Allyn Allyn: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

When he opened the suite’s outer door, he felt a click as the lock button popped up. How perfectly she always anticipated his needs, protected him. He would miss her in that way.

“Ted!”

It was young Jay Patel, coming down the hall. Beyond them, in the conference room, Ted heard music, laughter.

“Jay, did I miss the all the fun?”

“Still going strong. I was on my way back to make Effie come. She’s such a party pooper, isn’t she?”

Patel was slurring, stinking drunk. Ted slapped the young man’s back and steered him toward the party.

“She’s just putting on her lipstick. Come on, show me where to find a drink.”

Copyright © 2010 Katia Lief

James Powell’s whimsical holiday stories have become a regular feature of EQMM ’s Christmas issue. And as Jon L. Breen points out in this month’s Jury Box, the latest collection of Powell short stories, A Pocketful of Noses (brought out by Crippen & Landru Publishers in June 2009) also contains a particularly memorable holiday tale by the Canadian-born author.

The last Halloween jack-o’-lantern had hardly been drop-kicked out into the middle of the street when it was boots on the ground for Santa’s crack naval commando unit, the Christmas Seals.

The Pilgrim Fathers never saw it coming. Maybe they were wearing their belt-and-buckle hatbands too tight that year, cutting off blood to the brain. The elves caught the whole lot of them sitting down to table. When the Pilgrim Fathers turned to their Native American dinner guests for help, they saw buckskin backs disappearing into the trees. After a defense more blunder than blunderbuss the Pilgrim Fathers headed for the trees themselves. Long the sickie among the holidays, Thanksgiving wasn’t going to be missed.

When the turkey-in- Mayflower -regalia flag was lowered for the last time, Santa himself stood on the reviewing stand to receive the salute of his victorious elves amid the rumbling flyover of flak-blanketed reindeer pulling humpsters, as the armored sleighs were called, for their part Humvee, part dumpster appearance. Next came a contingent of elves in boater hats carrying long poles and singing a shrill medley from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers . Santa’s Little Helpers brought up the rear. The SLH, pro-North Pole activists who hid their identities behind full white beards, marched, pumping left arms up and down and chanting ho-ho-ho behind a banner that read “Cheers for Mr. C., who made the toy trains run on time!”

Several rows behind Santa, Police Commissioner Denis Ahern stood next to the governor. Ahern’s reputation as a man who got things done had already attracted the attention of the state politicos. He watched the proceedings with the careful eye of an ambitious man, spotting the mayor’s loping gait and two-tone shoes among the SLHers and wondering why the Mart-Mart marchers were there. All Thanksgiving meant to the merchandising giant was that the following day, Black Friday, the Christmas shopping season began with stores moved out of the red ink and into profitability. The Mart-Mart people carried placards that read “Hooray for the Black Whatever!”

After the parade, Ahern went down and introduced himself to Santa. “Didn’t I know your great-aunt Moira?” asked the jolly old elf. “A fine Dolly Dimples of a woman she was back then. We called her Miss Curly-Toes. Did she ever tell you why?” Ahern said she had. They smiled at each other. Then Ahern moved on. The Mart-Mart people were waiting to shake Santa’s hand.

Ahern sat alone in the backseat of his car. The governor had his eyes on Washington and the approaching Senate race. In return for Ahern’s support, he had offered to back the police commissioner for the governorship. But something told Ahern he could do better. When he took over the department, crime was rampant in the city and police morale in the tank. Last year crime was down another fifteen percent, and enrollment at the Police Academy was way up. And Ahern had done it all without increasing the police budget one red cent.

Most people thought his success began with Operation Flat Foot, putting his people out of their patrol cars and back pounding the beat where they could nod at the shopkeepers, look the punks in the eye, and get the feel of the neighborhood.

But old ways die hard, which went double for policemen, as Ahern, a third generation cop, knew very well. Stories of night-shift patrolmen sleeping in unlocked parked cars sent him prowling the streets to catch them at it. One night three Decembers ago, Ahern, coming quietly around a corner, spotted a pair of knee-high elves, each with a clipboard tucked under his arm, studying a street map beneath a lamppost. They wore smart forest-green uniforms with epaulettes like lug treads.

One elf looked up, saw Ahern, and touched his companion’s arm. They both gave the police commissioner a wink and vanished into the darkness.

Ahern recognized those epaulettes. His late great-aunt Moira had written Herself’s Field Guide to the Little People of Eastern North America, illustrating it with box-camera photos from her turn-of-the-last-century freelance journalist days.

(“Are we talking brownie shots, Auntie?” schoolboy Ahern once teased the old woman. She’d squeezed his knee approvingly. “There’s my grand-nephew.” Her words smelled of whiskey, for she lived in a fairy world with convenient suns and yardarms.)

Her field guide chapter on elves showed every sort, from stout sled-wrights with beards tucked in their belts to miners, candle stubs stuck on their hat brims, who delved beneath the North Pole for kriskringlite, the rare mineral, essential in the making of Christmas tinsel, that financed Santa’s operations and the Toy Works.

The caption under the photo of the elf wearing the lug-tread epaulettes read: “North Pole Intelligence Officer, a.k.a. Naughty-or-Nicer, who once provided Santa with the names of the good and bad humans. They always worked in pairs, so every Christmas list could be checked twice. Note the epaulettes allowing one officer to stand on the other’s shoulders, handy for peeking through keyholes.”

In the mid nineteenth century, her book explained, Santa replaced these elf foot patrols with observation sleighs pulled into orbit around the earth by high-flying reindeer and equipped with surveillance devices at the top end of kerosene technology. Elves had a knack for putting everyday objects together in breakthrough combinations. Their Space-Time Capacitor, a clever arrangement of stopwatches and shoehorns, allowed Santa to deliver presents all around the world in a single night. Their Phrenoptikon combined spyglasses and finger posts with felt-piercing capabilities so orbiting elves could probe human skulls phrenologically, looking for overdeveloped bumps of acquisitiveness and secrecy, the gimmie-gimmies and shifty-shadies, as the elves called them.

Soon burglars and cutthroats were lining the inside of their hats with the newly invented iron tissue paper, believing it deflected such surveillance. By the time criminals learned the foil did not work, they had made themselves social outcasts by refusing to tip their hats to ladies on the street or kneel bareheaded in church.

Similarly, rustlers squatting around Western campfires came to believe black hats would frustrate the Phrenoptikon. This made things easier for the lean, handsome, white-hatted men into whose Christmas stockings Santa put the tin stars and silver bullets.

So if the Phrenoptikon worked, why had Santa returned to foot patrols? Ahern’s first thought was cost-cutting. Orbiting observation sleighs had to be expensive. And hadn’t he read an article in a recent New York Times under the headline “Mine Flooding Roils Kriskringlite Supply”?