Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel (4 page)

“Growling?” I repeated.

“Uh-huh.”

—and felt hot, foul-smelling breath on his face. He screamed like a girl (he said), and this incited a long, loud burst of maniacal, menacing laughter. The elevator was shuddering and quaking, bobbing wildly up and down, as if threatening to fall four floors and crash into the ground. And then it burst into flames.

“Flames?” I said.

“Flames.” Satsy nodded emphatically. “All around me. I was drenched in sweat, screaming in terror, and certain I’d die in there!”

“So . . .” I looked in the direction of the freight elevator. “Did it burn up? It is a charred wreck now?”

“No. It’s perfectly fine.
I’m
not.” He gestured to his damaged costume. “But suddenly the whole crazy thing stopped cold. Just like that. As if it had never happened. The lights came back on, the elevator stopped rocking and shaking, and everything around me looked perfectly normal. Then the doors opened and I was ejected by an unseen force—one that was still laughing!”

I stared at my friend, dumbfounded. Now it was easy to understand why he had careened screaming with mad terror into Santa’s throne room, looking like a demented nightmare and creating a stampede among the volatile visitors.

“Satsy.”
I gave him a hug. “How horrible!”

“Esther, there’s something here at Fenster & Co.,” he said in a low voice. “Something that shouldn’t be here. Something . . .
evil.”

* * *

Realizing that Satsy had endured a mind-boggling shock, I decided I’d better get him off the floor and into quiet surroundings. I escorted him into the men’s locker room, helped him remove his costume, got him dressed and then wrapped in a blanket that I found, and then gave him a cup of hot cocoa in the break room.

While I was handing the cocoa to him, the Russian elf came into the room. She was a sullen, dour woman about my age, with dark hair, a pretty face, and a strong foreign accent. All I knew about her was that she came from Moscow and seemed to hate everyone and everything. I had worked with her only once and couldn’t remember her name. Holly? Ivy? Merry?

I gestured to the big garbage bag into which I had stuffed Satsy’s Santa costume. “Hey, can you do us a favor and take this upstairs to the costume mistress? Tell her there’s been an accident and it’ll need to be repaired or replaced—preferably by this afternoon?”

She looked at the bag, then looked at me. “No. I am not your servant.”

I blinked. “I didn’t mean you were my servant. I just thought maybe you could . . .” I said to her back as she stalked out of the room. “. . . do us this favor?” I called after her, “Elves are Santa’s
helpers.
Have you forgotten that?”

Twinkle, who passed the Russian elf as he came into the break room, said, “What—the bitch queen wouldn’t help you with something? What a surprise.”

“I guess you’ve worked with her?” I said.

“Oh, yeah.” He gave a dramatic shudder, which made his bells tinkle.

“You’re on break now?” When the bespectacled elf responded with a nod, I said, “Good. Can you stay here with Drag Queen Santa for a while? I need to take his costume upstairs.”

“Sure,” said Twinkle.

“Don’t leave him alone,” I said. “He’s had a shock today.”

“So have we all,” said Twinkle.

Satsy asked the elf, “How did your alpaca story end? I think I missed that part.”

“Ah!
Well . . .”

“Okay,” I said quickly, gathering up the garbage bag. “I’m out of here. Oh, and then I’ll check out, um, that thing, Satsy.”

“What thing?” he asked, his lashes fluttering.

“The place where you . . . had your shock.”

“Oh! Right. Oh, my God. Be
careful,
Esther.”

“Absolutely.” I exited the break room. In the hallway that ran alongside it and the locker rooms, I bumped into Jeffrey Clark. “Hey, you got here fast!”

“I was on my way to the subway when Miles called my cell,” Jeff said with a shrug. “I had just been wondering how to pay for a Christmas present for Puma, so it seemed like a good idea to cancel my plans and come here when Miles offered me the extra hours.”

Puma Garland was Jeff’s girlfriend, whom he’d been dating since summer. I had introduced them, in a sense, when dragging Jeff along with me to her voodoo shop one hot day while investigating some mystical mayhem in Harlem with my friend Max. A lady of strict ethics, Puma had asked for my blessing when romance developed between her and Jeff, since I’d previously been his girlfriend.
Way
previously, in fact. There had been a gap of four years between when I had broken up with Jeff (and, nope, no regrets) and when we’d unexpectedly reconnected this past summer. Puma was a fine woman and undoubtedly better than Jeff deserved, and I had granted the relationship my dubious blessing.

I asked Jeff, “Did Miles tell you we had some unexpected excitement this morning?”

He shook his head, which was now covered by a light fuzz of hair. He had been shaving his head regularly in recent months, for his previous job. Jeff was a handsome man, but I thought the cue ball look didn’t suit him at all. I was glad to see he was abandoning it, now that he was no longer playing a gladiator at the Imperial Food Forum, a Roman-themed gourmet superstore that had recently gone bust.

