Vimal selected a dop and mounted the stone to it. He then started the scaife, about the size of the old LP record turntable his father still had. Oil, impregnated with diamond dust, dripped onto the platter and, resting the dop stick’s two padded legs on the workstation, he pressed the diamond against the scaife for a second or two, lifting it to study the progress through the loupe, and grinding away once more. Slowly the facets emerged, first on the girdle—the side—and then the crown and pavilion, the top and bottom of the stone.
The smell of the warm oil—it was olive oil—wafted around his face. And at the moment, there was not a thing in the universe but this stone. Not Adeela, not his brother Sunny, his mother or father, not poor Mr. Jatin Patel. Not his sculptures at home, The Wave or Hidden.
He was not thinking about killers searching for him.
Only this diamond and its emerging soul occupied him.
Touching the stone to the spinning scaife for a fraction of a second, lifting, examining…
Again, again, again.
The oil dripped, the turntable hissed, minuscule amounts of the stone vanished into oily residue.
The art of diamond cutting is about resisting that addictive urge to overwork a stone. And so—an hour later or twenty hours or ten minutes; he couldn’t say—Vimal Lahori knew the job was done. He shut the scaife off and it spun to silence. He sat back. He gasped, starting with surprise. Four of the other cutters had silently left their stations and had come up behind Vimal to watch him cut the parallelogram. They were huddled close. He had been completely unaware of them.
One, who identified himself as Andy, asked, “Can I?” Holding out his palm.
Vimal gave it to him. Andy flipped the loupe down and examined it. “You added an extra facet on the crown. I would not have thought about that. What is the angle?”
“Seven degrees.”
Andy passed it around. The others laughed and examined it through their loupes. The image of their identical astonished, almost reverent, faces was comical.
“Boil it,” another said.
Vimal carried the stone to the wash station, where he boiled it in acid to remove the cement, oil, dust and other materials adhering to the stone.
This could often be a very tense moment. You might think your gem was cut perfectly—only to find that a bit of cement or oil was concealing a mistake. Vimal never worried about this, though. Oh, in his eight or so years of diamond cutting, he had made mistakes. Had ruined stones (and been screamed at by Mr. Patel or his father). But he knew instantly when a cleaving or sawing or faceting went wrong. There’d been no errors on this stone. It was as perfect as it could be. The worst inclusions had been in the portions removed (and the remaining ones were in the heart of the diamond and invisible to even the best eyes). The facets were sharp and symmetrical. The balance of brilliance and fire and scintillation, faultless.
He picked up the finished stone with tweezers and looked it over once more—this time not to assess, but simply to admire.
Vimal Lahori had discovered, and released, the stone’s soul.
As he studied the finished diamond, noting the flashing of color and white light, he was stabbed by a sudden sorrow that Mr. Patel was not alive to see his work.
Then Mr. Nouri stepped into the workshop—two cutters had gone to get him. The bulbous man, with his graying complexion, smiled at Vimal and took the tweezers from him. He dropped the loupe and examined it. He muttered something in Hindi, it seemed, a language Vimal knew little of. His face registered astonishment.
“You didn’t flatten the culet.” The very bottom of the pavilion. These were often ground flat, which made a sturdier stone, less prone to chipping. A flat culet, though, tended to darken the diamond. (Vimal believed that the famed Koh-i-Noor had been ruined when it was recut in the nineteenth century on orders from Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband; the resulting broad, flat culet imparted a muddiness to the otherwise magnificent stone.)
“No.”
Expecting resistance at his impractical decision.
But Mr. Nouri said, breathlessly, “A brilliant choice. Look at the light. Look at it! The damn customer—whoever they’ll be—will just have to be careful. They’ll live with it.” Squinting. “And an extra facet on the crown.”
“It was necessary.”
“Of course it was. Yes, yes. My goodness, Vimal. What a job you’ve done!”
But Vimal didn’t have interest in, or time for, praise. He had to leave and now.
“I should go. Now, you said, twenty-five hundred.”
“No.”
Vimal stiffened.
“Three thousand.”
They both smiled.
That much money would get him out of the city. If he lived cheaply he could make it stretch until he got a job, something modest, menial—perhaps at a university that had a fine arts program. Even janitorial or in the cafeteria. He felt the first blush of what approached joy that he’d experienced in ages.
The man put the diamond onto its sheet and folded the paper, slipped it into his breast pocket. “I’ll get your money.” He stepped out of the workshop and into his office.
Vimal stepped to the basin in the corner to wash up; scaifing is dirty work. As he walked past the others they were regarding him with variations of admiration or awe. He didn’t like it. Anything that cemented his ties to the diamond-cutting world left a bad taste. He washed his hands and, as the others returned to their workstations, Vimal walked to the doorway and stepped into the office.
Mr. Nouri was putting cash into an envelope. He was offering it to Vimal when the door to the stairwell opened and two figures entered.
Vimal gasped, stabbed by dismay. He was looking at Deepro Lahori. His father. With him was Bassam Nouri; the young, stocky man looked down.
No, no…
“Papa. I…”
Squat, gray-skinned, his father strode forward angrily.
