Unsafe Deposit

by J. E. Kellenberger

  It sat well in his hand. He twisted and turned and swivelled it to its most comfortable position in his palm. It was oblong in shape. One end was relatively fat and round, the other relatively flat and sharp. When the flat end was nestled up against the root of his middle finger the bulbous end extended to the bottom of the V-shape formed by the meeting of two major crease lines in the palmer skin. When he closed his opposing thumb and little finger he could hold the red stone firmly. He would draw the flatter, sharper end across the leaf stems near their bases hoping that this would separate each leaf from its parent plant. When he did this a thin ridge near the tip easily sliced the leaf from the main stem, leaving a clean, surgical cut. It was his first tool and he would safeguard it for future use. Thousands of years would pass with the rough stone being passed down to succeeding generations and its use as a cutting tool remaining largely unchanged. It wasn’t until the Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from the western coast and settled in East Africa bringing with them basic tools in metal and the methods for making them that the stone’s former use became redundant and it metamorphosed from tool to bauble.

  It had come into the possession of the Bantu-speaker who had learned the knack of exposing it to intense shafts of light in the midday sun and he had been able to amuse and entertain fellow tribesmen with the remarkable chain reaction it caused in the ruby, as if by magic. The Bantu-speaking peoples lived in villages in a hierarchical society in which the chief and elders governed the tribesmen and directed events. Magic was the sole preserve of the village chief to whom the Bantu-speaker was finally required to pay homage in the form of the rough stone.

  The first European to reach Tanganyika was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama who arrived in 1498. The Portuguese were at first peaceful but within a few years they had subjugated the local population by force along a narrow but long coastal belt. They were eventually driven out almost two centuries later by Arabs migrating south from Oman and who remained the dominant power in the region until the middle-nineteenth century when Europeans began to explore inland Tanganyika. In the 1840s two Germans, Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, reached Mount Kilimanjaro and in the 1850s two Britons, Richard Burton and John Speke, reached Lake Tanganyika. In the 1860s the first missionaries arrived. Then in 1885 the Germans began taking over. A German named Karl Peters formed the German East Africa Company which made treaties with African chiefs and although this company acted independently of the German government it received its blessings. Meanwhile the British had taken control of the island of Zanzibar. In 1890 Britain and Germany signed a treaty dividing the area between them. Britain took Zanzibar and Germany took mainland Tanganyika. Colonial rule in Tanganyika started in 1891 when the German government took direct control.

  The village chief was beguiled by the shiny trinkets, the brightly coloured silks and the pungent spices that the town-dwelling native had shown him when he visited their isolated village. These goods had arrived from Indian and Chinese ports as global trade had expanded to serve the new colonies of the European powers. Increasingly his younger tribesmen were slipping away from the village at night and trekking to the smaller towns along the coastal belt where the town-dwelling native had told them stories of an easier and better life. The village chief needed to obtain something contemporary from the town-dwelling native in order to maintain his status and command the obedience of his tribesmen. The town-dwelling native had shown him a wooden box with a horn and when he turned a handle it made strange, rhythmical noises. It was an example of the early gramophone, a type further developed and sophisticated from originals of the mid-1850s by the German-American Emile Berliner using flat discs and a clockwork motor and which would, in time, be marketed under the trademark “His Master’s Voice”.

  The native town dweller moved from one isolated village to another with his goods on the back of two heavily laden donkeys. The constant bumpy ride must have caused the hairline crack in the disc, he reflected. It would still work but probably not for long. It just had to work long enough for him to put sufficient distance between himself and the village elder because he had no intention of returning. But he wanted that red stone that the village elder kept in a wicker basket in his wooden hut and the gramophone would get it.

  Modern gold mining in Tanganyika started in the German colonial era beginning with gold discoveries in 1894. The sea captain was sitting on a tethered rope hold on the dock, relaxing and sunning himself in the early morning warmth whilst watching his first mate supervise the unloading of mining machinery from the holds of his wooden vessel. With few chances to go ashore, even an hour or so on the dockside was a welcome break from his cramped cabin and the bridge. A man sidled up to him, not a native of East Africa but a Caucasian dressed in European clothing, a German he guessed. He had a proposition. He was a trader and hustler who had come out to the German colony to make his fortune.

  Up to the age of fourteen the hustler had lived his entire life in an orphanage in the medieval town of Ulm in the Swâbische Alb of southern Germany where he had been taken by the pasteur who had found him abandoned as a baby of a few days in a pew of his orthodox Protestant church. Rules dictated that all orphans had to leave for live-in work in agriculture or the factories of the industrialised Ruhr on their fourteenth birthday. With little formal education a life of servility beckoned, so when the third possibility of working in domestic service in the German colony of South East Africa was offered he had no second thoughts. But the hustler was ill-suited to the demands made on him by middle-class fellow countrymen who adopted colonial airs and graces the moment they set foot in sub-Saharan Africa. Within a couple of years he had fallen out with his masters to fend for himself, a situation he did not regret. He was here to make his fortune, by fair means or foul. He was soon trading with the locals and seafarers and procuring those little extras that his insider knowledge of the system allowed him to know were essential for those working periods in lonely outposts away from the administrative centre. And while the master was away up-country he found a profitable sideline in fulfilling the sexual needs of the mistress. He kept his ear to the colonial grapevine and by his twentieth birthday his income easily exceeded that of a middle-ranked official.

