One Horse Open Slay, page 7
Claus reached the end of the production line at the far rear of the factory where the elf with the clipboard began some sort of lengthy explanation that looked like it was boring Claus to tears. He nodded a lot, sighed and scratched his huge gut.
I still couldn’t hear what was being said for all the noise of the factory, but from my vantage point I got a good view of what was going on.
The molten chocolate sluiced into hundreds of molds which were placed by robotic arms into dozens of racks which were then rolled into a series of large upright stainless steel booths. With a hiss and a plume of chocolate-fumed steam, the candies were instantly firmed into permanent shape. The racks then rolled out doors in the other side of the booths to join a hundred other identical racks, even while more racks loaded with fresh melted chocolate were being wheeled into the booths.
The firmed chocolates were dumped by more robotic arms onto a conveyer belt on which they were bounced and rattled until they formed up into one continuous single file.
Claus and the foreman elf started moving again, and I followed along from my concealment, ducking behind shelves, ovens and empty racks. I caught up with them near the very end of the production line.
The chocolates had passed through another stage and were now wrapped in thin blue, gold and pink tinfoil. Something seemed out of place and it took me a moment to put my finger on it. Then it walloped me upside the head like a frozen orange at the toe of a swinging stocking. It was the colors. They were all wrong. The tinfoil wrappers were washed out pastels, not the bold greens and reds of Christmas.
And that’s when I realized what I was looking at.
Easter eggs.
The wrapped chocolate eggs bounced down a chute presumably to be bagged then boxed for shipping. And I suddenly had the sort of flash of clarity we all used to get in youth but which in my case, thanks largely to enough booze to float an aircraft carrier from here to Gibraltar, came few and far between these days. I shoved my hand in my pocket and pulled out the thin strip of treated paper I’d found on the sugar-dusted floor during my tour with Mannix.
It was so obvious to me now what the scrap of paper was that I was ticked at myself for not seeing it before. Probably because I was used to seeing whole clumps of them stuffed in bags, never single blades. I was quite clearly holding a strand of the phony grass mommy and daddy stuff in little Junior’s Easter basket.
Easter basket grass and Easter eggs. What on Earth did they have to do with Christmas, and why was Santa’s North Pole candy production facility being turned over to chocolate Easter eggs? He was obviously keeping a tight lid on this operation. He’d brought in the worst of his elves to run the shop -- if Mannix was right, elves who’d never worked candy before -- while others he was laying off. Nothing here made sense.
A few seconds later, I realized I had to find somewhere else to sort it all out.
I spied the two guards from the hallway coming down the line to where Santa and the supervisor elf were talking. Claus had peeled the tinfoil off several Easter eggs and was holding each up to the light in turn, examining them for flaws. He seemed satisfied that they were perfect, and when he was finished he jammed them all in his mouth. He was drooling chocolate onto his beard when the guards reached him.
“This can’t be good news,” I whispered.
One of the guards held up the Frisbee I’d used to distract them. My cue to hightail it out of there.
I couldn’t hear their voices over the loud equipment, but as I picked my rapid way back in the direction from which I’d come I glanced back to see that St. Nick’s face was now bright red. He was yelling something I could not hear and spraying all three elves with chocolate-fueled spit.
I made it back down the line to the main entrance. A fresh pallet full of raw chocolate squares had just arrived on the elevator and while the elves were distracted unloading it, I made it back out in the hall. Luckily the two guards hadn’t scrounged up replacements before going off to tell Santa about the mysterious Frisbee, and so I had clear sailing through the dimly lit candy plant and back out to the main toy facility.
The corridors were deserted between shifts. I left Claus, the elves, and the mysterious Easter eggs behind me and ran like a rabbit for the stairs.
Little did I know as I headed stealthily back to my room that this whole dirty business had more to do with rabbits than I could ever have imagined.
