A Persian Gem

by Jeff Isaacson

  Don’t judge me.

  I met Thad at the appointed time. I knew he’d be there right on time. And he was.

  I wanted to sit out on the patio. But again with the tank top. So we sat inside.

  After being out, I could kind of understand Thad believing that the weather was cold. Not because it was cold, but because people, probably locals, clearly believed that it was cold.

  On my run, and on the beach, I had seen people in hoodies, with the hood up. I had even seen people wearing those puffy jackets that look like rolls of a garbage bag like fabric filled with love handles of baby fat spilling over and over again. I’ve seen people in Minnesota wearing those jackets when it was below zero. Here in Florida, they wear them when the temperature is in the low sixties. I had never seen such freeze babies before in my life.

  I ordered a grouper reuben. I told Thad that he could have half.

  “No,” he shook his head. “Unless it’s pizza, I’ve got to watch my figure.”

  We chatted for a while about not much at all. Thad and I enjoyed some tropical drink that I had never heard of. Maybe it only existed in Florida, or maybe even just at the resort. It tasted like every form of citrus juice mixed with top shelf vodka. It was unimaginative but delicious and, like every drink down here, the orange juice was the star of the show.

  We sat in an open dining room that was part of a larger lobby. Guests shuttled in and out. One or two checked in, or at least checked on something at the front desk. The empty tables in front of us were covered in linen and ornately folded, mauve napkins. Maybe it was the white linen, but there was something ghostly about those empty tables.

  Beyond the empty tables was a bar fashioned out of dark wood. A single bartender in a fancy white shirt, tie, and stylish vest held wine glasses up to the light and then polished off the water spots that he could descry with a white cloth that almost looked like it had been cut from the linen on the ghostly tables.

  As I looked up at the bar, I couldn’t help but notice a man come in.

  He was Vietnamese, or Vietnamese American. He was a couple of inches taller than me. He had a little bit of salt in his pepper hair, but I would describe it as mostly pepper. His jaw was solid, settled, and no doubt had been even more strongly defined in his youth. But it looked better now that it had been softened just a little with the settling of time. His cheekbones were high and delicate, like something one might see in a ballerina. Those cheekbones gave his face just the right feminine touch. But those alert black eyes were the most amazing thing that I had ever seen.

  My best friend Alyssa and I had to write a report on a cultural event from another culture back at the U of M, back in college. We had gone to this opening of a Buddhist temple. It was colorful and lovely and neither one of us understood very much, but we took lots of pictures because the temple, from the statue of Buddha himself, to the brightly colored wheels that people spun, were a visual feast.

  But what was most interesting was the young Buddhist monks. When Alyssa and I walked past them, their faces and their eyes lit up. But what was weird about that was that there wasn’t even a trace of sexuality in it. They had this raw, unfiltered, childlike delight in the two of us for some reason. They were like small children who had seen a squirrel or a bird that they believed would bring them good luck. It was bizarre. Alyssa and I both agreed it was bizarre. So we watched them to see if they always acted like that, or if they only acted like that around us. And it turned out that they always had a childlike delight, but they were rarely as delighted as they had been with us.

  Alyssa and I didn’t know what to make of it. But we both concluded that they had some kind of mastery. That being a Buddhist monk did something to you. It transformed you in a powerful way. It gave you some type of knowledge that I had never seen in the world before or since.

  At least until the moment that man walked into the bar.

  His black eyes had that kind of knowledge, that kind of realization. But unlike the Buddhist monks, he was also on the prowl. He wasn’t just a master of the spiritual. He was a master of the material.

  He was the most intriguing man I had ever seen. And he was damn sure good looking enough.

  He came in and sat down at the end of the bar.

  “Go sit down at the other end of the bar, and cast a subtle glance at him,” Thad prodded me.

  “Is it that obvious?” I laughed.

  “Yes,” Thad nodded emphatically.

  “He’s interesting looking,” Thad added. “Can’t always judge a book by its cover. He does look interesting though, but kind of old.”

  “I’d say distinguished,” I decided.

  “Then get in there,” Thad commanded pushing me toward the bar.

  I went up and sat on the other end of the bar. It looked like my mystery man was planning on meeting someone. He kept looking everywhere and nowhere at once. And I was sure that it was some woman who was coming to meet with him.

  Even so, I kept glancing.

  Then I saw him check his watch again, but in a way that looked like he was trying to hide that this was the final time. That something was about to happen. He stood up from the bar stool, laid a ten dollar bill on the bar, and he walked toward me.

  I was shaking. I couldn’t speak or barely even breathe. Then he stopped right next to me.

  But only to adjust his shoe. And then he walked on by. He walked right out the door.

  I sighed. I stirred my polycitrus vodka with a finger like it was salve for my wounds. I took another drink.

  I moped up at the bar for a while. The bartender asked me if I needed anything. And by anything, I think that he didn’t just mean to drink. He also meant someone to commiserate with. But I refused the offer.

