But occasionally shapes other than octahedrons are found: triangular macles, cubics, tetrahedrons, and complex or irregular shapes. These are used for “fancy” cuts—anything that isn’t a round brilliant. Marquis, heart-shaped, cushion, pear, oval, emerald and the latest in-vogue cut: the princess.
The stone Vimal was to cut was an elongated complex—a round-edged rectangle. It was, like all rough, not transparent but somewhat milky; only through cutting and polishing does a diamond become clear. But it was still possible to grade a diamond at this stage with some accuracy and Vimal knew that when finished it would be colorless G grade clear, rated VS1—very slight inclusions, which meant that its few imperfections would be invisible to the naked eye. A superb stone.
Vimal glanced at Mr. Nouri and then the plot—a computerized image of the diamond on the monitor next to them, which showed how to most efficiently cut the stone.
Generally a piece of rough is cut into two or three pieces, and algorithms, developed over the years, will produce highly accurate plans for finishing the stones.
Because this diamond was large—seven carats—and of an unusual shape, the plotting software had come up with instructions for cutting it in four places, creating five individual diamonds, each destined for a round brilliant cut. Mr. Nouri had drawn the cuts with red marking pen on the stone itself.
“But you can redraw them,” Mr. Nouri said, offering the marker. “See? This is why I need you, Vimal. There is no room for error. One mistake will cut the value of the finished stones by a quarter. Maybe more. I can’t do it. Nobody who works for me can do it.”
Vimal lifted the stone to his face once more, flipped down the loupe. “A pad. A damp pad.”
Mr. Nouri handed him a gauze square—similar to what Adeela had used to treat his wounds. With the pad Vimal cleaned the red lines off and again studied the stone closely.
Every block of stone, Michelangelo wrote, has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Vimal believed this, and it applied to diamonds just as it did to marble or granite.
He took up the marker. Though his heart pounded, his hands were as steady as the stone he was drawing upon. Eight fast lines.
“There.”
Mr. Nouri stared. “What is this?”
“That’s the cut.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“This.” He indicated the lines.
“What cut is that? I don’t recognize it.”
“I’m not separating it.”
Mr. Nouri laughed. “Vimal.”
“I’m not.”
The diamantaire grew somber. “But I paid so much for it. I need five stones to recoup the cost.”
“Five brilliants like any other five brilliants. They’ll add nothing to the world.”
“Add to the world,” the man mused sardonically.
“It has to be a parallelogram.”
“A parallelogram?”
“Think of it as a trapezoid, with parallel sides.”
“I know what the shape is. I studied mathematics at university. It simply has no place as a diamond cut. There’s no market for it.”
“You will never see a stone like this again,” Vimal said.
Mr. Nouri’s shrug said, So?
“No, I won’t separate it. I’ll only cut the parallelogram.”
“I’ll find somebody else.”
“Yes, I’m sure you will.”
Vimal set the stone down and rose.
A rueful smile spread across Mr. Nouri’s face. “I will pay you two thousand to separate it like I’d planned.”
“No.”
“Two thousand five hundred.”
Vimal started to turn. Then he stopped and leaned down, his face close to the older man’s. He whispered, “Take a chance.”
And thought: So timid with my father, so bold here.
“What?” Mr. Nouri asked.
“I know your work. I know the work of your son and the other cutters here. You’re all good. You create diamonds that your customers love—the newlyweds and the wives and the husbands and parents and grandparents. You make them happy. And you’ll be able to make them happy again and again—with thousands of other round brilliants. But this once, with this stone, do something different.”
“Business is business, Vimal.”
Yes, it certainly is, the young man thought. “I should go.”
When Vimal was five feet from the door, Mr. Nouri said, “Wait.”
He looked back.
“You think this is best, this cut?”
“It’s the cut this stone deserves, I can’t say anything more than that.”
Mr. Nouri shook his head, as if trying to process this comment. Then he stuck his hand out.
