even the Ring. She’d had a jeweler fashion it for her personally—a knuckle-size imitation emerald tapered into razor sharpness along its raised center. A simple swipe across the throat was all it took. Sabrina would look at the eyes then: always the same, bulging first with confusion followed swiftly by terror. It was her favorite moment, even bet
ter than the instant with the swipe of the Ring itself.

  Tonight, though, the best moment of all would come when she opened the briefcase.

  The bell rang at the front door of her Sansucci Boulevard home in North Miami. Right on time. Sabrina excitedly threw the door open without checking the peephole, saw the briefcase first.

  Then the stranger who was holding it.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he apologized.

  “You’re not the usual …”

  “A change. I have the proper papers.”

  Sabrina fought down her disappointment and eyed the man. Much younger than the other courier and big. She could feel him looking at her as well. The hope in her rekindled just as quickly as it had been snuffed out. She had planned this night for too long to pull back now. The man’s youth would work to her advantage, her beauty the means that would free her to use the Ring against him.

  “Come in,” she told the courier.

  He stepped forward clutching the briefcase with rigid unease. She closed the door behind him.

  “I need my instructions,” he told her, eyes running all over her frame.

  “Upstairs,” came her practiced response. “It’s the way this is always done,” she added softly as she slid against him on her way to the circular stairwell. “This way,” she beckoned.

  Sabrina waited until they were near the bedroom on the second floor before draping her arms around the man’s back. His muscles arched and she could feel his power, certain now of his strength and aware she would have to choose the perfect moment to strike with the Ring. She eased him toward the bed. The briefcase fell to the rug.