Marse had filed Chapter Eleven during Xmas four years before, the Xmas of the Terrible Twos, when demonstrations drastically curbed the Xmas sales; there had always been a noncommercial Xmas movement but the antics of the Nicolaites and the inflammatory media speeches of Black Peter had exacerbated the situation. Elder Marse had bounced back from the Xmas Crash of the T.T.’s, and was now managing this middle-90s Xmas before surrendering to serve six months at a California federal prison, nicknamed “Club Fed” by insiders, for an insider-trading scam that had wiped out hundreds of investors. He had chosen his own jail, and was given a suite of cells, equipped with ten telephones, computers, a chef, a masseuse, and two color television sets. For a couple of Heath bars and some heavy metal records Santa Barbara surfing blondes would come down and administer to his needs all night, or take a cruise on one of his yachts, while the bribed guards looked the other way. Jack Frost was the only man on Big North’s payroll to survive the scandal of the Terrible Twos and was now working for Elder Marse as a floorwalker or troubleshooter. His old boss, Ozwald Zumwalt — an alias, he’d run across the name in Jane’s fighting ships — was living in Florida. Two other survivors were also living in Florida, Vixen and her husband Stuart, who had been hired by Big North to play Santa Claus, only to be kidnapped by Black Peter and the gang and replaced with a dummy, the corpse of the gangster Snow Man. Vixen still hadn’t recovered her speech after discovering Black Peter feeding the corpse of Snow Man with the drops of Tarpon Springs water, supposedly the tears of the original Saint Nicholas. Bro Andrew, the red-haired white dred who had been introduced to Rastafarianism by Black Peter, had abandoned the impostor and taken up residence in the Santa Cruz mountains. Their roosters, dogs, and goats disturbed their neighbors.
Jack Frost enjoyed free-lancing. He made his own hours. And Elder Marse only called on him when he needed to apply a little extra persuasion to a stubborn client. Jack and Elder Marse were talking quietly between sips of sherry. Marse was seated in a made-in-Korea antique chair with a dragon on its back.
“Jack, I’ve grown fond of you in the past few years.” Elder Marse wore a blue striped shirt, red suspenders and a flowing bow tie. His chin looked as though it were expecting. He was bald, and wore a black patch over one eye. “My colleagues and I won’t forget that you were the only one remaining to deal with that Nicolaite band when they tried to keep the consumers from our stores. You’ve done a lot of good work for me.”
“Why thanks, Elder Marse,” Jack said, leaning toward the toyman, one hand on a hip, the other holding his empty glass.
“Don’t mention it, Jack. Here, have some more sherry.” Jack poured from a decanter that was a remnant of one of the important Chinese dynasties.
“We’ve bounded back in four years, but with these endless Terribles, the stock market crash, and what have you, our sales are still pretty spotty.”
“I know, Mr. Marse.” Since coming on board Elder Marse’s organization, Jack had taken to reading the Wall Street Journal.
“Our sales are only marginally above those of last year. We need something dramatic. Something that will give us a big push.” Elder Marse gazed at Jack. He was meditative.
“What do you propose, Mr. Marse?”
“Jack, I’ve been reading the newspapers about this Black Peter phenomenon. Wasn’t he one of the leaders of the Xmas boycott during the Xmas of the Terrible Twos? Why, this record hit has been at the top of the chart for almost six months now. Look at this.” Elder Marse placed some clipped newspaper ads before Jack. They showed all of the Black Peter products. The Black Peter doll was outselling the Cabbage Patch doll of the 80s.
“This Black Peter is bigger than Michael Jackson. Why, during the intermission of football games, crowds are shouting Black Peter, Jack. I think this Black Peter is just the thing that we need to put into the cash register. And just think, it was only a few years ago that the public was screaming for his skin, after that playboy Boy Bishop, that hippie, revealed how Black Peter took over his group and forced him out.”
“What are you getting at, Mr. Marse?”
“Jack, I’m a businessman. I know that you’re a little upset with Black Peter after what happened at the garden during the T.T.’s, but money doesn’t give a rat’s ass about who makes it. Look at that Reagan fellow back there in the eighties. Anticommunist for years. His anticommunism was preventing us from making a dollar in one of the biggest markets in the world. The Soviet Union. So we told the son of a bitch that if he didn’t soften his attitude and sign that treaty with them back there in the 1980s that he and Nancy would have to spend their retirement years doing commercials. We threatened to take away that big house in California and refuse to contribute to his library. Now this crazy crowd in Washington is calling him a left-winger. What I’m trying to tell you Jack is that you have to put aside your personal feud with Black Peter for the sake of the industry. We earn a quarter of our sales during December. Xmas is our tent pole season. The other eleven months merely serve as a warm-up. We need Black Peter to pump sales. Electronic toys aren’t faring well. People are squawking about war toys, sexist toys, you name it. We need something with which to build consumer confidence. That’s what it’s all about. Jack, I want you to find this Black Peter. Make him a deal. We’ll provide the guy with luxuries he’s never experienced before. I checked his background. He grew up on the Lower East Side in those projects on Avenue D. First got arrested for stealing a Xmas ham. A bunch of auto thefts, a drug arrest, and then he ran a con game with a dummy down in midtown. So it shouldn’t take much. He’s not used to anything. A Cadillac, a Minnesota Viking, and a discount suite at our hotel ought to do it. We’ll give him some spending money. Maybe $100,000. Pocket money to me.”
“Now wait a minute, Mr. Marse. You’re asking me to bring in Black Peter?”
“Black Peter is already in. I want you to find him. Get him to work for us.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Marse.”
“Look, Jack. I’m going to be away for six months. Maybe three months for good behavior. I need somebody to kind of keep an eye on things while I’m gone. Somebody I can trust. Case anybody gets ideas about a hostile takeover or something.” Jack Frost, a man so cold that he went to a musical on the day of his grandmother’s funeral, wasn’t the brightest guy but he was bright enough.
“I’ll bring him to you, tomorrow, Mr. Marse.”
“I knew that I could count on you, Jack.” Mr. Marse rose from the chair behind the desk. He went over and put his arm around Jack, and escorted him out of his office.
12
The phony Black Peter — wanted by every city, state, and federal law enforcement agency that you could give letters of the alphabet to — was struggling for survival in a cave underneath Manhattan, since the Madison Square Garden Xmas riots. He and his followers were always being set upon by desperate surps, who were robbing them and stealing the food that some of Peter’s followers scavenged from the garbage bins of supermarkets. Most of the white dreds who’d followed him had returned to their suburbs, after polite, middle-class plea bargaining. Many had moved on to prep school or joined Reverend Jones’s Christian majority, which was signing up students by droves on the campuses. The remaining ones had become fed up with the squalid life and were getting on one another’s nerves. Black Peter’s British accent had become even more affected, and he’d become a pill to live around. He spent his time sending his followers out to steal for him, or smoking Philadelphia marijuana and recovering from the headaches. One of his followers had died mixing Philadelphia and New York grass. He had the reggae music turned up loud, or spent hours manipulating his dreds, which were dirty and entangled. He always talked about the dreds as being the appendage of his manhood, and that cutting them off would be like cutting off his manhood.