The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  35

  Flowers and champagne were waiting for me back in my hotel room along with a note from Rafi saying he would pick me up at eight for dinner.

  I had the same room the last time I visited Bath. The hotel was on a slope and the balcony gave a lovely view of the river below. I longed to sit on the balcony and drink champagne and daydream about what Bath was like during Roman times and decided that was what I wanted to do tonight with Rafi.

  I put the champagne on ice and ordered dinner for two from a restaurant recommended by the front desk—prime rib with Yorkshire pudding, horseradish cream, Brussels sprouts, and creamed onions.

  My own choice would’ve been an Indian dinner from a restaurant down the street that I remembered had excellent food, but I decided that a traditional English dinner would be a better choice for Rafi, partly because there were some similarities between Indian food and Egyptian and the last thing anyone should want while traveling in a foreign country is to eat what they do back home.

  Rafi also struck me as a meat-and-potatoes man and reminded me of Michelangelo—a guy willing to order champagne to finesse a woman, but after he gets what he wants heads for a sports bar to grab a beer and argue the latest game with his pals.

  I need tender loving care, not sex, went through my mind as I soaked in a leisurely bath before meeting Rafi.

  After two glasses of champagne, I was feeling a little buzzed and blamed it on the fragrant bath oil rather than the sparkling wine.

  Had I been a decent woman the issue of sex on a first date wouldn’t have even come up. It all went back to my theory of being raised bad because too often I let my desire for gratification overwhelm what should be at least minimal moral courage.

  In other words, I shouldn’t jump in bed with this guy until I can at least claim I have shared a little more intimacy with him than a handshake.

  Come to think of it, I don’t think we even shook hands.

  I comforted myself morally with the fact that seduction has a long history in the intelligence-gathering sector. While I didn’t delude myself into believing that Rafi would tell me what he’d learned about the missing scarab, a lot can be revealed just by the way he avoided my questions or asked his own.

  Which is probably exactly what he was thinking about me.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME RAFI knocked on the door, the champagne was chilled, minus what I had drunk, the table on the balcony set with hors d’oeuvres, and dinner was covered with silver hoods and ready to be served from a side table.

  When he stepped inside, I got a whiff of a very subtle cologne, a really nice woodsy scent. I usually didn’t like cologne on a man, mostly because they used too much of it, but Rafi’s was just right, a hint of masculinity and oozing with sensuality.

  “You smell really nice,” he said.

  We stared at each other for a long moment and all of sudden we were in each other’s arms, kissing passionately, my breasts pressed against his chest as he pulled me hard against him. I could feel the bulge growing between his legs. He wanted me as much as I wanted him.

  My dress came off a few seconds later and went flying somewhere. The only thing I wore underneath was a black lacy thong .

  Our lips were still locked together as I undid his belt buckle and zipper and I’m ashamed to say my fingers didn’t fumble in getting down to basics because they knew exactly where they were going and what they wanted to do.

  I wrapped my hand around his throbbing phallus and squeezed, hard, up and down. Rafi waited to come, gentleman that he was. Instead, he grabbed my legs and pulled me up, mounting me on him as he stood, driving his stalk up again and again, pushing against my clit until I was moaning with pleasure when the orgasm came for both of us.

  Before the night was over, we ended up having sex three more times.

  Okay, I knew I would be mad at myself in the morning but, as always, I fell back on the alibi that in order to do these things, I had to have been raised bad.

  36

  The next morning as I was soaking in the tub, trying to make sense of the scarab mess that I’d gotten myself into, and trying not to think about the mess I’d gotten my own life into, my cell phone went off.

  I reached out and grabbed the phone where I’d laid it on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Rafi asked.

  “Soaking in the tub.”

  “Want company?”

  “Only if you have your own soap.”

  We chatted for a moment and agreed to meet for breakfast. After I hung up, I thought I saw someone go by the partially opened bathroom door.

  I had closed the door most of the way to conserve the heat in the bathroom.

  “Come back later, please!” I yelled, assuming it was the maid and regretted that I hadn’t put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Then it occurred to me that it might not be a maid and that got my adrenaline going.

  I got out of the tub and wrapped a towel around myself and went into the bedroom. No one was there and I went to the door and opened it a crack to put the sign up, poking my head out to see if the maid was in the hallway.

  The corridor was deserted.

  No maid.

  What the hell?

  I swung around, looking over the room.

  My purse was open.

  I already knew the flash drive with the pictures of the scarab would be gone before I checked.

  37

  Feeling like a windup toy unable to turn in any direction but the one I was set on, I caught a train back to Salisbury to meet Fuad at the Druid Faire that evening.

  I stood up Rafi for breakfast and checked out of the hotel. I left a simple message for him at the front desk: GTT.

  Let him figure that one out. It meant Gone to Texas. Back in Old West days, the initials were left behind by people who were leaving town, heading out for a new life out West, or didn’t want anyone to know where they were off to.

  Rafi would not get it at all, which was why I left it. He was so in love with the Internet, he could go on the Web and find out what it meant.

