The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  He had a good thing going here—living the high life was better than selling shoes or whatever he did before he got reincarnated as an ancient pharaoh, but it was a lifestyle that could quickly change if his wacko protégée decided she was bored with being a goddess and found something else utterly weird to make herself look ridiculous.

  My father would have said Ramses was like an snarling old dog who had jumped on the back of a meat wagon and ready to go for the throat of anyone who tried to drag him off.

  Mentioning the police earlier had probably gotten his immediate attention.

  “Did Sir Georges-Hamilton advise you on how sensitive Isis is?” Ramses asked.

  I was tempted to say that he told me she was a bisexual nympho into bestiality, but I decided to be nice and keep it straight. I sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk before I answered him.

  “Yes, he did. I really don’t need to bother Isis. I understand that she has a curator who can provide me with information.”

  “Unfortunately, she learned you were coming and wants to meet you. She wants to be reassured that you will not defame her family name in any way.”

  “I have no intention of even mentioning her family name to anyone. I’ve just been hired to examine the scarab. When it’s found, that is. Has there been any news about it?”

  Ramses started to say something and stopped when the goddess herself came into the room.

  26

  “Ramses, is this the woman you told me about? The American art person?”

  Isis had an overloud, shrill voice. She floated toward me and absentmindedly shook my hand.

  “You-you’re supposed to be at Stonehenge,” Ramses stammered, surprised by her appearance.

  Sir Georges-Hamilton was with her.

  “The stupid police refused to arrest me,” she said. “They gave me a ticket for trespassing as if I had been driving a car.”

  Isis was thirtyish, skinny, with a narrow nose, thin lips, and unmanageable blond hair that probably always looked like it needed to be brushed.

  She struck me as a hyper person, a bit scatterbrained, and even a little melancholy when I looked at her doleful eyes.

  I would have bet that she had never read a book in her entire life. It went with the territory of upper-class British women who were intellectually uneducated except for attending an expensive finishing school as Princess Diana had done. Unlike Di though, I suspected that Isis had not risen above her lack of education.

  “My great-grandfather was a thief,” she told me, without waiting for confirmation of who I was. “Most of my ancestors were thieves, too. That’s how great fortunes are built, don’t you think?”

  I started to tell her I didn’t think, period, about her great-grandfather, but Ramses interrupted me.

  “But we don’t want you telling everyone that, do we? You’re supposed to pretend that it was never stolen by your great-grandfather like your family has always pretended.”

  “Have you found the scarab yet?” Isis asked him. “I should never have let it be taken out of the vault. If it was to be returned to its spiritual home, I should have been the one to do it, not that incompetent woman. Now she’s dead and the police will be asking questions.”

  Ramses swept in between us. “Miss Dupre has been advised as to how to deal with the old rumors about the scarab and she has to get to work now, doesn’t she, Sir Georges?”

  The dapper art dealer picked up the cue and ran with it, taking me out of the library with a firm grip on my arm.

  Once we were outside the room, Sir Georges-Hamilton said, “I will introduce you to the curator.” He gave me a sympathetic look and shook his head. “Sad, isn’t it? All that money and she’s really quite miserable.”

  “No. Sad is being broke and miserable.”

  27

  The great-granddad of Isis really was a robber baron when it came to antiquities. That was evident the moment I stepped into the museum wing of the palatial Radcliff house.

  “There are private collections all over the world,” the art dealer told me, “but few this large and valuable.”

  Although I saw a few Greek, Roman, and Babylonian pieces, the main focus of the museum was Egyptian.

  Sir Georges-Hamilton introduced me to Curator Fuad Hassan and then did another one of his disappearing acts. He apparently had learned how to avoid trouble by slipping quietly away anytime it raised its ugly head.

  Fuad appeared scholarly and honest. I liked him immediately.

  A little mousey and fragile, he was paper-thin, with olive flesh pulled tightly over small bones. Gold-rimmed glasses were mounted on a small, stubby nose. His eyes reminded me of a rabbit that sticks its head out of its hole to check for rain before venturing out.

  He seemed a little overwhelmed by life and probably retreated into a museum like a monk cloistered in a monastery.

  “Quite a mess, isn’t it?” I said.

  His eyes flinched back as if I’d slapped him, but then he gave me a look of pure gratitude.

  “Thank you. No one has described it so accurately. One of the great treasures of my country, of the ancient world, has been lost—stolen—and the people in this house talk as if it was just a knickknack taken from the local antique shop.”

  He instantly shut up and turned around, as if he was looking for somewhere to hide his head. This was probably the most insubordinate that he’d been in his life.

  “How did this ridiculous deception get started?” I asked. I wanted to test Kaseem’s version against Fuad’s.

  “Miss Radcliff was persuaded to return the scarab to Egypt, where it rightly belongs.”

  I noticed he didn’t use the name Isis.

  “How was she persuaded?”

  “I believe her advisor convinced her that the scarab carried a curse that had doomed her family and the curse was now keeping her from being happy.”