Chapter 9
I was out of breath and sweating bullets by the time I got back to my guest room. I closed the door with a gentle click behind me and thought as I stood in the dark with my back against it that I’d made it safe and sound. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I heard a rustle of fabric; someone moving in the darkness. With no gat to blast the intruder to hell, my weapon choice was limited to a candelabra from the table next to the door. I felt the weight and coldness of the heavy hunk of brass as I lifted it over my head with one hand and snaked the other hand for the light switch.
If the intruder had a gun I was going to look like a real Hermey standing there with only an antique tchotchke to defend myself. I prepared myself for a short burst of ridicule followed by an intense hail of lead, and reluctantly flicked on the light.
Turned out my nocturnal visitor had a pair of guns. They were barely concealed under a sheer red negligee trimmed in white fur.
“Why, hello there, Mr. Crag Banyon, P.I.,” she purred.
The nightie Mrs. Claus wore left precious little to the imagination, and my filthy mind could easily fill in the blanks. She was curled up on top of my unmade bed in a sex kitten pose that made Ursula Andress in her bikini from Dr. No look like Yukon Cornelius in a Speedo.
“Is it checkout time already or did you get lost on your way to the can?” I asked.
I lowered the candelabra but didn’t set it back down. I had no idea if she had come there alone, and there were lots of hiding spots around the big old room. A whole platoon of heavily armed elves could be stashed in the sweater cubby.
“I could ask you the same question,” she said, stretching her arms above her head and sighing seductively. One long bare leg crossed languidly over the other and she was abruptly sitting up on the covers, feet tucked under her rear. “So where have you been wandering around so late at night? And you can put the candlestick down, Crag, you silly Christmas goose. I’m all alone and I’m certainly not armed. See?”
She arched her back as some kind of proof, but all it proved was that she possessed the most potent weapon a dame could use against any red-blooded male. It took rapid deployment of the kind of willpower my bartenders and bookies have never had the misfortune of seeing just to keep my knees from buckling. I replaced the candelabra to the clean spot it had vacated on the dusty doily.
“Sister, I don’t know what your game is, but if your husband catches you in here it’ll be me who gets chopped up and fed to Blitzen for New Year’s supper, and since I had my heart set on not being reindeer crap until my sixtieth birthday I suggest you haul that lovely derriere of yours off my bed and get back to your own room before Sinterklaas wakes up and finds the nondiabetic side of his bed vacated. Capice?”
“Oh, Crag, don’t be such a Boy Scout.” Her legs slipped out from beneath her like long, sharp blades from a Swiss Army knife and she glided on bare feet across the carpet to where I stood my ground at the door. Her creamy white arms slipped around my neck and she drew her lips close to my ear. “Doesn’t Mrs. Claus deserve an early Christmas present?” she asked, her voice huskier than a dog sled team.
I pulled her off me and held her wrists tight in my hands.
“I’d think it’d be present enough to have Santa himself wipe your slate clean. I’m probably still on the hook for that box of Junior Mints I swiped from the Bijou concession stand when I was ten, but not you. No, you’re free and clear. Must be nice to have an in with the guy who makes the list. You’re like a Yugoslavian gymnast who trips over her own feet five times and falls off the balance beam but still gets the gold thanks to the Iron Curtain judges whose Commie cards come preprinted with 10s. Except that we see it live on TV so we know we’re getting sold a bill of goods. You remain an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a Chanel baby doll red flare nightie.”
“What do you mean?” She pulled her wrists roughly from my hands. “Is that where you’ve been; looking through my permanent naughty-nice record?”
I nodded sharply. “And the million dollar question on everyone’s inquiring mind is why did Santa take an eraser to your naughties?”
“I have no idea. Crag, you had no right to break into the records room.”
“Beg to differ, doll. The fact is I’ve been framed for murder for one of your elves, and that gives me the right to do anything to clear my name. So what’s the answer? Somehow you’ve got zero naughties, one nice, and that makes for a record shorter than a-ha’s greatest hits. Even Mother Teresa blew off steam and kicked a leper in the crotch once in awhile. I’ve seen the YouTube video.”
She turned her back on me and walked slowly back across the room. “We’ve all got some things in our backgrounds we’re not proud of, Crag,” she said. She toyed absently with an arrangement of dry flowers on the bureau.
