RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright © John Zubrzycki 2012
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EPUB ISBN 9788184003369
To my late father,
Jerzy Zubrzycki,
for teaching me the value of knowledge
CONTENTS
Prologue
1.
The Healer of Sick Pearls
2.
Black Amida
3.
Prostitutes, Princes and a Poisoning Case
4.
The Jeweller of Simla
5.
Mr 50 Per Cent
6.
All the Powers of Moses—and More
7.
The Mysterious Mr Isaacs
8.
A Clever Conjuror
9.
The Lion’s Jaws
10.
Spy Vs Spy
11.
A Piece of Sparkling Vanity
12.
The Price of Justice
13.
The Imperial Diamond Case
14.
The Ghost of the Chowmahalla Palace
15.
Searching for Jacob’s Shop
16.
The Devil Worshippers
17.
Broken China
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
PROLOGUE
PERCHED on a slender stalk, the diamond quivered and gleamed as it slowly revolved in its specially built glass cabinet throwing shards of coloured light across the mirrored hall. Its size and lustre drew gasps from the pressing crowds. Rarely had a single gem created such a sensation. Weighing 184 carats, the Imperial was the largest brilliant-cut diamond in the world. Next in size came the Regent which weighed 141 carats. The fabled Kohinoor was a mere 106. The stone had earned its name a few months earlier after it was shown to the Prince of Wales, who exclaimed, ‘What an imperial gem!’1 Now it was the standout attraction among £8 million worth of diamonds in the French jewellery section of the Exposition Universelle of 1889.
The Imperial’s journey to Paris—where it shared the limelight with such novelties as the recently opened Eiffel Tower, a faux African village with 400 negroes, and William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s Wild West Show—had begun a few years earlier in Northern Cape Province. In the winter of 1884, a sharp-eyed surveillance officer working for the Kimberley Mines noticed an oval-shaped rock with a rough jagged fracture at one end.2 As he picked it up, he felt its weight and saw the octahedral shape of a crystal protruding from the rock. Immediately, he knew that what he was holding was one of the largest rough diamonds ever found.
Ordinary mine workers were searched to prevent pilfering, but the officer’s position exempted him from the usual full body pat down and he managed to steal his find out of the mine without being detected. He then contacted four smugglers who paid £3000 for the 457-carat rough. A night of gambling and heavy drinking saw two of the smugglers’ gang blow their share. The others made it to Cape Town where an English dealer handed them £19,000 in exchange for the stone. With the diamond hidden in his pocket to avoid paying duty, the dealer boarded a steamer for London and began hawking it around the city’s jewellery market, Hatton Garden. A nine-member syndicate bought it for £45,000, a 15-fold increase in price in just a few months, but still, a mere fraction of its ultimate value.
On April 9, 1897, in the presence of the Queen of Netherlands, M.B. Barends, the master craftsman of the polishing mills of Jacques Metz in Amsterdam, began shaping the stone, using a special rotating wheel hardened with diamond dust known as a scaife, a pair of clamps, a microscope and a set of precision measuring instruments. It was decided to cut the diamond as a brilliant to increase its value and appeal. It was a painstakingly slow process that demanded exacting attention to the direction of the grain running through the octahedral to ensure that each angle and parameter was cut perfectly. Barends could run his scaife for only an hour at a time to prevent the stone from overheating. It was more than a year before he unveiled a cone-shaped 58-facet steel-blue brilliant.
‘The Imperial is without a single flaw,’3 a newspaper reported at the time. ‘It is perfect in colour (white) and brilliance, and is among diamonds which are unmatched as regards colour, purity, brilliance and cut, by a long way the largest and heaviest cut diamond on the face of the earth.’
As it spun slowly in its heavily guarded case at the Paris Exposition, the walnut-sized Imperial caught the eye of European potentates, mining barons, bankers and Oriental autocrats, but its price put it out of the reach of all but a handful of buyers. Estimates of its value ranged from £300,000 to £800,000 or almost £50 million in today’s currency, making it the most expensive stone ever to come on the market.