  He’d heard rumours that one of the assistant deputy governors of the territory was homosexual and obtaining his carnal pleasures as often as he could in a hotel room with a young waiter. It was, in the hustler’s opinion, the perfect opportunity to increase his fortune. With Indian silks in vivid and dazzling colours to entice his forlorn wife he soon found his way into her bed. Desperate for the hustler’s brand of rough intercourse to continue, she was soon yielding secrets about her husband. While up-country he’d been approached by a native who possessed a rough stone with interesting flashes of deep red where the roughness had been worn away. He speculated that it was a ruby. The price for this stone was booze and it was easy for the husband to divert a few cases of schnapps from the mess to be lost in transit. In a verbal exchange reminiscent of a thug twisting a victim’s arm behind his back and pulling hard up, the hustler was able to promise to keep his lips sealed about certain sexual proclivities in exchange for the large, rough stone that his cuckold wife had indiscreetly told him about.

  The proposition was interesting. The hustler had something to exchange and what he wanted in return was a set of identification papers. He’d heard dockside gossip about the seaman, a young man of a similar age to him, who had been bitten by a rabid dog at their last port of call in the Portuguese colony of Goa. He had died on board and been buried at sea. His few possessions had been shared out amongst the living crew according to prescribed rules. He was wiped from the slate of life save for his identification papers, rudimentary as they were in that epoch, which were kept under lock and key in the captain’s cabin together with the ship’s official papers. The hustler wanted these papers. They gave details of name, age and place of birth. He might need a false identity at some time in the
future, a sort of insurance policy should he need to leave East Africa in a hurry. It would give him options. The sea captain knew of no rule requiring him to hand in the dead man’s papers at the end of the voyage. He was being given the opportunity to trade with something that had cost him nothing. The exchange took place after the hustler had added a monetary component to the deal which he had forced through by wit and guile and for which the sea captain rebuked himself for allowing the hustler to lead him down the garden path. After millions of years the stone was finally leaving Africa.

  The shipping magnate’s fleet of merchant vessels was based in the Baltic Sea ports of Kiel to the west and Rostock to the east. In the early 1890s his vessels plied the oceans of the world, their holds carrying export cargoes of tools and machinery, manufactured goods and liquor to the southern hemisphere and German colonies scattered around the globe bringing home raw materials and exotics to a German nation in an aggressive, expansionist mood. It was an era in German history when the Prussian autocracy and the commodities and industrial magnates of the day governed their lands and industries with scant regard for democracy. A plutocrat to his fingertips, the shipping magnate ran his fleet on regimented lines. Captains and seamen who transgressed or disobeyed orders were harshly treated. Flogging was not uncommon. Prison sentences for questioning orders were possible. The sea captain with the rough gemstone was, in private, contemptuous of the rules he was required to follow but kept his head down in order to continue to earn sufficient to support his family. But he now had the rough gemstone to sell, which he knew would cushion his dotage.

  After leaving Dar es Salaam and navigating through the Mozambique Channel they headed for the open sea, rounding the Cape of Good Hope destined for their home port of Kiel. Stopping at Walvisch Bay in the German colony of South West Africa to collect cargo and re-victual the ship, one of the crew, a muscular man with a fiery temper ignited by too much alcohol, got into a fight in a dockside bar. Hauled back onto his ship by some crew mates, his punishment for returning drunk was three lashes. It was the practice stipulated by the magnate that a draw of lots would determine the crew member to inflict the sentence. On this occasion it fell to a staunch Lutheran who refused point blank to harm a fellow human being. In order to stem a situation that could have escalated into a mutiny the sea captain broke the rules and changed the sentence from lashes to loss of wages. His first mate, a nasty little snitch, spotting an opportunity for self-advancement, reported the captain for this transgression on their return to Kiel. Dismissed without redress and with the loss of his last voyage wages he was forced to sell the large, rough gemstone to a jeweller in Kiel who paid him little more than he had paid for it in Dar es Salaam.

  The jeweller in Kiel rubbed his hands in glee as soon as the sea captain had left his premises. Clearly the sea captain had no real idea of the gemstone’s potential value, but he did. A lifetime of experience in the trade had taught him how to assess gemstones even with a minimal inspection. All he had had to do with this rough beauty was to establish that it was genuine, not a fake. He did this by simply examining the stone through his jeweller’s loupe which gave him ten times magnification. He spotted impurities in the gemstone. All natural rubies have imperfections in them, including colour imperfections and inclusions of rutile needles. No imperfections, no natural ruby. But this one had them. What’s more its colour was a vivid medium-dark tone of red, blood red. The finest rubies were blood red. And the clarity was peerless. This stone had everything: quality, colour, clarity, size. He was salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs long before he looked up from the magnifier. He composed himself before asking the sea captain what price he expected for the gemstone. In relation to its real value the sea captain hadn’t asked for much. Probably he had trebled the price he had paid for it. The jeweller offered him half. The sea captain protested but it did him no good. Half was what he was offered and half was what he had to reluctantly accept. He called it a swindle even as he shut the door behind him. The jeweller sat at his bench for a long time after the departure of the sea captain just looking at the stone, gazing at it with incredulity and stroking the stone to confirm its realness. This was a once-in-a-life-time stone and it had come into his ownership for a paltry sum. There was a great deal of money to be made here but he had to think clearly. Act hastily and he might regret it. He would enjoy a stein of his favourite beer tonight, say nothing to his wife and in the morning he would consider all possibilities.

