The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  I had a sick feeling deep in the pit of my stomach.

  “What does he want from Rafi?” I asked, dreading what she was about to say.

  “The scarab, of course.” She gave me a smirk. “Not that piece of junk you saw at the Khan.”

  62

  The world around me disintegrated.

  Rafi ran out of the house, checking his gun as he left and jumped into Lana’s car.

  He took off without her.

  She gave him a grin full of spite and jealousy as he left and then turned her venom on Noor.

  “It’s your fault, you slut,” she said. “Did you think your husband was completely stupid?”

  Noor slumped down in a chair and burst into tears. She didn’t say anything.

  I stepped in between them.

  “Leave her alone. She has enough to worry about without you kicking her when she’s down.”

  For a moment I thought Lana was going to attack me, but her phone went off. She checked the number and gave me a sly look before she went off to answer the call in privacy.

  She identified herself as Sphinx as she left the room, shooting a glance back at me as if to taunt me.

  Good work, I thought. With my usual ability to dig a deeper hole for myself, I had taken the side of a woman who could do absolutely nothing to help me and pissed off the one who could.

  All part of my life plan to do what I think is right without giving a single rational thought about the consequences.

  “It is my fault,” Noor said, sobbing “I’ve always loved Rafi. How could I help it? My sister loved him. Everything she felt, I felt, too. I should never have married Amir. He’s a good man and I’m a bad woman. I hurt him, I hurt our children, and now I’ve put Dalila in danger.”

  “You didn’t do half the wrongs you think you did,” I said. “You don’t choose who you love; you just get victimized when it doesn’t work out.”

  She collapsed in tears and I tried to comfort her, but she was too distraught.

  I could understand her wrong turns and bad choices—I had a long list of mistakes in my own life that I wished I hadn’t made.

  Sitting down beside her, I stroked her hair as she cried while wondering what the hell was going to happen.

  My mind swirled with questions.

  Why did that bastard Kaseem take Dalila? To get Rafi off his back? Did Rafi really have the scarab as Lana intimated?

  More important than Kaseem and Rafi, what was going to happen to Dalila? Had anyone called the police? Would that even do any good?

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

  Amir turning a sick child over to Kaseem because he couldn’t keep his wife in his own bed?

  Kaseem laying claim to being a man of destiny but kidnapping a child to use as bait?

  Rafi giving up an organ for his daughter, but letting her be pulled into this mess?

  What kind of games were these people playing?

  I’d call the damn police myself if I spoke the language and thought anyone would listen to me. Or believed that they weren’t all in Kaseem’s pocket.

  I was getting ready to hike to Abu Simbel and get a taxi to the airport when Lana offered to drive me in Noor’s car. She didn’t bother asking Noor’s permission to use the car.

  If Lana was feeling sorry for Rafi and worried about Dalila, she hid her emotions well. She seemed to take pleasure knowing that the man who slighted her affections was suffering.

  I still wanted to know Rafi’s full involvement.

  In the car, I probed her willingness to give me the lowdown on the extent of Rafi’s machinations to get the money to save his daughter.

  “Noor told me Rafi was desperate to get money for Dalila. That he needed a lot of it,” I said.

  “You want to know if that’s why he took the scarab, don’t you? And how he did it, too.”

  “Yes, I’d like to know.”

  Lana kept her eyes on the road as she talked.

  “She probably told you about the kidney and the liver. The liver thing would have killed him or left him incapacitated, so he decided to steal the scarab when we got word that it was being returned.”

  That confirmed my suspicion as to why Kaseem grabbed Dalila. He wanted to swap the girl for the scarab.

  “How did Rafi find out it was being returned? Kaseem told me it was being brought back in secret.”

  “Fatima Sari liked to talk. And she was all caught up with the thrill of being a great heroine of Egypt, of being the one who brought the heart back to us. She told a friend who had been a classmate of hers when she studied Egyptology. The friend knew Rafi was the head of the Supreme Council’s recovery team and she told him.”

  “So Rafi decided to intercept the scarab? To steal it from Fatima before she got on the plane to Cairo?”

  She shook her head. “Rafi knew she would never make it to the plane, that Kaseem had no intention of letting Fatima bring the scarab back.”

  “Because Kaseem wanted to return it himself and be a hero.”

  “With a bang.” She laughed harshly. “He wanted to return the scarab in a way that showed the greatness that Egypt would be able to achieve again.”

  “So Kaseem intended to take the scarab from Fatima all along. From the beginning he was never going to let Fatima bring it back.”

  “Exactly. He got that crazy British woman to agree to have it returned by bribing that ridiculous mentor of hers who calls himself Ramses, but once the scarab was out of the vault, Kaseem planned to grab it. He set Fatima up because she was easy to manipulate.”

  “What went wrong?”

  She shrugged. “Both Rafi and Kaseem had the same idea of getting the scarab without causing a lot of noise.”

  “Drugging Fatima?” An overdose would explain why she had seemed so dazed to me.

  “Yes, drugging her. Kaseem put a dose in the bottle of water she had by her hotel room bed without knowing that Rafi had bribed a hotel maid to deliver tea laced with sleeping medicine. She drank both.”