“I notice we’re back to first names again, Mrs. Claus.”
“Oh, don’t hate me for that. Of all things, not that!” she cried, whirling around, her long hair whipping dramatically. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. “You have no idea what it’s like. No idea what he’s like.” She brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen across her left eye.
It was an inadvertent move, but I noticed something dark beside her eye.
I strode over and for a moment a spark of hope glinted in her eye. It turned to confusion when I reached past her and grabbed a corner of the bed sheet. I dabbed the cloth deep in the water jug on the nightstand and brought it to her face. She realized what I was doing and tried to pull away, but I grabbed her by the back of the neck with one hand to hold her in place and wiped the corner of her eye.
“Stop it!” she said, struggling to free herself.
“Stand still,” I snapped.
“You’re hurting me.”
“I’m not the first guy to hurt you, Julie,” I snarled, disgusted, as I released her. “I suppose you got that shiner playing Twister with a herd of caribou.”
I’d cleaned off enough of the concealing makeup to reveal the purple bruise she’d so carefully disguised.
Julie Claus sat down angrily on the edge of the bed and with slender fingers combed her long hair back over the now exposed black eye. The anger quickly bled away and she sighed heavily, gazing up at the ceiling.
“He wasn’t always this bad.” Her voice was soft now; faraway. “At first he was always giving me little gifts. I suppose that’s what he’s always done. To make people love him, right? And eventually to control. It’s always about control, isn’t it? Psychiatrists probably have written whole books about how men like him operate. I consider myself a smart woman, Crag, I really do. I shouldn’t have fallen for it. But he found me at a vulnerable time in my life and, well, those first couple of years were good.”
“Then it all changed in September.”
She glanced up, confused. “What? No. He’s been a brute for ages now. What does September have to do with anything?”
I frowned. I was sure I was right. Everything else was coming up September. Julie’s abusive relationship with Claus was just about the only thing in this whole mishigas that didn’t point like an arrow across the calendar to four months ago.
“Did anything happen to Claus back then, Julie? Think back to just around Labor Day. Was he sick or did he maybe get kicked in the head by a reindeer? Anything. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or even physical. Maybe someone you didn’t know -- an old friend he never mentioned before -- showed up here unexpectedly?”
“Well there was a kid on some damn magic railroad. But that was last December.” She bit her lip in thought. “There was a flying snowman that passed over a few weeks ago, but he didn’t land. And the Jehovah’s Witnesses are always knocking on the door. Oh, but we don’t let them in, Crag. We just hide behind the drapes and pretend we’re not home. That’s all I can think of. What’s this all about?”
I took the strand of green basket grass from my pocket and handed it to her. “I found this down at the candy factory. This has Easter basket written all over it. And your husband’s down there right now supervising production of chocolate Easter eggs.”
She looked up sharply. “You were downstairs?” Eyes back down at the long strip of colored paper in her palm. “Easter eggs? No. No, you’re mistaken.”
“I thought it was strange, too,” I said. I took back the paper grass strip. “But I saw it with my own peepers. Santa’s factory’s being subbed out to somebody else’s holiday.”
“It isn’t,” she insisted. “The North Pole is exclusively Christmas. It always has been.” She shot to her feet, as if she had suddenly just recalled a four a.m. beauty parlor appointment. “I’ve got to go.”
I darted in front of her, blocking her mad dash to the door. “Why? What’s going on here? What’s Easter paraphernalia doing all the way up here on Christmas week?”
She seemed to want to run, to dart around me and fly out into the hallway, out into the snow and into the Arctic night, never looking back. When she spoke, the words came tumbling out in a headlong rush.
“You have no idea, Crag. You just don’t know. These holidays. They’re more cutthroat than you can possible imagine. It’s gang warfare among goblins every Halloween. Baby New Year is always the most vicious little punk in the preschool. And those birch trees on Arbor Day…they’re monsters, Crag. Monsters. Santa has avoided it living in seclusion up here, but…do you remember Hedgey?”
It came out of the blue. The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it. She saw the puzzled look on my face.
