It seemed like a long time before I got Tommy Hutchings on the phone. I went through a switchboard and was transferred twice to different sound stages. He seemed surprised to hear from me. Although we hadn’t been introduced, I assumed he knew what had happened the night before in the shed behind Casa Guatemala. Where had he been? My hand wandered to the lump on the back of my head. Too easily I got him to agree to meet me during his lunch break, which would begin in about an hour. We hung up at the same time.

I checked my watch again. It would take only fifteen minutes to get there. I swiveled around and looked out the window and down onto the Boulevard. Someone had smashed the plate glass window of the video store across the street and now two men had begun boarding it up with plywood. Someone had wanted videocassettes. Could they properly be called movies if they weren’t up on the big screen? I wondered. Didn’t putting it on a television set make it a different medium?

The thieves would sell the cassettes out of the backs of vans to people too poor to own two VCRs and pirate the images themselves.

By nightfall the plywood would be thick with graffiti. Inevitably someone would try to rob the store again before the plywood was replaced by glass. I turned back to the desk feeling tired and discouraged with the world. Always the invention of new crimes. Now in the late twentieth century it was the theft of images. I thought of Armando, the Cuban photographer. Why did he go to all the demonstrations and take photos? What did he do with them? The paper usually didn’t cover the demonstrations, didn’t consider them newsworthy enough unless someone famous was there or unless a vote on aid was coming up in Congress, as it was now. I picked up the phone again and asked information for the number of the Times.

Eventually I was connected with a guy in the photo department. I asked him if he could find an article from June about a demonstration in front of the Federal Building. He didn’t sound too thrilled about it, but it was his job so he put me on hold for about ten minutes. I looked back out the window while I was waiting. A small crowd had gathered to watch the plywood repair and there was laughing and pushing and shoving.

“Ok, I got a story about a demo on June 18.” His voice brought me back to attention. “What do you want to know about it?”

“Did any photos run with it?”

“On the front page. Picture of Johnny Why getting arrested. You know, Johnny Why, the singer.”

“Who’s got the photo credit on it?”

“Marilyn Navarro.”

“What? Are you sure?”