The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  He also needed to cut the hair in his nose and ears. And lose some weight.

  Once in a while he’d look up from a report he was reading and shake his head a little, causing his jowls to jiggle.

  I was ready to reach across the table and grab the papers and find out what the hell he found so interesting.

  The body was still warm, literally, so the police bureaucracy couldn’t have produced much paperwork. I got the impression that he thought if he kept me here long enough, I’d confess to something out of sheer boredom.

  I considered it just to get the hell away from him, but I didn’t know what crime to confess to.

  Failing to stop a suicide?

  Was that a crime?

  I wasn’t trying to be insensitive, but at the moment I was more concerned about the money in my pocket that my hand kept brushing to feel the reassuring bulge. So far he hadn’t searched me, but the night was still young.

  A uniformed subway cop had called the poor woman a “splatterer,” but I guess that wasn’t being insensitive, either. Millions of people ride the subway every day and a few of them end up accidentally (or on purpose) falling, tripping, jumping, or being pushed in front of the oncoming trains.

  One of the terrible truths I’d learned in my thirty-something years was that people commit suicide because sometimes life is worse than death for them.

  The woman had been out of it, maybe even tired of living. She might have just wanted to lay down and die but some thought spinning in her head about a curse was keeping her body moving.

  Suicide had been the first thought from the cops who talked to me and other witnesses at the scene. But after giving the uniformed cops a statement, I had been shuffled to this detective whose nose and ears needed a haircut.

  While he read at a snail’s pace, I tried to occupy my tired mind with the view I had through a grimy plate glass window to a large room with government-issued gray steel desks that had probably been requisitioned back before my parents were born.

  Cops of all size, color, sex, and race were at desks talking on phones or talking to each other—no one seemed to be reading anything, just talking, no one except the cop who had me trapped as though he had a foot holding down my tail.

  “Very strange,” he said, jiggling his jowls.

  “What is strange?”

  “A woman you don’t know tries to stab you this morning and then hours later starts talking to you about a subject you didn’t understand or couldn’t hear. One moment this woman is talking to you, the next she’s flying off the platform in front of a train.”

  I sucked in a breath and bit my lower lip to keep my sanity intact and then attempted to express myself without totally antagonizing him and thereby delaying my exit and jeopardizing the money in my pocket.

  “I don’t know that I’d call it strange in a city with eight million people. You hear about people every day that are so devastated by life or drugs that they end up street crazy. You must deal with them every day.”

  “Actually, I was referring to the coincidence.”

  “What coincidence?”

  “You and her both being there … right at that moment … and you’ve never met each other before this morning.”

  “The woman probably got the notion in her head that I was someone else. Maybe someone who stole her husband. So she wanders around my building until I open my door. Then she follows me when I leave. Or maybe we just happened to be in the same subway station at the same time.”

  He nodded, his jowls jiggling. “Interesting.”

  I lost it.

  “Excuse me, but what is so interesting about it? I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, when a poor sick woman decided to end it all. End of story.”

  He wasn’t buying it.

  “Look,” I told the subway cop, “it’s too bad that this woman didn’t get help with her problems, but she was obviously miserable. For some people, dying is better than living.” Which pretty well described my feelings about being trapped in this interview room with this detective. “I have things I have to do. There’s nothing else I can tell you.”

  “Hell of a coincidence.”

  “There’s that word again. What’s so hard to understand about ‘I don’t know her’? Never saw her before this morning. A complete stranger, as are most of the millions of other people in the city.”

  Staring at me, his wrinkled face, wide nose, and watery, red-veined eyes reminded me of a sad bloodhound.

  I felt sorry for talking so callously about the poor woman and I needed to go to someplace sane and have a drink.

  I got up, ready to leave, but paused, not wanting to be rude. I was beginning to feel sorry for him, too.

  “Detective, I really don’t know the woman. I’m not even sure it’s the same woman who was at my apartment.”

  A lie, but a good one. How would they prove that it was the same woman? I just as well could have run into two crazies on the same day. It wasn’t out of the question.

  Let me tell you, any juror in New York City would sympathize with that contention.

  I decided to beat the drum on the premise that it was an entirely different woman than the one that had wielded the letter opener.

  “The more I think about it, I’m sure it wasn’t the same woman.” I locked eyes with him. “When you get the report I gave to the policeman at my apartment this morning, you’ll see that it’s not the same woman. The description is different.”

  The clothes were certainly different.

  “The woman in the subway approached me because I made the mistake of meeting her eye. You know as well as I do that you should never do that with a crazy. Then she went running in front of the train. That’s all I know. Can I go now?”

  “Have any business dealings in London or Egypt?” he asked, ignoring my question to leave.

  “Not—not really.”

  I rubbed the sweat from the palm of my hand on the money bulge.

