Cynthia Manson (ed) (45 page)

Then he turned away and walked out
into the night. It had begun to snow again—soft, gentle flakes. They fell on
Father
Crumlish’s cheeks and mingled with a few drops of moisture that were already there.

It was almost midnight
before Big Tom Madigan rang St. Brigid’s doorbell. Under the circumstances
Father wasn’t surprised by the policeman’s late visit.

“How did you know,
Father?” Madigan asked as he sank into a chair.

Wearily Father related
the incident at the crib. “After what I heard at the Swansons and what Casey
told me, a crying child was on my mind. And then, when I saw what looked like
tears on the Infant’s face, I got to thinking about all the homeless—” He
paused for a long moment.

“Only a few hours before,
Herbie had told me how hard it was, particularly at Christmas, to be lonely and
without a real home. Charley was suspected of murder because he was going to
lose his job. But wasn’t it more reasonable to suspect a man who was going to
lose his life’s work? His whole world?” Father sighed. “I knew Herbie never
could have opened another store in a new location. He would have had to pay
much higher rent, and he was barely making ends meet where he was.”

It was some moments
before Father spoke again.

“Tom,” he said brightly,
sitting upright in his chair. “I happen to know that the kitchen table is
loaded down with Christmas cookies.”

The policeman chuckled. “And
I happen to know that Emma Catt counts every one of ’em. So don’t think you can
sneak a few.”

“Follow me, lad,” Father
said confidently as he got to his feet. “You’re on the list for a dozen for
Christmas. Is there any law against my giving you your present now?”

“Not that I know of,
Father,” Madigan replied, grinning.

“And in the true
Christmas spirit, Tom,” Father Crumlish’s eyes twinkled merrily, “I’m sure you’ll
want to share and share alike.”

Father Crumlish’s
Christmas Cookies

(1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

(2) Combine butter, sugar, and cream in a saucepan and
bring to a boil. Remove from the heat.

(3) Stir in other ingredients to form a batter.

(4) Drop batter by spoonfuls onto a greased baking sheet,
spacing them about three inches apart.

(5) Bake ten minutes or until cookies begin to brown around
the edges. Cool and then remove to a flat surface. If desired, while cookies
are still warm, drizzle melted chocolate over tops.

YIELD: About 24 cookies

—
Courtesy of the author

THE PLOT AGAINST
SANTA CLAUS – James Powell

Rory Bigtoes, Santa’s Security
Chief, was tall for an elf, measuring almost seven inches from the curly tips
of his shoes to the top of his fedora. But he had to stride to keep abreast of
Garth Hardnoggin, the quick little Director General of the Toyworks, as they
hurried, beards streaming back over their shoulders, through the racket and
bustle of Shop Number 5, one of the many vaulted caverns honeycombing the
undiscovered island beneath the Polar icecap.

Director General Hardnoggin wasn’t
pleased. He slapped his megaphone, the symbol of his office (for as a member of
the Board he spoke directly to Santa Claus), against his thigh. “A bomb in the
Board Room on Christmas Eve!” he muttered with angry disbelief.

“I’ll admit that Security doesn’t
look good,” said Bigtoes.

Hardnoggin gave a snort and stopped
at a construction site for Dick and Jane Doll dollhouses. Elf carpenters and
painters were hard at work, pipes in their jaws and beards tucked into their
belts. A foreman darted over to show Hardnoggin the wallpaper samples for the
dining room.

“See this unit, Bigtoes?” said
Hardnoggin. “Split-level ranch type. Wall-to-wall carpeting. Breakfast nook.
Your choice of Early American or French Provincial furnishings. They said I
couldn’t build it for the price. But I did. And how did I do it?”

“Cardboard,” said a passing elf, an
old carpenter with a plank over his shoulder.

“And what’s wrong with cardboard?
Good substantial cardboard for the interior walls!” shouted the Director
General striding off again. “Let them bellyache, Bigtoes. I’m not out to win
any popularity contests. But I do my job. Let’s see you do yours. Find Dirk
Crouchback and find him fast.”

At the automotive section the new
Lazaretto sports cars
(1/32
scale) were coming
off the assembly line. Hardnoggin stopped to slam one of the car doors. “You
left out the
kachunk
,”
he told an elf engineer in white coveralls.

“Nobody gets a tin door to go
kachunk
,”
said the engineer.

“Detroit does. So can we,” said
Hardnoggin, moving on. “You think I don’t miss the good old days, Bigtoes?” he
said. “I was a spinner. And a damn good one. Nobody made a top that could spin
as long and smooth as Garth Hardnoggin’s.”

“I was a jacksmith myself,” said
Bigtoes. Satisfying work, building each jack-in-the-box from the ground up,
carpentering the box, rigging the spring mechanism, making the funny head,
spreading each careful coat of paint.

“How many could you make in a week?”
asked Director General Hardnoggin.

“Three, with overtime,” said
Security Chief Bigtoes.

Hardnoggin nodded. “And how many
children had empty stockings on Christmas morning because we couldn’t handcraft
enough stuff to go around? That’s where your Ghengis Khans, your Hitlers, and
your Stalins come from, Bigtoes—children who through no fault of their own didn’t
get any toys for Christmas. So Santa had to make a policy decision: quality or
quantity? He opted for quantity.”

Crouchback, at that time one of
Santa’s righthand elves, had blamed the decision on Hardnoggin’s sinister
influence. By way of protest he had placed a bomb in the new plastic machine.
The explosion had coated three elves with a thick layer of plastic which had to
be chipped off with hammers and chisels. Of course they lost their beards.
Santa, who was particularly sensitive about beards, sentenced Crouchback to two
years in the cooler, as the elves called it. This meant he was assigned to a
refrigerator (one in Ottawa, Canada, as it happened) with the responsibility of
turning the light on and off as the door was opened or closed.

