Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 1. Whole No. 833, January 2011

Snowman Stew by James Powell

James Powell’s stories are always full of interesting references. In this one, his allusion to the silent movie version of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables comes from Montgomery’s diaries, which were published a few years ago. “It stayed with me,” he says, “because the Regent, the movie theater where she saw it, was one of my boyhood haunts.” Mr. Powell is the recipient of many honors for his stories, including a nomination for the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for his story “Clowntown Pajamas.”

Mattie Claussin arrived at Toronto’s Union Station in late October, 1944, a plump, middle-aged woman in a stout overcoat with a striped fiberboard suitcase in each hand. The four pinch-faced little boys crowded around her wore imitation leather helmets with fur-lined earflaps buckled under their chins. All five looked like they’d come from a colder place.

With much to be done, she quickly found an office on Queen Street East near Sherbourne, a third-floor front over a notions and sundries shop. In this down-at-the-heels part of town many storefronts stood empty. One or two had windows draped in black with gypsy women sitting at the door inviting people in to have their fortunes told. Any color came from the metal streetcars on Queen and the poster-sized photographs of men with upper bodies, arms, and faces ravaged by venereal diseases placed in vacant shop windows by Saint Michael’s Hospital, which had a clinic treating such disorders. Well, the public expected shabby for people in her line of work.

Mattie’s office was up two narrow flights of stairs — “I wish you people lived in pleasanter climes,” the telephone installer had remarked — and down a dusty corridor to a door whose opaque glass would soon read “Claussin Private Investigations.”

As part of Mattie’s divorce settlement the North Pole had given her the annual naughty-or-nice contract, the job of separating the world’s good little boys and girls from the bad. Contrary to popular legend, these naughty-or-nicing elves did not wear uniforms with lug epaulettes so one could stand on the other’s shoulders to peer through keyholes. In fact, they dressed in children’s wear with headgear to hide their pointed ears. Nor were there enough of them to do the whole world. Much of the work was farmed out to private detectives and national police agencies like Scotland Yard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

So Mattie and her loyal elf assistants, Nutkin, Hopkin, Timkin, and Bodkin, who’d followed her into exile, busied themselves arranging the files sent on ahead and working the phones with subcontractors all around the world.

It was seasonal work, of course. Afterwards Mattie’d have to find clients to support the detective agency. But she planned on keeping her elves in children’s clothes. “Stick close behind the guy you’re tailing,” she instructed them. “If he looks back over his shoulder, chances are he won’t look down, and if he does, he’ll see a kid.” For the places where children weren’t allowed she taught the elves the trench-coat-for-two trick. A large one like Timkin, who was nicknamed Tiny because he was big for an elf, would carry a wee one like Bodkin on his shoulders and they’d share a trench coat, Bodkin wearing a fedora ingeniously designed to hide his ear points.

The elves slept in the spare office filing cabinets and used the washroom down the hall. Fortunately, the odor of stale elf which the office quickly developed resembled dried lavender.

Mattie found herself a rooming house around the corner on Moss Park Crescent facing a bleak little park. She shared a gas stove in the second-floor hallway next to a window on which an orange crate had been nailed to serve as a common icebox in winter.

Walking home late that first night, Mattie saw a policeman on horseback beneath a streetlight on Sherbourne just above Queen. He wore a greatcoat against the weather and a tall hat of gray Persian lamb in place of the bobby helmet worn by Toronto’s constables on foot patrol. Sitting at the curb across from him, as if they were his flock and he their shepherd, were a dozen men who’d missed closing time or were too drunk to be admitted to the Salvation Army hostel up the street, the Sally Ann, as it was called. They sat quietly, arms or head or all three between their legs.

The first heavy snow came in early November, casting a blanket of startling white over the general drabness. Leaving for work that morning, Mattie discovered two freshly made snowmen in the park. These carrot-nosed, many-buttoned personages wore top hats and bright wool scarves and their twiggy arms held old hockey sticks. She knew her elves would want to see them. The North Pole’s songs and stories borrowed heavily from the “Snowmanslandia” saga, which recounted the history and terrible extinction of the original snowmen.

Clever Snowmansland had made its coinage out of ice. So no one hoarded money that would only disappear in the spring thaw. Instead, snowmen bought things or started factories to churn out goods for themselves and for export. As they prospered, they built the sub-tundra railroad to carry their wares down to Fort Churchill (whose name came from the ice cathedral they erected there) and beyond. But then cold Phrygia, Snowmansland’s northern neighbor, invaded, defeating the snowman army and driving the country’s inhabitants southward to below the tree line, never to been seen again.

