“I’m sorry, Mr. Zumwalt. It won’t happen again.”
“I’m sorry, he says. You have a good job here. If it weren’t for this job you’d be in a nursing home, glued to the Betamax. Watching your lousy soap opera reruns. Rex Stuart. Wasn’t that your name before you got this job? The North Pole Development Corporation gave you new life. The North Pole Development Corporation rescued Christmas. Made it what it is today. Both you and the season would be out of a job if it weren’t for my genius.”
“I’m very aware of that, Mr. Zumwalt,” Santa said.
“Okay. You can go. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we move on to Manhattan. You’re going to need your energy.”
“Good night, Mr. Zumwalt.” Santa rose and started for the door. Jack Frost sneered at him as he passed him on the way out. S.C. didn’t trust Jack Frost. Jack Frost had been acquitted of killing his own grandmother, but Santa didn’t believe him. The prosecutor just didn’t have enough evidence. Frost never left any. And if that wasn’t bad enough, on the day of his grandmother’s funeral, he went to a musical.
Alone in his room, Santa settled back with a double bourbon on the rocks. His long white beard stretched to his belt. Each morning a barber from the North Pole Development—or Big North as the conglomerate was called—trimmed his beard. He’d been trying to reach Vixen, but the phone was busy. He wanted to tell her that everything was going as planned. She was the only one of the brass who would give him the time of day. He removed his boots and his jacket, and settled back in the brass bed, taking the newspaper with him. New York, the City of Saint Nicholas, whose first church was named for Saint Nicholas, and which boasted a Saint Nicholas Avenue—whose first Dutch ship wore his face on its stern—was all geared up for his arrival. The Mayor would be there. Key officials. They’d be met at the pier. Afterward, they would push up to Bowling Green Park. The caravan’s pause at Bowling Green Park was obligatory, for it was on this site that Oloffe, the Dutchman, had a vision of Saint Nicholas. “And the sage Oloffe dreamed a dream—and lo, the good Saint Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children, and he descended hard by where the heroes of Communipaw had made their late repast. And he lit his pipe by the fire, and sat himself down and smoked; and as he smoked, the smoke from his pipe ascended into the air and spread like a cloud overhead.”
There was a knock at the door.
* * *
Nance Saturday’s generation believed in Santa Claus until they were at least twenty-one. Some left out soup and cookies for him until they were twenty-six or even forty. When they found out that there was no Santa Claus, no unlimited filled stockings hanging from the fireplace, they began to haunt the bars west of Fifth Avenue and vowed never to go above Fourteenth Street again. They were nurtured on novels in which the protagonist expressed little emotion upon receiving news that his mother had died.
During the epidemic of child murders the Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner described his methodology in the following manner. When you come to a brick wall, you either tear down the wall or start in a new direction. Apparently he had torn down the wall and solved the case. For Nance, that approach lacked elegance. He approached a problem as a romantic would. He would read material. He would study all the trivia connected with the case and all the facts he could sew together and usually the solution would come. If that didn’t work, then he’d have to try the other method. Tear down the wall, or, in this case, open the door.
Saturday entered the lobby on Riverside Drive near 114th Street. On each side of the entrance there was a Chinese vase, dark blue and light blue with some long-beaked, long-legged bird on it. There was black walnut tables and a shiny tiled floor. There was a huge Christmas tree in the Art Deco–style lobby. The elevator had an oval window. The Puerto Rican doorman asked Jamaican Queens was it okay for him to come up, she gave her permission and he rose in the elevator to the seventh floor, where she lived. She was what they’d call a “yellow” woman; she was barefoot, and she was wearing a black dress which clung to her body as lovingly as a child would grip its mother’s thighs. Her sandy reddish hair was done up in a frizzy manner, and it had been combed out and nearly reached her waist. She was wearing a bit of rouge on her cat cheeks, and her eyes were the color of nightclub smoke, which was fitting because there was jazz in her walk.
“Mr. Saturday. Please come in.” Saturday walked into the apartment and sat on the sofa she directed him to. “Get you a drink?” she asked.