  It sounded like the Keystone Cops with a woman’s thinking process at stake.

  “It affected her mind, especially when she realized she had lost the great treasure she was supposed to deliver.”

  She gave me a narrow look. “I was not part of it, you understand? I stayed in Egypt. Rafi told me what happened.”

  That didn’t ring true to me.

  I suspected that Lana was something more than an innocent bystander, but it didn’t matter. If I started making accusations, I knew she would clam up.

  “So while Fatima was under, Rafi took the scarab and was going to bring it back to Cairo?” I asked.

  “Yes. He slipped into her room and got on the next flight to Cairo. It was easy for him to bring it back undetected. As an antiquities officer, he was not examined at customs.”

  “How does the scarab replica fit into all this?”

  “He had a duplicate made to delude Kaseem. Fool that Rafi is, he didn’t want Kaseem to get his hands on the scarab. Rafi thought he could get money from Kaseem for the fake and in the end, turn the scarab over to the museum in Cairo.”

  The counterfeiter told me a woman had approached him and his assistant to have a fake made. I was certain Rafi sent Lana to have it done, but again I kept my mouth shut.

  Larceny, fraud, deception—and desperation for his daughter. Maybe even murder. An all-around bad combination, especially for a basically honest man like Rafi to handle.

  She eyed me as she drove. “You realized it was a fake when you examined it in the Khan, didn’t you? Rafi was sure that the reproduction was good enough to make you think that it was real, especially in the poor light. How did you know?”

  “Experience? I don’t know. Maybe just instinct. The reproduction for Isis was duplicated from the real scarab. The second one was done from pictures because the employee who made the fake got paid to do it on the side. Both looked exactly like the original … but no matter how much they look alike, there is a differen
ce that’s hard to quantify.

  “It’s like reproductions of the master painters. Modern painters copy them exactly, but most of the time an expert can tell which one is the imitation.”

  I waited a moment before I asked, “Why did Fatima try to kill me?”

  She shrugged, but I could see the smirk on her face. She really enjoyed feeding me information … but just enough to whet my appetite. With Lana, there was always going to be another shoe that dropped. And it might just hit me on the head.

  I was still puzzled by her role. She seemed to know what both Rafi and Kaseem were up to, yet stated that she wasn’t involved.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Her mind was mixed up by drugs and guilt. When Kaseem was angry with her after Rafi stole the scarab, she got it into her head that Kaseem had been the one who stole it. She got away from him but came back like a ghost, watching him.”

  Although she kept up the pretense that she wasn’t a participant in what had happened, she sure had all the answers.

  “So she started stalking him and he led her to me?” I asked.

  “Your name had come up earlier with Kaseem, before the theft. He actually was going to have you examine the scarab taken from Fatima to make sure that he hadn’t been given a reproduction by that fraud of a mentor who controls that Radcliff woman.”

  “No honor among thieves.”

  My phone went off with a message from Michelangelo that said subway tape with an attachment. What lousy timing Michelangelo had. Just like in bed.

  I hit the link and waited for the connection.

  “Rafi?” Lana asked.

  I shook my head. “No. A cop friend in New York has sent me the security camera tape of Fatima running in front of the train.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have bad karma, I guess. Or shitty luck. Fatima tries to puncture me with a letter opener and jumps in front of a train and I suddenly find myself the chief suspect in her death.”

  I got a nod of agreement out of Lana—whatever that meant.

  The picture was tiny and fuzzy on the smartphone screen. The camera view was wide-angle, taking in most of the small subway station. As I’d been told, the camera had been mounted behind Fatima, facing me, so my expression was visible and not hers. More importantly, her body blocked a view of my arm, making it impossible to see that my gesture was a defensive one, rather than striking out at her.

  Watching the video, I remembered something had frightened Fatima, causing her to veer off toward the tracks like a startled doe. I didn’t see anything obvious but the tape was only a few seconds long and I replayed it, looking at the people it captured in the crowded station as Lana pulled over to the side of the road.

  I ran it three times before I recognized someone.

  My blood froze and my heart jumped into my throat.

  I turned to Lana, to that evil smirk she had plastered on her face.

  “I guess you didn’t stay in Egypt.”

  There she was, in a starring role in the subway video.

  Lana was the one who Fatima had recognized—and the mere sight of the woman threw Fatima into a such a panic that she ran in front of the train.

  Lana pulled a slender rod up from the side of the seat. I stared at it, puzzled. For a moment I thought it was a long flashlight.

  “Cattle prod,” she said.

  I grabbed for the door handle, jerking it down, and tried to open the door, but nothing happened.

  “Locked,” she said.

  I opened the lock just as she touched me on the shoulder with the cattle prod and my head exploded.

  63

  A road to nowhere. That’s where Lana took me. A dirt path in the desert with fresh tire tracks, but even those would be covered by the next sandstorm. A landscape far away from the life-giving waters of the Nile—the far side of the moon, an endless wasteland where only the hardiest creatures on the planet survive—snakes, spiders, scorpions, and hard-shelled insects that devour each other in a never-ending cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

  All my strength and coordination had been snapped by the electric shock so I sat helplessly while she handcuffed me.

