The Curse (21 page)

Like an Old West cattle drive,
I thought.

“You know a lot about the camel business.”

“My family raised camels when I was a boy,” he said. “I drove them here more than once.”

Which meant that we had met at the market because he had old friends and family connections with it that would protect him from government agents.

“Do not trust the police agent, Rafi al Din,” he said.

I kept from laughing. Rafi's and Kaseem's names were both at the top of my “Do Not Trust” list.

“Like everyone else in the government,” he said, “the man is corrupt. He is not working for the people of Egypt, but for himself.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked.

“Just stand by.”

“For how long?”

“Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. Negotiations are being conducted to ransom the scarab. Once I am convinced that the people I'm dealing with actually have it, then arrangements will be made for you to examine it.”

“Examine it where?”

“I don't know yet. Obviously, the thieves will choose the place. You will not be harmed—they want money, not blood.”

That wasn't necessarily true.

It had occurred to me in Britain that the thieves might not want me as a live witness after I examined the artifact. Now that I was sure Kaseem had political shenanigans up his sleeve in which the artifact played an important role, I was a loose end for him, too.

He handed me another phone.

“Discard your other one. Keep this on so I can reach you when I need to.”

We parted after I stepped into a small, unlit room, a so-called bathroom with a hole in the floor to do your business, and substituted the real money he gave me for the phony bills.

I kept the phone on—at least until the taxi dropped me a couple of blocks from the Egyptian Museum.

44

I had used the museum as an instructor for me when I was a student. I learned more about Egyptology in a few months there than spending years in a classroom.

At the information desk I confirmed that Adara Zidan, an assistant curator who had been helpful to me in the past, was still employed in the museum's King Tut gallery.

“Is she here now?”

“Yes, but I believe she's on her lunch break.”

I scribbled a note and handed it to the person behind the desk.

“Could you deliver this to Adara and let her know that I'd like to see her?”

“She should be back in another half hour.”

“Fine. I'll wait for her in the gallery.”

I remembered Adara used to eat her lunch in the employee lounge so I knew my wait wouldn't be that long.

I wandered around the Tut treasures. Not all of the 3,500 items that the museum had from the tomb discovery were on display, but to anyone who had seen any part of the treasures, they were dazzling.

From the research done to reconstruct the boy king's life, it's pretty certain he had a short life—he died at the age of nineteen, probably due to injuries from an accident. Despite his imperial position, he might not have been the happiest guy in the palace because he had some medical problems, including an overbite, a cleft palate, and scoliosis. Opinions of his death ranged from a chariot accident to a kick from a horse.

Two hundred pieces of jewelry were found at the tomb, despite the fact that the outer chambers had already been looted. Howard Carter estimated more than half of the king's jewelry had been taken in the earlier robberies, though the inner chambers were intact.

On display in the museum were two of the best-known Tut scarabs: a magnificent ornament in blue, green, red, and orange known as the pectoral scarab; and a simple black resin scarab with an inlaid figure of a heron, which has erroneously been called the heart scarab even though it was found at the wrong place of the body and did not contain the magic inscriptions from
The Book of the Dead
used on heart scarabs to keep the heart from confessing its sins.

After Tut's chest had been opened, amuletic jewelry and a beaded “bib” were placed over the area to cover where the sternum, ribs, and skin had been excised. There were also a dozen layers of other protective jewelry above the bib.

So much to live for, so short a life. The Fates had not been kind to him.

Adara came out and gave me a sincere hug, then took me back to her office for tea.

“You haven't changed, you're still beautiful,” she said.

“Thanks, you're too kind, but I know I've gotten more haggard from the weight of life's problems.”

“Haven't we all.” She laughed.

She was still tall and thin, in her fifties, but with more gray in the head of hair she pulled back into a bun.

I explained I was in town only briefly to look at an artifact being offered by a private collector. She knew enough about the competitive, cutthroat nature of international art to keep from asking about the piece or the name of the collector.

“I was wondering if you knew a person named Fatima Sari,” I said.

“Oh, yes, poor dear, we heard about her accident. She worked here at the museum for a while. Terrible thing. We were told she stumbled into a train in New York. You knew Fatima?”

“Only what I heard on the news.”

I didn't volunteer that I was a candidate—the only candidate—for pushing her onto the tracks, but I had to come up with a reason for my questions about the woman.

“Was she working for the museum when she died?” I asked.

“Oh, no, she worked at the private Radcliff museum in England.”

“Wasn't Radcliff one of Carter's backers? Something of a scandal about Radcliff and missing pieces during the Tut find?”

“A number of pieces were taken and even Carter himself was suspected of rewarding himself from the find. Radcliff's name of course pops up in connection with the heart scarab.”

“Did Tut really have a heart scarab?”

“Of course he did, even the poor had one carved from wood. It's unimaginable that he would have been buried without one. But you don't have to look far to find it, I have it right here.”

Adara reached over and took a scarab holding down papers on the shelf behind her and handed it to me.

I could see it was a skilled fake—steps above the stuff sold to tourists in the marketplace, but not something that would fool an expert.

“My mother bought this for me at the Khan nearly twenty years after I got my job here in the Tut gallery. She was so excited, certain that she had found the missing heart.”

“Perhaps she did. A couple thousand years from now this piece will also be an artifact from antiquity and worth a fortune.”

“That's what I told her.”

“Have there been any demands made to the Radcliff heirs for the return of it?”

She shook her head. “I don't know; that sort of thing would come from the administration.”

Not wanting to raise questions about why I was interested in the heart scarab, I changed the subject, asking her about people I knew years ago and catching up on each other's lives.