“Hedgey the Ramadan Hedgehog,” she explained.
I remembered. The Hedgehog had made a brief splash back in the late Seventies. Hedgey was a giant talking hedgehog who wasn’t content to ride around on his magic trolley car that traveled underground. An ambitious hedgehog, he decided one day that he wanted to be the focus of fun for children the world over, and he cast his eye across the calendar for an untapped holiday to make his own. He thought he’d struck gold when he found Ramadan, a month-long period during which he could bring joy to Muslim children the world over. No elf or wizard, troll or anthropomorphic dolphin wanted anything to do with Ramadan, and instead of wondering why that was, Hedgey was thrilled. He had a whole religion and a whole corner of the world all to himself. He loaded up his trolley with plastic banjos and Colorform gifts and set off from his home in an enchanted railway tunnel underneath the Rockies. His first stop was Syria.
“You remember now, Crag, don’t you?” Julie said, nodding. She had seen the spark of memory in my eyes. “You remember what they did to Hedgey?”
“I remember he showed up on the first day of Ramadan to pass out baklava and chocolate covered peanuts,” I said. “That was his thing; baklava and chocolate covered peanuts. Weird. The crowds in Damascus seized him, cut off his paws, stuck his head on a pike and set fire to his trolley car. Hedgey was the last enchanted creature to get in his noodle some grand holiday licensing dream with Islam. So what does a talking hedgehog who’s been dead for more than thirty years have to do with what’s going on here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
The dame was scared. You could see it in her eyes, in the way she tugged anxiously at the short hem of her nightie. And she wasn’t just afraid of a lout husband with a beer gut and a homoerotic fixation on chimneys.
I sat next to her on the bed and took her hands in mine. They were as soft and warm as mine were callused and cold. “It’s okay, babe. It’ll all be just fine.”
“I wish you could promise that, Crag. All I want for Christmas is for all of this to be gone.” She buried her face in my shoulder and cried, probably the first time she’d allowed herself to do so since Claus had brought her up from her boring job as an events whatever-it-was at some rinky-dink resort in Nowhere, USA.
She left the eye spigots wide open for a few minutes, during which I stroked her back and promised her that her life wasn’t over and that the world was still out there just waiting for a gal like her to conquer it. The usual baloney life preserver you’ve got to toss out to a broad who’s paddled out with a bum into the middle of an ocean of promises who then leaves her without so much as a hunk of driftwood and a bon voyage.
She finished with a long sniffle, blew into a wadded up Kleenex, and looked up at me with grateful, mascara-stained eyes.
“Thank you, Crag. It’s been so long since a man has been there for me.” She suddenly touched her hair. “Oh, I must look like a drowned rat.” She managed a flustered laugh and dabbed at the runny mascara with the damp tissue.
“You look great, babe. Julie, I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta push. What does a dead hedgehog have to do with chocolate eggs downstairs?”
She nodded tightly. The cry had done her good. Her spine steeled.
“Santa just sort of took over Christmas, Crag. You, know, organically. I mean, the hedgehog was doomed from the start, but even if he wasn’t you really can’t force that sort of thing. It just sort of grows over time. I don’t think Santa meant to take Christmas all to himself. At least, not at first. He was Saint Nicholas, after all. And Christmas was just so joyous and happy, and there he was with all the presents.”
“It isn’t all his,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Isn’t it? When was the last time you saw manger figures in a store? I don’t mean those complete cheap plastic sets they stick away in a corner or those ostentatious two hundred dollar ones. I mean when was the last time you could walk into Kmart on any day in December and pick up a new sheep or wise man because you knocked the heads off your old ones while vacuuming? When I was a kid every store sold sheep or camels or Josephs. Now you go into a store and it’s all Mickey Mouse Christmas welcome mats and electronic reindeer for the front lawn and Santa doing everything from water skiing to fishing from a hot air balloon. But no nativity figures. Santa didn’t mean to do it, but he wiped religion from Christmas. It’s gone. They don’t even call it Christmas any longer, Crag. They call it ‘holiday.’”