  My eyes were burning, my throat felt raw, and my bones had that achy feeling I remember having when I had the flu. The worse part was my head—it felt as if she had jumped up and down on it wearing spiked heels.

  I was drained and exhausted without having done anything strenuous. I could sit upright now and stretch my limbs but I knew physically I couldn’t have gotten out if she had stopped the car and let me escape. Not that I would have gone very far—the only reason Lana would let me out would be to run me over.

  The cattle prod she used to stun me was tucked into the side of her seat. I could reach for it, but knew that I’d only get another jolt, maybe a lethal one that would kill me.

  Lana had not spoken since giving me a whap that would have knocked a bull on its butt.

  A CD played at loud volume and she hummed and sang along with the music, a song with that jangling wail and tinny rhythm of the Middle East. I admired many things about Arabic culture, but its music wasn’t one of them. Neither was Lana’s singing voice.

  I wanted to scream at her to shut up, but it would only make her laugh and turn up the music even louder.

  I don’t know how Rafi could have missed the signals of hate, spite, and jealous rage that Lana radiated. But I also didn’t know her total involvement or who she was connected with, though Kaseem was my candidate. That meant she had sent Rafi into an ambush that would no doubt get him killed as soon as he turned over the scarab to Kaseem.

  At the moment I was worried about my survival.

  If I had a choice between the two men, I would pick Rafi as the one giving me a slightly better chance of staying alive than Kaseem.

  At least Rafi’s motives for getting involved appeared to stem from his concern for Dalila. And even at that, he had what sounded like a plan rooted in hope and madness to make sure that the scarab found its way back to King Tut at the museum.

  I could cut a deal with Rafi to keep my mouth shut if he came out on top. But Kaseem again struck me as the type who wouldn’t want to leave any dangling ends.

  “It’s not about the scarab,” I said out loud.

  I don’t think Lana heard me over the noise she thought was music. She probably wouldn’t have answered me if she had heard me.

  Rafi’s only motive to get the money was to save Dalila.

  What was Kaseem’s game? Political, for sure. I didn’t think he planned to come back to Egypt riding a white horse and waving the scarab. No, he had something bigger planned, something that the scarab was only a part of.

  Giving Lana a sideways glance, I wondered what she had in mind.

  She hit the radio power button. The sudden silence was like a breath of fresh air. But heavy with anticipation—she was waiting for me to say something.

  “I have money,” I lied. “If you help me and let me go, you could be a rich woman.”

  She laughed. Not a ha-ha laughter full of humor, but a screech that got under my skin like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  “I help you and I will be a dead woman.” She smirked, full of arrogance and contempt. “Besides, you made a mistake when you fucked my man.”

  That got a sigh of defeat from me. I had to admit that my attitude about sex had gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion.

  She hit the radio power button again and started that mournful wailing that passed for music with her.

  If I could have gotten my hands on the cattle prod, I would have stuck it in a place I knew would really make her wail.

  64

  Lana turned off the radio and slowed the car as we came around a bend in the road.

  Parked on the roadway was the car Rafi had driven, coated with dirt. It had an abandoned look and that’s what I would have assumed it was had I not seen him ride off in it earlier.

  She drove slowly up beside the parked car and inched around it, pulli
ng a small pistol out of her purse as she steered.

  I didn’t know if she wanted to see if it was occupied by anyone—or looking for Rafi’s dead body.

  “You’d kill him, wouldn’t you?” I said. “And let Dalila suffer and die. Just because he didn’t give you the attention you wanted?”

  She raised the pistol and put the muzzle against my temple.

  My blood froze. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, out of fear she would actually pull the trigger.

  “Bang,” she said. And giggled like a crazed banshee.

  She suddenly tensed and gave me an evil look. “I would kill you if Kaseem didn’t have plans for you.”

  The hatred in her eyes meant she was serious.

  “You are a—”

  She didn’t let me finish, but hit me on the side of the head with the butt of the gun.

  I saw stars but got out “crazy bitch” before she hit me again.

  “When he’s finished with you, you’re mine,” she said.

  65

  Lana continued driving down into a wadi, following tracks in the dry riverbed, and back up again. She drove very slowly, the car engine making little sound and raising no dust.

  Finally I saw a house, a mud hut with a flag near the front door that appeared to be a small, remote military outpost; a sand-colored van with an Egyptian Army insignia on its doors stood parked in front.

  A body lay on the ground near the van. Another body was sprawled nearby. Both bodies wore military uniforms.

  Lana stopped the car and slipped out, leaving her door open as she did, gun in hand.

  The door to the hut opened and Kaseem came out.

  Someone stood behind him. It was Rafi, with Dalila next to him. Rafi had a gun pointed at Kaseem.

  Lana slowly approached the two men, holding her gun casually pointed downward. She acted as if she was approaching a situation that Rafi had well in hand.

  What Rafi didn’t know was that she had sold him out to Kaseem.

  I heard Rafi say something in Arabic to his daughter who started to run back in the house, then he suddenly gave Kaseem a shove as Lana approached them.