The rain slows him down and as he nears Fifth Avenue he glances over the rusted train shed at the clock tower on the Milwaukee Road, though it stopped long ago. He quickens his step and lights a cigarette and holds it underneath the hood of his cupped hand so the rain won’t put it out. He rushes past the jewelry store and glares in, not expecting her there. Usually the last person in the shop is the manager, a beak-nosed man with acne in wrinkle-free polyester trousers and short sleeves that expose the skin of his forearms, as pasty and pale as fish belly, studded with thick black hairs. Simon looks in quickly, and in the air trap between the doors Vera is struggling to get her arms through the sleeves of her damp plastic trench coat, like a mink caught in a leghold trap.

Simon considers jumping back into the shelter of the Mill Inn but instead ducks and breaks into a trot. Vera must have freed herself from the twisted silver plastic and the door swings open as Simon flicks the butt into the gutter and with the agility of a tailback cuts into the next door and pulls it closed with a rattling crash behind him.

He flaps the jacket open to shake off the water. He looks up into a riot of carpets in stacks and rolls and on a wall-mounted rack like posters at a head shop.

“Can I help you?” someone asks.

It takes Simon a minute to sort through the patterns and textures. A small man, no taller than five feet, hoves into view from behind a stack of rugs. He wipes his mustache with a napkin and approaches Simon with his hands on his hips, his chest thrust out even with his curved belly.

“Can I help you?” he repeats, running his hand over his bald head and searching the front of his teeth for remainders of egg salad.

“Huh?” says Simon.

“Do you need a rug?” he says, gesturing at the expanse of carpets around the store.

“Why the fuck would I need a rug?” asks Simon suspiciously, backing toward the door.

“Why do you need a rug, or why do you need a rug?” asks the salesman professionally.

“Whatever.”

“Why? Because they make you feel good. That’s why.”

“Why would a carpet make me feel good?”

The salesman winces. “They’re rugs, not carpets.”

“Okay.”

“They make you feel good because they are special. They are distinct. No two are the same. They make you feel good because they will last longer than you. Because,” he says finally, “because they’re beautiful.”

“I live in a basement.”

“All the more reason,” he says exuberantly. “All the more reason. You’d be able to say you live in a basement with a Bokhara.”

“A what?”

“Bokhara. They’re from Uzbekistan.”

“Where?”

“Uzbekistan. It’s in the USSR. But the tribe is more important than the country.”