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"Ah'll hold this one for you, suh,
while you go'n take a look."
    "You won't sell it to anyone while I'm gone?"
    The black man looked at me stupidly.
    I had the rear of the shop more or less to myself. It
was dry-walled into a three-sided cube, racked on each side with
magazines. A curtained portal in the back wall led to the peep shows,
and there was a bin marked "Special" in the center of the
floor. I rummaged through the torn magazines and snapshots inside the
bin and came up with two more of Cindy Ann. Both of them were tame,
nondescript Polaroids--very different fare from what Hugo had
discovered in that shoebox. Which puzzled me.
    I looked back up to the counter and decided it was
time to do a little detection. After thinking it over, I decided a
twenty dollar bill would be just about the right tool.
    The clerk was staring at his own reflection again
when I walked back up to the register. "Find what you looking
for?" he said to me.
    Some of them are back-slappers and some of them
handle you as daintily as teacups. This one was the cautious type.
But I figured that most of his suspiciousness came from being black
and poor. Which made the twenty dollar bill seem more and more like a
good idea. Besides, that gold in his eye wasn't all eyestrain.
    "These pictures," I said in my most casual
manner. "I'd like to get some more of them."
    "You would?" he said, mocking my tone of
voice. "How bad?"
    I slipped the twenty out of my wallet.
    "That bad?" he said and his eyes glittered.
"Well, I'll tell you, we get us a shipment every month."
    I started to put the bill back in my pocket when he
reached out and grabbed my arm.
    "'Course you in a
hurry. So you might try up to Gem Distributors on Mohawk."
He pulled the twenty out of my hand. "You can
jus' keep them," he said, pointing to the three photographs.
"They's your change."
    ***
    It took me half an hour to walk up to Mohawk. Half an
hour in the noon sun through that part of the city where commerce
dies off and languishes in two-story storefronts and red-brick
tenements. Used furniture stores, redneck bars with names like
"Liberty Bell," two-dollar-a-day hotels, pawn shops,
abandoned movie houses. Most great cities trail their own death
around with them and sleep, like John Donne, with one foot in the
coffin. And the Over-the-Rhine, around Mohawk, is Cincinnati's
dead-end.
    It took me ten more minutes to find Gem Distributors,
because, like a box within a box, Gem Distributors was tucked away
inside an old white trolley depot. At least, it looked like it had
been a trolley depot from the size of the round picket doors set in
the white stone facade. I found a customer's entrance on the west
side of the building and walked in. Two men were sitting on a dolly
by the door, drinking wine from a paper bag. One of them had long red
hair and the lush, simpering face of a painted Cupid. The other was
older, with a great shock of white hair and white walrus moustaches
and spry gray eyes. They were both a little drunk and, from the looks
on their faces, I'd walked in on them in the middle of a joke. The
old one got to his feet and dusted at his overalls, while Cupid broke
up in laughter.
    "Don't mind him, mister," the old one said.
But there was laughter in his voice, too, and he was having a hard
time containing it. He made his face over into a mask of seriousness.
And the young one fell back on the dolly and roared.
    "Shut up, Terry," the old one said. "Don't
mind him, mister. What can I do for you?"
    "I want to speak to the manager," I said.
    "You're looking at him." The old man hiked
up his pants.
    "Pete O'Brien," he said, holding out a
hand.
    "Harry Stoner," I said.
    Pete O'Brien didn't look like a pornographer--for
what that was worth. And if he were, he wasn't a particularly
successful one. The warehouse was virtually empty. From the dust on
the floors it hadn't seen much business in quite a time. I began to
think that the clerk had pulled a fast one.
    "You deliver all over the city,