Jonathan Harries continues his genre-bending, stranger-than-fiction trek backwards through the 2000-year history of his family of knife-wielding assassins in The Bodyguard of Sarawak!
When the British Secret Service Bureau commissioned my great-uncle Leon to whack a Russian Count aboard the SS Gwalior on its way from Cape Town to Mombasa, he had no idea the size of the maelstrom into which he was about to plunge.
It was early in 1912 and the world was awash in rumors and fears of global conflict.
As Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the founder of MI6, told Leon, “It’ll be a war the likes of which we haven’t seen. My job—and this is where you come in—is to make sure our side wins.”
It’s all the impetus Leon needs. After tossing out bodies to the lions of Tsavo in Kenya, graduating with honors from a school specializing in sexual techniques in Singapore, avoiding headhunters in the sweltering jungles of Sarawak, to becoming bodyguard to his highness Charles Brooke, the 2nd Rajah of Sarawak, Leon carves a magnificent swath of death and seduction as the 68th generation in our family assassination business.
Jonathan Harries continues his genre-bending, stranger-than-fiction trek backwards through the 2000-year history of his family of knife-wielding assassins in The Bodyguard of Sarawak!
When the British Secret Service Bureau commissioned my great-uncle Leon to whack a Russian Count aboard the SS Gwalior on its way from Cape Town to Mombasa, he had no idea the size of the maelstrom into which he was about to plunge.
It was early in 1912 and the world was awash in rumors and fears of global conflict.
As Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the founder of MI6, told Leon, “It’ll be a war the likes of which we haven’t seen. My job—and this is where you come in—is to make sure our side wins.”
It’s all the impetus Leon needs. After tossing out bodies to the lions of Tsavo in Kenya, graduating with honors from a school specializing in sexual techniques in Singapore, avoiding headhunters in the sweltering jungles of Sarawak, to becoming bodyguard to his highness Charles Brooke, the 2nd Rajah of Sarawak, Leon carves a magnificent swath of death and seduction as the 68th generation in our family assassination business.
Preface
As a skeptic I’ve always had a hard time believing that morality can be traced back to biblical times. That all changed when I read the translation of texts from a hitherto-undiscovered Dead Sea Scroll found in the Caves of Qumran in 1996 and given to me by a conniving Israeli archaeologist, Dr. Jacob Peretz. As the late Dr. Peretz made clear in a threatening note, the morality of my family—or more correctly, the total lack of morality—went back to around 70 C.E. at the time of the first great Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire. The scrolls revealed that it was then that the two branches of my family—the Smulians and the Isakowitsches, both of the Tribe of Asher—having disregarded far too many of the Ten Commandments (I suspect not stealing and not coveting thy neighbor’s wife being the ones most flagrantly disregarded), were cursed by the law-giving Levites (those sanctimonious hypocrites) to get the hell out of the land of Canaan and go into the world to perform assassinations for seventy generations. Each family was given a sica, the curved dagger of the Sicarii, a radicalized splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, and told to work for whomever would cough up the fee. The translation was unclear as to why, especially as neither family were members of the Sicarii, but I assume it was because the Levites thought we’d fail miserably and disappear once and for all, allowing morality to once more return to the land of Canaan.
Well, I won’t comment on what happened in Canaan, but I can tell you for both families things turned out a lot better than the Levites had hoped.
The Isakowitsches and Smulians went their separate ways, whacking some of the biggest monsters in history—with a few less-awful individuals thrown in when the assignments called for it—turning “you pick them, we stick them” into a thriving business. It was only in January 1946, when my mother—a descendent of the Smulians—and my father—a scion of the Isakowitsches—married that the two families were once again united.
The curse, if there ever was one in the first place, ended when on the eve of my seventeenth birthday, both parents presented me with the sicae of both branches and told me I was in fact the seventieth generation and the first assassin to have both knives.
In the first book in the series, The Tailor of Riga, I revealed the hitherto-secret assassinations carried out by members of both families from 1888 to 1996, when I completed my final assignment for a mysterious branch of the British Secret Service with whom we’d had a contract for over a century and effectively ended the curse. In my second book, The Carpet Salesman of Baghdad, I related the story taken from the diary of an ancestor on my mother’s side who was given an assignment by the Maharaja of Kutch in 1858, the year following the great Indian revolt against the British and sent to me by a mysterious and distant relative living in Argentina.
