A Persian Gem

by Jeff Isaacson

  Big surprise.

  I listened just because it was honestly less boring than listening to Thad describe in minute detail exactly how he was installing flooring at Farhad’s mansion. I don’t know if Morty and Ruby are just naturally that interested in leveling the base of a floor, or if they are better at feigning enthusiasm than I am. Then again, maybe laying high end flooring was what Morty and Ruby used to do. So maybe it was inside baseball to them too.

  Although I must admit that Thad really has a way of telling a story. He could tell a story about paint drying and keep up the suspense. I think it comes from being a stand-up comedian.

  I can write a story, but I need time to compose it. Thad has a real knack for improv and a real skill for capturing the arc of a story in an oral narrative.

  At a certain point though, not even the best storyteller can keep my interest when the subject is carpentry.

  So I listened to the radio. And I heard something amazing.

  That ship, yes the ship that served as a landing pad for that woman who had BASE jumped off of the Causeway between Sanibel and Fort Myers just a few hours ago. That ship that had conveniently lumbered by right as the mystery woman pulled her rip cord and parachuted out to meet it had been detained.

  This was the report:

  “The ship that captured everyone’s attention by picking up a mysterious, parachuting passer-by has been detained by the Coast Guard. The name of the Chinese ship in question translates roughly into Flying Butterfly in English, and she made news today when a still unknown woman jumped off of the highest point of the Causeway, close to Fort Myers, only to quickly open a parachute, an activity commonly known as BASE jumping, and land onboard the deck of the Flying Butterfly.

  Just minutes ago, the Coast Guard issued this press release regarding the Flying Butterfly:

  ‘The Flying Butterfly was detained by the Coast Guard shortly after the BASE jumping incident off the Causeway earlier today. The captain reported that the BASE jumper landed on the deck of the Flying Butterfly, dropped her parachute, stripped down to her bikini, and then jumped over the side of the Flying Butterfly and swam toward what would have been Captiva. The captain denied having any knowledge about who the BASE jumper might be or why she jumped onto his ship. Coast Guard officials seized the abandoned parachute and outerwear, and, after a search of the vessel failed to locate the woman, notified local law enforcement that a female suspect might be in Captiva.

  As for the captain and crew, the Coast Guard is currently holding them in custody due to an anomaly in the ship’s manifest. The farthest southern port that their paperwork indicates was Jacksonville. Coast Guard officials are working to determine what the captain and crew of the Flying Butterfly were doing in the Gulf of Mexico.’”

  I puzzled over this. Was this part of some elaborate Chinese conspiracy? Maybe to show the former spies in Sanibel just how awesome they were?

  I doubted that almost as soon as I had thought of it. If that was some massive Chinese intelligence display, then what was the endgame? Did they want to show us that they had parachuting technology? That they can BASE jump too? Was it part of some Chinese triathlon where a person walks up to the edge of a bridge, parachutes off of that bridge onto a boat, and then swims the final leg to shore?

  It was obviously bizarre, but what was even more bizarre was making all of the facts fit. Did the Chinese boat detour here specifically to serve as a landing pad for this mysterious BASE jumper? If so, why? Because now the captain of the vessel was in a lot of trouble. And he didn’t seem to know what had happened or why it happened.

  But maybe that was China just using this poor captain. Maybe he got orders to be at a certain place, at a certain time, and he had no idea why. But he knew that the punishment could be sure and swift if he wasn’t there.

  Of course it was also possible that he was just full of hot air. It was entirely possible that he knew exactly what happened.

  Either way, it seemed to me that the BASE jumper was trying to achieve something. If there was an operation, she was at the center of it.

  So I began to wonder what she could have been trying to accomplish. If the BASE jump was part of an operation, what would that operation be?

  It seemed improbable that BASE jumping from the Causeway onto a ship was just a shortcut to get to Captiva to perform one more act of criminal mischief. It was about the least sneaky way to get into Captiva that possibly anyone had ever tried.

