The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(40)

Rhyme nodded and wheeled back to the charts. The entries provided some direction, some help. But the prickly dissatisfaction he felt, like a nagging fever, told him that the problem wasn’t that the answers were so elusive; it was that he was beginning to think they weren’t asking the right questions.

It was then that his phone dinged with a text. He looked over the screen.

“Thom?” he shouted.

“I’m right—”

“Bring the van around.”

“Here. The van?”

“Yes. Bring. The. Van. Around.”

Sellitto regarded him. “Got a lead?”

“No. This’s something else.”





Chapter 19



Well, a problem.

Vimal Lahori was sitting across from Mr. Nouri at the diamantaire’s desk, in his upstairs office at N&B Jewelry. His heart was beating hard, his breath coming fast.

He needed the money. But there was a glitch.

He was staring at the diamond that he’d shaken from the stiff folded envelope, the diamond Mr. Nouri was hiring him to cut.

“Something, isn’t it?” the man whispered.

Vimal could only nod. He tipped down the loupe and examined the stone under the sharp light from a gooseneck lamp. Turned it over, and over, and over.

Rough diamonds occur in nature in various forms. The most common shape is octahedron—essentially two four-sided pyramids joined at the base. These are cut into separate pyramids and each one is then bruted—smoothed against another diamond or a laser. These become round brilliants: the most common cut, making up tens of millions of stones in rings, earrings, pins and necklaces around the world. This cut features fifty-seven or occasionally fifty-eight facets; it was created a century ago by Marcel Tolkowsky, one of the most renowned diamantaires who ever lived. He applied geometry to establish the ideal proportions for shaping diamonds.

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.”