The Curse (2 page)

Fear suddenly gripped her, and she turned looking back down the street to see if she was being followed.

She recognized no one behind her but still had a constant sense of being stalked, of being hunted like a wounded animal. But she kept on the move, driven by a sense of sacred duty that overrode her fears and her deep sense of morality.

She had come to New York to kill the woman whose name was being shouted by the man in the street.

Fatima knew the woman had to die, but she couldn't have given anyone an explanation as to why because she wasn't sure herself why the woman had to be killed.

What she did know was that something had been taken from her besides the artifact—a piece of her mind had been stolen.

That was how she thought of it, that part of her mental faculties had been taken. It made her thinking foggy, but she knew clearly who she was and that she had to kill the woman. But the reason for her actions was more akin to the instincts of a wounded animal than a rational human being.

Fatima's thinking had not always been twisted and shadowy. She was an educated woman with a worldly sophistication far beyond the vast majority of women of her country and religion. Her parents had both been educated teachers and saw to it that she received a university education.

Well traveled, with an advanced degree in Egyptology, she had left her native Egypt and taken a position as assistant curator to one of the great private collections of Egyptian antiquities.

She had embraced the Age of the Pharaohs with a passion bordering on political and religious fanaticism.

No other ancient civilization radiated as much mystery as Egypt of the mighty god-king pharaohs and the dark magic of its priests, who commanded their Nile gods to curse their enemies, and incurred the wrath of Jehovah who hurtled plagues at their Nile land.

The Old Testament recounted the struggles between the powers given the favorites of the god of the Israelites and the magicians of the pharaohs, while the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
recounted the incantations of the dark side.

Fatima had embraced the wondrous history and ancient mysteries of her land, and believed that while her body was in the modern world, her heart and soul belonged to the past.

She took the job in England because it permitted her to become the keeper of a sacred treasure.

She failed in that responsibility and now was cursed and damned for her failure.

But it wasn't just the dark magic from the time of the pharaohs that she believed cursed her, but her own faith. She felt as if someone had called down a curse of Allah upon her, punishing her for the failure to her profession and to her people.

The only way she could redeem her soul was to kill the woman.

3

The woman whose code name was Sphinx hung back as Fatima Sari stepped up to the front entrance of the apartment building and paused by the tenants' mailboxes.

It hadn't been that difficult to avoid being seen by Fatima. Fatima was in a mental haze. The hard part was keeping Fatima going in the right direction. Even that objective proved challenging as Fatima frequently stopped and looked behind her, paranoid that she was being followed and looking confused at the same time.

Sphinx couldn't suppress her excitement. She almost laughed out loud as the haggard woman studied the mailboxes. Even at a distance, Sphinx could see the struggle that the woman was going through as she tried to focus on the name she was looking for.

The name was Madison Dupre and it was on the mailbox for apartment 305. Sphinx had made sure of it before she maneuvered the Sari woman to the building.

Sphinx was about the same age as Fatima and was from the same country, but she had no sympathy for the bewildered woman. Like most modern political movements, the one Sphinx obeyed considered people who got harmed because they were used or got in the way as collateral damage.

She had helped warp Fatima's mind with drugs, fears, and superstition, making her easy to manipulate, so confused and subject to suggestion that she could be led to do something Fatima would have considered reprehensive had her thinking been clearer.

Overwhelmed by narcotics, Fatima would be easy to kill when the time came to dispose of her.

Sphinx's phone vibrated and she received a text message. The missive started with SX, for Sphinx, identifying it as genuine.

The message was from Fatima, waiting for her confirmation on where she was and what to do.

You know what you have to do,
Sphinx messaged back.
There is no other way.

Sphinx liked her code name.

Often portrayed as having the body of a lioness, the head of a woman, the wings of an eagle, and a tail tipped with a serpent's head, to her own people a sphinx was a frightening beast, with the Great Sphinx at Gaza capable of rising from its mound to kill the enemies of the pharaohs.

The ancient Egyptians venerated the lioness as one of their war gods. The word “sphinx” was not Egyptian, but a Greek word derived from the Egyptian word “strangler,” as it was used to describe the way fierce lionesses attacked the animal they hunted.

Lionesses, the most savage hunters in a pride, killed their prey by strangulation—sinking their teeth into the throat and holding an animal down until it died.

The strangulation gave rise to the riddle of the Sphinx in which the goddess accosted strangers on the road to Thebes and asked them to answer a riddle, strangling them when they could not.

More than the preternatural violence of the sphinx, the woman who operated under the code name identified with the name's enigmatic nature, the inscrutable and mysterious qualities that people had imbued to it over the eons.

Sphinx lived behind a mask. The world never saw her real features, never knew her capability for greatness.

Now she had an opportunity to act as she saw herself, to possess the most significant power a person can wield: the power of life or death over another human being.

As Fatima Sari disappeared into the apartment building, Sphinx resisted sending a text message to her controller explaining what she was doing.

She was out of bounds; off the reservation was how modern spy networks described an agent who was not following orders.

4

The day wasn't going well. Actually, my life wasn't going well at the moment.

I had offended someone in a high place, probably a lot of someones, the whole crew of gods on Mount Olympus and maybe the people who manufacture good and bad karma, too.

I was unattached, worked as a self-employed art investigator, and right at the moment was short on money, clients, friends, and lovers.

My love life had more overdrafts than my bank account and the friends that had once hovered around me like bees to honey when I was in the chips treated me like I was on a terrorist watch list now that I had gone from a high-paying job to one step away from a homeless shelter.

