Mysterious Mr Jacob , livre ebook

RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright John Zubrzycki 2012
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
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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 for 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- -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 tumu