  Several moments later I noticed something. My mystery man had left without his laptop bag! It was still just sitting there, leaning against what had been his barstool.

  I raced out the front door to see if maybe, just maybe he was still in the parking lot. I stepped out onto the sidewalk next to a sloped little c curve of a place to drive up and check into the resort. The parking lot was some distance away, and I didn’t see anybody out there amid the sprinkling of what looked like rental cars parked within a perimeter of palms.

  I walked back into the resort. And I couldn’t believe what I saw!

  Some woman in a hoodie with the hood pulled so tight over her face that I couldn’t even really see her was walking past me clutching a computer bag that looked mysteriously like the one my distinguished crush had left behind!

  I looked by his barstool. The bag was gone!

  “Thief!” I yelled at the woman.

  She took off running with the laptop bag flailing at her side.

  8

  That was a mistake.

  Even in flip flops I knew that I could outrun her.

  I dashed after her, down a long hall. She must have been a runner. At a minimum, she was athletic. And she had that long, lean body. She might have even been in track as a high schooler.

  I still caught up to her just before an elevator bank and a flight of stairs. I decided not to tackle her.

  It felt like concrete underfoot.

  So I ran past her and whirled around. I stopped her in her tracks.

  And for the first time I got a good look at that little disk of a compressed face framed by the hood of that hoodie. That wrinkled circle of a yellow hood almost looked like it was made out of a ring of crinkle cut French fries, and the silver dollar pancake of a face peeking out was obviously black…and familiar.

  Yes, the delicate bulb of the nose was almost like a brown, LED, Christmas light. The dark eyes, were like the black on the back of a circular refrigerator magnet swimming in an almond shaped pool filled with milk from that same almond, thin and a bit watery. The high curl of the upper lip arched over the bottom of the hoodie right by a pronounced philtrum. It was definitely her. I didn’t need to see the whole face to know that.

  We just stood there and stared at each
other for a moment. Then she turned to run in the opposite direction.

  Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. I guess I should’ve tackled her.

  Fortunately, just at that moment, a panting Thad arrived with a fresh coating of head sweat. And she was completely hemmed in.

  She turned back to me.

  “What do you want?” she hissed.

  “I want you to give me the laptop bag that you just stole,” I hissed back.

  “It’s mine,” she growled. “Somebody left it specifically for me. And it’s none of your damn business anyway.”

  “Well, I’m going to make it my business,” I said.

  Over her shoulder, I could see Thad swallow hard. And even I was surprised at how much of a hard ass I was being.

  “No, you’re not,” she insisted.

  “This is what we’re going to do,” I stated. “You’re going to hand the laptop bag over to me. Then the three of us are going to get into our van in the parking lot, and we’re going to have a little talk.”

  “Ha!” the woman laughed. “What makes you think that I’m going to do that?”

  “BASE jump much?” I asked.

  “You bitch,” she said, but she handed over the laptop bag.

  “This way,” I said.

  Thad got in the driver’s seat of the minivan. I sat in the captain’s chairs in the back with the BASE jumper.

  The first thing that I did was open the laptop bag.

  “Holy Shit!” I screamed.

  “What? What is it?” Thad demanded, turning around.

  “It should be twenty thousand dollars in unmarked twenty dollar bills,” the BASE jumper said. “I guess it’s gone now. I should’ve known this whole thing was too good to be true. Hell, I knew the whole thing was too good to be true, but I did it anyway. All this risk and I’m only going to get half of my payment.”

  “We’re not going to keep your money,” I stated.

  “What?” the stunned BASE jumper startled.

  “Let’s think about this, Angie, okay,” Thad said.

  “Thad, this is dirty money,” I pointed out.

  “Okay, we thought about it,” Thad decided.

  “You two aren’t thieves?” the BASE jumper looked stunned. “Then what are you, cops? Am I under arrest?”

  “We’re not thieves or cops. Our interests in you are our own,” I replied. “But if you don’t answer my questions honestly, we will call the cops. So tell us the truth, and remember that we know many of the facts of this matter. We will know if you’re lying.”

  The BASE jumper loosened her hood so that I could finally see her whole face. She studied me for a moment. Then she turned and cast a look up at the back of Thad’s head because Thad had turned away from us.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “You two do seem to know a lot. I have no idea how you knew about this exchange. I didn’t even know about it myself until about two hours ago.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” I suggested. “What’s your name?”

  “Shanice Benjamin,” she stated.

  “Benjamin?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s a stage name. Because I’m all about the Benjamins. I act. I model,” she nodded.

  “And you BASE jump,” I pointed out.

  “I’m a skydiving instructor. To pay the bills,” she nodded again.

  “Who hired you to BASE jump?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  I glared at her.

  “What? I swear to you on my mother’s grave that I don’t know. I just got some cryptic message on this app I have?” she insisted.

