The Curse Read online

  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.

  The “provenance” of an item in my business basically refers to its chain of ownership. It’s like buying a house—you have to check to make sure the party you’re buying from is the legal owner.

  However, houses have ownership histories that are easy to examine, while it can be difficult and even impossible to trace the o
wner of art pieces thousands of years old that might have passed through many hands over the millenniums or had been dug out the ground yesterday.

  Artifacts by the tens of thousands have made their way from antiquity sites in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, the Far East, and the Americas, be it legitimately, by conquest, or by just plain looting.

  It wasn’t that long ago that colonial empires were emptying archaeological sites around the world. Some regions have had one conqueror after another loot their historical treasures. Looting occurs all around the planet even today—there are thieves in Cambodia using electric saws to cut out pieces of irreplaceable Khmer art, peasants in Iraq looting Babylonian sites in order to feed their families, even construction workers in Italy who occasionally find rare artifacts when digging and sell them on the black market.

  All in all, it wasn’t that big a deal for me to have accidentally purchased at auction a piece that turned out to be looted—except for the fact that I paid more than fifty million for it and had to violate a few laws of man and nature to get it back to where it belonged.

  Unfortunately, the international art trade was literally a cottage industry with all the major players knowing—and spying—on each other. It wasn’t easy to keep a low profile when you had once run with the big dogs.

  Since nobody wanted to hire me I became self-employed as an art appraiser and investigator; that meant I got paid when clients wrote a check, which usually didn’t always happen in a timely manner.

  Morty eyed me as I came back to bed. He didn’t seem to care that I had just lost my computer and my flash drive. He closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  He had the right idea.

  I was about to crawl back under the covers and cover my head when I saw the white envelope that had been slipped under my door.

  My first thought was that it was an eviction notice from my landlord, but I quickly rejected that notion. As bad as the geek bastard with the bullhorn, he would have served the notice by pounding on my door and yelling so the whole damn building could hear him, which is what he’ll be doing when he finds my window broken.

  A bill collector was also definitely high on my list, but there were other candidates. The lock on the entry door hadn’t been working longer than my shower had been dripping, permitting entry by the army of restaurant menu distributors that littered the city, along with muggers, rapists, and anyone else who wanted to step inside where the hallways were dark because the landlord used refrigerator bulbs to light them.

  As I bent to pick up the envelope, I heard a tiny, almost timid tap on the door.

  I took a peek through the door peephole and saw a woman with cinnamon-colored skin, rather dark wild hair, and Middle Eastern features.

  I couldn’t see much through the little round opening but I could see that she looked nervous and stressed.

  I opened the door a little, keeping my shoulder against it, and asked, “Can I help you?”

  She stared at me as if she was puzzled, even dazed. The first thing that struck me was that she’d had a bad drug trip.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She pulled a blade out of her pocket and lurched forward, jabbing it at me.

  I immediately shoved the door forward with my shoulder. The pointed end of what looked like a letter opener went into the wood.

  She pushed against the door and I pushed back in panic as hard as I could. The door finally closed and the latch caught. She kicked at the door as I ran for my phone.

  As I frantically pressed 911 on my cell phone, I raced for the window.

  This was New York—I could be sliced and diced by this crazy woman by the time it took police to arrive.

  I shouted “Help!” out the window as the 911 line rang and rang and then I got an inspired idea, remembering what I’d been told at a self-defense class to shout in an emergency: Don’t shout help because no one wants to get involved.

  Instead, I screamed, “Fire! Fire!”

  The sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, “TOMLINSON”

  5

  Cursed. That’s how I felt about my life. A computer geek bill collector disgraces me to the whole city and a wild-eyed woman tries to ventilate me with a letter opener—all on the same morning.

  Some sort of biblical retribution for a life not well spent?

  Bad karma for something I did in a past life?

  Did I offend those three goddesses the Greeks called the Fates?

  Someone who didn’t like my art advice tormenting me with a Gypsy’s evil eye?

  A woman paying me back for sleeping with her man by sticking pins in a voodoo doll?

  Getting involved with the gold mask of that Babylonian queen that’s said to have caused more misfortune than God smit Egypt with?

  The list seemed endless.

  I didn’t know the source of the damnation, but it seemed obvious that I was throwing snake eyes and it wasn’t even Friday the thirteenth.