  “Sounds like you’re not sure.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Her name is Fatima Sari. She had an Egyptian passport. Flew in yesterday from London.”

  I tried to keep a poker face but my guilty conscience got my tongue wagging.

  “I’ve never heard of her. I did talk to someone, not this woman, about an Egyptian piece recently. But that’s all. I’m an expert on antiquities. I’ve dealt with Egyptian artifacts hundreds of times. But like I keep telling you, I don’t know this woman from Adam.”

  “A complete stranger speaks to you, someone you’ve never seen before, and you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.…”

  “Exactly.”

  Was he finally getting it?

  “And she has your business card in her pocket.”

  “What?”

  He holds up a business card. “Madison Dupre, Art Inquiries—”

  “That’s my card.”

  “Unless there’s another woman with your name and information, I guess it is. This woman you keep saying you don’t know is carrying your business card when she just happens to be in the same subway station as you are and just happens to end up in front of a train after talking to you.”

  He gave me a sad look. “I guess with seven billion people on the planet, it was inevitable one of them would be carrying your business card when they accidentally bump into you and get killed in a New York subway station after trying to fillet you earlier with a letter opener.”

  My heart was in my throat.

  “It’s a coincidence, that’s all.”

  I sounded desperate even to myself.

  His cell phone rang and he answered it. “No shit? It showed that?”

  He gave me a meaningful look, letting me know the call concerned me.

  “Get it over to me so I can take a look.”

  I had the feeling that he had been told something I didn’t want to hear.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  I didn’t want to, but I had to take the bait. “Wha
t now?”

  “The security camera at the station shows you giving her a push.”

  16

  The meeting with the woman had gone well, Kaseem thought. She appeared to have accepted him as he presented himself. And nothing he had told her had been a lie. His only fraud was by omission—he didn’t tell her she would be killed after authenticating the artifact. If the thieves didn’t kill her, which he assumed they would, he would have it done because he couldn’t risk having a witness to his machinations.

  That she would die carrying out the task meant nothing to him. He considered himself a man of destiny. The death of Madison Dupre would be collateral damage, one of many to come, as he put a plan into action that had been brewing in his head for nearly two decades.

  Kaseem had not lied when he said that he was a scholar, though he was far more a soldier than a man of books. He, in fact, had a doctorate in history, but it was obtained in the narrow field of military history. And his degree didn’t come from an ordinary university but from a military academy: the Egyptian Army War College.

  He had also failed to mention that before his banishment from his country, he had been a general in the army. And that he had fled a firing squad after organizing a coup that would have toppled the government had one of its members not betrayed the plot to the authorities.

  As a history student, he had studied conquerors, from the great Thutmose to Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin, asking himself what inspired the passions and fiery visions of conquerors like Alexander and madmen like Hitler.

  It had been Hitler’s style that most captured Kaseem’s interest. Hitler had managed to galvanize millions of people despite the fact that millions of others considered him a raving lunatic.

  He had studied the Nazi dictator, analyzing what was the “fire in the man’s belly” that caused millions to support him when much of what he spoke were lies and exaggerations.

  Hitler rose to power after the economic debacle and great depression that followed World War I. The Germans had suffered particularly hard, both from hyperinflation whereby it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread, and all the while having an overreaching peace treaty shoved down their throats.

  Kaseem came to the conclusion that Hitler had talked to the German people as if they were a defeated sports team he was coaching, shouting at them about how they were possessed with the power and destiny to be masters of the world and giving them a reason for why they had not achieved their great destiny and an enemy to hate: the Jews had held them back, he ranted, raved, and shouted.

  What especially interested Kaseem was the way Hitler mesmerized the nation not only with Teutonic legends of powerfully built, golden-haired heroes and heroines for the German people to emulate, but with religious magic and the supernatural.

  A special unit of storm troopers called the Ahnenerbe was formed to search the world for archaeological treasures to prove the superiority of Hitler’s imagined master race and to strengthen the people’s belief in extreme nationalism.

  In other words, the SS set out to find proof other than their own chest-pounding and ravings that they were the master race.

  Seizing Austria, they took possession of the spear called the Holy Lance or the Spear of Destiny. Said to have been used to pierce the side of Christ on the cross, the blood-stained spear had been carried into battle by kings and emperors.

  Other quests were for the Holy Grail, a cup with magic powers because it was used by Christ at the Last Supper, sacred stones and runes with mystical meanings from Teutonic tales, and even an expedition to the Roof of the World, Tibet, to find what their junk science told them would be Aryan ancestors.

  That Adolf was a psychopath who killed himself after killing thirty million people and losing a war he started didn’t matter to Kaseem. Nor did the bizarre Austrian’s sex life that ranged from the suicide of his niece after she was forced into a sexual relationship with him to getting it off by lying down and having women piss on him.

  Hitler had failed after conquering a vast territory because although he was a great talker he lacked a good military mind. He had only risen to a rank of corporal during his military service.