But not everyone one was deterred by the price. Thousands of miles and another continent away, in Simla—the summer capital of the British Raj—was a man who saw the diamond’s value as an opportunity, not an impediment. Word had reached him through his network of agents that stretched through the passes of the Hindu Kush, across the deserts of Arabia and into Europe that the Imperial had come on the market. He had watched India’s princes compete against each other to build the biggest palaces, gather together the largest harems and own the most valuable jewels. From his cramped shop on Simla’s famous Mall, Alexander Malcolm Jacob began to plot what would be the most audacious diamond sale in history.
Jacob was no stranger to the world of trading in gems. Though he referred to himself as someone who dealt ‘largely in curiosities’,4 he was India’s most successful purveyor of precious stones, jewellery and antiquities, and was rumoured to be ‘rich almost beyond the dreams of Aladdin’.5 Not even the traders of Delhi’s fabled Chandni Chowk, who had built their reputations over centuries by plying their wares to the courts of Mughal emperors, could compete with him on price, quality and clientele.
He was also a man of mysterious origin, dubious reputation and colourful infamy. In newspapers and books and at the highest echelons of the Raj, Jacob was variously described as a ‘pseudo-Arabic genius’6 living in Simla in a Haroun al-Rachid setting, ‘a pure-blooded Persian’, an Armenian, a Greek, a Pole, an Italian, a Turk, a Gypsy or, more generally, ‘as belonging to some nationality of the mysterious East’. In appearance, he was a combination of any or all of these.
By religion he was referred to as Jewish, though others swore he was a Parsi, a Christian or a Muslim. In his later years, he referred to himself as ‘a Buddhist by adopted religion, and an “adept” or “sage” by profession’.
By reputation, he was either an astute businessman, or a ‘wealthy old wizard’ or a swindler who hypnotized his clients and made them trade whole kingdoms fo
r a single precious stone. ‘He’s a merchant; wheat, diamonds, dust, bones—anything out of which he can screw a pice’,7 one writer exclaimed disparagingly. The Times of London once described him as a ‘man of very varied experience’ with a ‘reputation all over India as an intelligent, indefatigable bric-à-brac hunter’ and ‘dealer in costly jewels’.8
In 1996, I saw the Imperial Diamond on display at the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad. Renamed the Jacob, it again commanded attention, this time in an exhibition devoted to the Crown Jewels of the Nizams, the dynasty that had once ruled over large swathes of southern India. The customer Jacob would groom to buy the stone was Mahboob Ali Khan, the opium-addicted, incredibly wealthy sixth Nizam. The transaction set an unbroken record for the highest price ever paid for a single gem and triggered the most sensational case to come before the Calcutta High Court in decades.
Few people among the crowds viewing the diamond in its roped-off, bullet-proof glass cabinet in Hyderabad had any idea of its dark history—or of the man after whom the stone was now named. I soon found out why. For someone who had achieved celebrity status in his lifetime, Jacob was an elusive and enigmatic figure. He rarely dismissed any of the more preposterous notions about his antecedents. He also played down his successes, once claiming that the jewellery side of his business did not make enough profit to feed his forty Tibetan terriers.
As one writer observed caustically, Jacob revealed few facts about his life in case it got in the way of ‘his affectation of mysterious authority’.9 The exact location of his famous curiosity shop in Simla has baffled historians for decades. Adding to the mystery was a reference to a diary he kept, a journal said to be so detailed it would lift the lid off some of the most sensitive secrets and scandals of the British Raj.
What was often a frustrating, meandering search eventually brought immense rewards.