I thought that was the last of it, but as it turned out I was very much mistaken. The fickle finger of fate that had probed and prodded the family for so long was not done yet. In October of last year, I received a large wooden box that had been shipped to me from a cousin in South Africa whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly forty years. Inside the box was a carefully wrapped package. Attached to the wrapping paper was a letter that read:
My dear Jonathan,
I was going through a storage locker the other day and came across a crate that contained some old books left to my father by your great (and my great-great) uncle Leon, whom I’m sure you remember with affection.
There were some fine old books that Leon picked up on his travels, but there was one that had a note to you slipped between the cover and first page. I hope you don’t mind, but I opened it. It said that he’d promised the books in this crate to you, and so in good faith I’m shipping them to you in New York. As you can imagine, the shipping was quite costly, and I’d appreciate if you’d wire me the $350. Bank details attached.
Kindest regards
Monty.
The nerve of the bastard, I thought. First his old man keeps my inheritance, and now the son wants me to pay for it. If Monty thought I was forking over $350 for some old books, he could blow grapes out his ass. Insouciant? Perhaps, but if it’s any consolation to those of you who think me a cheapskate, I not only sent Monty the money, I included a great bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet to thank him for his efforts.
There was a reason for my abrupt change of heart.
As I took the three-volume set out the box—and I’m not sure whether it was the feel of the dark-burgundy leather bindings or the musty smell of old paper that triggered it—I was overcome with a strange sense of nostalgia. I could see myself as a boy of around ten, lying on the carpet of Leon’s small apartment, a book open in front of me, totally absorbed in the exploits and rags-to-riches escapades of an indolent son of a barber in what I thought was the greatest adventure story I’d ever read, The Adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan, written by the English diplomat and ambassador to the court of Persia James Morier, first published in 1824. It was once compared to Sir Richard Burton’s (the explorer not the actor) The Arabian Nights; though without the sex, more’s the pity. I’d almost forgotten that Leon had promised them to me when he died, but as I paged through them again, I remembered what he’d said the last time he’d found me sprawled out on the Persian carpet reading them for the third time: “I’m going to leave these to you, my boy, because I can see in your eyes that the story fascinates you as much it does me. But remember this: It’s not always what’s on the pages that makes them so intriguing; it’s what’s between them.”
To be honest, I’m not sure those are the precise words he used, but they were certainly to that effect, and they explained perfectly what I discovered later that evening after eating a splendid Madras chicken curry. Fortified with a pre-dinner martini or two and a glass of Trimbach Gewürztraminer with the curry, I began to go through the books. Loosely inserted between each page of Volume 1 and 2 was the diary of my great-uncle Leon recounting his own adventures in the years just prior to World War I.
It is, as you will hopefully discover, another tale of the sica, when Leon served for a period as a bodyguard to Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, Knight Grand Cross of the order of St. Michael and St. George.
In The Tailor of Riga, I tried to clarify that while the stories had some degree of legitimacy in terms of when and where they took place, they were for the most part “of dubious veracity.” At the very least, I categorically deny any knowledge of the assassinations attributed to me in the Central African Republic and Botswana. That being said, the story of my mother’s ancestor, Elias Smulian-Hasson, as related in the The Carpet Salesman of Baghdad and now this, the diary of my great-uncle Leon, make me question if what started as fiction was fact. Or perhaps it was simply the third martini. You’ll be the judge.
As my brother-in-law Milton said to me the other day, “When I get into bed next to your sister from now on, I’m sleeping with one eye open.”
Leon, as I remember him
My great-uncle Leon resembled neither a dangerous assassin nor a great lover, and yet he was both. He was not overly tall, heavily muscled, or handsome in that classic, silent-film-star sort of way that appealed to many women of the early 1900s. But he had kind grey eyes, a lopsided grin, and a wonderful sense of humor. My father, who loved Leon, told me that he was unmotivated and lacked ambition. That the wit, charm, and general dégagé approach to life that made Leon irresistible to women could have been better employed when it came to activities of a more pecuniary nature. Then again, my father didn’t read Leon’s diary. Had he done so he might have realized that Leon was far from lazy and unmotivated. The truth was he’d simply done it all already.
The last I saw of Leon, and thank goodness the sighting was brief, was his bony white ass rising up and down as he made love to his current girlfriend, Thelma, on the couch in the living room of a cousin’s house in Cape Town. It was a month before he passed away, a few days shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. Thelma was thirty-five years his junior and, according to my father, the oldest lover Leon had ever taken. Not true by the way, as you shall presently find out.
