Chapter 37
Vimal Lahori was back in his beloved bus station, the Port Authority.
Better this time. Less pain. The horror of the killing had diminished. And he had money.
At home last night, before he’d gone down to the studio to “have words” with his father, he’d walked upstairs on the pretext of getting a sweater. He’d done that... but he’d also taken the three thousand dollars — his three thousand — that Nouri had paid him, as well as his wallet. He had lifted another two hundred of his father’s because he was owed that, and much, much more, for the cutting jobs his father had rented him out for. He got his phone too. A razor, toothpaste and brush, the antiseptic Adeela had given him. Some bandages. And of course his Book, his most precious possession.
Vimal had been planning all along to escape last night as soon as his parents were busy with their game or had gone to sleep. He’d agreed to some ambiguous peace treaty with his father, which Vimal hadn’t meant a word of. But then it turned out that his father hadn’t meant a word of it either. He should have guessed that Papa was lying — and going to entrap him in the basement prison; the bottled water stacked up, the food in the fridge, the sleeping bag. Lite fucking beer?
Goddamn it.
He shivered with rage.
Vimal was now walking away from the Greyhound window. The one-way ticket cost him $317.50. The journey from New York to the station at 1716 7th Street, in Los Angeles, would take sixty-five hours.
Thinking about what was coming next, Vimal Lahori was sorrowful, he was terrified.
But these emotions were outweighed by the exhilaration he felt, and he knew he was doing the right thing. He turned his phone on and texted his mother that he loved her. And texted his brother that he loved him too and he’d be in touch from someplace out of town.
He then bought a soda — a large Cherry Coke, a secret delight (his father never let him have any beverage with caffeine because he was, for some reason, convinced it would make his son’s hands shake, resulting in a flawed diamond facet). Vimal bought a slice of pizza too. He stood, eating and sipping, at a dirty high-top table. There were no chairs for customers. To encourage turnover in the “dining room,” he guessed.
He looked into what amounted to his luggage — a canvas bag he’d bought for a dollar at a grocery store. And he took out what gave him as much comfort as the Port Authority itself.
The Book. A holy book in a way. It was something he turned to a lot, something that comforted him, that never failed to astonish.
The Collected Sketches of Michelangelo had been printed years ago, in the early part of the prior century. Vimal considered the master to be the greatest sculptor who’d ever lived and, given his own passion, it was logical that he’d be drawn to the man and his art. The artist was Vimal’s god. Oh, he liked pop music, manga and would have liked binge-worthy TV, had his father allowed him to watch much of it. But he loved Michelangelo and, in those moments when his ancestral country’s religious legacy — reincarnation — seemed plausible to him (this was rare, usually after wine), he fantasized that the ancient sculptor’s soul — part of it, at least — resided within Vimal himself.
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.