  Jesus, I thought. The only thing keeping the woman from being happy was that she had so much money; she needed to get a life.

  I could see how it came down—Kaseem got to Ramses, with money, and had him sell Isis the curse story. I didn’t unload the garbage on Fuad.

  “Why did your assistant, Fatima Sari, agree to be the one to carry the scarab back to Egypt?”

  His features softened and I saw the concern in his eyes. He trembled as he struggled to get control of his emotions. He obviously must have had some special feelings for her to be so overcome with sadness. Poor bastard, he was probably in love with her.

  Quiet, reserved, even timid, and quite a bit older than Fatima, he no doubt had been completely unable to deal with either his feelings for her or his failure to come and save her when everything went south after the scarab was stolen from her.

  My heart immediately went out to him. His assistant had been in trouble, in danger, alone, and from what I could see, more than half crazy. He had probably tried to help her but what she needed was a knight in shining armor and all he probably offered was pleas for her to come home.

  “She was really a good person,” he said. “She loved the artifacts of our country, called them her children. It was that love that would doom her.”

  “Because she agreed to return the scarab?”

  “Yes, she was thrilled at the opportunity when it was offered to her. Knowing that she would be the one who returned one of our greatest treasures to Egypt mesmerized her.”

  If I had been in her shoes, it would have enthralled me, too. No one who loved art would pass up the chance to return a national treasure to its home.

  He appeared ready to break down. “Fatima was…”

  “Too idealistic? Naïve?”

  “Yes, yes, that is exactly right, she saw people and situations too often as she thought they should be, rather than as they were. The world is full of people who are greedy and corrupt. She had no sins, no faults. She only wanted to do good.”

  “So what went wrong?” I asked.

  He waved his hands nervously. “Everything. It was
all being done in secret. My advice was for Miss Radcliff to present the scarab to the Egyptian ambassador in London as part of a goodwill gesture, but she was convinced that it would be an admission that her ancestor had stolen it in the first place.”

  I could see his logic.

  “Everybody already knew that Sir Jacob Radcliff pocketed the scarab anyway, so why go through the pretense.”

  “Precisely. They acted like children playing a game rather than dealing with a priceless artifact. They sent Fatima out with it in secret.”

  “What about security?”

  “Hired from an agency who provides guards for social events. They were not professional art security. They didn’t even know what they were protecting.”

  “No one I’ve spoken to has told me how the scarab was taken from Fatima. Do you know?”

  He shook his head. “Not all that happened. I got a call from her, she was hysterical. No … not just hysterical, confused—”

  “Drugged?”

  “Yes … yes, for a certainty. She was confused, stumbling over her words.”

  “When did the theft occur?”

  “Sometime after Fatima retired. Everything was fine when she went to bed. The heart was in the hotel room safe. But when she woke up, the safe was open and the scarab gone. And she was confused, dazed.”

  “She had no idea of who might have drugged her? Been in her room last? Had a drink with in the hotel lounge before she went to bed?”

  “She was a good Muslim, she didn’t drink alcoholic beverages. And even though I recognized that she had been drugged, she did not.”

  “What did she think happened?”

  “She didn’t know. Her mind was mixed-up, as if she had been given something so potent that it was still affecting her thoughts hours later.”

  “Days later,” I said. “When I saw her, she wasn’t coherent in her thinking process.”

  “I know. I called her cell phone many times. At first she answered and I could tell she was not thinking correctly. I tried to get her to come home or even just tell me where she was so I could come and get her…”

  He stopped, emotion swelling in him. He walked away for a moment before turning back to me.

  “She was a sensitive person, fragile both in mind and body. When she called me she was traumatized and not just because she had been drugged. I believe the loss of the scarab broke her mind.”

  When I saw the woman she was very thin, almost anorexic. I’m sure she wouldn’t have shed that much weight in the few days that had passed since she had been drugged. Obviously whoever drugged Fatima gave her too much, not realizing the effect it would have on a woman of such slight build.

  “Who else knew that Fatima was returning the scarab to Egypt?”

  He threw up his hands. “The whole world. It was supposed to be a secret, but the servants and the gardeners knew it, which meant the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and so on also knew it.”

  The hurt etched on his face grew. He appeared ready to tear up. “When you last saw Fatima, did she … did she…”

  “She didn’t suffer, if that’s what you mean. She was killed instantly. She probably didn’t even know what hit her.”

  I liked Fuad and was tempted to tell him that he should get away from the Radcliff house and the insanity and intrigues as soon as possible, but he saved me the trouble.

  “I will share a secret with you,” he said. “I am leaving my job here as curator for the museum. I have given Miss Radcliff notice and will leave after she is able to hire another curator for the collection. I have been loyal to her despite everything that has happened.”

  “Have things changed since Ramses has come on board?” I asked.

  He grimaced. “Very much so. He—he influences Miss Radcliff and I believe not in a beneficial way.”

  “That’s probably an understatement. Have you heard of Svengali?”

  He shook his head.

  “He’s a character from a novel. The name has come to characterize someone who dominates and manipulates another person for their own purpose. I see Ramses as her Svengali.”