Vimal said, “Still, twenty-five hundred?”
A nod.
The men shook hands.
Vimal asked, “Where can I work?”
Chapter 20
Got your text,” Lincoln Rhyme said.
The man lying in the bed glanced up with a brief but glowing smile. Surprise too.
“Lincoln. You came. I mean in person. I just…Just wanted to chat. Phone call I was thinking.”
“Barry.” Rhyme directed his chair closer.
The complicated bed was in a room deep in the bowels of a complicated hospital complex on the East Side in Midtown. It had taken some minutes to find the place. Much color coding. It didn’t help a lot.
“Thom.”
“Hi.”
Barry Sales shifted a bit, tucked under excessively washed sheets and blankets. He found a wired remote control, pressed a button and rose into a sitting position, thanks to the hydraulic mattress. The man was in his late thirties. His skin was pale, his brown hair thinning.
His eyes game but hollow.
Rhyme wheeled closer yet. Both men nodded a greeting and Rhyme at least couldn’t help but grin at the irony, which Sales acknowledged with a smile of his own. The criminalist wasn’t able to shake Sales’s hand because his only working limb was his right. He couldn’t use his left.
And Sales’s left limb was the only one that remained after a firefight that had nearly killed him.
Rhyme looked around the room. He absolutely did not want to be here. There was not a single memory of medical venues that didn’t trouble, or torment, Lincoln Rhyme since the accident years ago. There’d been accommodation, there’d been a fierce punching down of recollections, there’d been stoic acceptance. But he would have avoided hospitals forever, given the option.
But this wasn’t one.
Sales had been a colleague of his years ago when Rhyme was running the crime scene operation for the NYPD.
Sales had been a star. He’d stay on a scene, walking the grid, for hours after any other forensic cop would’ve released it.
Rhyme hadn’t been happy when Sales had decided to move to general investigative work…but he’d followed the man’s career and learned that, even at a young age, he’d soared to a senior spot in Major Cases and then, after leaving the NYPD, led a suburban police department to distinction.
Rhyme said, “Do they have a bar here?”
“Jesus, Lincoln,” Sales said. “Never change.”
“Theorize after a drink. Analyze sober.”
“Sadly,” Sales said, “the hospital sommelier has the day off.”
“Fire the son of a bitch.” Rhyme nodded to Thom, who produced two bottles of iced tea. That is, they were labeled tea. The contents looked suspiciously more golden, like, say, single-malt whisky. The aide set one bottle on the sideboard and opened the other.
“Hell,” Sales said. “I’m not driving.” Then his voice choked and he struggled to control the tears. “Fuck me. This’s ridiculous.”
“Been there,” Rhyme said.
Thom poured two glasses from the opened bottle and handed them out. He retreated to the corner, sat and checked messages.
The men slugged down some of the whisky and judiciously slipped
the glasses out of sight when a cheerful Filipina nurse came in to take some vitals. She left, saying, “Oh-oh, bad boys. Keep those hid.” A grin.
Sales sipped more liquor. Looked at the bottle.
“How’d you do it?”
“A funnel,” Rhyme said.
A moment, a blink. Then Sales laughed.
“You mean, the whole disabled thing,” Rhyme said.
“Yeah, the whole thing.”
“You remember I hated clichés.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“But sometimes they fit. This one does: One step at a time.” Rhyme, a quadriplegic, with a break at the fourth cervical vertebra, had suffered a trauma in a league very different from Sales’s. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down, with a few glitchy, renegade nerves that provided a bit of movement in a finger. Sales had lost his right arm just below the elbow; all else functioned fine.
But funny how subjective tragedy is, of course. Barry Sales’s barometer was measuring his life going forward with what his life had been before the bullets tore through his flesh. Not comparing himself to Rhyme’s trauma.
“And there’ll be people.” Rhyme nodded toward Thom. Who cocked his head, meaning sentimentality wasn’t an option.
