I threw myself into the celebration.
And I checked my phone like a thousand times to see if maybe Key had texted or called.
He hadn’t.
As melancholy as it was, it was still beautiful. Things can be sad and beautiful.
The wedding ceremony was in the front yard. About a hundred people sat in white, wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle, and even more people, including me, stood behind those chairs. The grass looked like emerald colored threads of tinsel, as if the very ground was celebrating. The sky was a flawless blue. The sun seemed impossibly high in the sky, almost like it was the end of a spyglass behind which some distant Godhead was looking down lovingly. It was a perfect seventy degree day. But honestly there were some women wearing fur!
These Florida freeze babies. What do they think we do in January in Minnesota when it’s like one hundred degrees colder? I’m guessing that they think that if we have to walk more than a block we just ice up in place like a bag of frozen vegetables in a frosty, out of control freezer. But we remain cryogenically preserved so that when July comes and we finally melt, we’re still alive. Otherwise, obviously no one would be able to survive in Minnesota.
The ceremony itself was nice but of little note. The only thing that was different about it was that this was indeed the first wedding that I had been to with two grooms. That made it a little easier. I didn’t even have a chance at either one.
They exchanged rings. They kissed. We had a toast.
Then it was time to party.
I’m guessing that it will not surprise you to learn that Farhad really knows how to throw a party. There was a wait staff shuttling champagne around constantly. The ballroom was open and dance music rang out in the rafters.
Thad had to go bartend. So I was on my own.
I went out onto the dance floor. I danced with the few single, straight guys at the wedding. It was an act of charity.
Didn’t stop them from trying for more.
So I finally found a six year old girl who was dancing. She wanted to dance and dance and dance, but she couldn’t find a partner who could keep up with her.
So I offered to dance with her.
Here’s a tip for you. When you’re at a wedding, and a six year old girl wants to dance with you, don’t try to match her energy and intensity.
The mistake most people make when dancing with young kids is that they try to dance with those kids the way that they would dance with anyone else. They try to match up. Don’t do that. First of all, little kids haven’t learned that standard yet, and they don’t care if you do your own mismatched thing. Their idea of dancing is just moving in their own way by somebody else. Second, realize that, even if you want to, you won’t be able to keep up with them. I’m a marathoner, a pretty good marathoner, and I don’t try to keep up with six year old girls. They’re all ultramarathoners.
So I danced with this girl, in my own way, for hours. She kept up that same frenetic pace the whole time.
Her little black shoes hammered that white and black chessboard tile floor that Thad had installed.
(I had to admire Thad’s work a little. The floor seemed flawless. It was beautiful. It was perfectly laid out. It was completely level as far as I could tell. And, and this was important, it seemed spill resistant. Because there was a lot of champagne sloshing around, and some of it was from me.)
Eventually it was bed time for the little girl. Actually, it was probably way past bed time, but this was a special occasion.
Her parents thanked me.
“I don’t know how you keep up with her,” her father observed.
“I don’t,” I replied.
He looked at me like he was trying to determine if I had just laid a profound Zen koan on him, was drunk, or was just weird. It didn’t look like he was able to make his mind up between those three. So he turned away, perhaps questioning whether he should’ve let his only daughter dance with me for hours.
I was really at risk of spiraling into a drunken depression when that little dancing girl left. I looked around the ballroom. It was beginning to thin out. I checked to see if I’d heard from Key. Of course I hadn’t. But I was surprised to see that it was already midnight.
Then I saw her! Across the room was my salvation!
A woman over there was trying to drag her husband onto the dance floor. He was just a classic curmudgeon. He had only worn a sweater, or perhaps just put one on over his button down shirt and tie. His slacks looked like the kind of business casual slacks you only find on an endcap at a discount retailer, by housewares. He had his arms crossed. Even from across the room, I could see that he had his lips pressed so tightly together under his bushy white moustache that they were as pale as two long dead earthworms.
I heroically swept in. I offered to dance with her.
She turned to him as if to say, “See, I don’t know why you don’t want to dance with me. Even this strange woman who I don’t know from Eve wants to dance with me. I’m in demand.”
So I danced with her and had a few more glasses of champagne for a while.
Then I suddenly just had this feeling. I just knew that Key had come through at the eleventh hour and texted me.
So I parted from the dance floor. I checked my phone again. I was drunk enough to have fresh optimism.
And, as so often happens to drunks, I was proven wrong by reality.
I sighed.
Then I knew what I had to do. I had to find Thad and be there for him. Farhad had just married a douche. And I just knew that Thad had taken it hard. I had to heroically support him.
That shows you just how drunk I was. If I had been any less drunk, I would’ve realized that the last thing that Thad would ever want was some drunk chick just suddenly showing up and saying loud enough for everyone to hear, “Do you need a shoulder to cry on now that the only man that you ever loved married someone else?” Or believed that I could make the deep wound of watching the man you hoped to marry marry someone else disappear with a few drunken words like Thad was a three year old who still believed that all the pain associated with a skinned knee would just disappear after mommy kissed the boo boo.