He said he’d like some apple juice if she had it around, and she said that it was no trouble and went into the kitchen. He could see her moving about in the kitchen, opening the door and removing the bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator.
“Was it hard to get a taxi? It’s snowing so hard.”
“I drove up,” he said. When she climbed onto a chair to open a cabinet to fetch him some Fig Newtons, her dress hiked up and he saw a lot of thigh. That yellow skin all of a sudden dominating the black of her dress, decorated with white and red carnations, became too much for him, and his biological imperative almost burst through his trousers. It started to rise like the American flag on Iwo Jima, but Mr. Wigglesworth whispered to him sternly, and so his desire flickered out. Mr. Wigglesworth was his conscience. The old guy kept him out of trouble. There were boxes of unpacked things and he could glance into another room and see that she had begun hanging curtains. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her and she began to feel self-conscious, so when she came in from the kitchen with the juice and the Fig Newtons, he pretended to concentrate on the small Christmas tree which stood on a small hall table.
He hadn’t paid too much attention to the painting on the wall, but when he saw it, the colors jolted him. I guess that’s what it was supposed to do. The title of it was “After Clovis.” Naked, midnight-black men with yellow eyes and Playboy-bunny types—naked, supple pink women—were copulating in all manner of positions in a cemetery, by the light of a full moon. Noticing his attention, she mentioned the artist, a well-known black feminist painter. He had seen some of her work all over town, and every time he saw them, the colors jolted him. They were usually about the same subject.
“A striking painting,” he said.
“She’s done a lot in the same theme,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Do you think she’ll ever grow?” She gave him a cutting look, then a Hollywood “dahling” smile came across her freckled face.
“She says she’s doing her dreams.”
“She must have the same dream every night.”
“Mr. Saturday, did you want to ask me some questions?” She sat in a chair across from him. She tucked in her legs.
“I’m working for a man who wants me to uncover some information about the Nicolaite Society—Boy Bishop and the rest of them. My ex-wife, Virginia Saturday, said you could help me. I was reading articles in the newspapers about the group. I’ve been watching the mansion, and I can’t find what I’m looking for. If you help me, I would certainly appreciate it.” She rose and walked over to the other side of the room, revealing a glide that had a tinge of model-runway walk. There was quite a bit of aplomb in that glide. She returned to her seat.
“I hate a lot of glaring light. It’s hard on the eyes. I need my eyes for my work. Mr. Saturday, I did spend some time interviewing some members of the Nicolaites, but I don’t know everything there is to know about them. They’re quite hermetic. It’s hard to get close to them.”
He showed her a photo of Snow Man that Joe Baby had given to him. “Did you ever see this man there? Snow Man?”
“No. I don’t remember anyone vaguely resembling him. They were all pretty thin, anorexic if you ask me. So, you’re Virginia’s ex? How long did you two last together?”
“One year.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a long story. She, well, she thought that I was a slob. She was always trying to get me to comb my hair, or bathe three times
a day, or wear a tie. She was fanatical about me combing my hair. She said that when she was a child, her stepfather once tried to strangle her with his hair.”
“I think I can help you. I like you. Virginia didn’t tell me much about you except—”
“Virginia’s a country girl, and she has a country girl’s paranoia. Regardless of the original Paris fashions she wears, and the eyelashes, she’d like nothing better than to fling off those fancy shoes and run in the mud.”
“She doesn’t take any jive from those people at work. I wish I could be like her. Tough. Right now she’s in competition with Ms. Ming, that Chinese-American woman. I hear they had a hair-pulling fight in the ladies’ room. Mr. Whyte has to decide which one’s going to take Bob Riverside’s job.” Riverside was a Native American anchorman who was in trouble with Whyte B.C. for complaining about the cowboy-Indian reruns that were broadcast on the network. Mr. Whyte had requested an apology from Riverside, but Riverside refused. Gossip in the industry had it that Riverside would soon be out of a job.
“Virginia’s not so tough. You forget, I lived with her for a year. That was some year. But listen, tell me more about the Nicolaites. What did you uncover?”
