The Curse

by Harold Robbins

“Go ahead. Call. But tell them that you’re driving a man.”

  He turned around and looked at me, puzzled. He wasn’t sure what to make of me. “But you are not a man,” he said.

  “I need to get out of town,” I whispered. “I have a jealous husband in Cairo and my lover is waiting for me in Luxor.”

  “Ah,” he said, his eyes lighting up.

  Being a traditional Middle Eastern male, he understood completely what sluts Western women were.

  He swiftly darted in and out of the utter confusion and tumultuous array of cars, people, and donkey carts loaded with fresh produce, looking straight ahead of him, as he maneuvered through the city unfazed by the congestion all around, not bothering to stop at traffic lights, unless a policeman happened to be posted at the intersection.

  “I am a very good driver.” He smiled, noticing that I had put on my seat belt.

  I smiled bravely.

  He might’ve been a good driver but I was also worried about the other drivers not getting out of his way fast enough.

  He looked straight ahead and didn’t worry about cars coming from the sides.

  The only good part of getting killed in Cairo traffic is that it would be for a better reason than being murdered because my usefulness had been exhausted.

  46

  Driving south, following the Nile River, we left behind a bustling, noisy, congested city and entered a world of rural towns and villages that was much the same as the days when crusader knights fought the armies of Allah in the nearby Holy Land.

  Small mud houses, women dressed from head to toe in black, and donkey carts hauling hay had not changed much over the centuries. Even the men wearing the ubiquitous galabiyah and turban found throughout Egypt looked medieval outside urban areas, as they had at the camel market.

  And that about summed up my thoughts about the clash between fanatical Muslim terrorists and the rest of the world—not a clash between religions but a collision between the modern and the medieval. Women in New York wore high heels and the latest fashions, and the women we passed along the road wore wood sandals and shapeless robes. Cairo women fell somewhere in between the time scale.

  I worried a little about encountering problems on the road, but I knew the infrequent terrorist attacks in Egypt were usually well-planned massacres that erupted in areas populated by tourists.

  Besides the Egyptian Museum, Giza, and the Red Sea resorts, Luxor had also been hit some years ago at the stunning Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple on the west side when six terrorists killed sixty-two people, including a British child and four honeymooning Japanese couples, before killing themselves.

  Yet it was a relief to go to Luxor and back to the ancient world that I loved and understood better than my own time.

  Nearly dark when we arrived, I checked into the Winter Palace hotel and gave the taxi driver money to get his own room, though I suspected he would return to Cairo that night or sleep in his car and return in the morning because the money I gave him for a room was more than he earned in a month.

  The Winter Palace embodied Luxor’s vintage hotel, an elegant remnant from the Victorian Age with an added modern wing. It had been the favorite hotel for visitors during the age of colonialism and the “watering hole” during colonial times for Europeans like Howard Carter whose house across the river was still standing.

  The older part of the Winter Palace was built in 1886 on the banks of the Nile. It was here that Carter revealed to guests the incredible discovery of King Tut’s tomb.

  Originally built with an English ambiance, the hotel had been refurbished with modern fixtures and amenities but still emanated a European feeling of character and charm.

  Surrounded by beautiful trees and greenery and teased by a breeze that took the heat off the night, I walked up the wide stairway and entered the tranquil jasmine-scented lobby. I immediately felt at home. The grand foyer reminded me of a luxurious palace.

  I sat down in one of the lounge chairs and just soaked in the atmosphere for a few minutes, then reluctantly got up as I made my way across the lobby to have a quick peek at the lush gardens in the back and a gallery displaying old clothing and ancient artifacts.

  The terrace overlooking the Nile and the West Bank was a perfect place for a spot of afternoon tea or to watch the sunset while you leisurely sipped a cool drink, something I planned to do that evening.

  I could’ve sat in the lobby for hours, in a comfortable chair, watching people go up and down the grand stairways, but I finally went to the reception desk and registered.

  My room faced the garden. I opened the door leading out to a small patio and soaked in the view again. This was my kind of place.

  A charming old hotel with beautiful surroundings and attentive hotel staff and service.

  It was too bad that I had to worry about my next room in Egypt having steel bars.

  47

  In the morning I woke up early and hired a caleche, a four-wheeled horse carriage to take me to the temple ruins at Luxor and Karnak so I could wander among the sentinels of the past before heading across the river to the Valley of the Kings.

  A crowd of people had already gathered at the entrance of the Luxor temple.

  I wandered through the complex, awestruck at the gigantic statues and the colonnade of stone pillars still standing.

  During the Roman era, the temple and its surroundings were a legionary fortress and the home of the Roman government in the area. Now it was home to millions of visitors.

  The lone red granite obelisk stood proud and mighty despite the fact its mate was now in France.

  Before I left, I stood in front of the Colossus of Ramesses II sitting inside the temple, wondering what he thought of all these people intruding on his grounds, then I walked next door to the Karnak Temple Complex, considered to be the second most visited historical site in Egypt, after the Giza pyramids.

