The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(76)

Of course, Michelangelo was a prodigy. He was under thirty when he sculpted David and Pietà. Vimal didn’t rise to that level yet, though his own works, crafted in marble and granite and lapis, usually placed first or second in competitions around the New York City area.

But it had occurred to Vimal, with a shock, recently, that there was possibly a subtler, a subconscious, reason for his obsession with the man. Once, flipping through the pages, on break at Mr. Patel’s, he realized that the majority of Michelangelo’s sketches depicted in the volume, while superbly executed, were incomplete.

The man seemed incapable of finishing his drawings.

His 1508 study for Adam was merely a head and chest and floating, detached arms. His sketch for a Risen Christ featured a nearly faceless Jesus.

Incomplete…

Those sketches are just like me, Vimal had concluded, while acknowledging that the “disembodied” theory sounded like bad pop psychology on a bad TV show.

There was another parallel too between the two men. Vimal had shared this with Adeela and she’d given him one of her wry smiles. Meaning, Really? Aren’t you carrying this a bit far?

Well, no, he wasn’t.

The analogy was this: Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor before all else and only reluctantly would take on commissions for paintings. He wasn’t exactly a hack at this, of course, having produced the Sistine Chapel ceiling in merely four years, as well as The Last Judgment and dozens of other masterpieces. But Michelangelo’s passions lay elsewhere, with marble not canvas. And for Vimal, it was marble not jewelry.

Painting and diamond cutting, in their respective cases, simply didn’t ignite that undeniable, searing fire that flares when you’re doing the one thing that God, or the gods, or whatever, put you on earth for.

As he finished the greasy slice and slurped the last of the soda, anger at his father once more swelled. Then he tamped it down and, with a last look at the Poseidon statue, closed the book and replaced it in his bag.

Walking with his head mostly down—he wore a black baseball cap—he left the pizzeria and avoided the clusters of police, making his way to the waiting area. The bus would be leaving soon.

He sat down on a plastic chair, next to a pleasant-looking girl in her late twenties. He noticed from her ticket that, for the first leg of the journey at least, she would be on the same bus that his ticket was for. The address sticker on her guitar case was Springfield, Illinois. She wasn’t very Midwest in appearance, at least from Vimal’s limited knowledge of the region. Her hair was green and blue and she had three nose studs and a ring in her eyebrow. Vimal supposed that her dreams of stages and cabarets and theater in New York had come to an end. Her stoic face suggested this too. Wistful, as if she’d lost something important and given up looking. Which seemed sadder than sad.

Then Vimal reflected that this might be his imagination and she was going to spend a few days with some former roommates from college, drink plenty of wine from a box, sleep with a local bar boy and have the time of her life.

What was the truth?

The older he got, Vimal Lahori had decided, the less he knew.

A staticky voice—of indeterminate gender—announced that the bus was ready to depart. He leaned down, gathered his bag and rose.

*



“Any idea where he’s run off to?”

“None,” Sachs explained to Rhyme, who’d asked about Vimal Lahori, after the young man’s prison break from his own house. Clever, pretending to grind away on sculpture, all the while you’re cutting steel bars.

Sick, of course, that his father had decided to play jailer.

Sachs continued, “He took about three thousand from his father—though his mother tells me that it’s really his. Lahori takes everything the boy makes as a diamond cutter and banks it. He gives the kid an allowance.”

“At his age? Hm.”

The doorbell rang and Thom went to answer it. He returned a few moments later with Edward Ackroyd, dressed in a two-piece suit, pinstripe light gray, perfectly pressed. White shirt and red-and-blue-striped tie. Rhyme pictured him wearing this getup for a meeting at 10 Downing Street.

“Lincoln. Amelia.”

He’d given up, at last, on the “sir” and “ma’am.” Rhyme imagined that Scotland Yard protocols were largely baked in.

The insurance man said hello as well to Cooper.

“Any new leads?” he asked.

Rhyme offered the latest developments.

“Vimal Lahori.” Ackroyd nodded. “A bit more to go on. But locked in his basement?” A brief frown at this news. “And now he’s vanished. Doesn’t he know he’s in danger? Well, pointless question. Of course he does. But why doesn’t he want help?”

Sachs said, “The basement’s a clue. My guess is he’s avoiding his father as much as he’s avoiding Forty-Seven. We bring him in, he can’t escape Dad.”

Thom offered to take his coat but Ackroyd said he couldn’t stay; he had a meeting with another client.

The Brit said to Sachs, “So you met his family. Surely they must have some idea where he’s gone. Friends, other relatives.”

“They gave me a few names but nothing panned out. Vimal didn’t share much with anybody in the family. Dad offered five hundred dollars as a reward and the son of a diamond cutter Vimal was working for turned him in.” A shrug. “I suppose the father’s doing the same thing again. Maybe that’ll give us a lead. And they’ll contact me, if they hear.”