A Persian Gem

by Jeff Isaacson

  It seemed possible.

  There was a long pause in the conversation.

  “Shall we sit?” Gertrude asked.

  I nodded. We sat in the corner of the library, facing each other.

  “Would you like something to eat or drink? Some tea and finger sandwiches perhaps?” Gertrude wondered. “I took the liberty of having my servant bring us a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses.”

  “The lemonade is plenty, thank you,” I replied.

  Gertrude poured me lemonade with the flair of a bartender angling for a bigger tip, or an experienced hostess. I took a drink. It was delicious. There may be weird literary sex games going on in here, but the lemonade was good. That would have been my Yelp review of that place.

  We drank our lemonade in near silence for a moment.

  Then Gertrude said, “I’ve always wondered why more minorities don’t write true crime. Most of you grow up in such frightfully violent and deplorable neighborhoods. You’d think that the stories would just write themselves.”

  I sighed. Some of you will probably think that I should’ve corrected her misconception, pointed out the fallacy of her stereotype, and educated an eighty year old woman on the true nature of modern race relations. If so, congratulations! You’re white. I’m just so tired of this. So instead I said, “The incredibly violent neighborhood that I grew up in inspired all of my stories.”

  “Really,” Gertrude leaned forward as if about to receive a particularly juicy piece of gossip. “What do you write about?”

  “Mainly Cuthberting,” I stated.

  “Cuthberting?” Gertrude wondered. “Is that some kind of colloquialism?”

  “It’s lingo from the mean streets where I grew up. I can’t believe that you’ve never heard of it,” I replied.

  “See, this is why it’s so important for minorities to write true crime. Cuthberting? Who ever heard of such a thing? Surely no white person. What is Cuthberting?” Gertrude demanded.

  “It’s when you shoot somebody below the waist, because it’s a lesser charge…”

  “I had no idea,” Gertrude marveled.

  “Then you pack the wound with canned apricots…”

  “Why canned apricots?” Gertrude puzzled.

  “Two reasons. First, ninety percent of minorities can’t afford to buy any groceries at all so we have to get all our food from the food shelves. And of course people mostly donate the food that they don’t want to eat to food shelves. So food shelves are always bursting at the seams with canned apricots. I guarantee you. Go into almost any apartment in any squalid inner city minorities’ housing project and you’ll find at least a dozen cans of apricots in there…”

  “I had no idea,” Gertrude gasped.

  “Second,” I resumed. “The syrup in the canned apricots helps with blood clotting…”

  “How?” Gertrude demanded.

  “It either has a clotting agent in it, or it acts as a catalyst that helps the body’s natural clotting agents close the wound quicker…”

  “Wow!” Gertrude observed.

  “So you use the canned apricots in the gunshot wound to make sure the person doesn’t bleed out and die and then you get charged with murder. So that’s it. Gunshot below the waist. Wound packed with canned apricots. But it can happen a million different ways.

  My Ghetto Cuthberting books have been called the definitive series on Cuthberting,” I said.

  “You must be so proud,” Gertrude nodded.

  “But now I’d like to expand my horizons to jewel theft. And that’s what brings me here,” I began.

  “Of course,” Gertrude nodded and took a sip of lemonade.

  “First, I’d just like to hear your story. What happened during the jewel theft? In your own words,” I suggested.

  “Well,” Gertrude took a sip of lemonade as if to brace herself, like it was brandy or something. “I was watering flowers in the hothouse. Perhaps you saw this room on the way here. It was just down the hall, almost certainly on your way.”

  “I caught a fleeting glimpse of it as I walked by,” I replied. “Colorful.”

  “Yes, I love color,” Gertrude nodded. “So I was watering my colorful flowers when I heard this dreadful rapping on the door. As I turned around, I was wondering why my ladyservant, Penelope, was knocking on a door that I knew I had left open.