Jeff said, “Miles only told me that Moody Santa’s gone AWOL and they needed a replacement ASAP.”

“Two replacements,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “
No one
showed up for the shift? Man, people are dropping like flies around here.”

“The guys in the break room can tell you about it. I need to go deal with this.” I hefted the plastic bag over my shoulder.

“They’re making us take out the garbage now?” Jeff said, outraged. “
God,
I hate this job.”

“No, it’s . . . never mind.” As I moved past him, he asked me who the other shift Santa would be. I answered, “Rick, I think.”

“Super Santa? Oh, great. I can’t stand that guy.”

“I know.”

Most of the Santas resented Rick to some degree; he was so good at the job and so popular in the role, they felt inadequate by comparison. But I thought Jeff mostly disliked him for
enjoying
the job.

“Who are Santa’s elves this morning?” Jeff asked. “Am I working with you?”

“I
was
assigned to Santa,” I said. “But I’ve got to go deal with this costume and then—”

“Oh,
please
tell me I won’t be working with that Russian chick again.”

“Um, actually, she’s on the clock now, so she might be your—”

“Shit.” Jeff stomped off toward the men’s locker room. “Why am
I
always the lucky one?”

I rolled my eyes and headed toward the staff elevator. Then, recalling Satsy’s experience, I changed my mind and decided to take the stairs.

Jeff was not a negative person by nature. He was just unhappy these days. Four years ago, shortly after we broke up, he had left New York with high hopes for the original new show he was cast in, but it had died in Boston. (Since it was called
Idi Amin: The Musical
, I thought its fate seemed not entirely unpredictable. But Jeff was very disappointed.) For several years after that, he tried to launch a TV career in Los Angeles, but his efforts didn’t lead to anything.

Now he was back in New York . . . and so far, since returning to the Big Apple earlier this year, he’d gotten work as a gladiator play-acting with a sword at an uptown store for rich food-fetishists and as Diversity Santa at Fenster & Co. (He blamed me for the latter, since I had introduced him to his job the way Satsy had introduced me to mine.) Jeff was a dedicated actor who increasingly felt his talent was going to waste (and, although I was rarely in the mood to tell him so, I agreed that he deserved much better opportunities than he was getting), and he thought the jobs he was reduced to working were unseemly for a man in his thirties.

I wasn’t too crazy about some of the jobs I had to take, either—particularly this one. But my stint as Santa’s helper notwithstanding, I’d certainly had a much better year than Jeff. I’d worked in the chorus of
Sorcerer!
, a short-lived Off-Broadway musical. I’d had a plum guest role on
The Dirty Thirty
, a cult hit cable TV series in the
Crime and Punishment
spin-off empire of award-winning police dramas. And I’d spent the autumn as a female lead in a sold-out Off-Broadway adaptation of Dr. John Polidori’s influential nineteenth-century tale,
The Vampyre.
(Though, admittedly, it was only sold-out because hordes of feverish fans flocked to the show to see its leading man, Daemon Ravel, who claimed to
be
a vampire. And thereby hangs a tale . . .)

I also had a dedicated, hardworking agent who believed in my future (and who shared an additional bond with me, since we’d supported each other through a nasty vampire incident during the limited run of
The Vampyre
). Whereas Jeff’s agent had dumped him last year—something that too many agents tend to do whenever a client’s career requires them to do some actual
work
—and he’d so far been unable to get another. I had introduced him to mine, Thackeray Shackleton (not his real name), but Thack, though he liked Jeff’s audition and suggested some other agents for him to contact, had declined to take him on as a client. Thack had told Jeff candidly that he already had two African-American men of similar age, build, and type on his client list, and there just wasn’t enough work available for black actors for him to serve a third such client well, too.

That had put Jeff in an understandably dark mood even before he lost his gladiator job and wound up, at my urging, applying to Fenster’s about a week ago. He considered his role as Diversity Santa a real low point in his career, and that was
without
regularly overhearing parents asking the elves if there wasn’t a
white
Santa available whom their children could visit instead.

So although a year of dating him, back in the day, had taught me the folly of putting up with Jeff’s foibles and twitches in silence, I was mostly letting his ill-humor at Fenster’s roll off my back. He had his reasons for being grumpy, and I understood them.

The costume room, where I was headed with Satsy’s wrecked Santa outfit, shared the sixth floor with the store’s various administrative offices. This floor was closed to the public and accessible only by climbing these stairs, taking the staff elevator, or using a special key (which wasn’t issued to seasonal employees) in the public elevators.

I opened the door from the stairwell and started to enter the hallway. At that moment, I heard a man scream.

Startled, I staggered backward into the stairwell. As I did so, a chubby white man walked past me in the hall, moving so quickly that he didn’t seem to notice me or the swinging door. I thought he looked slightly familiar, even though his face was hideously contorted by strong emotion as he stormed past me, screaming,
“Freddie!”