  So what could it be?

  The answer was so obvious when it finally came to me. Right as we pulled into the parking lot of The Island Cow and Morty and Ruby lamented again how crowded it was.

  That BASE jumper was an elaborate distraction. Whatever the operation was, it had been happening while nearly every law enforcement officer in the county was on or on their way to the Causeway.

  I hoped that I could convince Thad to watch at least one of the half hours of news this evening. Because something happened. This bizarre BASE jump was all that anybody was talking about, but I knew that something else happened while everybody was distracted.

  And maybe the authorities had only just found out about it.

  2

  I ran and spent quality beach time and ate seafood seaside in a bathing suit. I was not going to waste my only vacation for the year.

  However, that curious female BASE jumper, that mystery Chinese ship she landed on that lumbered on well past its final official stop at Jacksonville, and what the BASE jump might have served to distract from was always in the back of my mind. And I took a couple of hours in each of those next two days to scour the news.

  By the end of the second day I had a mostly complete set of facts.

  First, the BASE jumper. There was a fairly high resolution picture of her on the news, on the internet, etc. The Captiva residence that she washed up at when she jumped over the side of the mysterious Chinese ship and swam to shore had security cameras all over the place.

  There were at least two things that were important about the photo. First, the BASE jumper had been described as Asian or Asian American in the initial reports of the jump. For all I know, she may have some Asian heritage. But most people agree (including me) now that we’ve seen the photo. The BASE jumper is clearly African American.

  It’s just another example of how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be. I believe that there are a lot of, especially African American, men in jail on eyewitness testimony that is inaccurate for a number of reasons, including racial animus.

  I don’t believe that the eyewitnesses who described this strange BASE jumper were motivated by racial animus though. I believe that what happened was that they were stunned by someone jumping off of a bridge, opening a parachute, and gliding onto a passing ship. I think that they were distracted by the combination of their own anxiety and the flashy parachute. I’m guessing that they never really got a good look at the woman to begin with. But you know what they did see? They saw that woman jump onto a ship with Chinese characters clearly visible on the sides and back. That, in my opinion, is why they thought that the woman who had jumped was Asian or Asian American.

  The other important thing to know about this black BASE jumper is that the best still photo from the security camera footage of her was posted everywhere in the Fort Myers (and Sanibel and Captiva) area. And no one knew who she was.

  To me that had to mean that she clearly wasn’t from the area. I love Sanibel. This may sound entirely unromantic and the weirdest thing to list as a first reason for why a person would love the place, but I’m an engineer by training. The thing that I love the most about Sanibel is the texture of the beach. It’s not like slick clay, volcanic rock, or sand so loose that I feel like I’m running through six inches of snow. It’s the perfect firmness, like a good mattress, or a cute guy’s body. It’s the Goldilocks of beaches. It’s just right.

  I love jogging on the beach barefoot. I also love the feeling of intense sun on my skin like a Minnesota summer. I love watching the wa
ves curl over and collapse onto the sand with just a milk moustache of foamy bubbles quivering and popping next to the shells they dredged up and ferried in. I love all kinds of fish and seafood that I never eat in Minnesota because Minnesota is oh so far away from an ocean. I love shrimp. I love scallops. I love grouper and salmon. And I can have them every day here. And they’re always great.

  You can’t be a bad restaurant in Sanibel and Captiva and survive. I take that back. You can’t serve bad fish and seafood and survive as a restaurant in Sanibel and Captiva. In my research before I came down here, I saw all kinds of negative comments about a certain pizza place. But there’s only a couple of places to get pizza in Sanibel. So you probably can make bad pizza and get away with it. But fish and seafood are everywhere. And if it’s your stock and trade, and you don’t do them right, you will go out of business.

  So I love, love, love Sanibel. I hope that I have made that abundantly clear. Because I’m going to talk about something that I don’t love about Sanibel. Something that I just can’t help but notice.

