Yehudah kept talking. “Don’t tell me you think so, tell me you know so. The more people think about this sort of thing, the worse off they are, in my opinion. Because if you have to think about it, then why are you doing it?”

Jake considered for a moment. The Mad Hatter had a point. “Fair enough,” he conceded. “But I know so.”

Yehudah slapped his hand on the table, making both Jake and the black velvet jump. “Good, we’re all set then. Now let’s get this straight—you want round brilliant cut, three-quarter carat, VS2 or SI1, H or I color class, from four thousand to fifty-five hundred dollars. Correct?”

Jake was impressed. Perhaps Abramovitch was right after all. “Yes, that’s it.”

“Great. I’ll just go over to the vault and bring out some samples, and we’ll see what we can do.” Yehudah stood up, cocking his index finger at Jake in another gesture Jake didn’t expect. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t think too much while I’m gone.”

Jake smiled and loosened his tie. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t think of it.”

And the Mad Hatter disappeared.

JAKE’S MOTHER had warned him when he was nine years old about the perils of thinking too much. It was a good thing she had told him then, because she only had thirteen years in which to warn him about these things. Sometimes Jake wondered whether she knew, in some untapped pool beneath conscious knowing, how the clock of her life had been fixed.

“Nobody likes a person who sits around pulling everything apart in his head,” she had told him one day in her clipped Netherlands English. He was helping her make dinner in his nine-year-old way, setting the table and chopping peppers (being very careful, of course, not to let the knife slip and cut his finger, not to deprive himself of this rare privilege, rarer and more valuable than buried treasure, of cooking with his mother), while his mother told him stories about one of her old lovers, from before she met Jake’s father. Her “lovers.” She was allowed to say that because she wasn’t American. Americans weren’t allowed to have lovers, unless they were describing their extramarital affairs. Instead Americans were stuck playing like children with “girlfriends” and “boyfriends,” even if the girls and boys in question were well into their sixties. God forbid you should grow up.