The Curse (11 page)

I shouldn't have a problem unless someone checks and finds out that the last time I was there I left in a hurry with a burning art gallery and dead bodies behind me.

 

 

CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS

After visiting Howard Carter and the tomb of King Tut, anthropologist Henry Field wrote that Sir Bruce Ingham, a friend of Carter's, had been given a mummified hand to use as a paperweight.

A scarab on a bracelet attached to the hand said, “Cursed be who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence.”

Not long after receiving the scarab bracelet, Ingham's house burned down and then flooded after it was rebuilt.

20

Salisbury Plain, England

Fuad Hassan squeezed his cell phone tightly and whispered to himself, “Fatima, where are you?”

He snapped the phone closed and stuck it in his pocket when he got her voice mail recording again.

Fuad had not heard from Fatima Sari, his assistant, for two days now and his last conversation with her had left him shaken. He couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate on his work as he worried about her.

For the last twelve years he had been the curator for the Radcliff Collection, a private museum founded by Sir Jacob Radcliff. The world's largest private collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts, it now rested in the hands of Radcliff's great-granddaughter, Heather Radcliff.

Fortunately for the museum, Heather, who knew infinitely more about the latest fashions than antiquities or anything else for that matter that required even rudimentary book learning, never strayed into the museum unless she was showing a visitor her unique collection.

The fact that she was very rich usually impressed her visitors, who were suitably complimentary about her knowledge of ancient Egyptian artifacts, even if she did call the collection's sarcophagus her mummy's bed.

She floated through a life in which the high points were sexual relationships with men and women, few of which lasted more than six weeks, and the quality of cocaine she sniffed.

In between attending parties in Manhattan, Paris, and London, she spent time trying to find out her purpose in life and why she was put on this earth. That quest to find the meaning in her existence had taken her from mind-spirit awakenings in the red rocks of Sedona to the white-capped Himalayas, all at great cost that produced little insight as to her place in the universe other than having done little to have so much.

Currently she was searching for herself in the Druid spirituality that many believed existed in Stonehenge and other megalithic circles and trilithons found in the Salisbury Plain that her estate laid upon.

To Fuad, whose life was dedicated to the protection and preservation of the historical treasures of Egypt's brilliant history, Heather Radcliff was a vain, foolish woman whose only redeeming qualities were that she paid him to oversee her antiquities collection and that she had absolutely no interest in it except to occasionally flaunt the brilliance of her objects.

The costume party at the Radcliff estate had already lasted several hours now and Fuad had gone into the garden to make his call to Fatima to avoid the possibility of being overheard by the two guards that had been hired to watch any guests that wandered into the museum.

He wanted the museum to be locked up that evening in order to keep out drunken guests, but Heather Radcliff wasn't about to keep her most famous possessions out of sight.

Fuad was frightened for Fatima, and also for himself, but he didn't know who he could trust at the museum. The two of them were the only foreigners employed on the estate. Their language, religion, Egyptology backgrounds, even their own rather timid, reserved natures, kept them from assimilating with the servants, gardeners, and other staff.

Keenly aware that their inhibitions had kept them from intimacy with each other, Fuad regretted that he hadn't pursued his feelings for Fatima. Had they married, he would have forbade her from assuming the task of returning the heart back to Egypt.

Now he wished that he had argued with her more about not going, persisted harder at trying to persuade her from getting involved. He should have taken up the duty himself to protect her.

Fuad hadn't felt right about it from the beginning. The sacred scarab should have been returned to the chest of King Tutankhamen in great fanfare, not surreptitiously.

He turned away, disgusted, as a woman burst out of the house with a man following her, throwing off their clothes as they raced for the pool through the garden, laughing and shouting.

That the costume party had a Druid “fertility” theme, a thinly disguised excuse for an orgy, offended Fuad but didn't surprise him. Heather Radcliff had recently “discovered” that in a past life she had been a goddess of fertility, which in her mind translated to sex.

Fuad found the lascivious horseplay between the guests not only offensive to his sense of decency but also juvenile.

Back in the museum wing, he nodded politely at the two guards who were arguing over a soccer match and went into his office to check the monitors to see if the guards or anyone else had secretly pocketed something while he had stepped out.

Nothing had been taken and he credited his own doubts about the honest nature of mankind for having never had an item stolen. As important as the security cameras were, anything small enough to be pocketed was housed in locked glass-topped cases.

The museum was one long gallery, occupying what had originally contained the manor's armory, military uniforms, and hunting equipment.

It was an eclectic collection that included several large pieces—a ram's-headed sphinx from Karnak, the mummified remains of a Twenty-sixth Dynasty high priest in his sarcophagus, a chariot from the Ptolemaic Dynasty—and many smaller pieces, such as weapons, jewelry, amulets like scarabs, gems, stones in the shape of animals, and the like.

The Radcliff Collection was dwarfed by the Egyptian galleries at the British Museum, New York's Metropolitan, and the Louvre, but it was unmatched by any private collection in the world.

How a rich man like Sir Jacob Radcliff had been able to acquire an enormous collection of Egyptian treasures was a reflection of Radcliff's times and the history of archaeology.

It was a piece of history that Fuad reflected upon as he hid away in his small museum office and stared blankly at the security monitors. If the Heart of Egypt had been rightfully stored in the Egyptian Museum instead of secreted out of the country by Radcliff, Fatima would be safe now.

Unlike most of his fellow countrymen who wanted everything ever taken or stolen from Egypt—the incredible collections in the great museums of the world and the countless number of pieces held in private hands—returned to Egypt, Fuad had a sense of history and understood that much of the great treasures of Egyptian antiquity would have been destroyed long ago if the relics hadn't been stored in museums and with people who could afford to safeguard and preserve them.