“As frustrating and difficult as they can be.”
“Aw, you two, you’re an old married couple.” Sales had been to the town house a few times.
“There’s Joan.”
Sales’s face remained completely still. “I can’t stand to be in the room with her. She tries so hard not to look.” He nodded at where his limb had been. “I tried to make a joke. Could she lend me a hand? She practically had a breakdown.”
“One day at a time. There’ll be people. And it’s a long road. Jesus, Lord, three clichés in a row. I’m not feeling well.”
Sales had tamed the tears. “There’s a good counselor here. Would you recommend somebody after I’m discharged?”
Rhyme said, “I tried that. Didn’t work. They…” He looked at Thom. “What’s the word?”
“Fled.”
Rhyme shrugged.
“But most people benefit. I can get you some names.”
“Thanks.”
But Rhyme sensed the questions about coping with the tragedy were perfunctory, ice breakers. After all, Sales, Rhyme knew, was destined to become just like him, like the vast majority of severely injured patients, spinal cord or otherwise: He’d end up saying to himself, “Fuck it. I’ve got a life to lead.” Rhyme, for instance, had finally chosen to ignore his condition to the extent he could. He was on earth to be a criminalist, end of story. No whining, no fund-raising, no public service ads. No political correctness. If he referred to his condition at all, he would use words like “gimp” or “crip,” and had once delivered a searing glare to someone who had commented condescendingly that Rhyme was a shining example to the “disabled-able” community, a term that, Rhyme hoped, never made into Merriam-Webster.
No, Sales had texted Rhyme, not inquiring about approaches to therapy, but because of a very different agenda.
He brought it up now.
“What do you hear about him?”
There was no doubt who Sales meant.
The shooter.
The man had been collared and was presently on trial.
Sales said, “I get bullshit from my team, and the chief. They say, ‘Oh, the asshole’s going away.’ But they say it like they aren’t sure.”
Rhyme’s rep—now and then—was that he was gruff and impatient, with no tolerance for laziness, and pissy on occasion. But he shot with facts.
“Sorry, Barry. From what I hear it’s not so clear-cut.”
The firefight had been, like most, a paroxysm of confusion. The prosecution was fighting to overcome a vigorous defense. And one that was well funded.
He nodded. “You know, it’d be one thing, facing down somebody. But never seeing the asshole shoot. Never seeing his eyes. Like that time where the perp hung around the scene. The Simpson shooting, years ago. That crazy guy?”
Occasionally a suspect would remain at or near the scene. Sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of a desire to get intelligence. Sometimes because they were simply homicidal shits. The perp in the Simpson case hid in a meat freezer after gutting the owner. He stepped out and emptied his gun at a shocked crime scene officer working for Rhyme. All the shots missed, thanks to the fact that the perp’s core temperature probably hovered about seventy degrees—the meat freezer—and his hand was shaking so badly he hit everything but the officer.
The memory brought a smile to both men. Thom too, when Rhyme explained it.
“God, I want this guy to go away.” Sales licked his lips. “Bonnie was here, my sister? I asked her to bring Trudi and George. She said sure. But she didn’t mean sure. She meant she didn’t want them to see Uncle Barry like this. Hell, I wasn’t thinking. I don’t want them to see me like this either. They’ll freak out. I can’t go to their games. I can’t go to their recitals.” He clamped his teeth together.
He inhaled deeply. “I’m pretty tired. Think I better take a nap.”
“I’ll bring the van around front,” Thom said. He took Sales’s email address and told him again that he’d send the names of physical therapists and doctors who specialized in prosthetics.
Rhyme moved forward and tucked the second bottle of Glenmorangie “tea” into the bed, beside Sales’s left arm. He was about to say something else, but the man had closed his eyes and slipped his head back against the pillow. Rhyme glanced at the tear that Sales simply could not keep from escaping, eased the chair in a circle and wheeled from the room.
Chapter 21
Vimal and Dev Nouri walked through a thick door into the factory proper.