  Sanibel is white. I don’t mean the beaches. I mean the people. They are pasty white. They are a powdered sugar donut coated in coconut flakes being dunked in milk by an albino white. It is the whitest place that I have ever been in my life.

  I’d been all over the beaches for days by that time. I had seen precisely two people other than me who weren’t white.

  And I’m not blaming anybody. I know this wasn’t planned. Sanibel has no control over the fact that it’s white Europeans who get fifty-four weeks of vacation every year. So most of the visitors that I have talked to in my time here are from the largely white countries of Western Europe.

  The others are mostly from the rural parts of cold weather states like Minnesota, Michigan, and Massachusetts. Those places aren’t exactly exemplars of racial diversity.

  And certainly no one here has been unkind to me much less done anything racist to me. It’s a strange thing to see coming from a Minnesota winter where almost everyone seems to be pissed off. Some guy gave me the bird a couple of days before I left for Sanibel just because I was walking through an intersection that he wanted to make a right turn in. It’s amazing what medicine there is in those golden rays of a bright sun and warm temperatures. Suddenly everything starts looking up. And we all think that maybe today is the day that I’ll find love, organize my closet, and start being a better person.

  So everyone has been very kind, very friendly.

  It’s just an empirical fact that at any given time Sanibel is overwhelmingly white. Given that, the African American BASE jumper would have stood out like a sore thumb. Someone would’ve known her if she lived on the island.

  I conceded that it was possible that she lived in Fort Myers, or maybe even somewhere else in the Fort Myers area. Fort Myers is a bigger, and certainly more diverse, city than Sanibel. But even that seemed improbable. Unless she was a hermit.

  And BASE jumping didn’t seem like something an introverted homebody would do.

  So realistically she was almost certainly from somewhere else. Which means that she traveled down here for the BASE jump. Why?

  Now let’s turn to the Flying Butterfly, the Chinese ship that mysteriously continued on a course well past its final destination of Jacksonville all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. How did that vessel fit into all of this? Especially knowing that the BASE jumper who landed on their deck was likely not Chinese at all.

  Reporting indicated that investigators initially seemed to believe that the BASE jumper was Chinese, and that the boat was a part of some conspiracy. My guess is that whoever looked into this felt that they had to rule out the possibility that they feared most. That this could have been some kind of Chinese military or intelligence operation that, while certainly bizarre and ostentatious, could also be crazy like a fox.

  And the captain of the vessel acted how I would guess someone who was actually a Chinese agent provocateur would act when caught. He played dumb. First he pretended that he didn’t speak English. That ruse fell apart after the Coast Guard did a more detailed search of the ship and found a U.S. version of a DVD of a certain action adventure movie sequel that pertains to cars that go too quickly and too angrily in the captain’s laptop.

  (Myself, I wouldn’t have assumed that the captain knew English just because he had the U.S. version of that cinematic masterpiece in his DVD drive. I’ve never seen the movie, but I assume that I saw all five lines of dialogue in it when I saw the commercial during halftime of a Premier League game a couple of years ago. Also, I’m really not entirely sure that the U.S. version is actually in English. But I’ll concede that it’s definitely not in Chinese. So it’s clear that, at a minimum, the Chinese captain knows how to tell a beautiful young woman he’s been bedding down, who perfectly understands his destiny, he just can’t stay with her because he’s really in love with velocity and rage in something resembling English. And she knows. She knows. She won’t try to stop him.)

  But the captain did know English. He couldn’t have written Hamlet or anything, but he knew quite a bit of English. He certainly understood what they were asking him. And I imagine that had investigators very worried.

  And they did have some reason to worry. But not about a Chinese military or intelligence operation.

  They had to worry about garden variety lawbreaking.

  Why had the Flying Butterfly made a detour into the Gulf of Mexico? It was because they had one last delivery that wasn’t on their manifest. Why wasn’t it on their manifest? The customer who worked with this particular shipping company wished to remain anonymous.

