But mostly they all spent Sunday afternoons in the office listening to Hopkin, the scholar elf among them, reading out loud from books like Mysterious Phrygia: Dark Tales From a Darker Land. Phrygia was ruled by the House of Fröst, descendants of Vikings who’d convinced its simple people that kings and queens were the up-to-date way of running a country. The elves hissed when Hopkin came to the part where Phrygia’s King Jack XII invaded Snowmansland. Mattie hissed along with them, too, but for her own reasons. Phrygia’s current ruler, Queen Alicia, had stolen her husband.
And the elves cheered loudly at King Jack’s terrible demise. An amateur alchemist, he was working one night in his palace laboratory, adding a pinch of this and a pinch of that to the pot, hoping to find the legendary universal solvent, that which could dissolve everything. Suddenly the bottom dropped out of the pot. Its contents spread in a circle on the floor, which also dissolved. King Jack and his accidental discovery fell into the basement. (It never occurred to him that if he ever found what he was looking for, he wouldn’t have anything to keep it in.) From there king and solvent worked their way through the earth’s crust to the magma beneath and hundreds of years later emerged on the other side of the world, causing the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, which shot them both off into outer space. It was only after this event that astronomers observed the galactic phenomena called black holes.
One evening in the first week in December, a snowy Inspector Wilfred Chin of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came to Mattie’s office with the final naughty-or-nice figures for his country. Afterward, Chin, a Canadian of Chinese extraction, stayed on to chat. Smiling, he told her his relatives in China were thinking of moving to Canada, which his parents had described to them as a land of opportunity where you could buy a silver sailboat for a dime. Mattie smiled back. She knew the joke. The Canadian ten-cent piece had an image of the famous Maritime schooner The Bluenose on its back. She also knew Chin had lingered hoping she’d reveal whether Canadian boys and girls were nicer than American boys and girls this year. But Mattie’d promised a Mr. Hoover at the F.B.I. she’d tell the American figures to no one. He, in turn, had promised an improvement in next year’s numbers. Only the French seemed to relish their many naughty boys and girls. (“Oolala,” as Nutkin would say, having been naughty-or-nice liaison with the French Sûreté before the war.)
After Chin left and the elves had bedded down, Mattie switched off the office lights and went to the window on Queen to watch the snow fall, noticing for the first time the little movie house, the Regent, catty-corner across the street. Mattie’s North Pole work had included finding children’s books suitable for her husband to leave under the tree. The Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame had been one of her favorites and she’d started a correspondence with the author, who was living in Toronto at the time. In one of her letters Montgomery wrote that she’d gone to the Regent in 1925 to see the silent movie version of that book. The neighborhood must have been more respectable then.
As it happened, 1925 was the year Mattie’d gotten a job with Al Claussin, a San Francisco private eye, as his doll-face, their term for receptionist. She’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks her first day on the job when he came into the office and skimmed his hat across the room onto the hat rack without even looking to see if he’d made a ringer, because he always did.
Claussin proposed five years later, the night he won the big poker pot at the Roscoe and Fedora Club, the private-eye social club everybody called The Gat and the Hat. “‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,’ Doll-Face,” Claussin recited. Poetry, his secret vice, wasn’t a private-eye kind of thing. Once, losing to a pair of red aces, he’d shouted, “Out, out damned spots!” A chilly silence fell over the card table. Private eyes may shun poetry, but they knew it when they heard it. After that, Claussin spent so much time in fistfights with his peers to prove his manhood and recovering—Mattie kept beefsteaks in the office icebox—that business suffered. By the time he won the big pot, he was ready for another line of work.
Among that night’s losers were his friends Sam Trowel and Miles Bowman, who’d naughty-or-niced the whole state of California that year, no small contract indeed. But Kris Kringle was dragging his feet paying up. As a favor, Claussin took the bill for what they were owed instead of their IOU. What better honeymoon than a collection trip to the North Pole, combining business with pleasure.
