The Curse
Authors: Harold Robbins
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Contents
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For Eugene Winick, who has been there for all of us
Acknowledgments
Books get published only because many people work to make it happen. This book made it into print with the help of Forge editors, Katharine Critchlow, Eric Raab, and Bob Gleason. I also want to thank the copy editor, Sabrina Roberts, who worked silently in the background to correct my rocky grammar and bad spelling.
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Harold Robbins
left behind a rich heritage of novel ideas and works in progress when he passed away in 1997. Harold Robbins' estate and his editor worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Harold Robbins' ideas to create this novel, inspired by his storytelling brilliance, in a manner faithful to the Robbins style.
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TOMB OF TUTANKHAMEN
Valley of the Kings
November 26, 1922
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Howard Carter made a “tiny breach in the top left-hand corner” of the tomb's doorway.
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As he peered through the opening with the light of a candle, Lord Carnarvon, behind him, asked, “Do you see anything?”
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“Yes,” Carter said, “I see wonderful things.”
1
New York
I was lying naked on a warm sandy beach, the soles of my feet teased by the gentle Caribbean waves, while a hunk with a golden tan and sculptured pecs whispered in my ear, his teasing fingers turning my sensitive pink spot blazing red, when a harsh call of my name sent me crashing out of bed.
I felt myself free-falling and then hit the floor hard.
What the hell?
I heard the irritating, raucous voice again.
“Madison Dupre!”
That's my name, all right. But it wasn't a friend summoning me because they would've called me Maddy. And I'm sure it wasn't God calling me out of a wet dreamâthe way things have been going in my life it was more likely to be the devil and she was welcome to come on down, or up I guess would be more like it, and make a deal with me.
I was an art investigator with a specialty in antiques, but business stunk ever since the economy turned bad.
A deal with the devil couldn't be any worse than letting my landlord take it out in trade because my rent was late.
I was so down-and-out and broke that I was considering making a type of oral contract with my landlord that was found in law books in the section for unnatural acts.
Any intimate contact with my landlord beyond a handshake would be considered bestiality. The guy gave new meaning to the expression “hairy ape.”
Morty, my cat, had been sleeping next to my feet, at the bottom of the bed. He lifted his head and glared at me with half-shut eyes as if I were to blame for disturbing his sleep.
I got up to go to the front door, thinking someone was yelling my name on the other side of it when the call came again ⦠from the street.
“I know you're up there!”
the jarring voice outside yelled.
Who the hell was calling my name at this time in the morning?
I reversed direction and staggered toward the window, glancing at the clock by my bed as I did. Eight
A.M.
Early for me now that I had gotten into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night with money worries playing in my head like a bad movie on automatic replay, but early anytime for having my name shouted from the street below. My apartment was a third-floor walk-up studio.
I had the window open a few inches for air. I raised it higher and stuck my head out as the voice boomed again:
“Madison Dupre!”
A man was standing just off the curb below with a bullhorn, a skinny runt with big black frame glasses and acne on his face. The bullhorn didn't fit. Guys with bullhorns were hostage negotiators who tried to talk wackos with guns and hostages out of buildings. He looked more like a computer nerd.
“You are a deadbeat, Dupre!” he said when he saw me.
I recognized him and flinched back, hunching my shoulders, and cringing in pure horror and shame.
Oh, shit.
He was the geek from the computer place where I had bought my netbook. I'd seen the company's ad in the paper advertising used and reconditioned computers for sale at very low prices. It sounded good at the time since I didn't have the money to buy a new one.
The computer I bought was refurbished and was supposed to run like a charm, but it turned out to be a lemon. It froze up half of the time and didn't boot up the other half.
My mentality definitely was
BC
when it came to computers, smartphones, and anything that came along after I finished high school. I was lucky to find the power button on some of the stuff kids found so easy to use. Worse, I didn't have patience for the damn things.
Whether I was being heavy-handed on the keyboard, pressing too many keys or the wrong keys or whatever, me and computers just didn't work well together. I'm sure the nerdy little bastard slandering me on the street probably stroked his own computer more than he did a woman.
Anyway, my old computer crashed and burned, so when I saw the ad for reconditioned computers and a low-financing rate, I jumped on it.
Unfortunately, I hadn't bothered to read the fine print. Who reads that stuff anyway? The warranty lasted only as far as the store's front door and the free interest rates hadn't lasted much longer. And neither did the computer.
Now it was judgment day for another mistake I'd made in my life. To get to the third floor and my bed, the sound had to carry a long ways, making me a deadbeat from SoHo to Little Italy and down to Chinatown.
“It's a piece of junk,” I yelled down.
“Give it backâno pay, no play, Dupre, no pay, no play, Dupre⦔
He kept singing it, doing a little jig.
Violent reds, purples, and blacks erupted in my head like thermonuclear explosions. I now knew why people went on a rampage and killed other people in a heat of mindless anger.
I grabbed the little netbook off the side table by my couch and threw it at the window opening.
Oh, hell.
The computer slipped out of my hand and went
through the window,
blowing a big hole in it, sending glass flying.
I ran to the window and stared out the shattered opening and down to the street below. The geek had backed into the street to avoid the computer and flying glass and I watched dumbstruck as a yellow cab came at him.
The cab swerved and nearly slammed head-on into an oncoming truck that careened to avoid a collision.
The geek didn't even appear to notice how close he had come to being turned into roadkill.
He stepped over to the computer and stared down at it and then knelt beside it. He touched it, gingerly caressing the casing for a moment before he looked up at me.
“You broke it.”
He sounded like I had broken his heart.
“It was junk!”
I screamed down. “You sold me a piece of junk.”
“You broke it,” he said again.
“Junk! Junk! Junk! It never worked. No work, no pay, no work, no pay!” I chanted, doing a little jig that he couldn't see from three stories below.
He bent down and picked up something and then looked back up at me. Grinning.
Oh my God!
My sixteen-gigabit flash drive.
My entire life was on that little storage device that was not even longer than a cigarette. Because the damn computer was constantly crashing, I worked off the flash drive rather than the hard drive. On it was a list of contacts, art gallery owners, and museum curators who might throw business my way, along with every art collector I had dealt with or wished I could deal with.
The only backup for that information was the flash drive and the computer that lay shattered at the computer nerd's feet.
“That's mine!” I yelled down.
His grin grew wider.
He put the flash drive's metal end that plugs into the computer between his teeth and bit it off.
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Allah! Torment my enemies with a mighty curse!
âTHE KORAN
2
Fatima Sari watched the man with the bullhorn and the woman on the third floor yelling as she approached the outside steps to the apartment building.
She recognized the woman's name being shouted and wondered if there really was a man on the street booming out the name or if her mind was playing tricks on her.
She was confused as she approached the building. She always seemed to be bewildered lately; a feeling of being dazed and even remote from her own body, as if she had left her physical body and was observing herself moving through the world from someplace above.
Despite that feeling of separation, Fatima's whole body itched and nothing relieved the sensation. The itch had been there for days, ever since she had lost the artifact. Ever since her thinking no longer seemed clear.
Sometimes she imagined that bugs were crawling all over her and had to resist the urge to take off her clothes and shake them out.
Fatima finally decided that the cause of the impulse to scratch herself until she drew blood in a dozen places was part of her punishment, torment inflicted upon her.