3

I
stood in the stairwell, blinking in surprise and confusion as the door swung shut, muffling the man’s scream.

He hadn’t looked like he needed help. He’d seemed enraged.

“Oh . . .”

I realized now why the man looked familiar. He was Preston Fenster, one of the company executives and private stockholders in this family-owned retail empire. I had seen him briefly twice before, both times when I’d been on this floor: once during the hiring process and once when being fitted for my costume. He had been noisily enraged on both of those occasions, too. It seemed to be his natural state.

Satsy was right about the tense atmosphere at Fenster’s. But considering how virulently all the Fensters seemed to hate each other, based on staff gossip and what little I’d seen for myself, I found it difficult to believe that last year had been any better. (Though last year my friend had presumably not been attacked by a growling, laughing, flaming freight elevator.)

I opened the stairwell door again and stepped into the hall.

“So if you think for one goddamn minute that we’re paying for all this crap, Freddie,
THINK AGAIN!”

I winced at the volume as I glanced down the hall and saw Preston, red-faced with rage, standing just outside the office of (I assumed) his nephew, Frederick Fenster, Jr.

I hovered uncertainly where I was, wishing Preston would enter Freddie’s office. If he remained in the hall, I’d have to pass right by him on my way to the costume shop, which was on the far side of this floor.

An overweight, doughy-featured, balding man in his early fifties, Preston was holding a pile of papers—bills, I supposed—in one hand. With his other hand, he was peeling pages off the stack, one at a time, and flinging them into Freddie’s office while he continued shouting.

“This family is not made of money!” Fling. “This company is not your personal plaything!” Fling! “Entertaining Russian gangsters is
not
a deductible expense!” Fling, fling, fling! “And
this
will get you arrested and indicted if the police ever find out about it, never mind the IRS!” He threw the whole remaining pile into Freddie’s office and stood there panting with rage. Then he added, “And for
God’s sake,
Freddie, learn to lock your damn door when you’ve got—got—got
company
with you!” Preston pulled on the doorknob to slam the door shut with a resounding
wham!,
then he stormed down the hallway, moving in my direction.

Clutching my garbage bag, I hugged the wall, intending to stay well out of his way.

Preston saw me, came to an abrupt halt, and shouted, “My God, what are
you?
Another of Freddie’s bright ideas?”

“No, sir,” I said with dignity. “I’m an elf.”

“No, you’re not!” he bellowed. “Our elves wear red and green!”

Unlike Santa’s other elves, I wore a costume of blue and white. Because of this color scheme, shoppers and store staff (and Fenster family members, I now gathered) didn’t always recognize me as an elf, even though the cut of my costume was identical to that of the other female elves: a micro-velvet bodice with short sleeves and a neckline too low to be comfortable in the chilly department store, high-cut shorts with a pointy scalloped hem, striped tights, and dainty boots with bells on them. While wandering the floors of Fenster’s in this outfit, I had so far been mistaken for a hooker, a cocktail waitress, and a store model for an absurdly expensive line of teen clothing featured on the third floor.

I
thought my pointy elf ears, which were attached to my blue stocking cap, were a dead give-away. But experience had so far proved me wrong.

“I’m a Jewish elf,” I explained, thinking that Preston looked overwrought enough to have a nasty medical episode right in front of me. “These are the colors of the Israeli flag. Blue and white. I’m called Dreidel. You know the spinning top that children play with at Hanukkah? It’s got four sides, with a Hebrew letter on each side? That’s a dreidel. And it’s my elf name.”

“A Jewish elf?” Preston shouted into my face.

“Yes.”

“A JEWISH ELF? Since when are there
Jewish
elves?”

I looked around, hoping someone would come to my rescue. The hallway was completely empty. Of course. Everyone on this floor was probably waiting for Preston to disappear into his office—or maybe keel over dead from the heart attack he was so ardently courting.

I said, “You’re perspiring, Mr. Fenster, and you look pretty red. Maybe you should get a glass of water and—”

“What the
hell
are we doing?” he shouted at me. “Whose idea was this? How much did that costume cost us? What are we paying you?”

“Not nearly enough,” I said. “Er, my pay, I mean. I don’t know what the costume—”

“You’re fired!”

“What?” I said. “What did
I
do?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Preston,” a woman said behind me. “Don’t take out your frustrations on this girl.”

I whirled around, grateful for this support by someone brave enough to face Preston Fenster’s noisy wrath. My savior was his older sister, Helen Fenster-Thorpe. We’d never met, but I recognized her face from my employee manual. Helen obviously took excellent care of herself, and she seemed to have a talented plastic surgeon; the result was a triumph of will (and money) over nature, if a little eerily plastic.