I had established what I wanted to know—the museum was unaware that Fatima was bringing the heart back to Egypt. It was the sort of colossal event that couldn't have been kept a secret. News of it would have spread to the staff, especially Adara's group who would have the task of authenticating it. And it would've been leaked to the press.

According to Kaseem, Fatima had been only hours away from a flight to Cairo when the scarab was stolen.

I found it interesting that she was about to fly out from London when the theft occurred.

When did Kaseem plan to advise the Egyptian authorities that one of their greatest lost treasures would soon be back?

Rafi was right—obviously Kaseem didn't plan to have the scarab returned, at least not to be handed over to the museum.

What if the scarab hadn't been stolen? Where would it have ended up? On a chain around Kaseem's neck as he rode a white horse into Cairo?

“I assume you're going to run up to Luxor,” Adara said, which was a good assumption about anyone coming to Egypt to see antiquities. “If you're curious about the heart, why don't you speak to De Santis, the Italian priest who's written a book about Howard Carter and the Tutankhamen find. He's at a dig in the Valley of the Kings.”

“I've heard of him. What does he know about the heart?”

“He's fascinated by it, probably because it's a mystery connected to the original find. He's doing a paper on it for an Italian archaeological publication. I've heard he's going to present a theory that the scarab doesn't exist and has evidence to back it up.”

“What's his theory?”

“We won't know until we read it in print. As you know, archaeology is just as cutthroat a business as other sciences.”

“It gets even more interesting when beaucoup bucks and the egos of billionaires are concerned.”

Or when the fate of nations are involved.

I left the museum with a daring thought roiling in my head.

Why not go to the Valley of the Kings? It wasn't that far—I could be back tomorrow if I scrambled.

The notion kept jabbing at me as I walked.

It would get me out of Cairo, where I was feeling claustrophobic and choking on machinations, plots, lies, and deceits.

Kaseem had not been definite about when I would be needed. And I needed some different air to clear my head.

45

Luxor and the ancient sites of Karnak, Thebes, and the Valley of the Kings and Queens were scattered on the sides of the Nile River south of Cairo.

The area is so chockfull of glorious remnants of ancient Egypt that it has been called an open-air museum.

The Valley of the Kings was where Howard Carter made history when he found King Tutankhamen's tomb, and maybe where he ignited ancient curses and where Sir Jacob Radcliff stole the boy king's heart.

It was also where an answer to the puzzles and conundrums that had been bothering me might be found.

I walked some six blocks before I made up my mind.

I took a taxi to the big Ramses Hilton and told a doorman to find me a newer taxi with air-conditioning and a driver that spoke a fair amount of English.

Seated in the cab, I told the driver to take me to Giza to see the pyramids. When I was sure that we were only being followed by thousands of other cars, none of which stood out to me, I asked him, “Can you drive me all the way to Luxor?”

“Yes. Tomorrow—”

“No, I need to go now.”

He shot me a look. “Now?”

I fanned five hundred-dollar bills. “Yes. Now. Immediately.”

“It is a long drive, eight hours maybe.”

“I've made it in six. We leave now or you can drop me off at the next hotel and I'll find someone else to take me.”

“I have to call my boss first.”

“Go ahead. Call. But tell them that you're driving a man.”

He turned around and looked at me, puzzled. He wasn't sure what to make of me. “But you are not a man,” he said.

“I need to get out of town,” I whispered. “I have a jealous husband in Cairo and my lover is waiting for me in Luxor.”

“Ah,” he said, his eyes lighting up.

Being a traditional Middle Eastern male, he understood completely what sluts Western women were.

He swiftly darted in and out of the utter confusion and tumultuous array of cars, people, and donkey carts loaded with fresh produce, looking straight ahead of him, as he maneuvered through the city unfazed by the congestion all around, not bothering to stop at traffic lights, unless a policeman happened to be posted at the intersection.

“I am a very good driver.” He smiled, noticing that I had put on my seat belt.

I smiled bravely.

He might've been a good driver but I was also worried about the other drivers not getting out of his way fast enough.

He looked straight ahead and didn't worry about cars coming from the sides.

The only good part of getting killed in Cairo traffic is that it would be for a better reason than being murdered because my usefulness had been exhausted.

46

Driving south, following the Nile River, we left behind a bustling, noisy, congested city and entered a world of rural towns and villages that was much the same as the days when crusader knights fought the armies of Allah in the nearby Holy Land.

Small mud houses, women dressed from head to toe in black, and donkey carts hauling hay had not changed much over the centuries. Even the men wearing the ubiquitous galabiyah and turban found throughout Egypt looked medieval outside urban areas, as they had at the camel market.

And that about summed up my thoughts about the clash between fanatical Muslim terrorists and the rest of the world—not a clash between religions but a collision between the modern and the medieval. Women in New York wore high heels and the latest fashions, and the women we passed along the road wore wood sandals and shapeless robes. Cairo women fell somewhere in between the time scale.

I worried a little about encountering problems on the road, but I knew the infrequent terrorist attacks in Egypt were usually well-planned massacres that erupted in areas populated by tourists.

Besides the Egyptian Museum, Giza, and the Red Sea resorts, Luxor had also been hit some years ago at the stunning Queen Hatshepsut's Temple on the west side when six terrorists killed sixty-two people, including a British child and four honeymooning Japanese couples, before killing themselves.

Yet it was a relief to go to Luxor and back to the ancient world that I loved and understood better than my own time.

Nearly dark when we arrived, I checked into the Winter Palace hotel and gave the taxi driver money to get his own room, though I suspected he would return to Cairo that night or sleep in his car and return in the morning because the money I gave him for a room was more than he earned in a month.