The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  “I see.” I didn’t see, and was straining to keep my mouth shut to find out if I could learn any more from him.

  “I regret the situation about your passport, but that will be straightened out. In the meantime, you are being well paid for—”

  I lost it. “You dumped counterfeit money on me. Is that what you call being well paid?”

  “Counterfeit?” He sounded surprised.

  “Yes. Every damn one of them.

  “That can’t be.”

  “Literally dripping wet from the printing press. You know what, Mr. Kaseem, I’m getting you out of my life. Don’t call me again.”

  I hung up and turned off my phone and went back out to the balcony in the hopes that the fresh air and peaceful atmosphere could help make some sense of the situation.

  Kaseem’s plan was that I would come to Egypt and authenticate an artifact for him, an artifact that the Egypt government also wanted.

  At some point, I was to meet with killers and thieves, examine the piece, and get away without being murdered.

  And if I managed to stay alive and jumped all the hurdles, I would be rewarded with funny money and share a cell with God knows who or what in a Cairo jail.

  All the downsides were easy to see. What I couldn’t grasp was an easy way out of what I had gotten myself into.

  If I went to Rafi and the police, they would simply make me do the same thing that Kaseem wanted from me. For free.

  And I was certain that the Egyptian police would be much less efficient at keeping me alive than Kaseem would—at least until Kaseem got with he wanted. Besides, if I double-crossed him, he’d simply kill me and get another expert.

  I wasn’t between a rock and a hard spot, but swimming frantically between a shark and a crocodile.

  No matter which way I turned I was damned.

  Stuck in a foreign country.

  With no help from the American Embassy.

  As usual when I have nowhere else to turn, I do what comes natural to me: I put one foot in front of the other and take cautious steps ahead, but also am ready to bolt and run if I have to.

  So plunging ahead, I decided I had to leave my room and find out more about the scarab.

  My first stop would be the Egyptian Museum. And I didn’t dare leave the counterfeit money to be found by Egyptian police during a search or by a hotel maid cleaning up the room.

  I cut a leg off of a pair of panty hose, spread the funny money inside it, tied it around my waist, and put my blouse on over it—an old traveler’s trick for instantly creating a money belt.

  In the Middle East, I always respect a tradition of modesty in female dress, so the improvised money belt wasn’t noticeable by the time I got fully dressed in a loose fitting blouse and a long skirt with pockets.

  42

  I gave the taxi driver waiting in front of the hotel the name of a tourist hotel within walking distance from the Egyptian Museum, rather than the museum itself so I wouldn’t signal my destination. For all I knew, every taxi driver in the city worked for Rafi or Kaseem.

  We had driven for several minutes when I realized we were not heading for the museum area.

  “Hey!” I snapped at him. “Wrong way.”

  He turned in the seat and smiled, saying, “It’s okay, okay,” and held up a small piece of paper with the sign of the Golden Nile on it. “Camel Market. It’s okay.”

  That seemed to be the limit of his English.

  It wasn’t okay with me, but I had two choices.

  I could throw myself out of the taxi when it slowed going through an intersection or even when we came to an actual stop, which was usually in a confused herd of vehicles, and probably get run over by other cars on the jammed streets.

  Or I could stick my head out the window and start screaming the next time we passed a traffic cop. I had no idea what good that would do me to shout in English at a cop who couldn’t even follow the cab.

  Dead or alive, I would attract a lot of attention. Not a good idea when I was carrying a life sentence in a stuffed panty hose leg.

  I needed Kaseem and real money.

  He needed me.

  I sat back and hoped I didn’t get murdered.

  43

  I’d never been to the Camel Market at Imbaba, a suburb of Cairo, but had heard of it. That camels were still traded in the modern city whose metro area was bulging with twenty million people seemed amazing until you drove a few miles up or down the Nile and realized that as soon as you left the city you had taken a time machine back to medieval days.

  The taxi let me off a short walk from the market, with the driver using a little pidgin English and sign language to let me know he’d wait.

  His belief that I was coming back was reassuring.

  The market resided in a field, a large empty space in view of severe concrete apartment buildings. Men dressed in turbans and galabiyahs stood around in groups and haggled over prices while camels stood around or laid about, hobbled and complaining. Camel feed was piled on top of a long single-story building in order to keep the animals from devouring it.

  The dust, stink, and noise was a pleasant relief from the dust, stink, and noise of the modern city.

  A man dressed the same as the haggling camel merchants in the market came up beside me.

  “I didn’t know the money was counterfeit,” Kaseem said.

  “Uh-huh.” I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him.

  “I was actually also swindled, for a much larger sum. Someone owed me quite a bit of money and chose to pay me in Iran’s second official currency.”

  “Come again?”

  He chuckled without humor. “The Iranians pride themselves on producing the finest U.S. hundred-dollar bills. I’m surprised you caught the fraud, though I’m glad that you did. The felon who cheated me will now have to pay twice. Just as you are being paid double.”