But the newlyweds found Kringle in a very bad way. Under Saint Nicholas, his predecessor, Christmas presents had been of a devotional nature—prayer books, edifying tracts, rosary beads. Back then, there were very few good little boys and girls. Kringle urged the elves to draw more children to goodness with pleasanter rewards. He suggested they build a toy works, financing it by the sale of kriskringlite. This rare ore, which Kringle, an amateur geologist, had discovered beneath the North Pole, was the principal ingredient in Christmas tinsel. And so the elves did. But kriskringlite prices tanked with the stock market crash of 1929. In hard times, people saved their tinsel, picking it off the tree to reuse next year.
Kringle, fresh from a failed attempt to float a loan from the gnomes of Zurich, was depressed and well in need of Al as a drinking buddy. For her part, Mattie used her doll-face skills to bring efficiency to the whole North Pole operation. The Claussins’ honeymoon stretched into several years. But by 1933, all Kringle could leave in good little boys’ and girls’ stockings were licorice whips gussied up with a bright bow. He came home with the disappointed cries of good little children everywhere ringing in his ears. Stepping down from the sleigh, he staggered and fell into Claussin’s arms, dead of a broken heart.
The Elf Council of Elders asked Al to take Kringle’s place. “Doll-Face,” he said, “working with kids, that’s the way to change the world. Like Billy Wordsworth wrote, ‘The Child is father of the Man.’” Mattie knew how much he wanted the job and urged him to take it.
For starters, the elves suggested Al shorten his name from Claussin to Claus. Keeping the “sin” in, they said, might give naughty boys and girls the wrong idea. But Al Claus didn’t trip that lightly on the elf in tongue so they asked what Al stood for. Albert? Alfred? Alexander, he told them. They brightened. Sandy Claus was good. But why not make it Santa in honor of his predecessor but one?
Al Claussin, a.k.a. Santa Claus, worked very hard at his new role, gaining weight, growing a beard which he whitened with bluing in the wash water, and practicing his ho-ho-hos in the bath.
Meanwhile, militaristic regimes with duces, caudillos, and fuehrers were springing up everywhere and with them the price of kriskringlite, which was also a key ingredient in the manufacture of insignias of rank and medals.
A few days after their North Pole work was wrapped up, footsteps in the hall and a knock on the door announced Claussin Private Investigations’ first client. The elves shooting craps on the carpet quickly replaced the dice and money with tiddlywinks, and Nutkin, already dressed in his blond doll-face wig and blouse, climbed up onto a stack of books on the receptionist’s chair. “Come in,” he piped sweetly.
An elderly couple entered, he wearing a brown overcoat with a large herringbone in it and carrying a homburg, she in gray fur with a matching hat.
Nutkin read their business card aloud. “Mr. and Mrs. Westerly of the Snowmen’s Aid Society.”
Mattie rose to greet them as they passed through the railing into the office proper. Offering them seats next to her desk, she nodded at the tiddlywinkers on the carpet and explained, “I’m babysitting several of my operatives’ children. Now how can I help you?”
“Perhaps you are unaware of our society’s work,” said Westerly. “We—that is to say Mrs. Westerly and her knitting circle—provide Toronto’s snowmen with scarves to brighten their winter months.”
“How nice,” said Mattie.
Westerly bowed. “But for two years now some person or persons unknown have been savagely murdering the snowmen hereabouts.”
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p; Mattie saw her elves heads pop up. “Murdered how?” she asked, though she suspected she knew.
“Heads, carrot noses, coal buttons, twig arms, the whole lot gone,” said Westerly, adding indignantly, “Oh, the authorities refuse to take us seriously. But these murders strike at our nation’s soul. Wasn’t it Voltaire who called Canada ‘A few acres of snowmen. Quelques arpents des bonhommes de neige’?”
“Mais oui,” insisted Mrs. Westerly.
“Oolala,” piped Nutkin.
“The Snowmen’s Aid Society wishes to employ your agency to catch the perpetrators of these heinous murders,” said Westerly. “We can’t do it ourselves. Moss Park and hereabouts isn’t a place to send our ladies at the best of times. Certainly not at night.”
On her way home yesterday Mattie had passed a snowdrifter, as the winter homeless were called, huddled in a doorway. He wore a bright knitted scarf. “Nice,” she said and asked him where he got it. “From Father Christmas,” he replied. A likely story. Were the snowdrifters stealing the snowmen’s scarves to keep themselves warm? But why take all the other stuff?
