Page 158 - tender-is-the-night

‘He’s in a terrible situation and it’s my fault,’ said Abe. ‘We
need some good advice.’
‘Come in our rooms,’ said Dick.
Abe insisted that Rosemary come too and they crossed
the hall to the Divers’ suite. Jules Peterson, a small, respect-
able Negro, on the suave model that heels the Republican
party in the border States, followed.
It appeared that the latter had been a legal witness to the
early morning dispute in Montparnasse; he had accompa-
nied Abe to the police station and supported his assertion
that a thousand franc note had been seized out of his hand
by a Negro, whose identification was one of the points of the
case. Abe and Jules Peterson, accompanied by an agent of
police, returned to the bistro and too hastily identified as the
criminal a Negro, who, so it was established after an hour,
had only entered the place after Abe left. The police had fur-
ther complicated the situation by arresting the prominent
Negro restaurateur, Freeman, who had only drifted through
the alcoholic fog at a very early stage and then vanished.
The true culprit, whose case, as reported by his friends, was
that he had merely commandeered a fifty-franc note to pay
for drinks that Abe had ordered, had only recently and in a
somewhat sinister rôle, reappeared upon the scene.
In brief, Abe had succeeded in the space of an hour in
entangling himself with the personal lives, consciences, and
emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans
inhabiting the French Latin quarter. The disentanglement
was not even faintly in sight and the day had passed in an
atmosphere of unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unex-

158 Tender is the Night