“I never ran across a Snow Man or nobody in the group mentioned him to me. What did you want him for?”
“He owes my client some money. I thought he might have joined the group or that you had some information about him.”
“He might have arrived after I left. Sisters Alice and Barbara, my contacts there, said there were some strange goings-on after Black Peter, that beast, had his showdown with Boy Bishop. Things had really deteriorated. She said that they were all locked in their rooms while Bishop’s and Peter’s followers were in debate. She said she heard shots, screams and shouting.”
“Black Peter. Who is Black Peter?”
“That isn’t his real name. His real name is Cudjoe or something like that, but that’s not his name either. But when he came to stay with the Nicolaites, he began to read their literature. He became Black Peter, a small dark Spanish page boy who traditionally serves Saint Nicholas. He was some sort of porter. He carried Nicholas’s bags. But in some versions, Nicholas carries his bags. There was always a question about who did what for whom. When Boy Bishop left on a fund-raising mission, Black Peter threw a feast and shocked the Nicolaites by unveiling one of his wild paintings. He had done it in the classical European style. Brother James, Boy Bishop’s most loyal follower, was furious.”
“Nothing in your article mentioned Black Peter.”
“Well, my editor cut out the material about Black Peter. He said that people were touchy about stories that featured black men.”
“The sixties.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Every time the black man ascends to the scene, America lets its hair down, kicks off its shoes. Its heart goes skinny-dipping. Chaos is unsealed.”
“Virginia said you were crazy.”
“Look,” he said, smiling, “are we going to discuss Virginia or are we going to talk about the story?”
“I’m teasing you.”
“Maybe I’ll have that coffee now.” She rose from the couch, smiling; she walked lissomely into the kitchen.
“Black Peter was always kept in the background by Boy Bishop. He didn’t want word of Black Peter getting out.”
“How did Black Peter and Boy Bishop get together?”
“They became acquainted while Boy Bishop was recruiting prostitutes down on Forty-second Street. Somebody stole Black Peter’s dummy, and the dummy was the drawing card for his street hustle. Without his dummy, Black Peter couldn’t put on a show. He persuaded Boy Bishop to take him in until he could find a new and bigger dummy. Before you knew it, he had taken over the society and was challenging Boy Bishop’s authority. They should never have permitted that nigger to use the library.” She returned to the room bearing a silver tray which held two china cups of coffee and a pitcher full of cream.
“You say that Black Peter, or rather Cudjoe, read some literature about this Spanish page. What does that have to do with anything?”
“The legend about Black Peter got his ego all puffed out. He’s a short dude, but after coming upon that story he grew ten feet tall and nobody could touch him. He said that he’d come upon evidence which convinced him that Nicholas was Peter’s servant and that, this being the case, they should substitute Haile Selassie for the Nicholas icon. Black Peter should have a master he could respect.”
“Where can I find Black Peter?”
“Sister Alice and Barbara say that after the ‘reasoning’ between the two Nicolaite factions, Boy Bishop and Peter disappeared and Brother Andrew was in charge. It was all a con job, you know. They had some of the most streetwise whores and pimps in New York who’d given up that life to join the Nicolaites, but whores and pimps are sometimes like two-year-olds, especially when they reform. Life to them is a plaything anyway. Why do you think they call themselves players? Notice how whores and pimps get all sentimental around Christmas, buying each other extravagant gifts. What’s that song that Nat King Cole sings, where the player promises his prime trick a fur coat, a diamond ring, big Cadillac, and everything?”
“Charles Brown. Merry Christmas, baby, you sure been good to me.” Nance was giving away his age. They laughed. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the time you spent doing your story on the Nicolaites?”