  But it wasn’t Penelope. It was a man with a gun, a gun that was pointed straight at me. He walked quickly toward me, flanked by two other men with guns. Two more men in the rear held Penelope at gunpoint in the background.

  The lead man approached me. He was short, maybe 5’6”, and thin. This is what he told me. I was so terrified that I remember it word for word.

  He said, ‘You will walk up to your vault with us. If that vault isn’t open in two minutes, we will shoot your servant. Any delay after that and we’ll shoot you in the lower leg. Any delay after that and we’ll work our way up to something that WILL kill you. Understood?’

  I dimly remember nodding. I led the parade, me, five gunmen, and Penelope up the stairs to the room with the vault. Opening the vault wasn’t a problem. It opens when it recognizes the combination of my fingerprint and my voice.

  The vault door unlocked with the usual supersized click. The lead gunman kept his revolver trained on me as he went to open the door to the vault.

  He looked inside. ‘Now the jewel safe,’ he demanded.

  I just happened to have the passcode on me. That was good. I had forgotten the combination in my terror.

  My hands trembled so much that I almost fat fingered the wrong code, but I eventually got it all punched in. I heard the tumbler roll over. I swung the door open.

  ‘Whoa! What are you doing?’ my captor demanded.

  ‘Opening the safe,’ I shivered. ‘I thought that was what you wanted.’

  ‘I open the doors around here,’ he insisted.

  At that point, the two gunmen who flanked me raced to the open safe. They put the best jewel that I had in one velvet bag. They shoveled everything else into another identical velvet bag.

  Then they told us not to call the police until at least five minutes had passed…or else. And they left. And of course Penelope and I called the police almost right away, right after checking to see if they got into a getaway car that we could get a description of. Instead they all left on motorcycles with motorcycle helmets obscuring their ski masks. Two turned to the left. Three turned to the right. I couldn’t make out the tiny license plates on the backs of the bikes. No surprise. My vision isn’t the best. Unfortunately, Penelope couldn’t make them out either.

  So we called the cops. And it took an eternity for them to arrive thanks to that conspiring bitch who jumped off that bridge with a parachute. It was a nightmare.”

  “Do you have a description of the gunmen?” I asked.

  “The only one who talked was the lead gunmen. I have travelled extensively around the world. And I’m confident that the lead gunman was Iranian, possibly Iranian and British. He spoke British English, or I guess, English, based on the accent. He was the kind of person who would’ve said aluminium instead of aluminum. I could see under his mask that he had that certain brown complexion that one sees in Iranians, because they are Persian, and slightly different from Arabs, essentially the rest of the Middle East.

  I was too scared to look at the others closely. And no one else spoke,” Gertrude explained.

  “Is there a reason why someone with Iranian heritage would be interested in your jewels?” I followed.

  “The Turquoise Egg was in there,” Gertrude nodded. “The Egg’s provenance goes all the way back to Darius the Great, an early Persian ruler. That is why I can recognize an Iranian accent. I have had Iranian museums, collectors, and even people who I suspected were cutouts for the Iranian government trying to pressure me for years into donating the Turquoise Egg back to its quote unquote rightful home.”

  “What about the other jewels in there?” I wondered.

  G
ertrude sighed. “I was lucky in this respect. Almost all of my best jewels beside the Egg were on loan to museums, reputable museums, museums that I knew I could get my jewels back from. The Egg was in the safe. The only other show piece was a ruby which has value only because of its considerable size. It has no special provenance. I hired an investigator to try to find a provenance on the ruby, because the story behind the gem can be half, or even more than half of the value. But the investigator found nothing…”

  I saw it then. I saw a microexpression.

  Microexpressions are what the Secret Service allegedly uses to figure out that people are lying. You may think that you’re good at figuring out when people are lying to you, but you aren’t. The Secret Service, however, is.

  So I knew that Gertrude was probably lying to me about the story behind this stolen ruby.

