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

Whatever Santa’s reason, that December’s crime statistics showed elf foot patrols much more effective than any vague spy probe in the sky. Crime sat on its hands all the way to Christmas morning. Ahern was amazed how getting something for nothing trumped everything else in the criminal heart. But he kept this discovery to himself and let Operation Flat Foot take credit for the drop in crime.

As his car entered downtown, Samantha, Ahern’s driver, a blond beauty with a skier’s golden tan, smiled back at him. “It’s a jingle out there, sir!” And it was. Shoppers crowded the streets and lamppost loudspeakers played Christmas music.

Last year Ahern had skeleton-crewed the police department for the month of December. Later, he used Decembers off as a recruiting tool among the ski-bum, ski-bunny crowd like wonderful Samantha there. With Thanksgiving knocked out of the box he could skeleton-crew right back to Halloween. But how long, Ahern wondered, could criminals sit on their hands without bursting?

That night’s television news led off with the story that Santa had joined Mart-Mart Corporation’s board of directors. This was followed by footage of the elves’ victory march-past and the jolly old gent’s morning arrival at the city’s seaplane facility. There he was coming down the ramp of the North Polaris flying boat in wading boots and waving to the camera. (The elf color commentator told the viewers the boots came with Santa’s new interest in fly-fishing.)

That reminded Ahern how Great-Aunt Moira got the nickname Miss Curly-Toes. “I did this photo article, ‘At Home With the Clauses,’ for Frozen Homes and Gardens, ” she’d told him. “At the North Pole the elves wore ice skates, old-fashioned jobbies with the blades curled up in front when they pushed visitors like yours truly around on sleds. ‘Whoa, Nellie!’ Mrs. Claus said when my sled-pushers tried to follow me inside. She valued her floors, you see, and made them pull heavy socks on over their skates. My group shot of Santa, the missus, and those elves with socks over their skates started the story that elves wore curly-toed boots. The Clauses called me Miss Curly-Toes from then on. I stopped visiting after Mrs. Claus ran off with another...” She looked away before finishing the sentence. “With somebody else, and Santa got broody.”

Ahern smiled as he remembered her words. Then he stood up in astonishment. Frozen Homes and Gardens explained everything, Santa’s wading boots, the flying boat, the elf gondoliers, the Christmas Seals. Goddamn global warming had flooded the North Pole. Santa and his elves were down here searching for the high and dry and it looked like they’d found it!

For criminals, those weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas must have crawled by. Maybe some did burst, for all Ahern knew. A team of safecrackers did blow themselves up. Was it suicide, nerves, or simple clumsiness? And a guy at the Cut-Throat Club went berserk, slashing and killing a dozen members before falling on his own knife. And what about the local chapter of the Forgers’ League, who committed suicide en masse, leaving a round-robin suicide note the experts judged to be authentic? Other criminals, unable to break the laws of God or man without forfeiting their Christmas presents, chose to violate their own code of honor by informing on their colleagues.

After Christmas, in spite of Santa’s assurances that he had no other territorial demands, Ahern heard reports that back at Fort Halloween the things that go bump in the night were getting goose bumps, fearing Santa meant to turn around and strike them from the rear.

In the first week of January, Congress, its gallery packed with Naughty-or-Nicers waving clipboards, ratified the Constitutional amendment giving elves the right to vote. The SLH quickly announced the formation of the Sanity Party, describing sanity as something the country needed a good dose of. So the Reindeer joined the Donkey and the Elephant in the political menagerie.

A few days later, the mayor loped into Ahern’s office. He had just come from a meeting with some serious people who wanted to field a slate of candidates for the November elections, he said. Would Ahern consider running for the U.S. Senate? The white beard peeking out of His Honor’s jacket pocket told Ahern who those serious people were. He saw Santa as a winner and accepted.

“Stress family values,” the mayor advised him. “But if the business about Mrs. Claus and the Tooth Fairy comes up, say Santa wishes both ladies the best of luck, blah blah blah.”

Then came February. The steep white walls of St. Valentinesburg Castle were decorated with pink rosettes and topped with pink crenellation, from behind which the cherub defenders could shoot their arrows and dump boiling chocolate and heavy cinnamon hearts down on any besieger.

In an eve-of-the-feast surprise attack the elves skied out of the woods. (Some say Santa had bribed the Groundhog’s people to have the creature see its shadow, guaranteeing six more weeks of snow.) In addition, the SLH had infiltrated Dy-Dee Den, which serviced the castle and starched that morning’s issue.

But wily General Dan Cupid, he of the brass diapers, keeping a cool head, sent his cherub air arm into battle naked. Buttocks an angry red, they dove down out of the sun, mad as hornets, quivers aquiver. First they attacked the humpster air support, coating the observation slits with paintball-tipped arrows, blinding the fly-boy elves, whose vehicles spun out of control. Many crashed. (The rosy-cheeked journalists imbedding with the angels reported that no reindeer were injured in the making of this tactical move.)

Then they swooped down on the skiers. Beset from the air by an angelic swarm shooting accurate little arrows, the elves retreated back into the woods, protected by a battery of bim-bim guns, as the anti-cherubim combinations of flyswatters powered by mousetraps were called.

That night the woods moaned with the lovelorn sighs and sobs of wounded elves. Santa moved among the campfires denouncing the use of unrequited love in warfare as a clear violation of the Hearts and Flowers clause of the Geneva Convention. Then he gave his famous speech urging the elves back into battle, beginning with, “Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day,” and ending with the rhetorical flourish: “We wee few, we wee happy few, we wee band of brothers!”

At dawn, the elves eagerly renewed the attack, charging through a blinding snowstorm. The sledded bim-bim guns were in place before the cherubs could de-ice their wings. Those who got airborne were quickly swatted down. Blinded by the driving snow, General Cupid’s archers on the castle walls couldn’t stop the swift-skiing attackers. Armed with battering-ram/ladder combinations, elves breached the castle gates. Others scaled its walls. The defenders threw down their bows and arrows and fought hand to hand.

In the ensuing slaughter, hosts of angels fell. Gallant cherub centurions feigned broken wings to draw the attackers away from those under their command. Angel feathers flew everywhere and can still be found, wooly-wise, under furniture all around the world.

In the end, only St. Valentinesburg Castle remained, empty, forlorn, and, as the months passed, looking more and more like a cake left out in the rain.

Back at Fort Halloween, Santa’s victory made specters go pale, disembodied voices moan, and invisible hands tremble as they rattled their chains, convinced they would be next. Headless horsemen drilled the saber charge. Sandbag defenses sprang up around every haunted house. Scarecrow jack-o’-lanterns in air-raid warden helmets patrolled the rooftops. Down in the basement strategy room the witches and warlocks toiled and troubled. But Santa would let them stew in their own bubbling cauldron for a few months yet.