Back Street [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 ONE evening in one of those Over-the-Rhine cafés which were plentiful along Vine Street of the Cincinnati of the nineties, a traveling salesman leaned across his stein of Moer-lein's Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent. "I knowl You're one of those cheating girls who act fly but aren't. You'll lead a man on, but you won't go aU the way." At the implication and all that went with it, Ray's hand flew to her tippet, color ran beneath her tan pallor, and as usual when under stress, she rolled her eyes and became flippant. "Try me," was what she said, with little sense of the out-rageousness of such a remark. "That's exactly what I have been trying to do all evening," said the traveling salesman who, having exhibited what was for him an unprecedented astuteness in his stimmary of Ray Schmidt, now leaned to pinch her knee softly underneath the table. Ray was forever being pinched underneath tables. As far back as she could remember, as a child and then as a girl growing up on Baymiller Street, boys had been fond of pinching and pulling her toward them for kisses. "Spooning" was not unpleasant, particularly in the evening, when somehow the boys' faces receded out of a pimply reality into the velvet tunnels of Cincinnati's low kind of darkness. With the boys whose faces persisted in jutting lumpily, even out of cover of nighttime, Ray simply had not the heart to follow the slightly disgusted impulse to push them away. 3