I once prided myself on doing things in a big way. When I got out of college, nothing was going to stop me from climbing to the top in my profession.

What I didn't consider was that the higher you went, the greater the drop when you fell.

My fall took me from a penthouse on the Upper East Side to a studio walk-up on the cusp of Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo, a neighborhood of working people who bused tables in restaurants, cleaned offices at night, cooked pungent-smelling foods, and had lots of babies.

Fifteen-million-dollar converted factory lofts were within walking distance in SoHo, but none of the money drifted down to the cusp, unless it was in the form of restaurant tips or something for the undocumented maid at Christmas.

I actually liked the neighborhood I was in, enjoying the mix of people, food smells, loud music, and nice smiles. In some ways, I felt more comfortable here than I did on the Upper East Side where I hardly knew my neighbors and mail and deliveries went astray if the doorman wasn't pleased with his Christmas gift.

I just wished I could afford to keep the wolf from the door and Morty in good-quality cat food.

I was also tired of living like a hermit in seclusion, afraid of going out and facing the world.

My shower had been dripping for weeks and I hadn't gotten around to telling Arnie my landlord that it needed to be fixed, mostly because I hated going to him for anything. The guy was a jerk and I avoided him as much as I could, even dropping my rent check in his mail slot instead of hand delivering it.

I put up with him because the apartment was cheap, and now that I was a month behind in rent again, I tried to avoid running into him because he kept threatening me with eviction papers.

I hadn't had a single business call in weeks now, but the bill collectors still called. The really determined ones had long since stopped falling for the “deceased—return to sender” I scribbled on the envelopes before dumping them into a mailbox, though none had been as creative about collecting as the damn computer geek.

The bills were all debris from the days when I was flying high. Like a criminal who had to do the time because she did the crime, I was stuck with debts I accumulated when I had a steady income.

I'd whittled down the amount of money I owed creditors, agreeing to pay them whatever I could every month, but the last few months had been pretty lean. I was expecting a payment any day now from a client who owed me money but was avoiding my calls. I felt like a bill collector myself when I had to call people for money.

I realized it was a tough time for everyone.

The only people I really didn't feel too sorry for were for the well-off and that was the case of the woman who used my services to find a piece of art and then made it hard to collect. She was the worst type—the kind who didn't earn their money and the hardest to deal with because their sole contribution to what they had in the bank was spending only what was absolutely necessary. I guess I wasn't on the necessity list.

I try not to think about those times when I didn't have to worry about money, but that was impossible.

My life went to hell less than two years ago when I went from a six-figure job to a no-figure job, not realizing at the time that I had been spending way more money than I was earning and not saving anything.

When I became head curator at the Piedmont Museum on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, I thought I had found my dream job. The museum was in the area known as the Museum Mile that included a dozen or so prominent museums, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art topping the list.

As curator, I managed the collection, making decisions on what to buy, sell, or trade to build the holdings of the Piedmont into a world-class museum.

My new job and salary allowed me to change from a tiny studio apartment on the Lower East Side to a penthouse in the Upper Eighties with a partial park view and a short walk to where I worked.

The man I worked for, Hiram Piedmont, lived in one of those exclusive buildings on the Upper East Side facing the park that had multifloor units with a dozen rooms. He occupied the top two floors of one of them. Hiram had inherited more money than the gods and wanted a museum to glorify his name. He hired me to get it for him.

My expertise centered on Mediterranean antiquities—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian—but I focused Hiram's museum on the Babylonian era and displayed the museum pieces in a way that brought out their magnificence as well as their cultural context.

I created an eminent museum that gave him bragging rights, but world-class art is a frantically competitive, cutthroat business in which no quarter is given. My world crashed and burned when I purchased a looted antiquity for the museum—$55 million dollars' worth—at an auction.

Of course, I hadn't realized it was a looted piece. There were some clues, but I had pressure from Hiram to buy the piece regardless of my doubts. Naturally, when things got nasty, I was the one thrown to the wolves.

Hiram was rich enough not to take the blame for anything. And it gave him a nice tax write-off as my career and comfortable life was thrown out the window of a very high building.

As a result I lost my job, my penthouse, my sports car, along with a covetous Manhattan parking space that cost more than the rent on my current studio on the cusp.

I even lost the black American Express card that had been my own measurement of having “made it.”

The only things I kept were the debts that remained after the car and furniture were sold for less than what I owed on them.

During the first few months of scraping bottom I sold off my jewelry and expensive clothes for a fraction of what I paid for them because I needed the money for food and shelter.

I didn't go to upscale restaurants or shop at high-end stores and boutiques anymore. Now I bought clothes from sale racks in my neighborhood, and I ate cheap deli food or takeout from my favorite Thai and Italian restaurants, stretching out the pad thai noodles and spaghetti Bolognese for a couple of days.

I also lost something I didn't realize I had had—a desire to possess material things.

I no longer missed the penthouse and the expensive sports car. I wouldn't replace them if I won the lottery. But the great clothes and good restaurants were another thing. I did miss that.

All in all, I was really more at peace with life and myself. I just wished I had a few less debts from the old days and a little more money for the lean cycles I constantly went through.

Having my reputation back would help, too. Being involved in one of the great antiquities scandals and frauds in history naturally got me blackballed as a curator in the art world. Nobody wanted to be associated with me, even though I had been an innocent player in the whole thing.

Well, basically innocent. The art business operates with many shades of grays rather than blacks and whites. It was inevitable that pieces with shaky provenances sometimes found their way onto the auction block and you had to look the other way to make sure no one else grabbed the item before you did.