The Curse by Harold Robbins Page A

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