But after a month Crouchback had
failed to answer the daily roll call which Security made by means of a two-way
intercom system. He had fled the refrigerator and become a renegade elf. Then
suddenly, three years later, Crouchback had reappeared at the North Pole, a
shadowy fugitive figure, editor of a clandestine newspaper,
The
Midnight Elf,
which made violent attacks on Director General
Hardnoggin and his policies. More recently, Crouchback had become the leader of
SHAFT—Santa’s Helpers Against Flimsy Toys—an organization of dissident groups
including the Anti-Plastic League, the Sons and Daughters of the Good Old Days,
the Ban the Toy-Bomb people and the Hippie Elves for Peace...

“Santa opted for quantity,” repeated
Hardnoggin. “And I carried out his decision. Just between the two of us it hasn’t
always been easy.” Hardnoggin waved his megaphone at the Pacification and
Rehabilitation section where thousands of toy bacteriological warfare kits
(JiffyPox) were being converted to civilian use (The Freckle Machine). After
years of pondering Santa had finally ordered a halt to war-toy production. His
decision was considered a victory for SHAFT and a defeat for Hardnoggin.

“Unilateral disarmament is a
mistake, Bigtoes,” said Hardnoggin grimly as they passed through a door marked
Santa’s
Executive Helpers Only
and into the carpeted world of the front
office. “Mark my words, right now the tanks and planes are rolling off the
assembly lines at Acme Toy and into the department stores.” (Acme Toy, the
international consortium of toymakers, was the elves’ greatest bugbear. ) “So
the rich kids will have war toys, while the poor kids won’t even have a popgun.
That’s not democratic.”

Bigtoes stopped at a door marked
Security.
Hardnoggin strode on without slackening his pace. “Sticks-and-stones
session at five o’clock,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t be late. And do
your job. Find Crouchback!”

Dejected, Bigtoes slumped down at
his desk, receiving a sympathetic smile from Charity Nosegay, his little blonde
blue-eyed secretary. Charity was a recent acquisition and Bigtoes had intended
to make a play for her once the Sticks-and-Stones paperwork was out of the way.
(Security had to prepare a report for Santa on each alleged naughty boy and
girl. ) Now that play would have to wait.

Bigtoes sighed. Security looked bad.
Bigtoes had even been warned. The night before, a battered and broken elf had
crawled into his office, gasped, “He’s going to kill Santa,” and died. It was
Darby Shortribs who had once been a brilliant doll designer. But then one day
he had decided that if war toys encouraged little boys to become soldiers when
they grew up, then dolls encouraged little girls to become mothers,
contributing to overpopulation. So Shortribs had joined SHAFT and risen to
membership on its Central Committee.

The trail of Shortribs’ blood had
led to the Quality Control lab and the Endurance Machine which simulated the
brutal punishment, the bashing, crushing, and kicking that a toy receives at
the hands of a four-year-old (or two two-year-olds). A hell of a way for an elf
to die!

After Shortribs’ warning, Bigtoes
had alerted his Security elves and sent a flying squad after Crouchback. But
the SHAFT leader had disappeared. The next morning a bomb had exploded in the
Board Room.

On the top of Bigtoes’ desk were the
remains of that bomb. Small enough to fit into an elf’s briefcase, it had been
placed under the Board Room table, just at Santa’s feet. If Owen Brassbottom,
Santa’s Traffic Manager, hadn’t chosen just that moment to usher the jolly old
man into the Map Room to pinpoint the spot where, with the permission and
blessing of the Strategic Air Command, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer were to
penetrate the DEW Line, there wouldn’t have been much left of Santa from the
waist down. Seconds before the bomb went off, Director General Hardnoggin had
been called from the room to take a private phone call. Fergus Bandylegs, Vice-President
of Santa Enterprises, Inc., had just gone down to the other end of the table to
discuss something with Tom Thumbskin, Santa’s Creative Head, and escaped the
blast. But Thumbskin had to be sent to the hospital with a concussion when his
chair—the elves sat on high chairs with ladders up the side like those used by
lifeguards— was knocked over backward by the explosion.

All this was important, for the room
had been searched before the meeting and found safe. So the bomb must have been
brought in by a member of the Board. It certainly hadn’t been Traffic Manager
Brassbottom who had saved Santa, and probably not Thumbskin. That left Director
General Hardnoggin and Vice-President Bandylegs...

“Any luck checking out that personal
phone call Hardnoggin received just before the bomb went off?” asked Bigtoes.

Charity shook her golden locks. “The
switchboard operator fainted right after she took the call. She’s still out
cold.”

Leaving the Toyworks, Bigtoes walked
quickly down a corridor lined with expensive boutiques and fashionable
restaurants. On one wall of Mademoiselle Fanny’s Salon of Haute Couture some
SHAFT elf had written:
Santa, Si! Hardnoggin, No!
On one wall
of the Hotel St. Nicholas some Hardnoggin backer had written:
Support
Your Local Director General!
Bigtoes was no philosopher and the
social unrest that was racking the North Pole confused him. Once, in disguise,
he had attended a SHAFT rally in The Underwood, that vast and forbidding cavern
of phosphorescent stinkhorn and hanging roots. Gathered beneath an immense
picture of Santa were hippie elves with their beards tied in outlandish knots,
matron-lady elves in sensible shoes, tweedy elves and green-collar elves.