  After I screamed “Fire!” I shouted to the maniacal woman on the other side of the door that the cops were on their way.

  As I cautiously went back to the door with a butcher knife in hand and looked through the peephole, I didn’t see any sign of the crazy woman.

  I guess telling her the cops were coming scared her off, but I wasn’t about to open the door to find out if she was still there ready to pounce on me.

  Screaming fire and yelling hadn’t helped, of course.

  No one came to my rescue, but that was no surprise. Sometimes living in New York made me feel like I was on a deserted island even though I rubbed elbows with people every time I left my apartment.

  Finally, a 911 operator came on that sounded like she learned her English in Bangladesh—or maybe she was in Bangladesh for that matter—and took my report.

  The first thing she wanted to know was whether it was a “domestic dispute.” I assured her that I had no relatives who wanted to poke holes in me with a letter opener.

  Knowing my blood hadn’t been spilled and the assailant wasn’t in sight meant she wasn’t going to waste officers on someone who survived, so I told her that the crazy woman was still somewhere in building looking for victims.

  I took some deep breaths to get my nerves under control while I waited for the police.

  The whole thing was bizarre.

  My computer ends up trashed, a complete stranger tries to poke holes in me … what else could happen today?

  Morty jumped on the bed and went back to his usual spot. He had dove under the bed when I started yelling for help.

  I grabbed the white envelope.

  My name had been written in pencil on it.

  The printed writing was neat and legible. Probably written by any older person because it wasn’t the way people usually wrote today. They mostly scribbled when they had to actually write something since they spent most of their time using a computer keyboard or texting.

  Also, there was no return address. And who used pencils anymore? People still wrote with pens, but addressing an envelope in pencil? I wasn’t sure I even owned a pencil.

  It occurred to me that a bill collector might have come up with a clever way to get my attention.

  Inside the envelope was a newspaper clipping with a phone number at the top, written in pencil again, with the same neat and legible writing, and what appeared to be a poor photocopy of an article from a pseudoscientific magazine.

  I didn’t recognize the phone number.

  My first suspicion of the natty handwriting was a bastard named Henri Lipton. I thought I had gotten rid of him two years ago when his London antique gallery had gone up in flames with him in it.

  No such luck.

  Like the devil that comes to call to make a deal with you when you are at your weakest level, Lipton had returned from the grave a few months ago and offered me a job.

  My mistake was accepting it. I soon realized that I shouldn’t have let my need for money get in
the way of survival. But how can you refuse a chance to make a buck when you desperately need it?

  The clipping was one of those society page photos of people in evening dress chatting at what I assumed was a society or charity affair.

  The photo had been trimmed down to just show several women standing together. I could make out some hieroglyphics on the wall behind the women. I couldn’t see much of the glyphs, but was sure they were a modern reproduction.

  The written description that ordinarily would have appeared beneath a newspaper photo wasn’t there, but I recognized the woman in the center, a dowager of London society, Lady Candace Berkshire Vanderbilt.

  Anyone involved in Mediterranean region antiquities would recognize her name.

  As a museum curator with a particular interest in Egyptian antiquities, I knew quite a bit about her because her grandfather, Gordon Nelson Vanderbilt, had been one of the wealthy backers of Howard Carter.

  Grandfather Vanderbilt, along with Lord Carnarvon and others, had financed Carter’s search for a pharaoh’s tomb back in the 1920s. Carter had found King Tutankhamen … and the rest was history.

  Of course, part of that history had to do with the mummy’s revenge: Lord Carnarvon died soon afterwards from what was thought to have been an infected mosquito bite, Vanderbilt croaked the following year from food poisoning, and the curse of the mummy was off and running.

  Vanderbilt also incurred considerable controversy because his wife was seen at a society gathering wearing an ancient Egyptian necklace, raising suspicion that it belonged in the Tut collection, even though he had claimed that he bought it on the open market.

  His wife drowned when she fell and bumped her head in a bathtub and the newspapers had a field day again about the curse.

  The current Mrs. Berkshire Vanderbilt had the necklace on in the picture. Somewhere along the line she had married a British lord and became a lady. I was surprised she was wearing it because I’d read she donated it to the Smithsonian, but the picture could have been taken before she gave it to the museum.