But I really believed it at that moment.
So I headed back toward the lounge. To my surprise, the pink and white booths, tables, the pool table, and even that retro bar were completely empty.
It all seemed to make sense to me, and I thought I remembered Thad saying that he was going to be done at two in the morning. (He had told me no such thing.)
So I entered the punch code that let me out of the east wing of the house (with the swanky lounge, ballroom, etc.) I walked toward Thad’s bedroom.
His door was shut, but I knew that he was going to want to hear this. So I knocked softly. There was no response. So I pounded on the door and yelled, “Thad! It’s me. We have to talk.”
There was still no response.
Suddenly, for a reason I can only ascribe to drunkenness, I became convinced that Thad had attempted or was attempting suicide in there. I twisted the doorknob to open it, but also threw my shoulder into it like I had to force it open. I fell on my side, and even on Farhad’s plush carpeting, it hurt.
Plus it had been pointless. Thad wasn’t in his room.
So it immediately became my mission to find him. I wandered all over the house. I wandered past the library. I walked into the conservatory.
It was eerie to be in a big dark room with tropical plants and flowers. It looked like the kind of room where the bad guy is waiting to ambush the good girl. Like he might step out from behind a rubber tree or something with a pistol and rather than do the sensible thing and just kill her right there, he holds her hostage until the hero invariably rescues her after she helps in some small way. Perhaps by kicking his gun farther away after our hero knocks it out of the villain’s hand with his Kung Fu.
I thought about all of this and was giggling. What a weird sight. Some drunken, giggling woman surrounded by tropical plants, flowers,
and darkness.
I cleared that room as if Thad could have been kidnapped by a particularly aggressive Venus fly trap who was holding him in some dark corner.
And I went through the whole mansion like this. Finally, on the top floor, I saw a light on in a room. And the door was open. I walked up to it. I peeked my drunken head in. I saw a woman.
I walked in.
13
“Key’s been good. He still thinks of you often. I can tell,” I stated.
I looked into her singular brown eyes so alive that the various aspects of the iris seemed like something out of a cinema. It was a theater in the round broadcasting a fantastic story that radiated out of the pupil. Except this time the guy didn’t get the girl, the good guys didn’t win the war, and all of these memories weren’t the key to the meaning of life but rather the key to a prison within a prison. And only the menfolk were officially trusted with that key. And that key might not even open the door to her cell.
It might just open her chastity belt.
Those eyes had carefully preserved and dispersed the slow fire of a girl in hiding, a girl who still thought that this was all ridiculous, even if it was serious, hell, especially if it was serious. It was the fire of a girl who knew that the emperor was wearing no clothes. But if the emperor or her father had ever looked at her, she would look like just another normal if strangely enchanting woman. It was obvious at a glance to the rest of us though. To those of us who knew that the emperor wears no clothes.
Those eyes should be on the flag of an optimistic new nation struggling toward something better. They were on the flag of the Amazons.
And they looked at me quizzically at first. As if they hadn’t understood. Then they opened wide and enflamed.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the cops right now,” I stepped up to her and demanded.
She stepped back. Then she darted to a closet. She pulled out some weird, little white electronic thing. She plugged it in and set it by the door. The machine released a steady white noise. She shut the door.
Then she turned to me and said, “If you call the police now, you will create an international incident that no one wants. There are things that you don’t know.”
“Like?” I demanded.
“My name is Anahita,” she began. “And you are?”
“Angie,” I spat.
“Angie,” Anahita let out a long sigh. “There’s always something that goes wrong with these operations. I was hoping that this time it was just that BASE jumper washing up two doors down from the theft. But it turns out it’s you.
Let’s discuss this matter open and honestly. I think that if you know the truth, you will see why we can’t report this.
So, I will start. I will tell you everything. Then you can decide if you want to call the authorities.
My husband is a distinguished member of the Iranian government. A short time ago he was contacted by a go between, someone who has been judged to be a reliable intermediary for the Israelis.
He brought a proposal that seemed outrageous. But he insisted that it was serious, and, if undertaken, it could be the most important step in years on the path toward peace and stability in the Middle East.
Such a thing was toxic, completely toxic to both official governments. So the only possibility for this was unofficial.
So my husband informed me about it. He said that I was the only one that he could trust to run something like this. He asked me if I would do it.
I went back and forth over it. I came up with a plan to do it immediately. That was the easy part. I knew that the hard part would be the execution.
I was undecided about it. I knew that if I said that I could do it, or even if I believed I could do it, I would be made to do it.
But then I thought of Key. I thought of Key for the first time in years. And it was such a powerful memory. It was like a sunbeam whose warmth makes you realize that you had become numb to the fact that you were chilled to the bone.
I realized that if I said that I could do this, or at least believed that I could, I would get the best help. I would get help from people who might even be able to track Key down. I might be able to send him a letter. We could be partners. Perhaps not in the way that we were meant to be. But in a way.
