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.