  “…the only other thing in that safe was a fistful of diamonds. Diamonds are graded based on four cs. One of those cs is clarity. I love clarity! The diamonds have no great value, but every single one of them catches the light in such a beautiful way. Even though they were worth a lot less, I think that I miss them even more than the Turquoise Egg,” Gertrude sighed again.

  “How much were the gems worth?” I asked.

  “The Turquoise Egg was last appraised at ten million dollars,” Gertrude stated.

  I almost choked on the lemonade that I was stealing a sip from. “Ten million dollars!”

  “Ten million dollars,” Gertrude nodded.

  “How about the ruby?” I asked, trying to mask my suspicions.

  “Only fifty, seventy-five thousand tops,” Gertrude all but sneezed at basically my annual salary.

  “How about the diamonds?” I asked.

  “All of them together, maybe forty or fifty thousand, none of them are worth very much individually, most of them would be worth several hundred dollars, a few perhaps between one and two thousand tops,” Gertrude almost spat at two thousand.

  “How did you get the ruby?” I asked.

  “At auction, same with the Egg,” Gertrude declared. “There’s a jeweler on the island, Sanibel Jewelry, who got the diamonds for me.”

  There it was! Another microexpression!

  I thought for a moment. Then I said, “Is there anything else that you can remember?”

  Gertrude stared out into space for a moment. She shook her head.

  “Can I talk to Penelope on my way out?” I asked.

  “Certainly,” Gertrude replied. “Do you want me to summon her?”

  “Yes, please,” I nodded.

  Penelope added nothing. But at least she confirmed that Gertrude had been honest with me about the details of the theft. Still, I knew that there were things that Gertrude had lied to me about, chief among them, this ruby.

  It made me wonder.

  Was this Turquoise Egg a ten million dollar ruse? Was it the jeweled equivalent of that BASE jumper? Did that ruby have a secret? And did Gertrude and someone else find out what that secret was? Was the ruby the real reason for the theft?

  Or were the Turquoise Egg and the ruby all of a piece? Were they both Persian, Iranian in origin? And had they been stolen back by someone (possibly even agents of the Iranian government) who, perhaps rightly, felt that they had been stolen from them…even if that original theft had happened well before Gertrude “legitimately” purchased them at an auction.

  I had so many questions that I knew that Gertrude wouldn’t answer. But there was one thing she said that I kept coming back to.

  Her description of the lead gunman, the lead thief, matched Thad’s description of his old flame, and my host, Farhad, exactly. Farhad was short, thin, Persian, and had learned English in the United Kingdom. So he spoke English with a British accent.

  And as I have said. Sanibel is the whitest place that I have ever been. It’s whiter than the Czech Republic.

  Farhad might be the only Iranian American who wouldn’t be as easily noticed around here. Shopkeepers would recognize him, etc. He might be the only Persian who could go somewhat incognito in Sanibel and Captiva. And “travelling for business” would make a convenient alibi that could be gamed in any number of ways.

  Could I be spending my nights in a beautiful mansion purchased with money raised from the sale of gems purloined by a master international jewel thief?

  5

  When I got back home…I guess technically to Farhad’s home. I was surprised to see Thad lounging on the couch in a tank top, too short shorts, and flip flops. Next to him there was a bead of dew on a margarita glass that held some kind of icy, fruity looking cocktail that looked like it probably required every small kitchen appliance that Farhad owned to make and would have been more appropriately served in a hollowed out pineapple adorned with a little paper umbrella.

  “I was waiting for you,” he said like he suspected that I had been up to something naughty and wanted me to spill the juicy details.

  “I thought that you were going to be working all day,” I said.

  “I finished early,” Thad stated.

  I admired that someone as detailed oriented and schedule driven as Thad had been able to adapt and adjust to such a change in plans. If you would’ve asked me, I would’ve said it was fifty-fifty whether Thad would stop working if he had finished work earlier than scheduled or if he would just push a broom around like a classic hourly government worker pretending to work until the end of the day even though Thad had no time card to punch and no hourly form to fill out.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he looked at the drink.