  “An encrypted app?” Thad turned and asked.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And the messages in this app disappear after a specified amount of time which you can set…within limits.”

  “So what was the message you received in this encrypted app?” I followed up.

  “I…” she paused. “I don’t remember it exactly.”

  “Paraphrasing it is fine,” I replied.

  “It was something like: we’d like to hire you to BASE jump off of the highest point of the Causeway connecting Fort Myers and Sanibel/Captiva for $40,000 on a specific day and time of our choosing. We will pay you twenty thousand up front and the other twenty thousand upon completion of the jump. The only catch is that you MUST (they capitalized all of must, I remember that exactly) jump at the exact time on the exact day that we ask you to and you MUST change into a bikini right after your jump. We will arrange for flights, transportation to and from the airport, and a place for you to stay. If you are interested just message back a y. If we don’t receive a y within five minutes, we will move on.

  It was something like that.”

  “So you messaged back y, and what happened?” I demanded.

  “They gave me the day, the time, and asked me to message y back one more time. So I did,” Shanice sighed.

  “And then?” I probed.

  “I picked up a laptop bag, similar to this one that just like today had been left in a very specific place at a very specific time for me to pick up and walk out with. The first time it had been left in an out of the way place in the Chicago Public Library. I walked out. I was shocked. There was twenty thousand dollars in there in twenties just like this. Plus I had a reservation code for airline tickets.

  Shortly after that, I got a message on my app that said that a hired driver would be holding a sign for me that read just the letter W when I got to Fort Myers. He would take me to South Seas where I was to give my name as Janelle Temple. They said that the resort would give me the key to a room without question. Which they did.

  To my surprise, I found the keys to a car in my room. I promptly received instructions to drive that car to the Causeway for my jump, and just abandon it on the roadside by where I had jumped and not worry about it. They reminded me to wear a bikini under my BASE jumping gear and to strip down to that bikini when I swam for shore,” Shanice reported.

  “This didn’t strike you as strange?” I puzzled.

  “What do you think?” she laughed. “Of course it struck me as beyond strange!

  I was so dubious about the entire thing that the first thing that I did after I got my first laptop bag full of twenties was to take a twenty to a convenience store in my neighborhood that checks every twenty dollar bill with one of those markers to see if it’s counterfeit. I knew they’d believe me if I said that someone must’ve just given me a counterfeit bill. But I spent it. The marker proved it. Someone had really just given me $20,000 for something that I would’ve done for free.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. So I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Mama needs a new pair of just about everything,” Shanice smiled a little.

  “Yes, but you had to think something was going on. Why did you think that someone was willing to pay all this money to have you do this?” I wondered.

  “I thought it was some rich guy with some weird sexual fetish of BASE jumping paired with a bikini. I thought that he had seen some of my modeling pics and maybe had a drone with a camera that would follow me or something. I really did. I just thought that it was some weird, old, Florida pervert. To be honest, I even wondered if it could be Trump. Lord knows, he was probably at Mar-a-Lago,” Shanice laughed.

  “You know what you were used for,” I stated.

  “I do now. At least I think that I do,” Shanice nodded. “I think that I was hired to distract from that jewel theft.”

  “But you don’t know?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “I had nothing to do with any of that. If you want to call the cops on me for BASE jumping, you broke your word, but I can’t deny that I did that. I know less than nothing about any jewel theft. I’m serious as a heart attack when I say that I thought that I had been hired by some rich, old freak. I don’t know a damn thing about any jewel theft,” Shanice declared.

  I studied her. No microexpressions.

  I examined the rest of the laptop bag. Nothing else except a business ca
rd, which I looked at and kept.

  I handed the bag and all the money back to Shanice.

  “I’m keeping the business card that I found,” I announced.

  “Okay?” Shanice clearly feared for my sanity. “Am I free to go?”

  I nodded.

  “Wait, unless there’s something that you want to know Thad,” I added.

  “Do you know a man named Nez?” Thad demanded.

  “Good question,” I observed.

  “No,” Shanice declared.

  “What about a man named Farhad?” Thad followed up.

  “No,” Shanice shook her head.

  Both responses were free from microexpressions.

  There was a long awkward pause where I waited to see if Thad would ask something else. But he didn’t.

  So I told Shanice that she was free to go.

  I got out too and climbed back up into the front seat with Thad. I turned my attention to the business card that I had just found.

  “Please tell me that he was dumb enough to have his own business card in that bag,” Thad pleaded.

  “No, this is the card for a female director of the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum,” I sighed.

  “Maybe he goes to work in drag,” Thad suggested.

  I just looked at Thad.

  “What? I bet he’d look good in drag. Best of both worlds,” Thad replied.

  “You think his drag queen name would be Amy Wilson?” I chuckled.

  “No,” Thad shook his head.

  I took out my phone. I dialed the number on the business card. I got a message that said that Amy Wilson would be out of the office until nine o’ clock that next morning. I hung up.