“Deepro,” Mr. Nouri said, frowning, confused.
Papa looked at the envelope. “That’s my son’s money?”
“Yes, but—”
His father snatched it from the man’s hand. “I’ll take care of it for him. He’s not responsible at the moment.” To Vimal he snapped, “You will come home. Now.”
Mr. Nouri was understanding that Vimal had not been completely honest earlier. He said to Vimal, “He didn’t know? You lied?”
“I’m sorry.”
Then Papa walked to the rack of jackets. He reached into the inner pocket of his son’s and lifted out his wallet. That and the envelope holding the cash vanished into his own coat.
Now the answer to the betrayal became clear. Papa nodded to Bassam, a look of thanks. So his father had offered a reward to anyone in the community who saw or heard of Vimal.
Vimal was furious, torn between screaming and sobbing.
He turned his cold eyes toward Bassam, who looked away and muttered, “He’s your father. Respect.”
Vimal wondered how much had been the price on his head. In the mood for blood, Vimal turned suddenly to his father. The man was only an inch taller than his son and was not as broad in the shoulders, nor was he anywhere near as strong. An image of himself pushing his father down, rifling his pocket for his wallet and the cash and sprinting out the door came to him.
But it was a fantasy as insubstantial as diamond dust.
“You’ll come home.”
As if there were any other options.
Vimal walked slowly to the door, his father behind him, saying firmly, “Son, I’m doing this because it’s best for you. You do understand that, I hope.”
Chapter 22
Amelia Sachs was in Cadman Plaza, at the subway station where their unsub had caught the train to Manhattan after ditching his hard hat and safety vest. She had been canvassing shops and restaurants nearby, those with a view of the subway entrance. The hour-long effort had been useless. No one remembered seeing anybody who’d pitched out the gear. This had not been unexpected.
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It seemed that the construction site to which Unsub 47 had some connection wasn’t devoted to birthing yet another apartment or office building; it was a high-tech energy project.
She now surveyed the huge jobsite, surrounded by an eight-foot-high plywood wall. Before her was a large sign mounted on two wooden pillars.
Northeast Geo Industries
Harnessing the Earth’s Clean Warmth…
for You and Your Family
Below this was a small billboard, the background off-white with lettering in green script, as if fashioned out of vines. Paintings of leaves and tufts of grass were prominent. It all reeked of eco. The text explained that the earth was itself a huge solar collector, which absorbed energy from the sun and maintained a constant temperature, however cold or hot the surface. That energy could be tapped for use in heating and cooling buildings. The geothermal facility being constructed now would do just that, servicing hundreds of buildings in the area. Pipes would be sunk deep into the earth and a solution would be pumped through them. When it returned to the surface, the liquid would then pass through regulators to generate air-conditioning or heating.
It was basically a massive heat pump, the notice reported, of the sort that environmentally minded residents used in their houses.
Reducing fossil fuel use for heating and cooling…Seemed like a good idea to Sachs.
But not everybody thought so, apparently. Thirty or so protesters stood on the sidewalk holding posters against the drilling. A tall, lean man with frizzy gray hair—and matching beard—seemed to be in charge. From the posters and some lapel pins people wore, she noted that the movement was called One Earth. She wondered what their objections were. Geothermal seemed just another environmentally friendly process. Some of the posters, though, referred to fracking and poisoning the groundwater.
The lean man stepped in front of a flatbed, loaded with girders. He crossed his arms and stood his ground. The rest of the crowd cheered. Every time the truck driver blasted the man with his horn, the protesters exploded with catcalls and applause.
A job for a patrolman, but no patrolman was around.
Sachs walked into the street. “Sir.” She showed her badge. “Could you step out of the street?”
“And if I don’t? Are you going to arrest me?”
This was, of course, the last thing she wanted to do. It would involve a trip to the local precinct, as she no longer carried her citation book. But there was only one answer. “Yes.”
“You’re in their pocket. The city’s kissing their ass.” He nodded at the site.
“Sir, you don’t want to go to jail for this. Step out of the way.”
Without protest he did, and her impression was that he’d planned the tactic as a mosquito bite, a small irritation.
“Could I see some ID?”
He complied. He was Ezekiel Shapiro and lived in upper Manhattan.
She handed it back. “No disrupting traffic. And I hope that can you’ve got in your jacket is for home repair.”
It seemed to be spray paint. She’d noticed where graffiti had been scrubbed off the sign and the walls of the barrier.
“They’re fucking up everything, you know.” He looked at the site with wild eyes. “Everything.” He returned to the crowd and many of the people hugged him as if he’d just faced down an entire army.
Then Mother Earth left her thoughts and she got to work. She pulled a small evidence collection bag, red canvas, from the trunk of the Torino, parked nearby, and walked to the subway entrance where the CCTV had captured the unsub’s image. She turned, recalled the direction of his route, and found the trash bin where he’d disposed of the hard hat and vest. Not empty—that word would never apply to any trash receptacle in New York City—but it was empty enough to see those items weren’t inside.
