It was the nylon ropes attached to the parachute that finally disabused the captain of the notion that they might have just sailed under a bridge between Sanibel and Fort Myers only to have emerged in a fairy tale land of myth and fantasy.
He soon recognized the one time flames, and then scaly tail, as a parachute, and he recognized the figure of a woman on the deck. The captain was convinced that was not much of an improvement from a dragon. In fact, it was maybe even worse. A dragon might just have been resting on the deck for a moment before it harmlessly flew back to a land called Honnah Lee. There was no question that this woman with a parachute had landed on the deck of the Flying Butterfly on purpose for some unknown and possibly criminal reason.
What did she want?
The captain feared the worst. Knowing that he had been transporting a large amount of an herb containing one of the main ingredients in crystal meth, the captain assumed that this woman was a meth head. That she was after the herb.
And I’ve never tried meth, and I never will. But from what I’ve heard about the drug, a woman parachuting off of a bridge onto the deck of a ship long after the herb that they were looking for has been unloaded sounds exactly like the kind of harebrained scheme and slipshod execution of that scheme that one would expect from a conspiracy hatched by a gang of meth heads.
Because of that, no one on the ship wanted to go out to the deck to confront her. So she had all the time in the world to get out of her parachute and strip down to a bikini.
I like to imagine the wonderment of that all male Chinese crew as they go from thinking that a dragon just landed on their ship, to thinking that a tweaker with a half-baked plan for an herb heist who might be armed to the teeth had just landed on their ship, to watching a woman make no effort to board the ship and steal anything or do anything at all except start to strip on the deck until she’s only wearing a bikini.
Of course every guy wanted to go confront her once she was just standing there in a bikini. So one of the crew finally went out there.
And she jumped over the side of the vessel and swam to shore.
And it’s curious where she swam.
You see, because I was right about something. My instincts as an investigator are as finely honed as…No, I’m still pretty lousy. But I’m persistent. And even a blind sow finds an acorn every once in a while.
And the acorn that I found was the idea that this whole BASE jumping debacle was really meant to be a distraction from something much worse. And it looks like it was.
Because something else happened exactly five minutes after that BASE jump had first been reported. A burglar or burglars tripped a silent alarm in a vault the size of an average bedroom in a suburban house.
The vault was mostly full of artwork. There was at least one Picasso, a couple of Monets, and a handful of works by Matisse among others. But the burglars had no interest in any of the art.
Philistines.
They were far more interested in what was in a second, small safe within the vault. They threatened the widow and her servant at gunpoint until the widow opened that second safe too. The thieves then raided the safe. Inside were a number of gemstones. However, one stood out above the others.
The rare Turquoise Egg. The Turquoise Egg was the good luck gem of Darius the Great, long dead ruler of the ancient Persian Empire, and he had carried it with him at almost all times. It was a giant, nearly egg shaped piece of turquoise, and, especially given the provenance of the object, is among the most valuable gems in the world.
Of course the burglars stole the Turquoise Egg, but they also stole all of the other gems. They stole a sizeable ruby and a fistful of diamonds, but the Turquoise Egg was the only gem mentioned by name in any reporting that I saw.
The whole time from when the burglars stole into the house, threatened the widow and servant who lived there with a gun until they gained access to the vault and then the safe, loaded all of the gems into two purple bags that would be familiar to any regular drinkers of a certain whisky, and got out of there, police were falling all over themselves to respond to reports of first a jumper, then a BASE jumper, and finally an Asian or Asian American BASE jumper jumping onto a passing Chinese ship. No one was able to respond to the silent alarm (which the security company had promptly called into police dispatch) until more than a half hour after the last burglar had hightailed it out of there.
It seemed clear in retrospect that the whole BASE jump had mainly been a stunt to distract from the jewel theft that was occurring almost simultaneously. Which was interesting for a lot of reasons.
One of those reasons led to my first hypothesis about this bizarre mystery heist.
You see, by all accounts, the BASE jumper was only able to hitch a ride on the passing Chinese ship by pure dumb luck and good timing. It ferried her out until she felt safe to swim to the shore. But what was odd was that the security camera that recorded footage of the BASE jumper once she had reached shore was only a couple of houses down from the house where the burglars may have still been in the process of (presumably) carefully loading the Turquoise Egg into the velvety whisky bag.
As far as I could see, that meant one of two things. The first possibility was that this BASE jumper was not a part of the robbery. In this scenario, the BASE jumper had been hired to make that BASE jump with no idea of the real reason why she had been hired to make that jump.
To me that hypothesis made the most sense. Why else would the BASE jumper have led the police almost directly to thieves if she knew what was happening and where they would be? If she knew that she was a distraction, and she knew what she was distracting people from, why would she lead people right to the neighbors of the home where the very crime that she was supposed to be a distraction from was possibly still in progress?
It made sense if we adopt the view that this BASE jumper was, most likely, hired to make a BASE jump, and she knew nothing else. In such a scenario, the actual conspirators and thieves were probably lucky that she didn’t wash up directly in the backyard of the house they were robbing.
