Page 159 - tender-is-the-night

pected places and around unexpected corners, and insistent
Negro voices on the phone.
In person, Abe had succeeded in evading all of them, save
Jules Peterson. Peterson was rather in the position of the
friendly Indian who had helped a white. The Negroes who
suffered from the betrayal were not so much after Abe as
after Peterson, and Peterson was very much after what pro-
tection he might get from Abe.
Up in Stockholm Peterson had failed as a small manu-
facturer of shoe polish and now possessed only his formula
and sufficient trade tools to fill a small box; however, his new
protector had promised in the early hours to set him up in
business in Versailles. Abe’s former chauffeur was a shoe-
maker there and Abe had handed Peterson two hundred
francs on account.
Rosemary listened with distaste to this rigmarole; to ap-
preciate its grotesquerie required a more robust sense of
humor than hers. The little man with his portable manufac-
tory, his insincere eyes that, from time to time, rolled white
semicircles of panic into view; the figure of Abe, his face as
blurred as the gaunt fine lines of it would permit—all this
was as remote from her as sickness.
‘I ask only a chance in life,’ said Peterson with the sort of
precise yet distorted intonation peculiar to colonial coun-
tries. ‘My methods are simple, my formula is so good that I
was drove away from Stockholm, ruined, because I did not
care to dispose of it.’
Dick regarded him politely—interest formed, dissolved,
he turned to Abe:

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