  “He would sell the collection for a pittance and pocket the money,” Fuad whispered. “He knows nothing about art. I’m sure he was paid to manipulate Miss Radcliff with that ridiculous story about a curse.”

  He turned away from me again. “I’m sorry, I probably have said too much.”

  “No, you’ve just told the truth about a bad situation.”

  “It’s my duty to serve Miss Radcliff until my replacement is found. I must not be disloyal.”

  Pretty sure I had gotten all the information out of him about Fatima, I asked him what he could tell me about the scarab.

  “I’ll show you what we have.”

  He handed me pictures of the scarab, which told me little about it because they were not the professional shots a museum would have taken to identify the scarab in case it had been stolen.

  The heart was short, broad, and ugly, as all scarabs were.

  I thought about the insect and its importance to the Egyptians as I looked at the pictures.

  People who see a scarab for the first time find it strange that the personification of the dung beetle is a significant source of the mystery and magic of ancient Egypt, and that a bug who waddled in excrement was worshipped as the symbol of rebirth after death.

  The beetle lived off the dropped excrement of animals, grabbing a piece of the stuff, forming it into a ball, and rolling it off to a hole in the ground or inside a dead animal where the dung was used as food. Eggs were wrapped in dung, too, for nourishment, so life appeared to come from the inanimate animal droppings.

  Because it appeared to the Egyptians that the beetles were reborn from dead matter, and the way they rolled the round balls that were used to create life, they identified the beetle with Khepri, a god who rolled the ball-shaped sun across the sky during the day. At the end of the day the sun was swallowed by Nut, goddess of the sky, and reemerged from her womb the next day, mimicking the birth of beetles from dark mass.

  Death and rebirth became a ubiquitous theme in the minds and art of the ancient Egyptians, with the death and rebirth cycle of the beetle symbolic of it. King Tut’s tomb wasn’t just rich in material possessions, but had been stocked with food and other provisions he would need when he was reborn.

  “I realize the pictures are not of the best quality. Here,” he said, handing me a scarab. “This is the most important item. Other than it being only a few years old, rather than a few thousand, it is an exact replica of the Heart of Egypt.”

  The scarab was made of the same grade of Afghan blue lapis lazuli with a brushing of a very fine gold pyrite like I had observed on the pictures.

  “The surest way to tell if it’s a counterfeit,” I said, “would be to compare the pattern of the gold dusting with the pattern on the original. It would be impossible to make a model that had exactly the same pattern as the original even if it came from the mining site. Or even if it came from the same piece of rock,” I added.

  “Yes, of course, the patterns would look the same to the naked eye, but a closer examination would show differences.”

  “Are there better pictures available?”

  “There are, but I don’t have them here.”

  I took a thorough look at the scarab he gave me.

  “You know, this is an excellent reproduction,” I said. “If you hadn’t told me this was a copy, I would’ve taken it to be a three-thousand-year-old artifact from the tomb of King Tut.”

  Its connection to the boy king was obvious: Tut’s name signed in hieroglyphics appeared on its back.

  After examining it for a moment, I still had the same impression—that I was looking at a piece of antiquity. But as I had told Kaseem, reproductions are often so good they are extremely difficult to sort out. The counterfeiter who did this one not only used the correct Afghan stone, I had no doubt that a microscopic examination would show it was carved with the type of tools used in an
tiquity. Without the real scarab to make a comparison with, the key to revealing it was a copy would be a chemical analysis of the patina on the stone that usually formed over the ages.

  “Howard Carter had a method for determining whether a piece was an artifact or a reproduction,” I said.”He placed the item where he would see it during the day. After a few days he knew whether it was real or a fake.

  “I think Carter would have reached the same conclusion I did about this piece—it looks real; nothing’s screaming at me that says it isn’t, so it’ll take more than a brief examination to determine that it’s a fake. Unlike Carter’s day, there are lab tests we can do.”

  He suddenly gave me a small smile.

  “There is a quicker way,” he said and offered me a magnifying glass. “Something about the appearance of the scarab may tell you it is a reproduction.”

  I felt like a schoolgirl being tested, but he was a sweet little man and I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  “I’ll use my own,” I said, as I took out the jeweler’s loupe from my purse and started examining the piece.

  Nothing on the top or the sides shouted fake at me. On the bottom I found a tiny mark, a swirl, that would have been visible to the naked eye only if you knew to look for it. Even at that, making out the detail of the swirl required a magnifying glass.

  I guessed the purpose.

  “The reproduction is so good, the maker put a mark on it so you see a difference from the original … but not easily, you’d still have to double-check it under magnification. They used a swirl pattern so the mark could be distinguished from marks created accidentally.”

  He grinned and clapped his hands. “Yes, yes, it’s a pattern that would not be duplicated accidentally by people or nature. I put it on myself. Not even the counterfeiter knows I did this.”

  “Is the weight also the same?”

  “Exactly the same,” he said.

  “So the reproduction was made for public display?” I asked.