The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  My taxi driver wasn’t there when I came out. Neither was the old man providing “security.” Both had probably fled as soon as the killers stepped out of their car.

  There was nothing I could do for the priest. A look of shock, even surprise, was imprinted on his features for eternity.

  I put my scarf over his face to give him some privacy.

  The first officers that arrived were patrol officers who spoke no English and could not understand my attempt to explain what had happened.

  Moments later the higher-ranking officer who I was now riding with arrived and told me he was taking me to police headquarters. He spoke English but asked me almost nothing.

  As we drove, I finally demanded if he wanted to know what the killers looked like.

  “When we get to the station,” he said.

  I laid my head back and closed my eyes. I needed a drink. A plane ticket home. And a passport in order to get onto the plane.

  I suddenly woke up to the fact that we were approaching the Luxor airport. I had no idea where the police station was and assumed it was near the airport until the police car pulled up to a curb.

  A man with a cell phone to his ear hurried toward us.

  “What is this? What’s going on?” I asked the officer.

  “He will take care of you.” He indicated the man coming toward us.

  “Take me to police headquarters. Now!”

  “A flight to Cairo takes off in twenty minutes. You can be on it or you can stay in Luxor for a great deal of time explaining to the police why you were at the scene of a murder.”

  I didn’t have to think that hard about which option to choose.

  My passenger door was opened by the man with the phone glued to his ear.

  He handed the phone to me as I stepped out, keeping a firm grip on my arm while I listened to the voice on the other end.

  “Are you familiar with the Khan?” Kaseem asked.

  I was so irate I couldn’t speak but kept the phone to my ear and permitted the man to lead me into the terminal.

  “I have followers in Luxor,” Kaseem said. “Even in the police. I was called after you reported the death of the monk. I notified the officer who drove you to the airport to get you out of there.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I knew I probably wouldn’t get the right answers from Kaseem, and I was right. He ignored the question.

  “I asked, are you familiar with the Khan?”

  Not even God was that familiar with the Khan el-Khalili, the medieval marketplace in Cairo’s Old City.

  “Enough to find the front entrance.”

  I knew more than that about the great marketplace in the Old City.

  The medieval souq was a twisted maze of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of vendors. It was an endless labyrinth of narrow serpentine alleyways. A few steps off the beaten path and tourists need a guide to get back to their bus.

  “That is all you need to know. You are to meet a blind beggar at the entrance at five o’clock. He will be selling bottle cap openers.”

  “Selling what?”

  “Bottle cap openers. Twist-off caps are not that common in my country.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with this blind beggar? Exchange secret passwords? Let you know what’s going on by speaking into my Dick Tracy watch?”

  “The man will lead you to where you can examine the scarab.”

  “That’s it? I just walk into the marketplace and a blind man with bottle cap openers will take me to a priceless treasure?”

  How blind was this beggar?

  “I didn’t make the arrangements, the thieves did.”

  I restrained myself from pointing out that thieves weren’t the reason my passport was pulled, he was.

  A man was dead. An old monk, priest, whatever he was, had been murdered in front of me. Savaged by a spray of bullets that made loud popping sounds. And Kaseem acted as if I was returning from a Red Sea vacation. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  The police officer he sent to get me out of the investigation into De Santis’s murder had expressed it nicely—get on the plane for Cairo or get stuck in Luxor, with many thousands of dollars in a panty hose money belt around my waist for which I had no explanation the police would like. And my passport had been pulled because I was on a watch list.

  I wanted to tell Kaseem to shove his whole intrigue in a place where the sun didn’t shine, but I was screwed no matter which way I turned.

  “What do you plan to do when I’m examining the piece?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to get shot in a crossfire.”

  He chuckled without humor. “These people are not fools. They will be prepared for an intervention. The ransom money is being put up by patriots that can afford it. And this time the money will be real. I just want the scarab, not a gunfight in the marketplace that will attract the police.”

  I believed him—at least the part about not wanting to attract the police.

  “Put the battery back into your phone,” he said. “You might need it in a hurry.”

  “Ah, I get it. You’re tracking me by the signal my phone gives.”

  He hesitated.

  “You might as well tell me. I’m also being tracked by the antiquities police. You’re not going to want them following me into the marketplace.”

  “Take the battery out of your personal phone.”

  “My phone’s turned off.”

  “You still have to take out the battery. Most cell phones give off a signal that is easily tracked even when the phone is off. Taking out the battery kills the signal.”

  Once I was on the plane, I took the batteries out of my phone and the one Kaseem had given me and took two aspirins.

  I tried to make sense out of why De Santis was murdered.

  Did Kaseem have him killed because the monk was going to publish a scholarly paper hypothesizing that there was no Heart of Egypt scarab?

  That just didn’t compute because the scarab had always been more legend than reality. Besides, the poor masses of Egypt who believed the legend and would be galvanized about it weren’t going to be reading Italian archaeological journals.

  Did my presence bring killers to De Santis’s door?