And that was one of the things that made me say yes and undertake this whole foolish venture. The other was that I wanted to be at the wedding of my only son.
I don’t care that Farhad is marrying another man. I don’t even care that the other man is, how you say, an odious buffoon. Farhad is my son. I insist on being at his wedding.
So I hoped that this would all fall apart. I hoped that I would be going to Farhad’s wedding just to clean up a failed mission.
There was so much that had to go right so fast. We had to launder thousands. We had to set up a number of fake local bank accounts. My faith in my tie with Key would be tested. Would he be up for the task? Yes, I had four expert jewel thieves lined up, but I needed someone who knew the lay of the land, someone who could speak English and give commands. I found a British expat who had frequently vacationed on Captiva and had even been in the Weisswalder house once. It’s a miracle it all lined up. And now all I have to do is return to the Middle East with the Turquoise Egg and the Greenberg Ruby…”
“The Greenberg Ruby?” I could feel myself squint.
“This is an officially unofficial joint Israeli and Iranian operation,” Anahita stated. “Things always have to start off unofficial.
The Greenberg Ruby belonged to the mother of a man who serves in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. It was taken away by the Nazis before his mother was shipped off to her death at Auschwitz.”
“That’s horrible,” I stated.
“Gertrude Weisswalder didn’t tell you that, did she?” Anahita laughed a dark laugh. “She didn’t tell you that she hired a private investigator to investigate the origins of the Ruby. She was hoping to establish, I believe your word for it is provenance, a history of the piece. Because the history could add to the value of the piece. But she didn’t tell you that she found out that the Ruby had been stolen from a woman by the Nazis, and then the Nazis turned around and killed that woman. No, she didn’t tell anyone. She just paid the private investigator to stay silent, played dumb, and pretended that she didn’t know the bloody history of that Ruby.
And she had to. Because people would have cared.
Don’t get me wrong. The Greenberg family was greatly wronged. The theft of their Ruby no doubt hurts them every bit as much as the theft of the Turquoise Egg hurts Iran. But no one in the West cares about Iran. The only pain in the Middle East that anyone in the West seems to accept as real is the pain of white Jewish people. And people would and should have accepted the pain of man in the Knesset who had been robbed of his mother and her treasures.
But Iran has been wronged also. Gertrude Weisswalder probably told you very little about the Turquoise Egg. Darius the Great, blah, blah, blah.
But did you know that the Egg has a much more recent connection to Iran. Probably around the time you were being born, Iran and Iraq were engaged in a brutal war. America was on Iraq’s side back then. Maybe you don’t even know this. As I said, the pain of the white Jewish person, but America put its thumb on the scales. And America, your America, sided with Saddam Hussein. You remember Saddam. Can’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud, gassed his own people Saddam? He was a monster all his life. But he was America’s guy against Iran.
And because of that, Saddam’s men looted a cultural museum in Iran after winning a battle. Those men took the stolen artifacts to Saddam. And Saddam himself took the Turquoise Egg. He gave that Egg as a gift to the American ambassador to Iraq at the time for all of his help. That ambassador was Gertrude Weisswalder’s late husband, George. That wasn’t from some ancient time BCE. That was 1985.
So, you see that she stole from both Israel and Iran alike. And now these things have been repossessed by their rightful owners.
And Israel and Iran are finally doing something together besides exchanging threats.
So do you really want to call the authorities just so that old, blue haired bitch can get her so called stolen gems back?”
“But what about the diamonds?” I wondered.
“I don’t give a damn about them,” Anahita hissed. “We took them so it wouldn’t immediately arouse suspicion.
In fact, wait right there.”
Anahita went to a safe in her closet. She rummaged around.
“So were Farhad or that…buffoon involved?” I asked her back.
“No,” I watched the back of her head shake.
I looked for somewhere to rest my eyes. I ended up staring at the burqa laying on the bed. It looked ominous. Like it had dissolved the person who had been wearing it.
“Here, open your hand,” Anahita insisted.
I opened my hand.
She squeezed these hard, sharp lumps into that hand. They felt like a handful of jagged pebbles. She let go of her hand. I looked down.
I was holding a fistful of diamonds!
“Take them,” Anahita insisted. “If you figured this out, you deserve them. I was just going to put them in an envelope and drop them in some random mailbox on the way out of town anyway. I have no use for them. Gertrude has probably stolen gems from India and Africa too.”
I was too shocked to speak.
“I need to get some sleep,” Anahita insisted. “I have to leave around noon tomorrow and it’s already four. Please take your diamonds and allow me to retire.”
I nodded.
I walked out of there in a daze.
14
And I kept walking. I drifted by the conservatory with those plants. I drifted by the library. I drifted by the bedrooms. I walked into an empty lounge. I walked everywhere. Then I eventually walked toward the front door to get some air.
I stepped out.
There was someone sitting at the top of the two steps leading up to the door! I almost stepped on them.
They were slumped over. They didn’t even move when they heard me shut the door just a couple of feet behind them.
A Persian Gem Page 14