  The temple used to be connected to its counterpart, the Luxor Temple, via an avenue of sphinxes, most of which, except for a few yards outside each temple, have been destroyed.

  There was so much to soak in—the reliefs on the walls with their original carvings and colors, the gigantic columns, the obelisks, the other smaller temples, but I wanted to see De Santis before it got too late.

  The entire area of Luxor, called Thebes in ancient times, included the city of Luxor itself, the ruins of Karnak on the east side of the river, and the city of the dead referred to as the neocropolis on the west side—the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and other mortuary ruins of ancient Thebes.

  I preferred taking the ferry ride across the river to the west bank instead of the quicker and more expensive motorboats that lined the Nile. A bridge had also opened in the late nineties allowing land access from the east bank to the west bank.

  Before I stepped inside a waiting taxi when I got to the other side of the bank, I arranged my fare with the driver. I didn’t want to haggle about how much I owed him.

  The west side had been the principal burial place for Egyptian pharaohs for about five hundred years, up to about a thousand years before the Christian era began.

  It may have been greener a few thousand years ago, but today it was a barren wasteland—a place of hot sands and deadly snakes, about the last place that you’d think five dozen of the mightiest kings on earth would have chosen for their burial tombs.

  While the surface was a series of dry, ugly hills, cliffs, and gullies, beneath the ground there had already been found some of the finest examples of ancient artifacts on the planet, including the Tut treasures.

  Howard Carter’s house, atop a hill, looked much like a mud-walled fort with a round roofed section that reminded one of an astronomy observatory.

  Adara had told me that De Santis was working at a site called KV99. It wasn’t a tomb excavation site, but what once had been a small “factory” that produced the paints used to color the hieroglyphic pictographs that covered the walls, sarcophaguses, and just about everything the pharaohs
needed in the next life from water jars to dinner plates.

  The site was up a steep dirt road far from the closest discovered tomb. Considering that not all the tombs had been discovered in the area yet, it might even be sitting on top of one.

  I didn’t know how to reach the priest other than making a cold call and that worked out well in my own mind because he might not have wanted to see me if I asked for an appointment.

  The hotel concierge knew De Santis when I inquired about him. Since it was some sort of workers’ holiday, the concierge said that it was unlikely there would be anyone around, but he mentioned that De Santis had a reputation of being a workaholic who spent most of his waking hours at the site so I would most likely find him at work.

  The concierge referred to him as a monk.

  The archaeological site itself was not being worked on when I arrived and I saw no one except an elderly Egyptian relaxing in the shade. No doubt the security guard for the site.

  A large tent had been set up about fifty feet from the site.

  I told the taxi driver to wait for me and flashed some money to show I could be generous. It was a long walk back to town.

  “Imam?” I asked the guard, using the only word I knew that could indicate a priest in Arabic and got back an answer and a wave pointing to the tent.

  Entering the dark tent, I found De Santis working at a table that held several small jars.

  “Ciao. Il mio nome è Madison—”

  “Yes, yes, they called me from the hotel,” he answered quickly, “they told me you were coming. What do you want?” He didn’t bother looking up but concentrated on his work.

  His English was better than my clumsy Italian. I guess monks have cell phones, too.

  “Ink used on hieroglyphics?” I asked about the dried, colored substances in the jars, trying to be friendly before I delved into why I was there.

  I recalled how the Ancient Egyptians made ink. They mixed soot with gelatin, gum, and beeswax to make black ink, and ochre with gelatin, gum, and beeswax for red.

  De Santis was short and thin, with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard and shaven head. He smelled of ancient dust. And vino da tavola. Lots of the table wine.

  “Yes. Are you an archaeologist?” he snapped.

  He had a brisk, impatient, all-business personality. I wanted to ask him some questions about his work but decided not to take any more of his time than necessary.

  “I’m an antiquities appraiser. Egyptian pieces are my specialty, especially the New Kingdom artifacts.”

  “Of course. The New Kingdom is everyone’s favorite because the pharaohs were at their mightiest.”

  “I apologize for not calling. They didn’t tell me at the hotel you could be reached by phone. Adara Zidan at the Egyptian Museum recommended I talk to you.”

  “Fine. You have come. What is it you request of me?”

  I couldn’t get the answer I needed without a shade of truth.

  “I have a client who is being offered a scarab that the seller claims is the Heart of Egypt.”

  He snorted with derision. “Tell your client that he will be cheated because the heart does not exist. Are you familiar with Howard Carter and how the treasure was handled?”

  “I know a little—”

  He interrupted me in his brisk manner.

  “When you hear talk of the curse of the pharaohs and people dying, the one person who truly deserved to be stalked and killed by an ancient curse was Radcliff. Carter himself was respectful of the pharaoh’s treasures and his desire was always to protect and preserve them. But not Radcliff. He was driven by greed and ego.

  “The man took many fine artifacts out of Egypt, and more than half of them did not come into his hands legitimately. Do you know how archaeological digs were financed in those days?”

  I nodded. “Half of the treasures went to Europeans who discovered the treasures, half to the Egyptian government.”

