The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(43)
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.
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.