I uncovered Jacob’s life one fragment at a time—through letters to an Armenian middleman, annotations on secret files, obscure references in out-of-print history books, throwaway lines in newspaper reports. A footnote in a book on the caliphate revealed a brother who was an interpreter and agent for William Scawen Blunt, the English writer, poet, politician, rebel and explorer. A newspaper clipping from 1881 hinted at a romantic relationship between Jacob and Harriet Tytler, the only Englishwoman present at the siege of Delhi during the Mutiny.
Jacob’s story went beyond an Arabian Nights-like tale of magic and mystery. It began at his birthplace on the banks of the Tigris in Ottoman Turkey and encompassed some of the most tumultuous events of the day. Jacob’s rise in popular imagination owed much to the fascination of the West with the supernatural and its discovery of Eastern mysticism. His reputation for espionage and political intrigue coincided with the height of the Great Game.
The British author Frederick Heath who knew Jacob in his final years insisted that the facts about his life were more remarkable than any fiction. When his real story is written, Heath insisted, ‘we shall possess a living romance not coined from the gold of some great imagination, but fashioned out of the plain metal of fact—a romance that will rob fiction of one of its greatest powers, and invest actual life with a wonder and mystery that even in our strangest dreams we never imagined it could possess’.10
What follows is an attempt to do just that.
CHAPTER ONE
THE HEALER OF SICK PEARLS
UNABLE to contain his curiosity any longer, the young writer dismounted from his horse and approached the doorway. A glimmer of candlelight played behind a beaded curtain. Through the soot-smeared windows he could just make out flashes of semi-precious stones embedded in statues of Hindu gods, a flake of gold leaf hanging from a Buddhist altar and the damascened blade of a scimitar.
A small sign announced that the shop sold ‘jewellery and bijouterie’. Entry was by appointment or, as the inquisitive visitor later found out, by a secret password. It stood on the lower side of the Mall, the great promenade that served as the focal point of Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj. The shop’s verandah was flush with the road, while the back was built over a sheer hillside and looked down into the chimneys of neighbouring houses and into the cacophonous ‘Native Bazaar’ below.
The shop shared none of the airs of its neighbours—grand establishments such as Bourne & Shepherd Studios; M. Rubenstein & Co., ‘Court & Historical Hair Dressers, Perfumers, Theatrical Wig Makers & Men’s Fancy Costumiers’; Thacker, Spink & Co., ‘Publishers of guides, maps and directories’; and the famous jewellery firm, Hamilton & Co. It was double-fronted with wooden framed windows and a small balcony for protection against the monsoon downpours.
The writer had passed by many times and had heard strange and wonderful stories about its owner—a man who dabbled in Eastern mysticism and the supernatural, and dealt not just in gems and curios but also in secrets brought to him by agents from as far away as the Hindu Kush.
As he parted the beaded curtain and stepped inside the dimly lit room, the first thing he noticed was the smells: ‘A whiff of musk, a puff of sandalwood and a breath of sickly sweet jasmine oil’. It took a few moments to adjust to the darkness. What he saw then took his breath away.
There were Tibetan ghost daggers and prayer wheels, devil-dance masks, ‘horned masks, scowling masks, and masks of idiotic terror’. In a corner, stood a Japanese warrior, mailed and plumed, and a score of lances, swords and daggers. There were turquoise and raw amber necklaces, bangles of green jade; incense sticks packed in jars crusted over with raw garnets; a wall covered with peacock blue draperies; gilt figures of Buddha and small lacquer altars; Russian samovars with turquoises on the lid; egg-shell china sets in octagonal cane boxes; yellow ivory crucifixes from Japan; carpets in dusty bales that smelled atrociously; Persian water jugs; dull copper incense-burners with friezes of fantastic devils running round them; tarnished silver belts; hairpins fashioned out of jade, ivory, and plasma; all sorts of arms, ‘and a thousand other oddments that were cased, or piled, or merely thrown into the room’.1
He then caught sight of a man with a green shade over his eyes, sitting at a table in a corner of the room, humming softly to himself. The young man watched closely as, one by one, with small, white hands, he picked up pearls from a tray and threaded them on a silken string. He had an olive complexion, thin lips, a meticulously manicured and slightly curved moustache, an aquiline nose and a broad forehead. But it was his eyes that captivated the visitor the most. They were dark and piercing, with such intensity of gaze that it felt as if they were trying to read the thoughts that were passing through his mind.