The elves were very eager to come back with Mattie and took pictures to send home. They enjoyed seeing the snowmen so much she didn’t have the heart to tell them that coming out the next morning she’d found nothing but two naked stumps of snow in the park.

They were very busy at the office now. The naughty-or-nice reports were due in by the first Friday in December, so the North Pole’s packaging and labeling department could do their work. This information was a deeply guarded secret. Children must never know that after that date they could be bad and Santa would be none the wiser.

Busy or not, elves always took Sundays off. But Toronto was a hard place to find things to do on a Sunday. The city’s blue laws closed down all movie houses and beverage rooms, as beer taverns were called. Sometimes Mattie took them to the Royal Ontario Museum, which the law judged more educational than recreational.

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.”

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. Unfortunately 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.

Much of her free cottage time she spent feeding the arctic or vested hummingbirds (Archilocus cardiganii) who survived the winters there by feeding on warm polar bear earwax. The bears were frequent visitors to the candy-cane slag. Santa’s Own Whippet Lancers had the job of killing the creatures if they became too bothersome. An officer in this fine old elf regiment always presented any dead polar bear earwax to Mattie, who’d put it out in a warm bowl for the hummingbirds, watching through the frosty window as the tweedy little things fed. Alicia’s bodyguard, the Bucket Brigadiers, square-jawed, hefty men who seemed built out of blocks of ice, were avid hummingbird watchers, too, and soon came over with their binoculars.

Some called Phrygia twice blessed. Its detractors called it “Left-Over Land.” The inhabitants lived in utter darkness. But every unpredictable now and then, as if a mighty door had swung open, the entire kingdom was bathed in light and then, abruptly, fell back into darkness.

Sometimes the great door that brought the sudden light would stand open too long, as if by an indecisive opener, and the ice-people and their dwellings would begin a slow terrible melt. Then the daring Bucket Brigadiers risked their lives rushing around in red wagons with bells ringing to throw buckets of ice on the sweating people and homes. The House of Fröst had enlisted these brave Brigadiers as special bodyguards to the royal family.

Brigadiers spoke as if through mouthfuls of ice cubes. When Mattie, deep in furs, came out to join them she soon learned their language, communicating with them by maneuvering her denture around in her mouth. They told her the vested hummingbird was their clan totem and spoke, in their innocent, block-headed way, of a golden age when the little things serviced men’s ears as well as polar bears, just as the razor-billed bunion bird (Pedes rasa) tended sleeping humans’ feet and the tweezer-tweezer bird (Nostriles etuia etuia) wove its elaborate hanging nests made from human nose hair.

The factory door swung open. Mattie’s old friend Captain Berg of the Bucket Brigadiers greeted her with a click of his square heels and ushered her into a large dim workshop illuminated by a small fire burning under an iron cauldron in a distant corner. Berg’s men were working with long-handled pitchforks to feed the fire from a pile of coal, hockey sticks, twigs, and high hats, and the cauldron from bins of carrots, snowman heads, and what looked like hat sweatbands. A heap of discarded scarves lay nearby.

When Mattie asked what they were doing, Berg explained how centuries ago King Jack XII, unhappy that the ice people never aged while he, their king, did and would one day die, had turned to alchemy to right this injustice. One night as Jack worked in his laboratory, Snowbanks Avalanche, Snowmansland’s ambassador, entered by way of a secret entrance the king had provided so plenipotentiaries could approach him privately should the need arise. Jack groaned inwardly. Prosperity had made the snowmen overbearing and haughty. And Avalanche was the worst of all, swaggering around, high-hatting everyone and looking down his carrot nose at everything and being generally much too big for his buttons. When Avalanche started in on another of his pompous insistences that Phrygia repay its substantial debt to Snowmanlandia, Jack lost his temper, grabbed his Viking battleaxe from the wall, and severed the snowman’s head from his body.

Now not even a king can murder an ambassador. To destroy the evidence of his crime, Jack put the head, carrot nose and all, into a pot which he brought to a simmer over a coal fire made from Avalanche’s haughty eyes, superior smile, and pompous buttons, intending to eat up the last trace of his crime. He was about to add the ambassador’s high hat to the fire when he remembered how famous warriors often made drinking mugs from their enemies’ skulls. So when the stew was cooked, Jack poured it into the high hat and ate it down. It was a tasty dish and the salt from the hat’s sweatband cut the carrot sweetness. Afterwards, watching the hat burn up in the fire, Jack felt a sudden lightness throughout his body as though a whole decade of years had been lifted from his shoulders. He ran to the mirror and found the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes had faded almost completely away. King Jack had accidentally found his sought-after potion.