  General Kaseem’s worldview was that there were more than three hundred million people in the Middle East of Arabic descent and that Arabs had a proud history. Not only was Egypt of the pharaohs a world power in its day, but the great Middle Eastern civilization that followed, the Arabic followers of Islam, had conquered the lands and people from Mesopotamia to the Atlantic, replacing those cultures with the Arabic language and customs.

  In its day, the Arabians weren’t just the world’s greatest military power, but the most advanced civilization on the planet in terms of science, medicine, and mathematics.

  With several hundred million people in the Arabic world, a long-term enemy to hate and rally against, Kaseem had found his calling: to take power in the largest Arabic country, Egypt, and unite all other Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa under his command.

  He also had an object with a proven ability to excite the masses: the Heart of Egypt.

  As he told Madison Dupre, in the 1920s when nationalistic fever ran wild in Egypt, the return of King Tut’s heart scarab had been a rallying cry to drive out foreigners and bring Egypt back to the greatness it once enjoyed.

  General Kaseem was going to bring that cry back to a fever pitch.

  The old beliefs will be brought back to honor again. The whole secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the demonic. We will wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race.

  —ADOLF HITLER

  17

  I staggered out of the police station gasping for air like a fish flapping on a boat deck.

  I couldn’t believe it. It was no surprise that Kaseem had lied to me. I had already guessed that.

  But going from a victim to a murder suspect in a flash had taken my breath away.

  The whole world had turned upside down since I tumbled out of bed this morning.

  The woman ranting about a curse had been right. There was a curse for sure and it had its arms around me and was squeezing me like a giant squid.

  I was left speechless when Detective Gerdy dropped the accusation that I had killed the woman.

  When I stopped hyperventilating I got out my cell phone and told Michelangelo to meet me in Little Italy immediately.

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Murder!” I screeched.

  I needed a drink—several of them—and a plate of carbohydrates and a chocolate dessert because I was burning up nervous energy faster than I could manufacture it.

  My nerves needed wine and pasta and Michelangelo’s help with the subway detective.

  But before I met him I wanted to drop off the money that I had on me at my apartment. With my luck, I’d be mugged before I got a chance to hide it.

  While I was there, I’d also pay the rent and feed Morty.

  I wanted to see my landlord as much as I hated having an IRS audit but I needed to drop the money on him before he actually did serve me with an eviction notice.

  * * *

  THE DOOR TO ARNIE’S apartment was open. I knocked anyway as the smell of curry hit my nostrils.

  “Arnie, it’s Maddy. Arnie?”

  “You have the rent?” he asked through a mouthful of food.

  “Yes.”

  “Come in.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was step inside.

  He was eating a piece of buttered bread. His T-shirt and work pants looked like they hadn’t been washed since Marlon Brando wore them On the Waterfront.

  Vaguely southern Mediterranean in looks, he had the bald head, thick neck, and petroleum barrel torso of a professional wrestler on a TV show.

  Someone—no, something—was sitting on his couch. At first I thought it was a person, but then realized it must be a big doll or mannequin.

  Arnie and the whatever appeared to have been sitting together w
atching one of the endless reruns of a cop and lawyer TV show.

  I resisted the urge to ask him why he had it because I suspected the answer would embarrass me, or at least send me into a fit of laugher.

  I handed him the money.

  He grabbed it greedily with his buttered fingers. “Why can’t you pay on time?”

  “Why can’t you fix things around here?”

  “I do.”

  “The lock on the front door hasn’t been fixed.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s on my list.”

  “You better make it number one on your list because some crazy person attacked me today.”

  “There are lots of weirdos out there,” he said, counting the money with his greasy fingers. “Some of them get invited in.”

  “Yeah, but this one didn’t get invited. I could’ve been raped and murdered! I should report you to the Building Department.”

  He looked hurt. “I keep you from being evicted and you want to make me lose my job? The owners say you’re late too often, to toss you out. I told them you’ve just had a bad run but you’re a good tenant.”

  Wow, I had no idea that he had been protecting me. I thought he owned the building. What a jerk I’d been.

  “Thanks, Arnie. I appreciate it. And I was only kidding about the Building Department. Listen, I’ll be gone for a few days and a friend will be coming by to take care of my cat.”

  “First you pay for the broken window.”

  “I didn’t break the window. Someone threw a rock at it from the street.”

  “The glass was on the street, not in your apartment.”

  Good point. I should have watched more cop shows on TV.

  I gave him the money and started to leave, but my curiosity got the best of me. I had decided the woman sitting on the couch was a robot.

  “What is that?”

  “Sheila.”

  “What does she do?”

  He gave me a wide grin on his face. “Stuff my wife never used to do.”

  I gave him a disgusted look.

  “How much did she cost?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “What? You paid ten thousand for a sex toy!”