  He slipped me a thick envelope. “Here is your money. Did you bring the counterfeit bills with you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did, but I’ll need to slip into a bathroom to retrieve them.”

  “I’ll take you to one, but it won’t be up to your Western standards.”

  I didn’t buy his story about being ripped off.

  During the taxi ride it had occurred to me that if he didn’t have the millions necessary to ransom the scarab, counterfeit money seemed to be a perfect substitution.

  Maybe he had been testing the money on me.

  As we walked, he asked, “Have you ever been to the Camel Market before?”

  “No, the closest thing I’ve seen are the camel races in Dubai.”

  “Ah, yes, in oil-rich Dubai millions are paid for camels that are raced or win beauty contests. The animals here will sell for a few hundred dollars apiece, a little more for the ones with the most meat on them. They’re brought here to be sold to butchers.”

  “To be eaten?”

  “Camel meat is cheaper than beef or lamb, and is especially important to poor people who can’t afford the choicer meats. Many of the animals were herded here by tribesmen, often a thirsty journey involving hundreds of miles.”

  Like an Old West cattle drive, I thought.

  “You know a lot about the camel business.”

  “My family raised camels when I was a boy,” he said. “I drove them here more than once.”

  Which meant that we had met at the market because he had old friends and family connections with it that would protect him from government agents.

  “Do not trust the police agent, Rafi al Din,” he said.

  I kept from laughing. Rafi’s and Kaseem’s names were both at the top of my “Do Not Trust” list.

  “Like everyone else in the government,” he said, “the man is corrupt. He is not working for the people of Egypt, but for himself.”

  “So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked.

  “Just stand by.”

  “For how long?”

  “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. Negotia
tions are being conducted to ransom the scarab. Once I am convinced that the people I’m dealing with actually have it, then arrangements will be made for you to examine it.”

  “Examine it where?”

  “I don’t know yet. Obviously, the thieves will choose the place. You will not be harmed—they want money, not blood.”

  That wasn’t necessarily true.

  It had occurred to me in Britain that the thieves might not want me as a live witness after I examined the artifact. Now that I was sure Kaseem had political shenanigans up his sleeve in which the artifact played an important role, I was a loose end for him, too.

  He handed me another phone.

  “Discard your other one. Keep this on so I can reach you when I need to.”

  We parted after I stepped into a small, unlit room, a so-called bathroom with a hole in the floor to do your business, and substituted the real money he gave me for the phony bills.

  I kept the phone on—at least until the taxi dropped me a couple of blocks from the Egyptian Museum.

  44

  I had used the museum as an instructor for me when I was a student. I learned more about Egyptology in a few months there than spending years in a classroom.

  At the information desk I confirmed that Adara Zidan, an assistant curator who had been helpful to me in the past, was still employed in the museum’s King Tut gallery.

  “Is she here now?”

  “Yes, but I believe she’s on her lunch break.”

  I scribbled a note and handed it to the person behind the desk.

  “Could you deliver this to Adara and let her know that I’d like to see her?”

  “She should be back in another half hour.”

  “Fine. I’ll wait for her in the gallery.”

  I remembered Adara used to eat her lunch in the employee lounge so I knew my wait wouldn’t be that long.

  I wandered around the Tut treasures. Not all of the 3,500 items that the museum had from the tomb discovery were on display, but to anyone who had seen any part of the treasures, they were dazzling.

  From the research done to reconstruct the boy king’s life, it’s pretty certain he had a short life—he died at the age of nineteen, probably due to injuries from an accident. Despite his imperial position, he might not have been the happiest guy in the palace because he had some medical problems, including an overbite, a cleft palate, and scoliosis. Opinions of his death ranged from a chariot accident to a kick from a horse.

  Two hundred pieces of jewelry were found at the tomb, despite the fact that the outer chambers had already been looted. Howard Carter estimated more than half of the king’s jewelry had been taken in the earlier robberies, though the inner chambers were intact.

  On display in the museum were two of the best-known Tut scarabs: a magnificent ornament in blue, green, red, and orange known as the pectoral scarab; and a simple black resin scarab with an inlaid figure of a heron, which has erroneously been called the heart scarab even though it was found at the wrong place of the body and did not contain the magic inscriptions from The Book of the Dead used on heart scarabs to keep the heart from confessing its sins.

  After Tut’s chest had been opened, amuletic jewelry and a beaded “bib” were placed over the area to cover where the sternum, ribs, and skin had been excised. There were also a dozen layers of other protective jewelry above the bib.

  So much to live for, so short a life. The Fates had not been kind to him.

  Adara came out and gave me a sincere hug, then took me back to her office for tea.

  “You haven’t changed, you’re still beautiful,” she said.

  “Thanks, you’re too kind, but I know I’ve gotten more haggard from the weight of life’s problems.”

  “Haven’t we all.” She laughed.

  She was still tall and thin, in her fifties, but with more gray in the head of hair she pulled back into a bun.

  I explained I was in town only briefly to look at an artifact being offered by a private collector. She knew enough about the competitive, cutthroat nature of international art to keep from asking about the piece or the name of the collector.