  In the cold light of the following morning he considered his options. The cutting of a gemstone as unique and precious as this would require a level of skill and expertise he felt he simply didn’t have. Sure he could cut, facet, polish and mount small stones into medium-priced rings and brooches. No problem there, he’d been doing that most of his working life. But to cut a large stone down into several smaller stones required more than just a steady hand. Even if he had an inkling of a design the cuts he made in the original stone to produce smaller ones would have to maximise their size without cutting through the asterisms, three- or six-point stars that are present in the best rubies, a property that is visible when the stone is rotated. And what about the design? Instinct told him that all off cuts from the virgin stone would be much more valuable together than separated. There would be sufficient stones for a magnificent necklace or something of that kind. It would require a golden chain with a design of its own. No, he couldn’t attempt it himself. It needed an expert cutter, probably someone working in the gemstone district of Antwerp where most of the major stones were cut. It also needed a professional jewellery designer.

  It was the late afternoon before his plan was finalised. As soon as his apprentice had left the workshop he took out the virgin stone and placed it tenderly on the wooden bench as if it might break into smithereens should he fail to place it gently on the bench, a ridiculous idea he knew since the corundum of ruby is the third hardest mineral in existence. He would prepare it as a cabochon, a technique he had used on a number of previous occasions with small rubies in which the gemstone is shaped and polished as opposed to faceted. A cabochon was usually of an elliptical shape with a dome. He would enhance the roundness of the larger, fatter end so that it looked somewhat dome-like and he would trim the flatter, sharper end with a trim saw to a soft apex. Heating the stone evenly, he marked the areas to be trimmed using a black waxy resin to draw template lines and proceeded to trim away the excess. He then dopped the stone by adhering it to a length of wooden dowel with hardening wax so that he could grind and smooth the trimmed areas. Finally he sanded the dome and polished the virgin stone to a uniform finish. The result was stunning. A minimum of material had been lost in the trimming and grinding processes but the resultant effect had transformed the rough stone into a gem. He felt a tremendous wave of relief. He wiped the perspiration from his face with a grimy handkerchief and dared to believe for the first time that he truly could become a rich man. Tomorrow he would leave for the diamond district of Antwerp where he would take his gem to an important auction house.

  Artisans, merchants and craftsmen established the early Livery Companies and by the close of the sixteenth century there were more than two dozen operating from premises in and around a small locus of the historic centre of London. They were joined over the centuries by many more as commerce and the Industrial Revolution gave rise to new trades and alliances. Each company was recognised and registered by the City of London Corporation, the capital’s elected governing body. This area of London would become known throughout the global trading world as “the City”. It was also dubbed the “Square Mile” due to its approximate size of one mile wide by one mile long and it would include, as the centuries rolled by, such landmarks as St. Paul’s Cathedral, Guildhall and Mansion House, the official home of the Lord Mayor of London. But the “Square Mile” sobriquet would mean somewhere very different for all those involved in the gemstone trade. It would refer to the Diamond Quarter of Antwerp in Flanders. It was a bizarre nic
kname for a district of a continental city, many had suggested, since continental Europe used the metre and kilometre as its standard for length and not the empirical British and colonial yard and mile. The buildings within this area, clustered around the central station and bordered to the west and north by the Frankrijklei thoroughfare, were of disproportionate splendour to those in other quarters of the Flemish capital. This was a very rich district with two or three hundred cutting and polishing workshops, brokering halls and associated meeting places. Many were long-established family concerns whose roots could be traced back two or three centuries. It was a small world with everyone involved knowing everyone else with news and rumours radiating out inexorably from the source like the ripples on a pond. Nothing could be hidden but there was no safely to be had in numbers.

  The tall and elegant auctioneer was dressed for work as ever in a dark frock coat with silver cravat and pin striped trousers, the perfect image, he considered, of sartorial elegance. He had not yet embraced the newer men’s fashion of shorter, cut-away coat with waistcoat and silk tie that he had given permission to his younger, front-of-house staff to wear. Now in his early seventies he was still enjoying his position as head of one of Antwerp’s premier auction houses where he had started his career in fine arts more than half a century before under the pupillage of a distinguished connoisseur of art. The house specialised in the sale of paintings and gems and had some fine rooms in which to display their lots to the European nobility and nouveau-riche industrial barons, for the prices asked could generally only be contemplated by the seriously rich. Seated at his antique mahogany desk with tooled green leather inset and drawers with rococo swan neck handles he usually felt very calm but today was different.