Who do you think said this sentence? The agent was eager to show me his portfolio of evidence against me, and I was curious, especially about the photograph. Harrison Shepherd and wife, Communist party meeting 1930. It was a puzzling disappointment, not one thing in the picture I could recognize. No person I’d ever known, no place I had been. “Is this the noose around my neck? I can’t even guess which one of those men is supposed to be me. I was fourteen that year, living in Mexico.” I handed back the photograph, and he took a great deal of care to put it inside a folder and settle it in the correct compartment of his briefcase. Then said, “That photograph is a piece of garbage. I realize that.” Who do you think said this sentence: “That photograph is a piece of garbage. I realize that”? The agent or the narrator?The passage following that sentence: The man was so shabby and earnest, I almost hated to let him down. Probably people habitually responded this way—shop clerks slipped back his change, the butcher put an extra ounce of chuck on the scales. Probably I’d let him in the door because of some vague sense he was a man of Artie’s ilk. A short, bald, gentile Arthur Gold. A widower, judging from his clothes, and the long, scant hair combed over his bald head, no one to tell him that was a bad idea. He had none of Artie’s cleverness but seemed to carry the same torch. Searching for an honest man and fed up with the whole shmear.