  My anger was directed at Rafi for a good reason. Someone had come into my room while I was in the tub and had stolen the flash drive out of my purse. He was the only one who could have done it.

  I had only one key card to the room and it was still in my purse, but thieves and spies have developed electronic “skeleton key” cards—passkeys for doors using electronic cards.

  Which is why I had a lingering doubt about Rafi. He was a high-ranking Egyptian investigator for an important government agency that investigated contraband Egyptian artifacts all over the world. He would have access to an electronic device that opens a hotel-room door.

  That left the question of how the intruder would know that I was in the bathroom and wouldn’t see him.

  Rafi knew I was in the tub. With the miracle of the interconnected world, he could have called me from just outside my room door, the wireless signal going tens of thousands of miles out to space to a satellite and beaming back down to me in the bathroom, before he entered my room as soon as we hung up.

  It fit nicely, the electronic skeleton key and the call to me.

  The only other scenario was a chilling one.

  The person could have entered to get the flash drive and not cared whether I saw them or not.

  I could think of only one reason why the intruder wouldn’t care if I saw them or not—they would have killed me.

  Had I barely missed getting killed because I was taking a bath?

  Or had Rafi called me from the corridor and entered when he realized I wouldn’t see him?

  I liked the second scenario.

  So why was the flash drive taken? To have the pictures so a copy of the scarab could be made?

  No, my gut was screaming that the pictures were taken to make sure I didn’t have them.

  The quickest and easiest way to identify a reproduction is to compare the golden pyrite dust grain on the original with the fake.

 
Now I couldn’t do that.

  Someone was thinking way ahead of me.

  I hired a taxi and spent the day checking out bars and dives for the missing Quintin Rees.

  I came up with exactly nothing except for stares from a lot of men I didn’t want to know better.

  38

  When I arrived in Salisbury, I checked into a hotel and rented a car, reminding myself to keep in mind the British did everything opposite to what I was used to when it came to cars and roads.

  I took a run out to Stonehenge to reacquaint myself with the Celtic spirits before heading for my meeting with Fuad.

  The Druid Faire sign at the entrance was illuminated by a flickering torch. It showed a raven sitting on a harvest moon, blood flowing down from where its talons gripped.

  The Druid gods must have blessed the gathering because tonight a big bright moon smiled overhead.

  The fair was laid out in a flat pasture and a long line of tents occupied both sides. Even at a distance I could see the “centerpiece” for the fair that Fuad had mentioned, a medieval stone tower about fifty feet high on a small rocky mound at the far end of the “street” created by the row of tents.

  Fuad had told me the horse pasture was owned by Isis, but that she wouldn’t be there because she was hosting a party for high-ranking Druids at her manor house.

  The fair was similar to the Renaissance fairs I’ve visited back home, but this one had knights in armor, Roman gladiators, Druid priests in hooded robes, ancient Brits, and a Viking or two.

  The smells were eclectic, too—Tibetan incense, good English horse manure, and the heady sweetness of marijuana were in the air …

  Besides the historical themes, like all the fairs I’ve gone to there was the ubiquitous premise of separating people from their money. Booths sold cakes, hot drinks, and Cornish pasties; magic potions, powders, and spells for success at work, punishing your enemies, and wooing the one you loved; crystals and magic amulets you wore that brought good luck—there was even a booth selling Egyptian Druid magic, but I didn’t see the Heart of Egypt among the scarabs offered.

  I stopped for a moment and listened to the whimsical tune of a woman playing a harp and dropped a pound coin into her collection box.

  I avoided a woman wearing a snake like a big necklace and smiled and shook my head at a fortune-teller who told me she had a secret to tell me, walked around a crowd watching a man swallowing a sword, and another group surrounding a woman blowing fire from her mouth.

  A man in a hooded Druid priest robe came up beside me and in a stage whisper offered to sell me an enigmatic symbol that would reveal to me the secrets of life.

  “No thanks,” I told him. “It would take the fun out of living if I knew all of the answers.”

  A Merlin character carrying a staff, a man who was dressed either as an elf or Robin Hood, a fierce, bearded Arabic sheik with a falcon on his shoulder, a Druid priestess who looked mean enough to enjoy human sacrifice …

  I know it’s all corny and hokey, but I love the energy and excitement of circuses and street fairs, the people having fun pretending, even the hucksters trying to part me from my hard-earned money.

  I was almost at the end of the street of tents when I looked up and saw the flash of a white shirt as someone fell from the tower ahead.

  By the time I reached the tower a large crowd had gathered around someone on the ground and I couldn’t get close enough to see who it was. I asked a man who was pushing out of the crowd if he’d seen the person on the ground.

  “A man’s dead,” he said.

  “Was he Middle Eastern?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m psychic.”

  I looked at the faces in the crowd, moving quickly, hoping to spot whoever had given Fuad a push.

  It occurred to me that I should get the hell away from the place before someone accused me of pushing him.

