Free The Curse by Harold Robbins Page A

my soul—it’ll take yours. Run! Get away now!”
    The light of the oncoming subway train was in sight now and the noise began blocking out most of what the woman was rambling about as I backed away.
    She got so close I put out my hand to hold her back, not to push her away but just to keep space between us.
    Her rambling in English had now reverted to Arabic. With the noise and my limited understanding of Arabic, I wasn’t making out what she was saying.
    I continued to back up and suddenly realized that I was still dangerously close to the edge of the platform.
    The woman looked startled for a moment, looking past me, as if she had seen something that frightened her. She screamed and lunged at me. I put out my hands to stop her from hitting me and she veered and ran off the platform as the train roared in.
    In a split second the train was there and she was gone.
    People were screaming.
    I was one of them.

15
    â€œYou didn’t know the woman? Never saw her before this morning? And she never tried to attack you at the subway station?”
    It was the third time the subway cop asked me about the woman who ran in front of the train. The incident at my apartment hadn’t been entered into whatever the police used for a database and I had to fill him in on the letter opener attack first.
    â€œShe didn’t appear to be trying to attack me,” I said. “As I told you, she struck me as delusional. I don’t know what she was trying to do. She just kept jabbering about a curse—look, I don’t know. I seem to have had the bad luck to run into her.”
    â€œLuck? She showed up at your apartment this morning and then again at a subway station halfway across the city?”
    I was being evasive, of course. I had money in my pocket that was as vital to me as life support to someone in intensive care. If I told this cop that a man had given me twenty thousand dollars this morning and there had to be a connection between him and this crazy woman, he would take the money, at least the nineteen thousand I had in my pocket.
    I had taken Kaseem’s word that he didn’t know anything about the woman but having her show up after I left him at the restaurant was too much. She might have followed me and she never mentioned Kaseem.
    Being broke made me easily persuadable and seemed to have gotten to the point of it making me brain-dead stupid.
    If I gave the cop a reason to arrest or search me, he’d also find the money and it would end up wherever the nation’s largest police force stuck cash evidence so it was lost forever.
    The subway cop didn’t exactly instill me with confidence, either, as to his ability or my own ability to sweet-talk my way out of anything. He seemed to have that pit bull mentality that sinks teeth into an idea and never lets go. Right now he was clamped on to the notion that the woman and I had a history.
    I didn’t blame him, but it wasn’t true.
    Detective Gerdy may have been a regular cop, but subway cop was how I’d come to think of him after a hurry-up-and-wait bureaucratic routine that had taken hours.
    I felt horrible for the poor woman who ran in front of the train, but now I wished I hadn’t identified myself at the scene as a witness because four hours later I was in a police interview room that smelled of stale cigarettes and the trans fat from greasy French fries and spicy buffalo wings. Trans fats were outlawed in the city and smoking wasn’t allowed in public buildings, but the smell had probably added a coating on the chipped paint over the decades.
    A patina of killer fat and cigarette smoke that a few thousand years from now some art appraiser would examine to see if the grimy table in the room was a real artifact.
    I sat on a grimy chair across the grimy table from the subway cop and tried to sound credible. I was tired and exasperated.
    â€œOfficer, I’ve already told you three times that I didn’t know the