Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

The Black Whatever by James Powell

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”?

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.

Not long after St. Valentinesburg, Santa resigned from the Mart-Mart board of directors to enter politics. In his farewell speech he wondered out loud why it couldn’t be Black Whatever every day of the year. The board’s eyes brightened. “Ho-ho-ho,” they uttered approvingly.

Santa’s words gave everyone permission to Christmas shop all year round. Soon industry was humming away making the goods for the names on the shoppers’ long lists, for no one wanted the shame of getting more Christmas presents than they gave. Meanwhile, surrounded as it was by clipboard elves, exploding colleagues, suicides, and squealers, the underworld decided to bid goodbye to the gimmie-gimmies and the shifty-shadies. Hardened criminals took well-paying factory jobs and, showing the kind of focus management appreciates, they rose quickly through the ranks.

This was the holiday atmosphere in which the political conventions were held. Santa won the Sanity Party’s presidential nomination and named the Easter Bunny as his running mate. When Mr. E. B. himself loped on stage in a full bunny suit amid a release of balloons painted like Easter eggs, he set a tone of good-natured fun that would last all through the campaign. Happy times, had there ever been any before, were clearly here again.

Nothing but Halloween stood between Santa and a November victory.

Creatures of darkness shunned the sun for their complexions’ sake and feared a daylight attack most of all. But if Santa got to choose the time, they would choose the weather. So dawn did not break that Halloween morning. Instead, thunderclouds as black as night brought pelting rain and lightning bolts, all reeking of the cauldron. Every grim-jawed ghoulie, ghostie, and long-legged beastie manned the ramparts. Suddenly, in midmorning, the darkness blinked, the thunder stuttered, the lightning bolts bolted, and the sun broke through. (The SLH had infiltrated the fort’s supplier of magical ingredients, adulterating the eye of newt with tapioca, the toe of frog with toad, the bat wool with mouse.)

The rampart defenders fled from the light to their sturdy haunted houses, intending to make a vigorous stand. But they found the doors locked. Amid the wild weather, teams of Christmas Seals had snorkeled up from the sewer and entered by the drains and commodes while others rappelled down from humpsters onto the roofs and entered by the chimneys Santa-wise.

The witches and warlocks tried to escape the fort with their precious bubbling cauldron in a covered wagon with headless-horseman driver and outriders, all impervious to sunlight. But a heat-seeking missile from a humpster locked onto the cauldron and blew the wagon and its passengers to dark Kingdom Come.

Fixing their bayonets, the elves entered the fort. Quickly the moaning, wailing, and chain-rattling stopped. The Fort Halloween massacre foreshadowed Santa’s success at the ballot box a few days later.

Running late, Senator-elect Denis Ahern headed through the crowded hotel lobby, which was decked with stars and candy-cane striped flags. But before he reached the glass elevator up to the victory celebration in the Reindeer Room, Santa and his Secret Service entourage arrived through another bank of doors. The police cleared the way for them.

In the elevator, Santa turned to face the glass door and smiled out at the crowd. When he saw Ahern, his smile grew bigger still. Then, laying his finger aside of his nose and giving a wink, from the lobby he rose.

To make up time, Ahern hurried back to the service elevators. When he popped through a pair of closing doors, several serious-looking men reached inside their suit coats. But the mayor raised a calming hand.

“Ahern,” nodded the mayor.

“Your Honor,” said the senator-elect.

When the elevator doors opened again Ahern went one way and the mayor and the serious-looking men another, followed by a bellhop pushing a wheeled luggage rack from which hung a bunny suit in a plastic garment bag.

After two hours of smiles, handshakes, and victory signs on prime-time TV, Ahern left the hotel, feeling strangely let down. Two months from now he’d be in Washington with the police department and all its great guys and gals behind him. Was that it?

He headed toward his car, parked on the street down from the hotel, walking under lampposts decked with stars and candy-cane bunting and loudspeakers uttering a drumbeat of ho-ho-hos. Halfway into the car’s backseat Ahern saw he’d caught his temporary driver, a bookish old desk sergeant, with his nose in a hefty tome. To put the embarrassed man at ease, Ahern smiled and gave a cheery, “Hey, how about that Santa?”

The driver raised a finger. “Commish, remember where Elias Canetti wrote, ‘God is a preparation for something more sinister that we do not yet know? I never really got that one. Now maybe I’m starting to catch his drift.”

“Ho-ho-ho,” volunteered the loudspeaker on the lamppost at the curb.

Ahern pulled the door shut. He felt tired. Who the hell was this Canetti guy? he wondered. And when would the wonderful Samantha get back from the ski slopes?

Out loud he said, “Drive on.”

Copyright © 2010 James Powell