  * * *

  THE LOCAL NEWS ON TV reported that Fuad had been killed in the fall and that the cause was not yet ascertained, but that authorities were looking into the possibility of an accident or a suicide.

  Things had gotten really ugly again. It seemed as if I had somehow kicked open Pandora’s box.

  I felt as if I had lost control, that events were spinning wildly around me. Since meeting Kaseem, I had gone from expensive tea to sheer madness in no time in New York. Now the insanity had followed me to England, right down to a woman with too much money and delusions of being a goddess.

  Murder, madness, and greed swirled around me like a Mohave dust devil.

  I didn’t know where to turn, but I knew I couldn’t go back to New York and face the subway suspicions with no answers and another “accidental” death hanging over me. And I couldn’t call Rafi. I no longer trusted him.

  Back at the hotel I found an envelope on my bed. It contained the second installment and a note that the third payment would be waiting for me in Cairo.

  39

  Cairo, Egypt

  “Do I look like a terrorist?”

  It was the first thing out of my mouth when security took me aside at the airport without clearing customs. I didn’t get an answer.

  Moments earlier, as I stood waiting in a slow line, I overheard someone mention that inspections were tighter because the U. S. president would be making a special friendship trip to Egypt to return an ancient artifact taken from Abu Simbel back in the 1960s and displayed until recently at the Smithsonian.

  The object, a stone falcon, had been given to an archaeologist working as one of the advisors on the incredible feat of moving the colossal statues of Ramses from the rising waters that were created by the construction of the Aswân Dam. He in turn donated the bird of prey to the U. S. national museum.

  I’d seen the piece at the Smithsonian and understood that it had been gifted by Egypt out of gratitude for aid in preserving the Aswân lake site, but I guess the political winds said that it was time to give it back.

  I found it interesting that even my government was getting into the act when it came to appeasing the agitation of countries whose national historical treasures had been looted during colonial years.

  I gave my passport to the clerk, idly ruminating on the international battles going on between museums and countries demanding their treasures back, when he startled me by saying, “You have to see a supervisor.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He will explain.”

  And he did. My passport was being seized because I was on a watch list.

  I almost laughed at the ludicrousness of it.

  “Fine. Give me back my passport and I’ll take the next plane out—to anywhere.”

  “You cannot exit the country until your passport is cleared.”

  “Cleared by who?” I asked.

  “The Supreme Council of Antiquities.”

  Of course. Rafi al Din probably knew I had purchased a ticket to Cairo seconds after I selected my seat assignment. It was no longer a case of Big Brother watching; we all carried Big Brother around in our pockets.

  That was all the supervisor could or would tell me despite my fuming. I demanded to see his superior.

  “He’s not here,” he said. “You have to come back tomorrow.”

  “I want to see the supervisor’s supervisor.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I was fuming. Short of being jailed or murdered, losing a passport had to be the worse thing that could happen to a traveler. Having it seized by a government agency in a third world country that was both inefficient and nightmarishly bureaucratic was light-years beyond simply losing it. When things got lost in Egypt they ended up buried in mountains of paperwork, desert dunes, or only God knows where.

  It scared the hell out of me.

  Still furious, when I came out of the airport to flag down a taxi, I almost ran into a young Egyptian girl holding up a piece of cardboard with “Madison Dupre” scribbled on it in pencil.

  I guessed her age at about eleven or twelve, b
ut she was thinner than the homegrown ones. A dark blue scarf covered her head and fell halfway down her back. Her shapeless white dress with long sleeves went all the way to her brown shoes.

  She smiled shyly as I approached with a stern frown.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, “you’re the shortest cop in Egypt.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Oh, no, I’m not a policeman,” she said in a naïve and sincere voice. “But my father is. He’s waiting over there.”

  She looked to her left and pointed to where Rafi was leaning against a car parked at the curb with his arms folded.

  He stood there with a grin on his face.

  I had to fight my instinct to let him know exactly how I felt about my passport being seized in terms that would bring his manhood into question.

  I kept my mouth shut because of his daughter.

  He strolled over and extended his hand for my carry-on. “Let me take that for you.”

  “I think you’ve already taken enough.” But I went ahead and gave it to him.

  He loaded the luggage into the trunk and I got in the backseat with him. The little girl sat in the front seat with the driver, a woman who I immediately assumed was her mother and almost asked if she wouldn’t mind breaking Rafi’s nose again, this time for taking my passport, but his introduction to her proved I was wrong about the relationship.

  “This is Lana, my deputy inspector, and you have already met Dalila, my daughter.”

  The young girl turned back and smiled.

  Lana shot me a cursory glance, but gave no greeting. I didn’t offer her one, either. She was about thirty, not unattractive, and my immediate impression was that she had the hard edge some women get when they’ve had to fight for survival because of a tough life.

  I didn’t like her. Which was fair because something in her demeanor toward me immediately signaled that I wasn’t on her favorites list.

  “Are you mad at me for playing that joke with the sign?” Dalila asked, a little shyly.