  That made no sense, either. There was a very short time from when I asked about the monk at the hotel to the time the killers had arrived—hardly enough time to plan out a killing.

  The reason De Santis was killed escaped me at the moment, but it was just one item on a long list.

  Two things, however, had not escaped me.

  Kaseem never asked me what my conversation with De Santis was about, and something De Santis said about King Tut’s mummified remains provided the clue that he had never had a heart scarab.

  I tried to focus on the clue on the mummy, rather than drive myself crazy trying to think of the dead bodies that I had left in my wake since meeting Mounir Kaseem.

  Trying to focus was all I could do because I kept thinking about the old scholar who smelled of wine and just spent his life with his head stuck in books and artifacts.

  49

  The Arabs called their marketplaces “souqs” and the Khan el-Khalili was the biggest one in Egypt, and the most interesting and exciting of the ones that I had been to over the years.

  I walked through the market watching the swarm of people, smiling politely and shaking my head at hucksters peddling “priceless antiquities” made in the back room of their shops and at tourists and locals haggling over prices that never seemed to have a set amount, while I warded off kids and beggars demanding baksheesh—all of these and more were part of the everyday rhythm at the Khan.

  Just about anything under the sun could be bought here—from three-thousand-year-old antiquities looted in the past week to three-year-old AK-47s last used even more recently.

  The market had served for six hundred years as a caravan stop, but camels had now been replaced by tourist buses. />
  The tourists didn’t venture far because the endless rows of narrow, serpentine, and nameless passageways filled with tiny shops in the Old City were daunting.

  Not far from where the tourist buses unloaded, you felt as if you had stepped into the past—and you had. Although the merchandise no longer arrived in long caravans of camels as it did for hundreds of years, much of the marketplace hadn’t changed since the Turkish pashas had ruled Egypt.

  Daylight was passing, and the muezzin late-afternoon call for prayers was in the air as I entered the marketplace.

  Even though I was dressed modestly—a scarf over my head, a shawl over my shoulders, and a long charcoal cotton dress down to my ankles—I wasn’t exactly blending in as a local, but at least I didn’t pulsate like a neon sign as a lot of tourists did, either, especially the women who insisted on wearing tight short-shorts in what was still a socially conservative country for the most part.

  I walked leisurely through the ancient streets, pretending that I was listening to the peddlers hawking their goods with a babble of short phrases in languages they thought you spoke and that had some connection to your homeland.

  “My cousin’s in Texas,” said one merchant as he tried to sell me “ancient” papyrus with hieroglyphics painted on it.

  “Kein danke,” I answered in German, hoping to throw him off, and he replied, “Mein Vetter ist in Berlin.” (“My cousin is in Berlin.”)

  No doubt if I had spoken the language of a remote Brazilian jungle tribe some Khan vendor would know it.

  The pungent odor of aromatic spices hit my nostrils as I walked near the area where big stuffed sacks of the fragrant substances were lined up next to each other. Every imaginable spice was displayed for your eyes and nose.

  I had only walked for a few minutes when I saw the blind beggar, an old wizened man standing in the middle of an intersection of passageways. He had dozens of metal bottle cap openers attached to the front of his coat like war medals.

  The bottle cap openers made him stand out for me like a metal-blazoned neon sign.

  I started to make my way toward him when a boy who looked about twelve approached me and said in a soft, enticing voice, “Come, Maddy.”

  50

  At first I wasn’t sure I had heard the boy right.

  He walked past me and then stopped and turned around when I hadn’t followed him.

  Then he said my name again. “Come, Maddy.”

  He had probably been taught the one phrase in English.

  I stayed a few steps behind as he took me deeper into the midst of the ancient alleys and off the beaten track and into a tiny canvas-covered passageway.

  As I followed, I slipped the battery back into the cell phone Kaseem had provided and also stuck my battery into my own phone.

  It was time to let the world know where I was in case I needed help.

  He paused in front of a small shop with inexpensive copper goods—fat coffeepots, bowls, and cooking pans were stacked in heaps.

  An old woman in the doorway of the shop narrowed her eyes at me for a moment before gesturing me to enter.

  I stepped into the shadowy, unlit interior that was also crowded with copper goods and warily looked around.

  She then led me into an open-air workshop in the back where a man and two boys barely looked up from hammering and bending metal into all shapes and sizes.

  We passed through the work area to a door and went through it into another passageway.

  I reluctantly followed her.

  What was I getting myself into?

  I was retreating farther and farther away from the outside world and, worse, I didn’t have a clue where I was.

  Not uttering a word to me, the woman kept going, leading me farther into the confusing, tortuous passageways, the sky growing darker as the shadows lengthened with the sun setting.

  I was truly in the medieval realm of the Khan where no tourist ever ventured.

  How would I ever find my way back?

  What perfect timing. Making the rendezvous late in the afternoon, the passageways were dimmer, which disoriented me even more, but they were not so dark that I might refuse to go deeper into the maze.

  I had been in the Khan dozens of times but I had no idea of where I was now, although the city’s relentless honking of horns in the distance clued me in to the fact that I wasn’t that far from an ordinary street.