  Why did they want to remain anonymous?

  The captain eventually confessed to everything.

  They had one last shipment on the boat after their stop in Jacksonville. It was a very large amount of an herb called má huáng. The herb má huáng contains a substance called ephedrine. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. But maybe like me you couldn’t quite remember why you had heard about it.

  You heard about it because it’s an ingredient in crystal meth.

  So the captain eventually confessed that he had delivered a huge amount of that herb containing ephedrine to Tampa Bay. He gave the investigators all the information he knew. Which wasn’t much.

  He had the name of a specific longshoreman to ask for in Tampa Bay. He knew that he had to radio ahead when he entered the Bay so that someone could go out and move another boat that had been saving a parking spot to make sure the Flying Butterfly was able to get into a very specific slip on a very specific dock. That was all that he knew.

  That was why he was so hard to separate from an agent provocateur. He wasn’t just playing dumb.

  He was actually dumb.

  I was impressed with the investigators. With nothing more than the name of longshoreman and the number of the slip that the Flying Butterfly had docked at, the investigators managed to take down a meth lab that was operating like a factory.

  Seriously, they showed video on the news. People were in clean suits with respirators and goggles like they were mass producing legitimate pharmaceuticals in a legitimate factory with top of the line lab equipment. I half expected to see a sign boasting something like “17 days without a safety incident”.

  It was quite a contrast from the one and only time that I had ever seen somebody make meth before that.

  It was on TV. Don’t get the wrong idea.

  I was watching some special report, and I think that they were talking to some guy with like three teeth in Kentucky. (Hard to know how much of that missing dentition was due to meth.) He combined something like an over the counter cough medicine, battery acid, and drain cleaner in an empty soda pop bottle. I remember how volatile that mixture was. It hissed and smoked, and I was amazed that the plastic bottle was able to withstand the intense chemical reaction. (At least I think it was a plastic bottle. Maybe my eyewitness memory is every bit as unreliable as all of those people who described the BASE jumper as Asian.) At the e
nd of that hissing and crackling, there was a tiny crystal that looked like an extremely small piece of quartz, except that it wasn’t quartz.

  The contrast between a three toothed Jessup seemingly throwing every ingredient in his trailer with a Mr. Yuk sticker on it into a pop bottle on his front porch and the slick, commercial crystal meth lab that had just been busted couldn’t have been greater.

  After everyone at the lab got arrested, there was only one question that remained unanswered.

  What was the Flying Butterfly’s connection to the BASE jumper?

  The answer appeared to be that there really wasn’t one. In fact, investigators had even commented to news outlets that the initial eyewitness accounts of an Asian woman BASE jumping onto a passing Chinese ship had led to far too many investigative resources looking into the possible connection between the ship and the jumper.

  The African American BASE jumper had most likely just improvised when she jumped onto the Flying Butterfly. The Flying Butterfly had just happened to pass right under the highest point of the Causeway at that exact moment. So the BASE jumper thought fast. BASE jumping is mostly illegal, and I would think that it’s a challenge to get away with. Especially when this particular BASE jumper was probably in for a long swim back to some type of shore after her jump. During which time, she would’ve been vulnerable to arrest. Especially if the police had a boat. Which I have to imagine they did.

  So imagine her surprise at her good fortune when she realized that there was a passing ship that she could land on and sail away with!

  So she did exactly that. The Chinese captain of the Flying Butterfly described the confusion among the crew when something really big just suddenly fell out of the sky and on to their deck as they puttered along the Gulf. It took them a long time to respond to her because no one was sure exactly what the hell had happened. None of them had seen her jump. Her parachute exhaled and flopped down behind her almost as soon as she landed. In fact, the captain said that he wondered if it was a dragon at first, even knowing that was completely impossible. Because the bright parachute looked like flames. Then it looked like a scaly tail in the sun as soon as it collapsed.