Sir Jacob Radcliff obtained his artifacts by participating in the financing of archaeological digs in countries rich in antiquities and poor in material goods. In countries where artifacts made an eon ago had little meaning to people who grubbed every day for enough to eat, wealthy individuals and museums paid fat fees and fatter bribes for the right to “mine” antiquity sites.

That Howard Carter had been financed by Lord Carnarvon, Radcliff, and others was well known, but their efforts, leading to the most fabulous find of all—the King Tut treasures—was just one of thousands of times in which people of wealth put up the money to find artifacts and often took half—if not all—of what was found.

Two famous incidents before the King Tut find were Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy and Lord Elgin's Marbles, the incredible collection of marble pieces from the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. Those artifacts, probably the greatest left from ancient Greece, now sit in the British Museum in London.

The process by which Sir Jacob Radcliff built his collection was utilized for a couple of centuries by wealthy foreigners in their efforts to acquire artifacts from Egypt and other poor countries: payments, often in the form of bribes, paid to corrupt officials and at other times to poor governments in need of the funds.

But wealthy foreigners came late into the game of looting Egypt. The country had been raped and plundered of its antiquities for thousands of years. The Romans did it, the Turks, the French, and the British, with wealthy American, German, and other European museums coming in and taking many prizes even after invading armies and colonial masters had grabbed what they could.

The Heart of Egypt happened to be one of those pieces.

However, unlike artifacts that lie in peace still buried in the desert or in museum galleries, the scarab seemed to have a life and spirit of its own. And Fuad feared that the spirit it housed had attracted men even craftier and more devious than robber barons like Sir Jacob Radcliff.

Although he and Fatima were both trained Egyptologists, neither of them had the personality or the fortitude to deal with the convoluted schemes that have shadowed what should have been the joyous return of the heart scarab to its homeland.

Fuad, a thin, small-framed, and gentle man, whose reach was confined mostly to his work, had an affection for Fatima that he never expressed to her. Although he was twenty years her senior, his feelings weren't of a parental nature, but he was too shy and timid to voice them.

Fatima had a less stable personality. Delicate physically and mentally, she was controlled by her emotions and was quick to cry and to become guilt-stricken when things went bad even if they were not of her doing.

It was her irrational reaction to the loss of the sacred scarab that worried Faud.

She didn't seem to be able to stay coherent when he talked to her. She was an emotional wreck over the scarab, but it went beyond that, as if her mind was fouled by drugs. And he knew she was not a person to so such things.

Fuad tried phoning her again, but the call went instantly into voice mail, where he left another message. Fatima's state of mind saddened and frightened him, but he didn't know which way to turn for help.

21

Heathrow Airport, London

My phone went off as I walked toward a currency exchange kiosk at Heathrow. I didn't recognize the area code or the number, so that meant it was probably my friend from the Tea Room.

“I heard what happened,” Mounir Kaseem said.

“I experienced what happened. A woman first tries to kill me and then dies in front of me and a cop wants to know why I claim she's a perfect stranger when she has my business card on her.”

“I know nothing about—”

“I don't believe you. She was Egyptian; she was connected to you and your attempt to recover the scarab. As soon as things go to hell, I can't reach you on the phone.”

“I'm sorry—you must have tried to call me after I'd gotten rid of the phone when the minutes were up.”

“All deals are off between us. And you're not getting a refund. I only came here to find out why that poor woman jumped in front of a train, not to help you.” I hung up on him.

I did it out of an angry impulse, but it was a good move because I wanted to see how he came back—if he did. Was it going to be with threats or answers?

My phone rang and I answered with a quick “What?”

“You're right. I did know the woman, but I didn't know that she was in New York or that she would attack you.”

“I want more than excuses. Tell me about Fatima Sari. Why was she in New York trying to contact me?”

He was quiet and I let the clock tick.

“She is … was … unbalanced,” he said. “Fatima was an assistant curator at the Radcliff museum.”

“Is she the one you said took the scarab?”

“She volunteered to return it to Egypt as part of the little charade we had devised to keep from tarnishing the Radcliff name. When it was stolen from her, she became irrational.”

His explanation didn't make any sense to me. “What do you mean, irrational?”

I waited out another long pause before he answered.

“Fatima believed in both the potential greatness of our country and in the power of the magic that has come down from the times of the pharaohs. I'm not referring to silly stories about mummy curses, but what we spoke about at lunch—the powerful effect that a symbol of Egypt's grand past can have on my people. The loss of the scarab was not a monetary loss to her as it might be for an art dealer or collector. It was an event that stabbed at her very being.”

“Are you saying she went crazy from guilt?”

“Yes, I suppose that's a way of putting it. She felt her life was ruined, her career destroyed, and her passionate desire to participate in an event important to her country was taken from her.”

“Did she take drugs?” I asked.

“Sadly, yes. I discovered only after the scarab was stolen that she had experiences with narcotics.”

“Could she have been involved in the theft? As a participant rather than the victim?”

“I considered that, but I doubt it. She was not the devious type. Perhaps I would know more if we had been able to report the theft to the police. But you can see the problem with that.”

I could see his point. How would Heather Radcliff report missing something that she denied ever having?

“But why was Fatima trying to contact me? And kill me?”

“I honestly don't know. I suspect she overheard me saying I was going to hire you after I was contacted by the thieves.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Just before I left for New York. In London. She was acting very erratic, unstable. I insisted she consult a doctor and she disappeared. For all I know, she got a flight to New York before mine.”

“I don't get it,” I said. “I can understand that she got my name through you, but why would she come to New York and try to kill me just because you were going to hire me to authenticate the stolen piece? From what you told me, she should have been pleased that you were hiring me to help get back the scarab.”