The Curse by Harold Robbins Page A

another woman with your name and information, I guess it is. This woman you keep saying you don’t know is carrying your business card when she just happens to be in the same subway station as you are and just happens to end up in front of a train after talking to you.”
    He gave me a sad look. “I guess with seven billion people on the planet, it was inevitable one of them would be carrying your business card when they accidentally bump into you and get killed in a New York subway station after trying to fillet you earlier with a letter opener.”
    My heart was in my throat.
    â€œIt’s a coincidence, that’s all.”
    I sounded desperate even to myself.
    His cell phone rang and he answered it. “No shit? It showed that?”
    He gave me a meaningful look, letting me know the call concerned me.
    â€œGet it over to me so I can take a look.”
    I had the feeling that he had been told something I didn’t want to hear.
    â€œInteresting,” he said.
    I didn’t want to, but I had to take the bait. “What now?”
    â€œThe security camera at the station shows you giving her a push.”

16
    The meeting with the woman had gone well, Kaseem thought. She appeared to have accepted him as he presented himself. And nothing he had told her had been a lie. His only fraud was by omission—he didn’t tell her she would be killed after authenticating the artifact. If the thieves didn’t kill her, which he assumed they would, he would have it done because he couldn’t risk having a witness to his machinations.
    That she would die carrying out the task meant nothing to him. He considered himself a man of destiny. The death of Madison Dupre would be collateral damage, one of many to come, as he put a plan into action that had been brewing in his head for nearly two decades.
    Kaseem had not lied when he said that he was a scholar, though he was far more a soldier than a man of books. He, in fact, had a doctorate in history, but it was obtained in the narrow field of military history. And his degree didn’t come from an ordinary university but from a military academy: the Egyptian Army War College.
    He had also failed to mention that before his banishment from his country, he had been a general in the army. And that he had fled a firing squad after organizing a coup that would have toppled the government had one of its members not betrayed the plot to the authorities.
    As a history student, he had studied conquerors, from the great Thutmose to Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin, asking himself what inspired the passions and fiery visions of conquerors like Alexander and madmen like Hitler.
    It had been Hitler’s style that most captured Kaseem’s interest. Hitler had managed to galvanize millions of people despite the fact that millions of others considered him a raving lunatic.
    He had studied the Nazi dictator, analyzing what was the “fire in the man’s belly” that caused millions to support him when much of what he spoke were lies and exaggerations.
    Hitler rose to power after the economic debacle and great depression that followed World War I. The Germans had suffered particularly hard, both from hyperinflation whereby it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread, and all the while having an overreaching peace treaty shoved down their throats.
    Kaseem came to the conclusion that Hitler had talked to the German people as if they were a defeated sports team he was coaching, shouting at them about how they were possessed with the power and destiny to be masters of the world and giving them a reason for why they had not achieved their great destiny and an enemy to hate: the Jews had held them back, he ranted, raved, and shouted.
    What especially interested Kaseem was the way Hitler mesmerized the nation not only with Teutonic legends of powerfully built, golden-haired heroes and heroines for the German people to emulate, but