He sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces.
Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days or else he will have him executed.
He eulogizes her as a faultless wife and mother of his three children, and describes how one day, she requested a rare apple while being ill.
He asked him where he had gotten it and the slave replied that he received it from his girlfriend, who had three such apples, which her husband found for her after a half-month journey.
After he returned home, however, his eldest son confessed to him that he was the one who took one of the apples behind his mother's back, and a slave had taken it and run off with it.
Harun, however, refuses to punish the young man out of sympathy, and instead sets Ja'far on a new assignment: to find the slave who caused the tragedy within three days, or be executed for his failure.
It is then, by complete accident, that he discovers a round object in her pocket, which she reveals to be an apple with the name of the Caliph written on it.
[7] According to Marzolph, the tale is present in "the oldest surviving manuscript" of the Arabian Nights compilation, and is considered to be part of "the core corpus" of the book.