‘Those things are nothing,’ the man said, looking up at his unexpected guest. ‘I buy them because they are pretty, and sometimes I sell—if I like the buyer’s looks. My work is on the table—some of it.’2 As the visitor looked down, he saw red, blue and green sparkles of precious stones and the occasional vicious blue-white spurt of a diamond.
‘There is no one but me who can doctor a sick pearl and re-blue turquoises,’ he said. ‘I grant you opals—any fool can cure an opal—but for a sick pearl there is only me. Suppose I were to die! Then there would be no one … Oh no!’
The man threading the pearls was Alexander Malcolm Jacob, and the words were Rudyard Kipling’s rendering of the conversation when he transformed the Simla jeweller and his shop into Lurgan Sahib’s school for spies in his ‘Great Game’ classic, Kim.
Kipling had recently been appointed assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette and had begun publishing the short stories about Anglo-Indian life that would soon make him one of the most celebrated authors of English literature. At the time of his visit, he was staying at Kelvin Grove, the house of James Wheeler, co-owner of the Gazette and proprietor of the Alliance Bank. The mysterious man he had stumbled upon, he told Kipling, was one of his best customers.
Kipling would have found the atmosphere inside Jacob’s shop intoxicating. Like the young writer, Jacob moved easily between Simla’s European, Eurasian and
Indian spheres. He also switched effortlessly between the realm of officialdom and the shadowy world of spies and secret agents which, for Kipling, provided a rich source of material for his stories. Jacob’s reputation was soaring. A few months earlier, the Times of India had portrayed him as a man ‘possessed of almost untold wealth’3 and a figure of ‘political importance’, a skilled sportsman and a graceful rider. ‘His extraordinary physical beauty, his complete mastery of English, his varied accomplishments, his princely charity and profuse hospitality have won him a recognized standing in Simla society. The accident of his Eastern birth had been completely forgotten. He mixed with the Anglo-Indians as one of themselves.’
Kipling went to Simla in May 1883. It was his first ‘season’ in the hill station, shorthand for one of the strangest annual migrations in history—the overland exodus of the Viceroy and his Council—followed by an army of civil servants, their families and staff—from the putrid plains of steaming Calcutta to the cool and verdant slopes of the Himalayas.
For six months of the year, the affairs of more than 300 million people were directed from what Kipling disparagingly referred to as ‘The Abode of the Little Tin Gods’. What had begun with the construction of a rustic cabin by Captain Charles Kennedy in 1822 on a ridge 7000 ft above sea level overlooking the Himalayas on one side and the baking-hot plains of Punjab on the other, had developed rapidly after Sir John Lawrence decided in 1864 that Simla should be the summer capital of the Raj.
The first mass migration of the secretariat staff, clerks and servants took place in April of that year, a total of 484 individuals who trudged up the Cart Road, passing through dense forests and skirting deep ravines in a variety of conveyances, including palanquins, carriages and elephant litters. Lawrence justified the cost by drawing up accounts to show that of the 400,000 rupees the Government of India spent during those months in Simla only 64,000 rupees went towards assembling the Council. The extra expenses were more than compensated by his belief that, ‘we will do more work in one day here than in five down in Calcutta’.4 Home-sick civil servants tried to replicate the old country, giving the quaint bungalows perched precariously on ledges looking out over the Himalayas names like Rookwood, Daisy Bank, Bonny Moon and Windermere. They held picnics in the pine forests, played tennis at the Viceregal Lodge and attended poorly acted plays by the Amateur Dramatic Society at the appropriately named Gaiety Theatre.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 1