Sunday is not the day of rest for most diamond cutters, given the ethnicity and religion of those in the profession, and this was just another workday for N&B. Here, sitting around grinding scaife turntables, were four Indian cutters and one Chinese, all wearing dark slacks and light-colored short-sleeve shirts. They ranged in age from late twenties to fifties and were all men. Vimal knew of only two women diamond cutters in New York. The unfortunate line, which he’d heard far too often, was: Making diamonds is for men; wearing them is for women.
One of the workers was Mr. Nouri’s son, Bassam, about Vimal’s age. The chubby young man’s face registered surprise when he looked up. He set aside his dop stick and rose.
“Vimal! I heard about Mr. Patel! What happened?”
“It was all on the news. That’s pretty much it. A robbery.”
“What’re you doing here?”
Vimal hesitated. “Some work for your father.”
Bassam was clearly confused but Mr. Nouri nodded his son sternly back to his workstation and the man picked up his dop once more, lowered his loupe and started polishing a stone.
Vimal nodded and followed Mr. Nouri to an unoccupied station.
Unlike the office, Mr. Nouri’s workshop was clean and ordered. It was well equipped too. The huge factories in Surat, India, where more than half of the world’s diamonds are cut, have largely moved from manual to computerized systems. The 4P machines automatically performed all four stages of processing: plotting, cutting/cleaving, bruting and faceting, or brillianteering. Mr. Nouri had two of these machines, which looked like any other piece of industrial equipment, blue metal boxes each six feet long, five feet high and wide.
There was, of course, no software to create a parallelogram, nor would Vimal let a computer handle the cut in any event. This would be handwork exclusively.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Mr. Nouri said, but he said it uneasily and with a look at the diamond as if he were saying goodbye to an old friend about to sail alone across the Atlantic.
Vimal nodded, only vaguely aware of the words. He was lost in the contours of the diamond, noting the red lines marking his planned cut.
Shaping this stone would mean both cleaving, cutting with the grain, and sawing, against
it. The tool for these tasks was a green laser, guided by a joystick and mouse. While proficient at the old-time techniques of mallet, chisel and saw, Vimal Lahori had no problem with lasers, his theory being that diamantaires had always used state-of-the-art technology—ever since the dawn of diamond cutting.
He now spatulaed a wad of cement onto the end of a dop pipe, which was like a large straw. He pressed the diamond into the adhesive, waited until it dried, then mounted the pipe in the laser unit. He closed the access door, powered up the unit and sat in front of the video screen on which he could see a close-up of the stone. He rested his hand on the mouse-ball controller.
Vimal moved the crosshairs on the video screen to align with the marked lines, and, working with the keyboard and the mouse, he began the process of forming the basic parallelogram shape. Amid a hissing sound and a pulsing thud, like a medical MRI scanner, the beam started the cut. He paused frequently. After about an hour, he removed the partially cut stone, cleaned it and remounted it at a different angle on a new dop pipe. Then cutting once more. Another pause—to wipe his face and dry his hands of sweat—and back to the task. One more remount. And, after a half hour, the initial cleaving and cutting were done. The diamond was in the shape of a parallelogram.
Vimal removed it and cleaned the cement off and examined it through the loupe. Yes, it was good.
Now the brillianteering, cutting the facets into the stone. Vimal’s task, like that of every diamantaire, was to maximize the three essential qualities of diamonds: brilliance (the white flash of light as you look straight down at the stone), fire (the rainbow shades refracted from the sides), and scintillation (the sparkle that flared from the stone when it was moved).
Vimal sat on a stool in front of a polishing station, which was a sturdy table about four feet square and dominated by a scaife—the horizontal cast-iron platter that would spin at three thousand RPMs and against which cutters pressed the diamonds to create the facets. On the wall was a rack containing a number of different dop sticks—armatures on which diamonds were cemented for this grinding process.
The Cutting Edge Page 13