The Curse (8 page)

I didn't add that the only person dumb enough to consider such a thing would have to be broke and desperate. Someone like me.

“I understand completely,” he said. “Even though I spoke to a number of experts in Europe, I did not attempt to retain any of them because they all expressed the same concerns you have. I came to New York because your name kept popping up as a person with unique qualifications.”

“What happened to the three names you got from the Met?” I threw back his lie with a smile.

“I lied, of course. In fact, some of the experts who mentioned you inferred that you had, shall we say, more than average experience with stolen artwork—from a unique angle, of course. Since you have dealt with thieves before and have been instrumental in returning historical treasures to their proper domains, I'm sure you are the right person who can help me.”

“Those experts who spoke of my unique relationship with looted artifacts probably forgot to mention that I was the one who went into the line of fire to return looted pieces while they did nothing.”

“Which is why I am here.” He leaned across the table, grabbing hold of my eyes with an intense gaze. “I have seen the scarab. I have even held it in the palm of my hand. I thought it was going to burn a hole in my flesh. It needs to be returned to my people, Miss Dupre. It won't take much. We have the money. We—”

“I would need data—pictures, exact measurements—”

“We have all that waiting for you in England.”

I looked away and sighed, not from boredom but with a mixture of remorse and regret that I had to deal with thieves to pay the rent.

“A short hop over the Atlantic,” he said, reaching into an inside pocket and pulling out an envelope and laying it on the table. “Inside is a ticket to London and your first payment. Twenty thousand in cash. Another twenty when it's returned to us.”

I stared at the envelope.

For sure, I'd gone to more dangerous places than merry ole England for less money.

“You'll have to add another zero to your figure if I succeed in getting the scarab returned to you.”

“That is satisfactory.”

I reached across the table and took the envelope.

I didn't know why, but my hands were sweaty, as if my body knew something I didn't know. But it didn't matter. After all, Britain was a civilized country. What could go wrong?

14

When we left the restaurant, Kaseem stepped into a cab waiting out front and I started walking toward the nearest subway. Even though I had the money for a taxi, I'd get home faster on the subway.

Kaseem told me contact had been made with the thieves but no examination of the scarab arranged. I was to check into a hotel in London and wait until he called me with the details of the meeting.

I was already nervous about meeting with the gang. For sure the meet wasn't going to take place at a London equivalent of the Russian Tea Room. Being searched—everywhere—and blindfolded and shoved into the trunk of a car for a ride to a dark and lonely place was not just the stuff of movies, but the way paying ransoms to recover artifacts commonly came down.

I couldn't leave for England without getting a sitter for Morty—keeper or even guard was a more accurate description for what it took to handle him than “cat sitter.” He was a ten-pound feline who thought he was a four-hundred-pound tiger.

I called my friend Michelangelo and told him I needed “someone to take care of my pussy.” Being in the chips, I invited him for dinner at my favorite Little Italy dive.

I admit I was shameless in letting him think I was talking about sex, but a girl has to do what a girl has to do these days when even schoolkids are sexting.

I stopped at a bank on my way to the subway station.

I didn't put the whole amount in my bank account, only a thousand of it; the rest was going home with me.

The last time I put a big chunk of money into the bank, the government got their greedy little hands on it. I still owed them money, not for back taxes but for the criminally insane penalties and interest they levy when you can't pay all your taxes at once.

I wasn't putting any more money into my account than necessary to meet current bills.

I also wasn't going to hide my cash in the refrigerator. That was a stupid mistake not to be repeated again. Who would have guessed that the guy I picked to watch Morty for me on my last trip out of town would help himself to my cold cash in the freezer? He seemed like a nice guy who liked cats … I had even bought him his favorite bottle of rum.

No, this time the cash was going in a place where no one would ever think to look. The toilet tank. In a sealed plastic baggie.

What thief would think to look there?

I thought the idea was inspired.

*   *   *

I
JUST MISSED THE
train by seconds after I walked down the stairs of the subway station and zipped my MetroCard through the turnstile. The next one wasn't due for another ten minutes.

I checked for any weird and crazy characters lounging about. I always did this when I was in a subway station. Call me paranoid, but if I saw any weirdos I'd get as far away from them as possible. I had already run into one crazy person today.

So far so good.

I picked a spot and waited, thinking about the good old days when I rarely rode the subway. It was a status thing to takes taxis or be picked up by a car and driver even if it took longer to get anywhere on the streets above. I had a good paying job then.

Back to reality here: at least I had picked up a new client and I was going to England and maybe even Egypt. That's what I was thinking about when my eye suddenly caught sight of a woman staring at me.

I froze.

Oh shit—it was her.

I wasn't 100 percent sure since she was dressed differently and there were thousands of women in the city with a similar age, build, and ethnic background. Other women with an alike appearance were in the station, but what keyed me on to her was that she had paused close to me, making the short hairs on the back of my neck fan.

I stood with my feet cemented to the ground debating what to do. I still hadn't gotten a look at her face because I was avoiding staring at her. I could run for an exit in the small station without passing her.

Don't panic,
I told myself.

She wasn't making a move toward me, probably because there were other people around. Of course, this was New York, a city famous for its refusal of the average citizen to come to the aid of crime victims. And the cops sometimes weren't much more helpful. The woman could slice and dice me on the platform and people would simply step around the blood.

I heard the rumbling noise as a train was approaching the station. I didn't know if that was a good sign or not. Train cars were smaller now, making it harder to avoid someone out to stab you. I sure as hell wasn't going to get into the same subway car with her.

I started edging away, I hoped subtly, as if I were getting in position to board.