For just a moment, I imagined the mastermind following all of this and realizing what can happen to the best laid plans of mice and men as Robert Burns once approximately wrote. I imagined them listening to news reports and exhaling a huge sigh of relief after they realized just how close the BASE jumper distraction had come to unintentionally bungling a master theft.
There was another possibility though. Just one. I couldn’t think of more.
I believed that it was possible that the BASE jumper was a part of the conspiracy and did know all the details of the theft that it was her duty to distract from. And that she had intentionally swam close to the thieves because, one, she was confident that she had eluded authorities, and, two, that she actually had to meet up with the thieves at a rendezvous point where they would all make their getaway.
This seemed like a less plausible hypothesis for several reasons. The first was that professional investigators (not some bridge inspector like me who plays an investigator from time to time to satisfy her morbid curiosity) had reportedly concluded that the Flying Butterfly, the Chinese ship, had no involvement with the BASE jump or the theft. It seemed to me that the Flying Butterfly would’ve almost had to have been involved if the BASE jumper had deliberately jumped, hitched a ride, and swam close to rendezvous with the thieves. That ship carried her a long way. That would’ve been a hell of a long swim with police on the scent if the boat hadn’t happened to be passing by at that moment, and I didn’t believe that there was any way that she could’ve made it to the rendezvous point on time unless she knew that the boat would be passing underneath at precisely that time. Of course, it was also possible that the captain of the Chinese ship was blind but the BASE jumper was not. Perhaps the BASE jumper knew the ships itinerary. Perhaps the gang of thieves and one daredevil distractor were in league with that one longshoreman who had known that the Chinese ship was coming in loaded with an herb to make meth, and that longshor
eman tipped them off. That seemed unlikely too though. Tampa Bay was a long ways away, and the ship had no manifest for the stop. How could they track it? I guess that the most obvious answer was that the longshoreman or someone else could’ve put a GPS tracking device somewhere on the ship, but again, the whole ship had been searched from top to bottom by professional investigators. I think that they would’ve found a GPS tracking device on the ship. Of course they might have found one and not revealed it to reporters to lull the criminal gang of thieves and aerial acrobat into a false sense of complacency. But Ockham’s Razor was that the BASE jumper had no idea about the theft.
So I preferred my first hypothesis. Because I’m a scientist by nature.
There was one final piece of evidence to enter into the record, to establish the facts. Video of the BASE jump emerged the day after all of this. It was taken by a person who worked at the toll station. (The Causeway is a toll bridge.) He was on break. Because he was a smoker, and because he had to smoke quite a ways away from the toll booth, he was on the one bit of shore that had a view of the jump that was miserable, but as good as it gets from land.
The BASE jumper looks like an action figure when the video starts. She is straddling the railing on the side of the Causeway. She looks like she is either hunchbacked or part camel with the parachute on her back. She moves in and out of focus as she carefully lifts her other leg over the railing on the Causeway and holds the rail tightly with both of her hands. The rest happens real fast. In what seems like less than a second, she jumps, plummets about fifty feet at breakneck speed, the parachute opens like a fabric explosion and snaps the BASE jumper forward and back at whiplash and/or concussion inducing speeds, and then she just starts to sail in the wind like she’s Mary Poppins with a plus sized umbrella down onto the deck of the Flying Butterfly where the parachute collapses around her like a giant blanket.
That’s when the video stops.
The video goes in and out of focus. The BASE jumper looks like a toy soldier with an early nineties toy parachute that kids everywhere were disappointed in when it arrived in the mail after they sent in the UPC codes of three boxes of sugary cereal. You really can’t make out what she looks like. About the only thing that you can say for sure about her from the video is that she’s not white. I guess that I should back up though. You can’t even say for sure that it’s a woman. But it confirms the reports. And in a case this mysterious, and in a place as potentially mysterious as Sanibel, I needed to confirm everything.
To that end, I had a call to make that next morning. And I had to hope that it went somewhere. Because I had one lead. And if it didn’t lead me somewhere new, my failure was going to cast a dreadful shadow where there should only be sun, sand, seafood, and fun.
A person with a scientific mind can handle not knowing. What we can’t handle is the complete inability to even begin to try to find out.
3
People think that engineers are straight laced, dull, square, and in love with the predictable. But no engineer is in love with the predictable. We want to create things that are elegant, functional, and, above all, iconic. No engineer wants their creations to meet expectations. Every engineer wants to exceed expectations and build something new, something extraordinary, something revolutionary. We want to create something beautiful, something that people cannot ignore, something perfect in its weirdness.
And that’s why I was so glad for the name Gertrude Weisswalder.
Gertrude was the rightful owner of the Turquoise Egg and the other missing gems. Poor Gertrude was the widow forced at gunpoint to open her vault and the smaller safe within that vault by a team of highly organized and well informed thieves. Gertrude was the victim of the theft that the BASE jumper tried and almost failed to distract from.