Leon was the youngest of the five children of Abram and Bryna Isakowitsch. He was born in the flat above my great-grandfather’s pub, The Sir Sydney Smith, in 1892 after Abram, for reasons explained in Part 1 of The Tailor of Riga, changed the family name to Harris. He was the baby of the family, idolized by his parents, coddled by his sisters, and doted on by his older brother Joe. He was not particularly good at school, but the patrons of the pub loved him. Especially the women, who found his demeanor mesmerizing even though he was still a teenager. His parents thought he’d make an excellent publican and planned to hand him the reigns at the appropriate time. But Leon was bored, and shortly after his nineteenth birthday he announced to his horrified parents that he was leaving. So it was that five years after Joe had hightailed it out of London, two steps ahead of the law, and jumped on a tramp steamer bound for Lüderitz in German South West Africa that Leon followed. At this point, Joe had settled with his wife Anna in Walvis Bay and started a shipping business called J.C. Harries & Co. Why he added the “e” to Harris remains a mystery. Leon stayed with my grandfather and grandmother in Walvis Bay, doing odd jobs around the office and sleeping with as many women as he could. That was until an angry mob of husbands demanded he exit the town for good or risk a bullet between his eyes. Leon chose the former, leaving a bevy of broken-hearted women in his wake.
He was very close to my father and spent a lot of time at our house when I was growing up. I remember sitting and listening to the stories of his travels in Asia while my father and he sipped their evening Scotch and water. Most were pretty funny, though some were bawdy and not suitable for the ears of a young boy according to my mother. Looking back, I don’t recall any mention of the sica, perhaps because he knew my father had not yet brought it up with me. I do remember once when Leon mentioned his own father’s run-in with Jack the Ripper and my father holding up his hand to stop him. Later that evening when I asked my father to tell me what had happened, he replied, “Nothing at all. You shouldn’t take the ramblings of a pox-riddled old adventurer seriously.”
Leon’s diary begins the moment he boarded the British India Steamship Navigation Company’s SS Gwalior, which had anchored off the port of Walvis Bay to drop off mail on the much longer Cape Town route to Bombay rather than the shorter voyage through the Suez Canal.
The diary, much to my surprise, was written in the third person as if Leon had planned to turn it into a novel at some point. The fact that he didn’t is probably why he lived as long as he did; my father would certainly have killed him for betraying the family secrets.
A killer. A libertine. A “partial liar.” A man of his word.
The story opens when the “narrator” receives a letter from South Africa about books bequeathed to him by his great Uncle Leon. What follows is an account of Leon’s adventures in the years prior to WWI when he served as a bodyguard to Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak.
Just how many family secrets did Leon betray in his diary about these adventures?
The rest of this fast-paced, action-packed novel is told through Leon’s eyes. He’s under “contract” with the British Secret Service. And he’s not quite sure he understands the difference between murder and assassination. But Leon’s “assignment” is to “eliminate” the Russian Count Orlov on his way to Mombasa, Kenya. Why is none of Leon’s business. And then…
Oh, wait. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens next.
A little Jason Bourne, a little James Bond, this is a tightly written story that’s expertly paced. Strong characters and solid writing undergird this robust tale of suspense, intrigue, and betrayal that hops all over the globe, from Africa to Singapore. There’s also lots of travel. Lots of booze. Lots of beautiful women, especially Abigail Dallas. And what about Stuart Grant? Is he friend, foe, or something else?
Also diamonds. Chinese “creeping imperialism”: The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient. “Assume nothing.” The Thunder Eagles. A shadowy agent named Leviticus. The Americans. Dayak warriors. The monocle-wearing “C.,” who’s reminiscent of Ian Fleming’s enigmatic “M.” Also double agents and double crosses. Serbia. The Black Hand. An Austrian Archduke.
There’s a lot at stake in this high octane thriller. What emerges is a fascinating, masterful blend of spy/thriller, romance, history, and intrigue. It’s clever, fresh, and original.
Adult fans of Jason Bourne or James Bond will enjoy this book. Cuz it’s a barn burner.
I passed this title over several times before finally deciding to pick it up. It seemed a little too “out there.” It turned out to be a rousing good read overall. It has some rough edges. But The Bodyguard of Sarawak is a remarkable achievement, especially for a new author. Keep an eye on this one.