Still, he had great faith in the resources of the extremely wealthy. “There are 230,000” — he said “thousand” with an astonished emphasis — “people in the world with a net worth, excluding their primary residence, of $30 million or more. In the luxury industry you call them ultrahigh-net-worth individuals. When you ask the bank to finance an aircraft, their rule of thumb is that your net worth has to be at least five times greater than the price of the plane. That means even if you’re at the bottom of that list, there are at least 230,000 people who might buy a $6 million airplane — though maybe they’d stop at $4 million, because then you need a million bucks a year to fly it.” No matter how hard his work or positive his outlook, Varsano knew he didn’t stand a chance of paying the rent on his storefront selling $4 million planes. There’s a strong downward pressure on commissions, which regardless of the purchase price of the aircraft usually top out at $1 million — a take of 1.4 percent on a $70 million plane. That world is just so vanishingly small, and there’s so much information on the market, and the principals are so powerful, that somewhere there’s invariably a small-time broker with a desk and a cellphone ready to elbow in for a fee that Varsano would consider an insult to his professional acumen. “There’s always some guy out there willing to do a deal for $25,000,” he complained.

And yet Varsano persisted in the belief that his new showroom — and the increased regard that Trump had brought to private aviation — might put him closer to the means of his clients. We sat in his decision-making boardroom at twilight, watching the people and the cars hurry by. Every once in a while, a pedestrian stopped in astonishment to take a picture, or a car would all of a sudden slow and swerve into the bus lane so whoever was inside could gawk.

“I’ll buy one some day,” Varsano said. “You know, you work in a shoe shop, you should have nice shoes.” He looked down at his own shoes, expensive but heavily scuffed with signs of extended wear.

“Do I need one?” He glanced out the window and then once more considered his shoes. “I should have one. I’ll get one.”

A few weeks into the new year, he told me he felt as if his optimism through the lean times had at last been borne out. “In the U.S., the market is on fire, and you could say it was the Trump bump, or you could say that it was the way this tax plan has energized people to make the jump.” A provision in the law actually allowed jet buyers to write off the entire purchase — effective immediately, for those who might want to claim it on a 2017 return. Varsano was on safari in Africa for Christmas but had received and taken a battery of excited calls, some from clients who sought confirmation that the provision was real, and some from those who needed no convincing and would buy almost anything from him if they could only close the deal in time. That was unfortunately impossible — the process of buying a used plane was just too cumbersome and slow, and involved too many parties — but he sent them on to the manufacturers, who were delighted to offload in a hurry whatever inventory they had in the hangar. When a longtime customer couldn’t get a Gulfstream G550 listed by Varsano for $30 million, he turned around and, in four days, bought one new from the company for $13 million more. Thus the Trump administration had, as Varsano had hoped, brought new license and new zeal to the acquisitive impulses of the jet-possession set, and he was sure he would see his own reward in short order. It would just take some time for their generosity to find its way to his level, and he had to be patient. His windfall would come, and he would take flight.

Varsano was born into a generation that understood the airplane for its totemic significance as a technological miracle within mortal reach. The memories of his youth he holds dearest are those that involve getting a rickety aircraft the size of a minibus lost in storm clouds over the Bahamas, the compass slipping slowly, and even now that both airplanes and the economy have been so thoroughly transformed, there was nothing he didn’t know about these machines, and almost nothing he didn’t love. But the brief minute in which they passed through his hands between an oligarch and an executive was the closest he was likely to come to calling one his own, at least in the class he sold — the class that mattered. The sarcophagal fuselage in his window was not, in the end, just an unusually elaborate showpiece. It might only be a diorama, but it’s the plane he can afford, a mock-up designed to his own last wish.