  “I was wondering if you knew a person named Fatima Sari,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, poor dear, we heard about her accident. She worked here at the museum for a while. Terrible thing. We were told she stumbled into a train in New York. You knew Fatima?”

  “Only what I heard on the news.”

  I didn’t volunteer that I was a candidate—the only candidate—for pushing her onto the tracks, but I had to come up with a reason for my questions about the woman.

  “Was she working for the museum when she died?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, she worked at the private Radcliff museum in England.”

  “Wasn’t Radcliff one of Carter’s backers? Something of a scandal about Radcliff and missing pieces during the Tut find?”

  “A number of pieces were taken and even Carter himself was suspected of rewarding himself from the find. Radcliff’s name of course pops up in connection with the heart scarab.”

  “Did Tut really have a heart scarab?”

  “Of course he did, even the poor had one carved from wood. It’s unimaginable that he would have been buried without one. But you don’t have to look far to find it, I have it right here.”

  Adara reached over and took a scarab holding down papers on the shelf behind her and handed it to me.

  I could see it was a skilled fake—steps above the stuff sold to tourists in the marketplace, but not something that would fool an expert.

  “My mother bought this for me at the Khan nearly twenty years after I got my job here in the Tut gallery. She was so excited, certain that she had found the missing heart.”

  “Perhaps she did. A couple thousand years from now this piece will also be an artifact from antiquity and worth a fortune.”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “Have there been any demands made to the Radcliff heirs for the return of it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know; that sort of thing would come from the administration.”

  Not wanting to raise questions about why I was interested in the heart scarab, I changed the subject, asking her about people I knew years ago and catching up on each other’s lives.

  I had established what I wanted to know—the museum was unaware that Fatima was bringing the heart back to Egypt. It was the sort of colossal event that couldn’t have been kept a secret. News of it would have spread to the staff, especially Adara’s group who would have the task of authenticating it. And it would’ve been leaked to the press.

  According to Kaseem, Fatima had been only hours away from a flight to Cairo when the scarab was stolen.

  I found it interesting that she was about to fly out from London when the theft occurred.

  When did Kaseem plan to advise the Egyptian authorities that one of their greatest lost treasures would soon be back?

  Rafi was right—obviously Kaseem didn’t plan to have the scarab returned, at least not to be handed over to the museum.

  What if the scarab hadn’t been stolen? Where would it have ended up? On a chain around Kaseem’s neck as he rode a white horse into Cairo?

  “I assume you’re going to run up to Luxor,” Adara said, which was a good assumption about anyone coming to Egypt to see antiquities. “If you’re curious about the heart, why don’t you speak to De Santis, the Italian priest who’s written a book about Howard Carter and the Tutankhamen find. He’s at a dig in the Valley of the Kings.”

  “I’ve heard of him. What does he know about the heart?”

  “He’s fascinated by it, probably because it’s a mystery connected to the original find. He’s doing a paper on it for an Italian archaeological publication. I’ve heard he’s going to present a theory that the scarab doesn’t exist and has evidence to back it up.”

  “What’s his theory?”

  “We won’t know until we read it in print. As you know, archaeology i
s just as cutthroat a business as other sciences.”

  “It gets even more interesting when beaucoup bucks and the egos of billionaires are concerned.”

  Or when the fate of nations are involved.

  I left the museum with a daring thought roiling in my head.

  Why not go to the Valley of the Kings? It wasn’t that far—I could be back tomorrow if I scrambled.

  The notion kept jabbing at me as I walked.

  It would get me out of Cairo, where I was feeling claustrophobic and choking on machinations, plots, lies, and deceits.

  Kaseem had not been definite about when I would be needed. And I needed some different air to clear my head.

  45

  Luxor and the ancient sites of Karnak, Thebes, and the Valley of the Kings and Queens were scattered on the sides of the Nile River south of Cairo.

  The area is so chockfull of glorious remnants of ancient Egypt that it has been called an open-air museum.

  The Valley of the Kings was where Howard Carter made history when he found King Tutankhamen’s tomb, and maybe where he ignited ancient curses and where Sir Jacob Radcliff stole the boy king’s heart.

  It was also where an answer to the puzzles and conundrums that had been bothering me might be found.

  I walked some six blocks before I made up my mind.

  I took a taxi to the big Ramses Hilton and told a doorman to find me a newer taxi with air-conditioning and a driver that spoke a fair amount of English.

  Seated in the cab, I told the driver to take me to Giza to see the pyramids. When I was sure that we were only being followed by thousands of other cars, none of which stood out to me, I asked him, “Can you drive me all the way to Luxor?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow—”

  “No, I need to go now.”

  He shot me a look. “Now?”

  I fanned five hundred-dollar bills. “Yes. Now. Immediately.”

  “It is a long drive, eight hours maybe.”

  “I’ve made it in six. We leave now or you can drop me off at the next hotel and I’ll find someone else to take me.”

  “I have to call my boss first.”