It was an interesting name. Not so much the Gertrude. There have been plenty of Gertrudes, admittedly not among the kids today, but we’ve all heard of Gertrude Stein, for example. Gertrude was a common name once. And the Gertrude in question belongs to a generation when that was a common name.
Gertrude was not unusual, but Weisswalder? Weisswalder was perfect in its weirdness.
I guessed that Weisswalder was German. I remembered what little German I had learned in preparation for our European family vacation.
That vacation was many years ago. It was several years after my mom committed suicide.
I remember that my dad had just dropped out of family therapy. The reason that he gave to us was that the therapy had done as much for him as it could.
It had done nothing. I guess that it’s possible that all the therapy could’ve done was nothing. I say that after many years have passed between then and now. At the time, I thought that he was a quitter and a hypocrite because he made my brother and I keep going to this Freudian weirdo. And it’s not like my dad was cured. Far from it, he was in the worst shape out of all of us.
Neil Young wrote a line that goes something to the effect of, “…on the day that she left, he died but it did not show.” The therapist had played the song that contained that exact line in it and asked us all what we thought of it. (My dad was still in family therapy at that time.) My brother and I were like, someone wrote a song about our dad.
My dad just shrugged. He mumbled, “I dunno.”
My dad is a ghost. Ever since my mom took her own life, he has haunted his house well into the night, going up and down stairs, turning doorknobs, entering rooms, and generally behaving like he’s looking for Ebenezer Scrooge.
Work is no better. My dad was really big in his academic field. So he gets away with doing nothing other than going to Wilson Library and either checking out poetry books, or reading poetry books in the library. Sometimes he writes his own bad poetry too. My dad is supposed to be a special assistant in the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
He doesn’t just moonlight as a failed poet. He’s found a way to sunlight as a failed poet.
So all of this was happening, had been happening for years when my dad finally dropped out of therapy but forced my brother and me to keep going.
I don’t know what my dad thought would happen when he dropped out of therapy, but I don’t believe that he expected what did happen. Either that or he did, and he just didn’t care. Because he had lost the ability to care about anything. I guess other than poetry.
The therapist immediately turned our family therapy sessions into strategy sessions for how we could engage our father in therapy again. My dad was clearly struggling. It did not take a mental health professional to see that my father was in a serious and profound state of depression. It would have been obvious to any passerby on the street regardless of their level of education.
It was that obvious that the man was abjectly miserable, befuddled, disconnected from reality, and ghostly.
It should also be noted that we were actually talking with our therapist about my dad behind his back while my brother was right in front of our therapist and had been experiencing bipolar depression which he was trying to control with copious alcohol abuse, marijuana, and sometimes LSD. Yet we were talking about our dad. That’s how concerned my therapist was about my dad.
And I totally agreed with that. I had lost one parent to suicide. I didn’t want to lose another. In fact, there were times that my brother and I hid the knives and even my dad’s razor at home. To which my dad reacted with a less than even halfhearted shrug when he found out.
My kids are terrified that I might commit suicide too. What you gonna’ do?
My brother and I came out of our first meeting with our therapist as a duo rather than a trio with a mission. Our therapist had collaborated with my brother and I to hatch a scheme that we thought just might bring our dad back to life.
The idea was a family trip.
I remember back when my mom was alive. We used to travel all the time. My dad had loved to travel. And of course as a practicing cultural anthropologist who published like his hair was on fire, he had to travel for wo
rk all the time. My earliest memories are of being in rainforests, in deserts with straw huts, and mud homes on endless plains. I remember getting a lot of shots. I remember us having to get new pages for our passports. We went all over the world.
But there was one place that my dad had never been, Europe.
So the therapist, my brother, and I hatched a scheme to convince my dad to take a family trip to somewhere new. We would go to Europe, and maybe, just maybe, our dad would come back to himself in a foreign land. Maybe he needed to leave the United States to feel at home. And, once he did, he would realize how much he missed traveling, his studies, his career, and his children. Then he would finally have a real breakthrough. And there would be no stopping him.
Or at least maybe he would go back to therapy and start to make progress. One of the two.
So we set out, taking essentially the whole month of July to work our way across Western Europe from Paris to Prague. I remember feeling unusually optimistic. And I remember that my brother and I both thought that our trip to Europe was the best idea our family therapist ever had. (Much better than the time he introduced the Freudian concept of penis envy and asked me where I was at with that.)
We both believed that once our dad set foot in an airport and heard a different language, once he saw people with customs and folkways different from our own, and once he fully realized that he had become an outsider in a land full of new and foreign people, something almost ancestral and primeval in him would intrude into his borderline catatonic world and shake up his snow globe. And when everything settled, he would return to the man we remembered.
Unfortunately, the trip was a disaster almost right from the start. I knew we were doomed after the first meal we went out for in Paris.
We stopped for an early dinner in a little Café near the Musee D’Orsay which we had just visited.
A Persian Gem Page 3