The woman turned toward me. She was sweating. It was warm in the subway station, but not uncomfortably hot enough to break out in a sweat.

She also looked tired, no, more than tired; she appeared fatigued, even wasted. Something was definitely wrong with the woman, but she didn't look threatening, just appeared all worn-out, as if she had been struggling with life's demons and not winning the war.

There was something else about her. A hint of hysteria from life or drugs, I didn't know which.

I still wasn't sure it was her and I didn't want to make eye contact with her even if it wasn't. I learned that lesson soon after I had arrived in New York for my first curator job.

I'd had the misfortune to make eye contact with a bag lady on the street who humiliated me by yelling for the whole world to hear, “Doesn't a lady know she's not supposed to pick a bugger out of her nose?” I wanted to crawl under the nearest manhole cover and hide.

After that I never made eye contact with crazies.

I edged farther away and my movement seemed to galvanize her into action.

She started toward me, rambling almost unintelligently. “It's cursed … it's taken my soul—it'll take yours. Run! Get away now!”

The light of the oncoming subway train was in sight now and the noise began blocking out most of what the woman was rambling about as I backed away.

She got so close I put out my hand to hold her back, not to push her away but just to keep space between us.

Her rambling in English had now reverted to Arabic. With the noise and my limited understanding of Arabic, I wasn't making out what she was saying.

I continued to back up and suddenly realized that I was still dangerously close to the edge of the platform.

The woman looked startled for a moment, looking past me, as if she had seen something that frightened her. She screamed and lunged at me. I put out my hands to stop her from hitting me and she veered and ran off the platform as the train roared in.

In a split second the train was there and she was gone.

People were screaming.

I was one of them.

15

“You didn't know the woman? Never saw her before this morning? And she never tried to attack you at the subway station?”

It was the third time the subway cop asked me about the woman who ran in front of the train. The incident at my apartment hadn't been entered into whatever the police used for a database and I had to fill him in on the letter opener attack first.

“She didn't appear to be trying to attack me,” I said. “As I told you, she struck me as delusional. I don't know what she was trying to do. She just kept jabbering about a curse—look, I don't know. I seem to have had the bad luck to run into her.”

“Luck? She showed up at your apartment this morning and then again at a subway station halfway across the city?”

I was being evasive, of course. I had money in my pocket that was as vital to me as life support to someone in intensive care. If I told this cop that a man had given me twenty thousand dollars this morning and there had to be a connection between him and this crazy woman, he would take the money, at least the nineteen thousand I had in my pocket.

I had taken Kaseem's word that he didn't know anything about the woman but having her show up after I left him at the restaurant was too much. She might have followed me and she never mentioned Kaseem.

Being broke made me easily persuadable and seemed to have gotten to the point of it making me brain-dead stupid.

If I gave the cop a reason to arrest or search me, he'd also find the money and it would end up wherever the nation's largest police force stuck cash evidence so it was lost forever.

The subway cop didn't exactly instill me with confidence, either, as to his ability or my own ability to sweet-talk my way out of anything. He seemed to have that pit bull mentality that sinks teeth into an idea and never lets go. Right now he was clamped on to the notion that the woman and I had a history.

I didn't blame him, but it wasn't true.

Detective Gerdy may have been a regular cop, but subway cop was how I'd come to think of him after a hurry-up-and-wait bureaucratic routine that had taken hours.

I felt horrible for the poor woman who ran in front of the train, but now I wished I hadn't identified myself at the scene as a witness because four hours later I was in a police interview room that smelled of stale cigarettes and the trans fat from greasy French fries and spicy buffalo wings. Trans fats were outlawed in the city and smoking wasn't allowed in public buildings, but the smell had probably added a coating on the chipped paint over the decades.

A patina of killer fat and cigarette smoke that a few thousand years from now some art appraiser would examine to see if the grimy table in the room was a real artifact.

I sat on a grimy chair across the grimy table from the subway cop and tried to sound credible. I was tired and exasperated.

“Officer, I've already told you three times that I didn't know the woman.” I gave him a smile. “Look, I'm hungry, tired, traumatized, and have a cat that's probably shredding my couch because I haven't gotten home to feed him dinner and I'm too humane to declaw him even though he's keeping me in the poorhouse buying furniture. Can we wrap this up soon?”

“I'm moving on it as fast as I can. A woman is dead. We have to cover all the bases.”

From the looks of him it was going to take a while.

His belly hanging over his belt with a shirt spreading apart where one button was missing, sports jacket too tight and so far out of fashion the polyester finish would have been a fashion statement on a stud, slacks wrinkled and faded at the knees, shoes scuffed—he looked like a guy who life had left behind and who couldn't run fast enough to catch up.

He also needed to cut the hair in his nose and ears. And lose some weight.

Once in a while he'd look up from a report he was reading and shake his head a little, causing his jowls to jiggle.

I was ready to reach across the table and grab the papers and find out what the hell he found so interesting.

The body was still warm, literally, so the police bureaucracy couldn't have produced much paperwork. I got the impression that he thought if he kept me here long enough, I'd confess to something out of sheer boredom.

I considered it just to get the hell away from him, but I didn't know what crime to confess to.

Failing to stop a suicide?

Was that a crime?

I wasn't trying to be insensitive, but at the moment I was more concerned about the money in my pocket that my hand kept brushing to feel the reassuring bulge. So far he hadn't searched me, but the night was still young.

A uniformed subway cop had called the poor woman a “splatterer,” but I guess that wasn't being insensitive, either. Millions of people ride the subway every day and a few of them end up accidentally (or on purpose) falling, tripping, jumping, or being pushed in front of the oncoming trains.