The Curse Read Free

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