“I’d interviewed Brother Andrew and the Sisters Alice and Barbara and was about to interview Brother James, who promised he’d meet me in the garden during the feast where Black Peter was to unveil his painting. Black Peter overheard James and asked me to come to his room on the third floor of the mansion. I didn’t see any harm in it. He was the perfect host and brought me some violets and offered me some of his provisions. Some Dragon’s Snout and some Dutch schnapps. He had some of his paintings on the wall. He was pretty good. Untrained, but heavy on colors and vision. He couldn’t draw, but some of the best painters around can’t. Whatever his art lacked in technical craftsmanship, it made up for in originality. He offered me some human-shaped cookies he said he’d baked. Brother James later told me that Black Peter always carried around a cooking pot. And he gave me some candy. The original Black Peter was always either handing out candy or giving people the rod. He was a kidnapper, you know. Took kids into Spain, the naughty ones.
“I realized when I talked with Brother James that bad blood was building up between them. Brother James said he was keeping notes about Black Peter’s bad and unruly behavior and was about to recommend his ouster from the group. Brother James didn’t feel that he should obey Black Peter’s authority. Well, we were walking through the garden and laughing about this and that. Brother James was very close to Boy Bishop. He said that Boy Bishop had always been brilliant and that he had abandoned his class in order to uphold Nicolaite beliefs. He said that Boy Bishop’s father was a big department store executive who lost his fortune when the oil men fired him for not producing huge Christmas sales. He said that the Boy Bishop was out to put Christmas back where it was before big oil moved into the business. His strategy was to infiltrate the establishment and win converts that way. Black Peter had approached him with a wild or crazy scheme. It had something to do with body snatching. He said that Black Peter was a loyal subject before then and used to be the butt of a lot of Boy Bishop’s taunts.
“We were going along and all of a sudden some of Black Peter’s people came into the garden. They claimed that Black Peter wanted to know my whereabouts. He’d told them that I was a spy. They grabbed both of us, but not before Brother James hit one of them with a snow-covered stone flowerpot. We tried to fight off the others, but there were more of them than there were of us, and so they dragged us before him. He was furious. He jumped up and down on the table and called me all sorts of dirty whore this and that, and he put me out. I was glad to get out. I could hear them arguing as I drove away. I think that Black Peter was going crazy. Brother James sa
id that he had told someone that a water from Tarpon Springs, Florida, was capable of reviving a corpse. He believed in all of Nicholas’s miracles, but he wanted Selassie to split off from Nicholas, just as Santa Claus had split off from Nicholas. He saw Nicholas as a model capable of producing endless variations. Those people were really becoming loyal to Peter, especially Brother Andrew, who was beginning to challenge Boy Bishop. They’re going to be in for a surprise, because Black Peter isn’t from Jamaica at all. He’s fake. His name wasn’t Cudjoe, either. I looked at his police file. He grew up downtown on Avenue D, in those projects. His first arrest was for stealing a Christmas ham.”
Nance looked at his watch. “I better go.” She walked him to the door. They focused on each other so long, their eyes bumped.
No one had touched the food. It was supposed to be a feast. When the Nicolaites entered the ballroom, conflict and raised voices had immediately begun. Bro Peter, as he was demanding to be called these days, had removed the face of Saint Nicholas from a painting above the fireplace and replaced it with one of Haile Selassie. Boy Bishop’s followers objected and were threatening to summon him back from Boston, where he’d gone to officiate at the wedding of a rich patron. They were being jeered by those Nicolaites who were loyal to Bro Peter. The Nicolaites were split down the middle.
Black Peter had been left in charge by Boy Bishop. Peter was seated at the head of one of fifteen tables located in the ballroom with mahogany panels and chandeliers. He sat on red, black, and green satin pillows. He wore the costume page boys wore in the Spanish court. The other brothers and sisters sat before turkey, goose, blackberry pie, and cherry pie, and there were huge bowls of salad on each table and three kinds of wine. And in the middle of it all lay a pig with an apple in its mouth. Black Peter was enjoying his fish and peppers, jerked pork, and Dragon’s Snout while the others whispered among themselves.
“How dare he remove the face of our Saint from that painting! Why does Boy Bishop always leave that crazy spade behind when he goes on a mission? I’ve had enough of this painting. Ghetto surrealism, that’s what it is.” Sister Alice and Sister Barbara were scribbling notes and passing them to each other. One would read a note from the other and giggle.
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