The Westerlys gave Mattie an advance for her services and took their leave. In the doorway, Mrs. Westerly turned, inhaled deeply, and said, “Oh, it smells so nice in here. Lavender, isn’t it?”
“Close enough,” said Mattie.
Later that afternoon, Claussin Private Investigations did a reconnoiter of the Moss Park area, going up Sherbourne, where the old shoveled snow stood in gray three-foot heaps along the curb, ramparts the elves enjoyed running atop and staring passersby right in the eye. Then Mattie led them left onto Shuter Street, whose yardless houses crowded the sidewalk, and passed the small Moss Park community center guarded by a bronze lion neck-deep in snow like a lost creature from an arctic carousel.
Mattie thought nearby Pembroke Street would be prime snowman country. She’d visited there looking for a place to stay. Well set back from the street, many of these substantial homes had been cut up into rooms for rent. In every other yard stood a snow torso, a cenotaph to a dead snowman. Were they going to rebuild their handiwork? Mattie asked some children coming home from school, and got the precocious reply, “We don’t do five-o’clock shadow snow.” Mattie understood. A day or two of coal-fired furnaces and chimneys stubbled things fast.
They continued up to Gerrard, then back over to Sherbourne and down to the office. That was the area they’d focus on when the next substantial snow came. They couldn’t stop the vandals, but maybe they could follow them back to where they were taking their snowman loot and find out why.
The following Monday the radio called for snow overnight. But it came early. By the time school let out, a good six inches of fresh snow had accumulated atop the old. An hour later, Mattie trudged around the area through a heavy fall of snow. Freshly made snowmen, hockey sticks at the ready, greeted her in many yards. She understood that in better parts of town the snowmen held brooms, associating the neighborhood with the more fashionable sport of curling. But here it was hockey sticks.
On one Sunday museum visit she and the elves saw an exhibit on the history of ice hockey. They learned that in his later years Hans Brinker, he of the silver skates, found a strange object in a Dutch curio shop. It looked like a boomerang with one wing many times longer than the other. The shop owner called it an ishuki stick, a primitive American Indian war club made obsolete by the invention of the tomahawk. Brinker bought the thing and pondered on it long and hard before coming up with a game he named ice hockey after that same stick.
Back at the office, Mattie assigned the elves their places and sent them out after nightfall. She’d make the circuit every hour to get their reports, bringing along a thermos of hot grog heated on the office hot plate to buoy their spirits.
By her first go-around, the stiffening wind was blowing the fresh surface snow ahead of it like spray on a stormy sea. The elves were cold, but they’d nothing to report. An hour later, a Sherbourne streetcar equipped with a snowplow had cleared the tracks so she took that easier path until she got parallel to Nutkin’s hiding place behind an old snowman torso. She trudged over and found the snow had drifted around the poor elf, leaving him in a deep hole. His jumping-jack effort to see above the snow and keep guard over the nearby snowmen had left him utterly exhausted. Mattie ordered him back to the office to warm up and wait for her. Then she continued her rounds.
Over on Gerrard, Mattie heard Timkin’s snore and found him sleeping on a porch glider. She suspected he’d brought his own pocket flask of rum against the cold. She prodded him awake, ordered him home, too, and watched him stagger out of sight. His snowmen were still intact and so were those at the top of Pembroke, where Bodkin had escaped the snow by clambering up the metal footholds on a telephone pole. Visibility was getting very bad. Mattie was ready to call off the whole operation. But after a good shot of grog in him Bodkin vowed to soldier on. Farther down Pembroke, Hopkin, sheltered in the lower branches of a fir tree in a yard with a pair of snowmen in it, vowed through chattering teeth that he’d stay, too.
As she set out the next time, trudge-weary Mattie met Bodkin on the stairs. He’d thrown in the towel and struggled back through snow up to his armpits. Head down against the windy whiteness, Mattie cut over to Shuter as the fastest way to get to Hopkin and bring him in. When she reached Pembroke she could make out ravaged snowmen on both sides of the street. Even Hopkin’s two had been looted. When she couldn’t find him in the tree she had a brief hope he’d followed the perpetrators. Then she made out a white bundle up on a higher branch and called his name.