  “Radcliff had never helped finance a significant find before Tut, yet he gathered many fine pieces for his private collection.”

  “So he was buying them and shipping them home.”

  “Exporting them in violation of the law, as part of the black market in antiquities that has existed since my Roman ancestors set out to conquer half the world and bring home the best of it.”

  “So he must have been ecstatic when Carter found Tut’s tomb.”

  “The whole world was blessed when Tut’s tomb was discovered, except perhaps the ghost of the pharaoh himself. But you’re right, because for Radcliff, it finally connected him with a legitimate treasure instead of buying from thieves and unscrupulous antiquities dealers and bribing customs officials to get them out of the country.”

  “Are you saying that the Radcliff collection is essentially all contraband?”

  “Oh, almost entirely. Which is one of the reasons it has always been kept in a private museum. It started out private because Radcliff was too greedy and egotistical to share his collection with the world by donating it to a major museum or even starting a public one in his name. Until the day came when countries whose treasures had been stolen wanted them back from the people who took them.”

  “So Radcliff kept it hidden,” I said. “But what about the heart? Isn’t it exactly like Radcliff to have stolen the heart scarab?”

  “It was exactly like him … had there been one.”

  “I know that Tut didn’t have a heart scarab, at least none that was reported. But wouldn’t that have gone contrary to a well-established tradition of providing one during the mummification process?”

  “There are two things that rebut the assumption of so many that King Tutankhamen had to have a heart scarab. First, go back to why the heart scarab was important to the Egyptians.”

  He waited for an answer.

  “Because…,” I began, pausing for a moment, “if the person’s heart revealed sinfulness when questioned by Osiris, the god of the dead, Osiris ripped out the heart and threw it to Ahemait, the devourer of hearts and the dead person was denied admission into the afterlife.”

  He wagged his finger at me like a schoolmaster trying to drive knowledge into a child’s head.

  “If the heart revealed wickedness.”

  “Ah … so you’re saying Tut might have been an angel—so to speak,” I added.

  “He was a youth, a teenager, apparently killed in an accident. His grieving mother or the priests may well have made a decision that he was without sin.”

  “Do you have any historical evidence of—”

  “Yes, that’s the second part. Howard Carter. Carter was an ethical professional. Like everyone else connected to the find, there was great disappointment when the Egyptian government ruled that Tut’s tomb had not been opened before Carter’s discovery and they were denied the customary division in which the discoverers took half and the government took the other half.”

  “And that apparently caused some of the members of the dig to help themselves to some items?”

  “Yes, and they were allowed some things, but Carter would not have permitted something of great value like the heart scarab to be taken.”

  “Did Carter claim there was no heart scarab?”

  “It was not noted in the inventory, so it did not exist.”

  “If you are correct and there was never a Heart of Egypt scarab, then how did the legend and stories about it get started?”

  “That devil Radcliff. He took a scarab, one of many found at the site, nothing of great value. No one stopped him and it was just another piece that Carter and the government were willing to look the other way about because there was a great deal of anger and resentment that the government was unwilling to honor the agreement.”

  “How did it come to be called a heart scarab?”

  The monk took a sip of wine and then paused. “I have water around here somewhere—”

  “I’m fine, I have a bottle in my bag.”

  “Now. As I said, there was no heart scarab, so Ra
dcliff filled the void. He intimated to people that he had King Tut’s heart scarab without really saying it right out. It was an empty boast, but one that pleased him because he was so angry that he was not getting part of the richest archaeological find in history. There was a nationalistic political movement at the time, one intent upon driving the British out. When the rumors spread that King Tut’s heart scarab had been stolen by a foreigner, there was much hue and cry.

  “It put Howard Carter into a terrible position. You see, he had to keep insisting that there was no heart scarab, but couldn’t say outright that a member of his consortium had started a baseless rumor. The Egyptian government also denied the existence of the scarab, but to no avail because the people wanted it to exist. And wanted to hate foreigners for taking it, much as they had skimmed off the cream of Egypt for a couple thousand of years.”

  “So you’re saying that after Radcliff died, his son, rather than letting the world know his father was a fraud and liar, put the scarab away and kept mum about the whole affair. And that’s been the attitude of the family ever since.”

  “That is what happened. There was a clue on the Tutankhamen mummy that solved the mystery for me. I am preparing a paper on it—”

  He suddenly stopped and stared past me.

  Two Egyptian men stood at the entryway.

  One of them had a big nasty weapon, the sort of thing you see terrorists firing on TV news reports.

  The man without the weapon pointed and said in Arabic, “That one.”

  The machine gun bucked in the man’s hands and the boom of rapid fire filled the room.

  48

  “They were thieves, not terrorists,” the police captain told me.

  Sitting in the backseat of a police car on my way to Luxor’s police headquarters, I was numb.

  De Santis was dead.

  “But they took nothing.” I hardly recognized the voice as my own.

  The killers had left immediately after shooting him.

  It happened that fast. My ears were ringing when they left and still ringing when I had called the hotel and asked them to send for the police because I didn’t know how to contact the authorities in charge.