  I couldn’t help but notice his little jowl wiggle when he turned his head. That made me note once again, just how round and hairless the man was. He was really this weird, bald and body bald, ball shaped little dude. He was like Frosty the Snowman if Frosty was made out of just a single ball of snow. He was what would happen if you translated the friendliest bulldog into human form and crossed him with one of those hairless, hypoallergenic cats that I always feel are staring at every human in the world as if to say, “Why did you do this to me? You’re a monster.”

  “You don’t know?” I laughed.

  “It’s like…Didn’t you ever go up to the convenience store when you were young and mix different amounts of every brand of pop and the slushy mixes into one cup just to see what would happen? Most of the time you had to pretend that you liked it. But every once in a while you’d come up with a mix that was better than any pop or slushy individually, and you’d wish that you had paid more attention to how you had mixed it. Because along with the revelation that your cherry slushy, cola, lemon lime, orange, and grape combination was transcendent came the revelation that it could never be recreated, at least not exactly.

  So I did the same thing here. This drink is basically every beverage that was in Farhad’s refrigerator, cabinet, and freezer. There’s some vodka in here. There’s some Grenadine in here. There’s some orange juice in here. There’s some blood orange soda in here. You get the idea. You blend it all up with a little ice, and it makes a surprisingly delicious drink that dare not speak its name. Because it has no name,” Thad observed.

  “Can you make me one?” I asked.

  “Girl, I have no idea what I did,” Thad exclaimed. “Plus I took the last of both the grenadine and the blood orange soda.”

  “Figures,” I said.

  “I was hoping we could go for a walk on the beach or just go sit out in the sun and sand. It would be a lovely contrast from the dust and debris that I have been dealing with almost all week,” Thad suggested.

  “I thought that those damn sand flies eat you alive on the beach,” I said.

  (Apparently, some people in Sanibel get horribly bitten by sand flies if they go to the beach. Most don’t, however. I’m lucky. The sand flies leave me alone. Thad gets bit horribly. I get it though. I think that if I was an insect and looked at Thad, I would guess that he tastes like a jelly donut, a Berliner. If I looked at me,
I would think that person probably tastes like the darkest, most bitter cold press coffee ever brewed.)

  “Please, Angie, this is the modern world, okay? They sell repellent, and I basically just took a bath in it hoping you’d say yes,” Thad insisted.

  “Sure,” I laughed. “Finish your drink and we’ll walk. I’m glad to see you. I have something that I want to talk to you about.”

  Thad sipped on his drink. I went to change into a bathing suit.

  We walked down the wooden dock that led over and around an orange tree, a key lime tree, and these very green bushes that seemed to grow everywhere like the kind of out of control chest hair that Thad obviously manscapes. There were even these weird little things that looked like cacti. Do cacti grow outside of a desert? I don’t know, but if they’re not cacti, they look exactly like those cacti that resemble the rounded blade on the end of a canoe paddle studded all over with thorns.

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?” Thad asked.

  The sun was halfway down the arc that it traces in the sky. (About three.) A cloud that looked suspiciously like a fake Groucho Marx moustache fashioned out of cotton drifted across the sky. The wind blew in over the Gulf. It was a light chop. (I’m learning the lingo.) But it stirred up water that wasn’t blue but rather colorless until colorless waves, resembling those that used to occasionally spill over the side of my mother’s tea cups when she stirred in honey too aggressively, overflowed onto the shore.

  “How well do you know Farhad?” I began.

  “I lived with him. I wanted to marry him. We’re still friends. How well do you want me to know him?” Thad squinted.

  “It’s just, here I am at his wedding, and I don’t even know the guy. What can I say to someone at the wedding who asks me? I’m friends with one of his exes. How do you know the groom?” I asked.

  “Come, what’s all this about?” Thad demanded.

  So I told Thad everything as we walked along, barefoot in the perfect sand.