Mattie struggled back to the office with Hopkin under her arm. When he’d thawed out, the elf told her and the others how, by the light of the street lamp near his tree, he’d seen a sledded handcart pull up beneath him, heaped with snowman heads tied up in bright wool scarves, high hats, carrot noses, twiggy arms, and hockey sticks. When snowman parts from his two in the yard were added to the cart it moved on through snow too deep for Hopkin to follow. But the cart pusher left large square footprints behind him.
For Mattie, square footprints could only mean one thing. Her rival, Queen Alicia, was in Toronto. But where and why?
She walked to the office the next morning amid a racket of snow shovels. The shopkeepers had hired snowdrifters to clear their sidewalks. One wore a bright wool scarf. “Father Christmas?” she asked. He nodded, then nodded again across the street at a thin, elderly man in shabby clerical black, including spats against cold feet, talking with two homeless men under the Regent movie house’s modest marquee. “Father Christmas,” he said.
The man in black walked away and Mattie kept pace with him on the other side of the street. When he went into a luncheonette, she crossed over and slipped onto a stool next to him. “They say you’re Father Christmas.”
He turned a long gray face to look at her just as the counterman arrived. “The usual?” he asked the priest in a Belfast accent. When Father Christmas nodded, the man asked, “And what about the Missus?”
“Tea,” said Mattie sharply. “And separate checks.”
As the smirking counterman moved away, the priest said, “My name is Christie. I’m a Catholic priest. I give the snowdrifters scarves around this time of year. Not much of a leap for them to call me Father Christmas.”
“Where do you get the scarves?”
“Who wants to know?”
“The Snowmen’s Aid Society has hired me to find out who’s murdering snowmen around here. Maybe it’s for their scarves.” The counterman returned with their orders. When he was gone, Father Christmas said, “I grew up around here. Tough part of town. But we don’t murder snowmen or rob them, either.”
“Like I said, where do you get your scarves?”
“Finish up and I’ll show you,” he promised, adding, “Talk about knitwear, in the seminary I was considered a comer. My mother even knitted me purple socks. For when I made bishop, she said. So did our archbishop’s mother. His Grace was a classmate of mine. Unfortun
ately I fell in with the tippling-clergy faction. Still, His Grace has always kept an eye out for me. The snowdrifters are my parishioners. ‘It takes one to know one,’ said His Grace, but in the kindest way.”
Back out in the weather, they headed west on Queen. “The Sally Ann folks do good work,” said Father Christmas. “But they’ve their rules. A lot of people fall through the cracks, and that’s right into my parish. I keep an eye out for places for my people to stay come winter. Thought I’d found one last year over on Mutual where we’re going now, an empty old factory in the shadow of the gasometer with all its second-floor windows knocked out. Thought maybe we could board them up with inside doors and put in a woodstove. But moving in closer, I saw these big guys working at something inside, couldn’t see what. So I crossed the place off my list. But around back I found a garbage can stuffed with wool scarves and I helped myself to them to hand around. And I came back later just in case. More scarves. This year, too.”
They reached the factory and Father Christmas led Mattie past several handcarts with sled runners to a side door with a window in it. He saw something move behind the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes to peer inside. Then he jumped back with a shout. “It’s a damn rink rat,” he said, and taking Mattie’s elbow, he tried to lead her back out to the street. “Never saw one face-to-face before. Like staring at a giant fish head frozen in a block of ice.”
But Mattie stood fast. “They won’t come out. They don’t like daylight. Not much of it around where they come from.”
“You know the rink rats?”
“By another name,” she admitted and went over and rattled the doorknob.
When her husband told her, “Sorry, Doll-Face, I want a divorce. I can’t do this Santa gig without Queen Alicia, the woman I love, at my side,” Mattie’d been too hurt and angry to protest. But elf divorce procedures grind slowly. Refusing to stay under the North Pole dome with the other woman, she moved outside to Slagview Cottage, across from the dump for defective candy canes and near the chilly encampment of Alicia’s Phrygian entourage. Every day for the next year she went back inside to manage the kriskringlite mine, run the Toy Works, and, in the fall, to direct naughty-or-nice operations.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 7