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the job even more desperately than me.
    I got a dry chuckle out of that one, but it sounded more like a death rattle than a laugh.
    I didn’t know if Mounir Kaseem had any interest in women, but just in case he was rich and wanted personal attention, I took extra care to look more attractive than desperate, but the lack of a callback number had sent my paranoia soaring.
    â€œSomething’s up his sleeve,” I told Morty.
    Why couldn’t things be simple?
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    THE HEART SCARAB
    The scarab … possesses remarkable powers, and if a figure of the scarab be made, and the proper words of power be written upon it, not only protection of the dead physical heart, but also new life and existence will be given to him to whose body it is attached.
    â€”SIR WALLIS BUDGE, EGYPTIAN MAGIC

9
    Other than rocks and dirt, Cleopatra’s Needle was the oldest thing in Central Park. An Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh named Thutmose had it built more than 3,500 years ago.
    That kind of time in history is hard to imagine without putting it into context—it was before the rise of classical Greece, long before the rise of the Roman Empire, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ. And now the monolith commissioned by a pharaoh and placed near the banks of the Nile was in Central Park, New York City, USA.
    The most militant warrior-pharaoh in Egyptian history, Thutmose would have turned over in his sarcophagus if he knew the nearly seventy-foot-tall granite obelisk had made its way thousands of miles from the Nile Valley to the heart of Manhattan.
    Why they called the shaft of stone and its sister statue in London “Cleopatra’s Needle” rather than “Thutmose’s Needle” was a mystery to me, but reason enough for the mummy of the militant pharaoh to throw a curse this way.
    The obelisk was about a hundred blocks and several hours from a morning of chaos with a computer store geek and a madwoman, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t left behind some of the insanity.
    It would be too much of a coincidence that I’d get a message under my door to meet with a client and had opened the door to find a frazzled woman intent upon sticking a letter opener in my throat.
    The man who asked me to meet him at the obelisk in the park had been genuinely surprised when I told him a woman had just tried to slice and dice me, but I had to admit to myself during the long subway ride that there had to be a connection.
    The monument’s plaza was deserted, giving me a chance to catch my breath. Due to my current financial situation—broke and desperate—I had almost run from the subway stop on East Eighty-sixth out of fear I’d be late. In the old days I would have taken a taxi from my apartment.
    Obelisks were right up my alley not only because I was an expert on Egyptian and other Mediterranean artifacts, but the ancient land of the pharaohs with its exotic mystery and magic has always been my prime interest in antiquities.
    I went up to the obelisk and offered my condolences to Thutmose III for the misnaming of his monument.
    â€œSorry about the name, old chap, but Cleopatra has more sex appeal. You can blame Shakespeare and Cecil B. DeMille.”
    I felt bad that most of the inscriptions on the stone’s surface were getting weathered. The pollution and acid rain in the city had taken its toll on the monument; it would have fared better had it stayed in the clear dry desert air of Egypt.
    A middle-aged man with the olive tan of the southern Mediterranean came slowly walking in my direction, keeping an appraising eye on me all the while.
    He was well dressed in a conservative, old-fashioned, gray worsted wool suit, a white shirt, and a British school tie.
    My first impression from his short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, flat stomach, and the way he held himself erect with his shoulders pulled back was that he was a military man.
    I smelled affluence, too.
    He grinned at me. “Only a