  The woman led me to a shop where tobacco for shishas, the ubiquitous water pipes, was sold. Besides a large selection of aromatic tobacco these places also sold pot and maybe a little hashish.

  She gestured for me to wait and I stood and watched for a moment as a man on a stool outside the shop forced smoke through the pipe’s bubbling water and inhaled it.

  The woman waved me in and stepped aside as I entered, hurrying away.

  The shop was dark, lit only by a dim lamp, and the air was thick with the sweet and pungent smell of scented tobacco.

  The only person I saw was a man behind the counter. He pointed to a door at the rear of the small shop.

  Just a gesture, not a word spoken. I was beginning to wonder if the world had gone mute.

  “All right,” I said out loud to myself, “must be the door with the tiger behind it.”

  My heart started beating a little faster as I opened the door and stepped inside.

  An old man with a long beard, turban, and galabeya robe sat at a small table. Nicotine juice stained the corner of his beard on one side of his mouth.

  I immediately felt claustrophobic in the stuffy room.

  A single naked lightbulb, dim and dusty, illuminated the cramped space.

  On the table was a piece of red silk, the size of a handkerchief, laid over what I presumed to be the Heart of Egypt scarab.

  My heart made it to my throat as I stared at the silk cover. This was the moment of decision.

  “Come, Maddy,” the old man said, motioning me forward with his hand and gesturing at the silk.

  I quickly glanced around the room while trying to appear as if I wasn’t nervous. A set of curtains were on the wall behind the seated man. I didn’t see any movement, but the curtains would be a perfect place for someone to hide behind.

  Looking at the man seated at the table, I was certain that he couldn’t be the mastermind of an international art thief scheme or even a knowing member. He was too much the small-time Khan merchant; probably the owner of the tobacco shop. He struck me as being used as a front, perhaps not even realizing exactly the role he was playing, who I was, or what was coming down.

  He pointed again at the object. “Come, Maddy.”

  “Is that all your English?” I asked. “Speak English?”

  He smiled and pointed again. “Come, Maddy.”

  I stepped closer to the table. “Take it off.” I waved my hand to indicate I wanted him to remove the silk cover.

  I was careful to look down and avoid letting him look at my eyes as he pulled off the piece of cloth, a trick that I learned talking to a rug dealer in Istanbul.

  Avoiding eye contact was an old habit from the days of haggling over the price of art. It’s done for the same reason that I suspect some poker players even wear sunglasses—just as other card players can “read” the tells on the faces and eyes of other players, your pupils can involuntarily open slightly when you see something you like, such as a choice piece of art, for example.

  I was glad now that I did it instinctively because when I saw the scarab I’m sure my eyes would have betrayed me the moment the silk came off.

  I stared at it, instantly petrified, almost paralyzed.

  My God … the scarab looked real.

  A pulse at my temple started beating and I kept myself from clearing my throat.

  I hadn’t really known what to expect—the Heart of Egypt in the flesh, or a scarab like the one Adara had gotten from her mother, something a step above tourist stuff.

  The scarab on the table appeared to be the real thing—or as close to it as a coun
terfeiter could possibly get.

  It looked exactly like the realistic reproduction Fuad had showed me and I had the same feeling as I did when I saw the reproduction—like Howard Carter I might have to walk around it for days before I would be able to give an opinion on its authenticity.

  Despite the tingling excitement I felt inside, I kept a poker face on as I took a Maglite and my loupe out of my shoulder bag and set them on the table.

  I was too nervous and excited to sit down, so I reached over and picked up the scarab.

  The man said something to me in Arabic and gestured to a chair next to the table, which I assumed meant an invitation to sit down, but I smiled and shook my head back and forth. My instinct told me to stay on two feet in case I needed to leave in a hurry.

  I first examined the scarab in the dim light, feeling its weight and texture in my hands. If I had been alone, I would have asked the dung beetle if it had lied for King Tut when Ahemait, the devourer of the hearts of the dead, questioned it about the boy king’s earthly sins.

  Was I actually holding one of the greatest treasures of Egyptian antiquity? Or a clever knockoff?

  Nothing about the feel of the scarab told me it was a replica, but the more I held it, the more I began to get a cold feeling. I wasn’t sure why I experienced the sensation—the piece in my hand was a perfect match to the one I saw at Isis’ private museum.

  I began to examine the scarab with the loupe and flashlight, this time going over every inch of it, not only looking for any marks that revealed it hadn’t been made with ancient tools, but also for a telltale mark like the one Fuad Hassan had put on the bottom of the scarab to ensure that a reproduction could be distinguished from an original.

  Again, nothing showed that I wasn’t holding in my hand the Heart of Egypt that had been sealed in a tomb with a pharaoh for more than three thousand years.

  I was stumped.

  I had gone from heart-racing excitement to a cold chill at the bone about the piece. Yet I couldn’t put my feeling into a coherent thought. I had no laundry list of factors revealing the scarab wasn’t the original heart; that it wasn’t the piece removed from King Tut.