The next day, Phrygia invaded Snowmansland. Hard-packed though it was, gallant General Plowright Winterbottom’s snowman infantry was no match for the ice people’s army. Afterwards Jack looted the battlefield for snowman stew ingredients, which he cooked and put up in kegs so he could prolong his own life and those of his descendants.

When Berg was done Mattie gestured at the bins. “But the snowmen are extinct,” she insisted. “These are only replicas.”

Berg shook his head and told Mattie how, lame and exhausted, the fleeing snowmen reached a large Indian encampment below the tree line where they were received warmly. The Indians even gave them old ishuki sticks to hobble around on.

But when spring came, the snowmen vanished, leaving behind as gifts for their hosts their carrot noses, bits of coal, and high hats — which the Indians particularly treasured. The Indians told stories around the campfire about the Palefaces, as they called the snowmen. Every winter after that, the Indian children built new snowmen who also vanished in the spring. Centuries later, when Commodore Jacques Cartier arrived with French settlers, the Indians thought the Palefaces had returned. They were disappointed when the new arrivals were still there when spring came. By then their children had taught the French children how to build snowmen, too.

Berg ended his story with this simple Phrygian moral. “Nothing’s extinct that lives on in the hearts of children.”

God bless him, thought Mattie with a shake of her head. Then she asked, “If you’re here, then so is Queen Alicia, right?”

Berg’s oath of loyalty to his queen prevented any reply, not even for old time’s sake. So Mattie said goodbye and left the building, not knowing what to do next.

Father Christmas was waiting for her outside. “If you know the rink rats, maybe you know the Dancing Pig lady,” he wondered out loud. When she cocked an eye he explained, “We patrons of the Walsingham Hotel call it the Dancing Pig.” He told her how a couple of nights ago he’d changed out of his clerical garb and gone to the Dancing Pig for a couple of beers. On his way in, he’d noticed these two large types dressed in loose white dusters standing outside in the shadows. Later he asked Sean, a waiter there, who they were. Sean called them rink rats and said they’d first appeared last December when a certain lady took a room there, and she’d just checked in again.

Queen Alicia of Phrygia, a tall, blue-eyed Scandinavian, sported high cheekbones and a large bump of conviviality. Boredom, in fact, first brought her to the North Pole. Her kingdom’s single fireplace was in the palace throne room, where she always had to sit alone, for none of her retainers dared approach so close to the fire. So she taught herself how to run a movie projector and had movies shipped in from Hollywood. When the war interrupted her supply, in need of amusement, she decided to pay a visit to her North Pole neighbors.

Alicia was an immediate hit with Santa and the Elf Council of Elders. They all loved to drink and dance and tell stories. Alicia had wonderful ones to tell about her gloomy kingdom and its gloomier inhabitants. As Alicia’s visits multiplied, Santa and the elder elves grew more captivated, hanging on her every word and following about after her. Was it the woman’s perfume, which Mattie thought smelled of parsnip? The carousing continued long after Mattie went to bed. But the next day the old elves seemed sprier than ever, while Santa’s ho-ho-ho veered more and more toward a teenaged hee-hee-hee.

Anyway, last October the divorce decree finally came through. Invited to stay for the marriage festivities, Mattie chose to leave with her small cadre of loyal elves.

Remembering how Alicia’s cocktail hour came early, Mattie set out that afternoon for the Walsingham’s ladies-and-escorts beverage room. Separate men’s and ladies-and-escorts rooms was a custom Mattie and Al encountered on a stopover in Toronto before their honeymoon visit to the North Pole. (The sub-tundra railroad’s Flying Snowman Express arrived and departed from a platform in a forgotten corner of the basement of Union Station.) The city had decided there’d be much less trouble if men drank beer in one room and ladies and their escorts, if they had them, in another.

Mattie found her rival alone at a corner table reading a Hollywood fan magazine and sat down across from her without ceremony. Alicia looked up in surprise. “How’d you find me?”

“A present from Father Christmas.”

Alicia gave a careless shrug. “No matter. I meant to look you up anyway. Maybe we can do some business. But first I’ll bring you up to date. The Elf Council of Elders, a gaga bunch themselves if I ever saw one, has declared Santa incompetent by reason of acute adolescence.”