She then spotted the likely gate he would have taken to leave the construction site. The large mesh panels were open and, as she’d hoped, some workers were here, despite its being Sunday. She showed her shield to a trim, vigilant man in a private security uniform, richly toned with a suntan that testified to the fine vacation he’d just taken. She asked if she could speak to the supervisor. He lifted a walkie-talkie and said a detective with the NYPD wanted to speak to him.
The clattering answer: “Uh, yeah. Hold on. Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Her.”
“What?”
“It’s a her. She’s a her,” the guard said, casting an awkward look her way.
“Oh. Her. A minute.”
Sachs looked over the site. The project—about three acres square, she guessed—wasn’t like most you see in the city, with the dark-red ironwork of skyscrapers latticing upward. This was more like what she guessed an oil rig operation would be. There were a number of drilling locations that measured about twenty feet wide, fifty long, surrounded by green six-foot-high fences; signs labeled them as Areas 1 through 12. Some of these were crowned with derricks rising about four stories high. Other green-fenced sites seemed closed. Maybe the drilling at those locations was completed.
Though the site wasn’t that populated, it was noisy. The drills were powered by raucous diesel engines and bulldozers rolled about, picking up debris and dropping it into dump trucks, with huge bangs.
The supervisor had said a minute and he was true to his word. A stocky man, in tan Carhartt overalls and orange safety vest, approached. He wore tinted, stylish glasses whose earpieces were attached to a bright-red retainer, and his yellow hard hat jutted forward, high on his head.
Introductions were made and hands shaken and the supervisor—his name was Albert Schoal—glanced out of the gate toward the protesters. “So, what’s it this time?” he yelled over the sound of the machinery.
“I’m sorry?”
“The complaint.”
She lifted a querying eyebrow.
Schoal asked, “Didn’t somebody file a complaint?” His voice was weary. So were his eyes, behind the gray lenses.
“That’s not why I’m here. Why would somebody file a complaint?”
“Oh. Sorry. It’s one of their tactics. Somebody calls nine one one—from a pay phone or throwaway mobile, natch—and says one of my guys was selling dope to somebody. Or exposed himself. Somebody complained that our guys were killing pigeons but nobody gave a you-know-what.”
“Who’s ‘their’? As in ‘their tactics.’”
“Protesters. The group’s called One Earth. They do it to harass us.”
She said, “Shapiro. Yeah, I met him.”
The supervisor sighed. “Ezekiel. What’d he do to earn your attention?”
“Stopped a delivery truck.”
“Oh, that’s one of their favorites. Graffiti too. And false alarms. Even set fire to some trash cans. No damage but it brought the fire department and clogged the street.”
Though Shapiro was some distance away now, Sachs could see that the scrawny man was worked up. He radiated intensity and passion. Arms waving, head raised high, he led his followers in an indecipherable chant.
“What’s their issue?” she asked. “Fracking? I saw a poster.”
A look of disgust crossed Schoal’s face. “Ridiculous. We build near-surface, closed-loop geothermal. We don’t pump anything into the ground. We don’t suck anything out of the ground. The solution’s contained in pipes. It never leaves the system. And the odds of a rupture are as small as a roach’s ass. I sometimes think they don’t have a damn clue what we’re doing. They just need something to protest. Like, oh, it’s Sunday, I’m bored, let’s hug a tree and go make hardworking people’s lives miserable.”
Roach’s ass?
“Anyway, so, if none of ’em made any bullshit reports, what can I do for you, Detective?”
She first asked if Schoal had been working on Friday. She wasn’t going to share any information if there was a chance that he was the person Forty-Seven had met with. But Schoal wasn’t on that day. Thursday and Friday were his “weekend.”
&nb
sp; “I’m not so senior.” He said this with a wry grimace. “That’s why I’m working Sundays. Day of Rest. Ha!”
She explained that a suspect in a homicide had, they believed, walked out of the jobsite Friday afternoon, though telling him nothing about the nature of the killings.
“One of our people? Jesus.”
“I doubt it. It looks like he exited, was walking to the subway and remembered he was carrying a hard hat and safety vest. He turned around, threw them out and then got on the train.”
“Yeah, nobody in the business’d throw out a hat. A vest maybe but not a hat. What was he doing here?”
She told him the two theories. Using the site as a shortcut, to avoid the CCTV cameras along Cadman Plaza—all the government buildings. Or meeting somebody in the site, possibly to buy a weapon.
Schoal thought the shortcut idea wouldn’t make sense. The entrance she’d come through and another, a half block away, for trucks, were the only ways to get inside. “You basically come out of the site the same place you walked in.”
As for the second theory, he said, “We screen our people good. For drugs, drinking. I mean, it’s New York City construction. Some of my boys might be connected and might have a gun or two to sell. Can’t use metal detectors when your crew brings twenty pounds of tools with ’em every day.”
She glanced around the site. “You have cameras here?”
“Only the supply storage area and the tool rooms. Where thieves’d be more likely to hit. But they’re on the other side of the yard. He came out here, this gate, they wouldn’ta caught him. So, whatta you want to do, Detective?”
“Canvass your folks, find out if anybody saw him on Friday. I’ve got a rough description.”
“Sure, I’ll help you. Play cop. My brother’s on the force in Boston. South Bay.”
The Cutting Edge Page 14
