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like it had been newsprint but was now brownfrom the sun. There was junk everywhere. Newspapers piled in red vinyl chairs. Cartons of books and magazines and stuff along the walls. The place smelled like dust and developer. When I stepped away from the door, my boots grated like sandpaper on the gritty linoleum floor.
    Brides had come here with their gowns in plastic bags. Little kids had fussed as their parents had fixed their hair, pulled at their clothes. Just wait a second. You want to look nice in the picture, don’t you?
    But that had been a long time ago. A very long time.
    I walked across the room to the counter and picked at the stacks of magazines and newspapers and camera parts. The newspapers were yellow. The Sun , June 14, 1986; January 30, 1979. Magazines were in piles, dusty. Photography , May 1953. A blonde woman in a red leotard and fishnet stockings. Babies and kids in Universal Photo Almanac , 1950. John Glenn smiling in his space helmet on the cover of U.S. Camera International , 1963. I put the magazines down and walked to a dark gray blanket hung across a doorway. Stopped for a second and then groped inside for a light switch. The light went on. Red. The darkroom. I pushed the blanket aside and stepped in.
    There were bottles of chemicals, brown and frosted with dust. Black darkroom sinks. Trays and a couple of enlargers. Next to one of the sinks was a crinkled tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap, pink, with dirt in the cracks. A toothbrush stuck out of a glass.
    Arthur’s bathroom.
    I swallowed and turned back through the blanket. To the left was a narrow hallway, then another blanket, beige instead of gray. I reached and groped again and found the light switch on the right. I flicked it and froze.
    It looked like a hideout for a hostage. There was a bed against the far wall, unmade, with gray sheets. At one corner the beddingwas pulled back. The mattress was stained. There was a wooden crate on end next to the bed, with a dirty plate on top and a fork on the plate. On the wall next to the bed was a reflector shade, the kind photographers use to light portraits. It was thick with grime, like a faded dirty parasol.
    This had been the studio but was now the bedroom. A studio apartment, silent and still. I walked to the center of the room and stood.
    To the right, along the wall, were stuffed toy animals. A teddy bear sat and stared. A light blue bunny rabbit with foot-long ears lay on its side. The tools of the trade, props used to get the little tykes to smile. They looked like they’d come to life and murder children in their beds.
    The place was giving me the creeps. I told myself ten more minutes, then out.
    Along one wall was a bookshelf. I rummaged through more magazines, more newspapers, folders of old prints of couples and kids and groups lined up and shot against walls, all with ARTHUR BERTIN PHOTO stamped on the back. Dead people, I thought. Folder after folder of them. Arthur’s portfolio. His friends from the other side.
    I walked the room, picking and poking. The crate beside the bed had stuff that looked more recent, less dusty. There were notebooks, white reporters’ notebooks from the Review , filled with Arthur’s scrawl. Pens and reusable film canisters. A binder with more pictures. I opened it to the middle, a photo of a guy in an Army uniform. He was standing beside a car from the early fifties.
    Arthur.
    He was thinner, with thicker hair that still looked greasy, even back then. On the next page was another picture of him, standing onthe runway of an airfield with planes in the background. It must have been Air Force, not Army. Arthur was looking into the viewfinder of an old 120-millimeter camera. Four smiling guys in uniform were posing in front of a big propeller plane.
    The pages went chronologically. An advertisement for Arthur’s studio grand opening, May 15, 1958. Arthur Bertin photos clipped from the Review and taped to lined paper. A cop beside a