“Snowman stew?”

“Clever girl,” said Alicia. “Men and elves love the stuff. Get them started and they’ll do anything to keep it coming. So now I control the Toy Works, the kriskringlite, everything. But I’ve got places to go and I travel light.”

“So?”

“So how’d you like almost everything back and Santa in the bargain?”

“What’s the ‘almost’?”

“We’ll get to that,” said Alicia. “Listen, when I was a teenager I used to do inky-dinky-spider up and under my daddy the King’s chin and he’d crow like a baby and drool and drool. The Fountain of Youth overflowing, that’s drool for you. When he got so he couldn’t handle the antidote anymore I gave him the injections myself right in his royal butt. Then one day I decided it was queen time for Alicia. So I let Daddy drool himself to death.” She paused. “By the by, Santa loves inky-dinky-spider.”

“Antidote?” asked Mattie.

“Thought that’d get your attention,” smiled Alicia. “Yes, King Jack found the antidote for inky-dinky-spider bite in one of his musty old alchemy books. It’s a compound to ward off acute childishness combining the bitterest of the bitter, the taste of window pane on a child’s tongue when he isn’t allowed to go outside and play, the smell of dusty curtains, the sight and sound of other children playing outside. It comes as a dry powder. I brought along more than enough.” She slid a small envelope across the table. “All you have to do is dilute it with children’s tears, which are never in short supply.”

Alicia smiled. “As for snowman stew, I never used the stuff myself except for a dab behind my ears to drive the boys crazy. I call it Eau de Ponce de León.”

“Oolala,” came a voice. Mattie looked over at a nearby table where a short man and woman wearing trench coats were sitting. She recognized Nutkin’s pint of face staring from beneath his bushel of doll-face wig and Bodkin hiding behind an underbrush of fake beard. Mattie’d told her elves she was coming here to confront Alicia. They’d wanted to go with her. But she’d said no. They’d followed her anyway.

As she watched, a waiter came by with a tray of draft beer and replaced Nutkin’s empty glass with a full one. A hand reached out from Nutkin’s midsection and drew the glass in. A moment later an empty glass reappeared and Tiny Timkin’s voice belched, “God bless us every one.” Christmas had officially arrived.

Alicia continued, “I used up the dregs of King Jack’s snowman stew on my first few visits to the North Pole, spiking everybody’s drinks. But I knew where to get more. Daddy’d been sickly as a prince. One year the royal doctor advised a milder climate for the winter. So he was sent south to Toronto where his health did, in fact, improve. Come March, Daddy set out for the train station and his journey back to Phrygia. As he waited at a curb for the traffic light to change he was surprised to hear the gurgle of snowmen’s voices in the water running beneath the dark ice scabs in the gutter. Their happy goodbyes and hopeful see-you-next-years told Daddy where he’d find more snowman stew whenever he needed it.”

Mattie blinked. Had Captain Berg hit it on the button?

“So for the last two winters,” said Alicia, “I’ve been sending a flat car of Brigadiers down to harvest Toronto’s snowmen, following down later to make sure the brew was right. You’ve got to be careful not to over-sweatband it. Anyway, now I’ve enough to handle the people where I’m going.”

“And where’s that?”

“I want to see action, be in the thick of things,” said Alicia.

“The war, you want to enlist?”

Alicia tapped her magazine. “Hollywood. What’s Joan Crawford got that I haven’t got? So here’s the ‘almost’ in our deal. I keep fifty-one percent of the kriskringlite mine. She who controls the tinsel, controls Tinseltown. You get Santa and everything else.”

Desperate to get to the North Pole and bring Al back from the brink of drool, Mattie quickly took Alicia up on her offer. She rose quickly and said goodbye.

“No goodbyes,” insisted Alicia. “I’ll soon be appearing in a movie theater near you.”

That same evening Mattie settled up her Toronto business by convincing the Westerlys to employ Father Christmas’s snowdrifters as winter bodyguards for the snowmen at a living wage and with knitted scarves and mittens thrown in.

The next morning, the inky-dinky-spider bite antidote secure in one of her suitcases, she and the elves boarded the Flying Snowman Express. Alicia had said it might take six months of injections to return Al to normal. With each shot of the antidote in his butt Mattie intended to recite, “Grow old with me. The best is yet to be.” Fortunately she could leave the ugly little butts of the Elf Council of Elders to the tender mercies of Nutkin, Hopkin, Bodkin, and Timkin.