The assessor clicked his stopwatch and pointed at a man in a Yankees jacket.
"Him," he said. "Five minutes. Get him to do one thing he wouldn't have done. Spit on the platform. Cut in at the door. Tell his wife a lie on the phone. I'm not fussy."
It was twenty to eight on Thursday morning, on the platform at Paterson station, up on the embankment over Ward Street. The sun was coming flat along the tracks from the east and lying on everything. I was thin in it. Daylight does that to us. I felt like a coat on a hanger.
The assessor didn't seem to mind it. He was a jinn in a car coat with a clipboard, and where the sun touched his edges they ran a little, the way air runs over a road in August.
I'd left Twentieth Avenue the way I came, under the door, while Samira was still saying it. I hadn't been back. I'd lain on my bunk for three nights hearing it in the cistern.
"Four minutes fifty," the assessor said.
I went up to the man in the Yankees jacket. He was fifty or so, heavy, with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. I came in by his right ear, where I'd always gone, and there was an ear, and hair, and the warm smell of a man who'd showered in a hurry. It was like walking into somebody else's kitchen in the dark. Everything was in the wrong place.
"Your knees," I said. "Your knees are killing you."
His knees were fine. He shifted his weight and looked down the track.
"Your son," I tried. "You know what you did to your son."
Nothing. Maybe he didn't have one. Maybe he'd been good to him. I had no way of telling. I had eighty-one years of one man's soft places and not a single one of this man's.
"You've missed the prayer," I said, which was the oldest thing I had. "You can make it up later."
He took a sip of coffee.
Then a hand pushed me. A woman in a pink ski jacket was standing so close behind his left shoulder that she was half inside it, and the hand flat on my chest was hers.
"Excuse me," she said. "Do you mind? He's mine."
"I'm being assessed."
"Be assessed on somebody else." She leaned in to him without looking away from me. "Mikey. That guy took your seat on Monday."
The man in the Yankees jacket turned and stared at a boy with headphones, and his whole face changed. When the train came in he went through the door shoulder first, and the boy bounced off the frame.
The assessor wrote something down.
"That was her," he said. "For the record."
The first time I got him to cheat a customer, it was over a wedding suit, and it was the best work I ever did with a needle.
1979, in April, the busy season. Mansour Tailoring had two machines by then and a rack of finished work by the door with paper tickets pinned to the sleeves. Ibrahim was thirty-four and going grey over the ears.
The suit belonged to a boy called Ray Haddad, who was getting married on the Saturday and had put on fifteen pounds since the fitting. His father brought it in on the Wednesday, a navy three-piece, and stood at the counter turning his hat round in his hands.
"Let it out," the father said. "All the seams. Whatever it takes. Use the good thread."
The good thread was silk, in a box on the top shelf, and it cost what it cost. The other thread was a cheap polyester from a wholesaler in Newark that came on a cone the size of a bottle and frayed if you looked at it.
Ibrahim wrote "silk" on the ticket. He wrote the price for silk.
He went to the top shelf. I was in his ear, and I said nothing, because nothing was the right thing to say. He had his hand on the box. He looked at the clock over the door, which said ten to six, and at the pile on the cutting table, and at the cone of polyester on the second machine, already threaded.
"Who's going to know?" I said. "It's navy. It's the same colour. He's going to wear it once."
He took his hand off the box.
The seam went at the reception, during the line dance, all the way up the back from the vent to the collar. Half of the Haddads saw it. The father came in on the Monday with the jacket over his arm, and he laid it on the counter with the split side up, the threads hanging out of it like hair.
"You said silk," he said.
Ibrahim picked up the jacket and turned the seam to the light. He didn't hurry. I felt him decide. It was like a key turning in a good lock, one smooth click.
"It is silk," he said. "The best I have. Silk doesn't hold when a boy dances like a horse. I can sew it again for you. Half price."
The father looked at him for a long time. Then he paid the half.
I was so proud of him that night. He ate a whole plate of rice standing at the stove, and I ate it with him, and I felt the lie sitting in him, warm, the way a coin sits in a pocket.
The bank was on Market Street, and by ten the queue went back to the door.
The assessor gave me a woman in a nurse's tunic, with a utility bill folded in her hand and a toddler on her hip. I had ten minutes. I was supposed to get her to walk out without paying, or to shout at the teller, or anything in between.
The bill was from the electric company, ninety-one dollars and forty cents, with FINAL NOTICE across the top in red. I could see it over her shoulder. That much I could use.
"Ninety-one forty," I said into her ear. "For a light you leave on in the hall. The teller's looking at you. She thinks you can't pay it. Walk out. Come back Monday when it's quiet and nobody's watching."
She didn't walk out. She kissed the toddler on the ear and told him two more people, two more, and he held up two fingers to show her he understood. The teller wasn't looking at her at all. The teller was looking at the clock.
I worked hard after that. I'll say that for myself. I tried his knees on her. I tried his son. I tried the look on a customer's face when the seam goes, and the long walk up Twentieth Avenue in the rain, and tea with four sugars. I tried his mother's envelope with the prayer times on the back.
She hitched the toddler up on her hip and checked her phone and moved forward one place.
Her own companion was sitting on the counter by the pens, a young one in a hoodie, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells. She watched me the whole ten minutes the way you'd watch a man trying to start a car with his house key.
"She's not him," she said at the end, kindly enough. "Whoever he was."
The result came on a half sheet, in a booth at the Office no bigger than a phone box, with the falls going behind the wall.
The assessor slid it across the shelf. There were nine boxes down the side: Pride, Delay, Anger, Despair, Greed, Lust, Doubt, Neglect, Other. Every box said "Not observed" in the same blue biro.
Down at the bottom, where the grade went, he'd written something longer and underlined it twice.
"Single-subject specialist," he read out, in case I couldn't. "Don't make that face. It's a category. You know one man very well, and he's dead, and that's what you're good at."
"So I fail."
"For general placement you fail." He clicked his pen. "For specific placement you're a gift."
There was a card clipped to the top of the sheet. I hadn't noticed it. It was cream-coloured and good quality, heavier than anything else in that building, and the paper clip holding it was gold.
The ink on it was dry. Somebody had clipped it there before I ever got on the platform.
It said: "Mansour household. Contact: Separation."