I knew some of her personal history, thanks to Jingle’s gossip during my training. Helen was currently on her fourth husband. Her first marriage, when she was nineteen, had lasted barely two weeks before her mother—Constance Fenster, the Iron Matriarch—had gotten it annulled. Even Jingle didn’t know who that short-lived spouse had been. Helen’s current (and not necessarily final) marriage was to a gorgeous “tennis pro” twenty years her junior; according to Jingle, although the guy looked hot in his sporting gear, no one had ever seen him play tennis, let alone engage in it professionally.

“Oh, so you finally deigned to show up, did you?” Preston roared at his sister. “It’s almost time for the board meeting to start!”

“And I’m here in time for it,” Helen said coolly. “So do try to calm down. The doctor warned you, after all . . .”

“Mind your own goddamned business!”

“The entire floor can hear you screaming, Preston,” she chided. “In fact, I suspect that all of Manhattan can hear you!”

“Have you
seen
the bills for Freddie’s latest escapade? Does he really think we can afford this shit now, on top of everything else? We’re going to need cash flow to pay the lawyers if we have to fight another lawsuit from the—the—the . . .” Preston turned red again. “You know. From those
bastards.”

“They wouldn’t dare. They were beaten for good last time,” Helen said, though she sounded hopeful rather than confident. “These new threats of a lawsuit now that Mother’s dead are just so much saber rattling.”

Clearly unconvinced by this assertion, Preston continued, “And we’ve got the hijackings to deal with, too! Do you know how much merchandise we’ve lost this season? So this is no time for Freddie to pull one of his expensive stunts!”

Helen Fenster-Thorpe sighed in disgust. “What has that little wretch done now?”

Seeing my chance, I tried to slip away unobtrusively. I failed.

“Never mind that! Who’s responsible for
this?”
Preston blocked my path and barked, “A Jewish elf! Are you
kidding
me? First it was solstice! Then Kwanzaa! And now
this!
What next? Should we get an imam in here for the holidays, so that
everyone
can feel included?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said his sister. “We live in a multicultural society, Preston. Fenster’s must keep moving with the times.” Over her shoulder, she said, “Tell him, Arthur.”

“Um . . . well, er . . . ah . . .” A timid voice floated out of the open office door behind Helen.

A man of about fifty, Arthur was the fourth and final child of the late Constance Fenster. Helen, who was Constance’s only daughter, was the Iron Matriarch’s eldest surviving offspring. Constance’s first child, Frederick Senior, had died in a liquor-soaked car accident twenty years ago, though the stripper riding with him that night had survived (and promptly sold her story to the tabloids). According to Jingle, Frederick Senior’s merry widow rarely made an appearance at Fenster’s, though she owned a chunk of the stock. She usually let her son, Freddie Junior, vote for her at Fenster board meetings.

“Oh, come out of there,” Helen snapped over her shoulder at Arthur. “And speak up, for God’s sake.”

Arthur partially complied, creeping up to the doorway and hovering there. Although the youngest of the three siblings, he looked the oldest, his face heavily lined with stress, his hair completely gray. A thin, soft-spoken man who wore wire-rimmed glasses and always dressed formally (even at company picnics, Jingle said), Arthur had never married, nor did he date. Some of the staff thought he was in the closet; others thought he’d been psychologically castrated by his notoriously ruthless mother, who’d died only a few months ago.

“Well, er, actually, yes,” Arthur said, looking around anxiously as he tried to avoid eye contact with his siblings. I must have looked innocuous (Santa’s elves weren’t supposed to be threatening, after all), because his gaze zeroed in on me, and he began speaking directly to me, as if I had asked for this information. “Demographic statistics show that ethnic and religious minorities by now form a substantial portion of the city’s residents and also its visitors, particularly if we consider these disparate groups as one combined whole in comparison to the population we would describe as white and Christian.”

He looked so anxious for my approval that I couldn’t help giving him an encouraging little nod, which made the bell on my stocking cap jingle as I said, “Ah! Yes, I see your point.”

He smiled, bashfully pleased by my response. “In fact, actuarial studies suggest that—”

“I don’t give a damn about actuarial statistics!” Preston roared, the veins at his temples bulging so alarmingly that I thought he was on the verge of
becoming
an actuarial statistic. “Fuck your demographics!”

“You are such a vulgar ass,” his sister said with open revulsion.

“This is not an actuarial demographic,” Preston shouted. “This is Christmas!
Christmas.
Do you know what Christmas
means?”

If I had expected him to deliver a speech about what the Christian savior’s birth meant to Catholics and Protestants around the world, or to reflect on the central theme of this season as a time of love and joy, I would have been sorely disappointed. However, I had by now seen enough of the Fenster family not to expect anything of the sort.

“Profits!” he said. “December should be our most profitable month of the year. And instead, it’s
breaking
us. Do you know
why?”

“Because our merchandise keeps getting hijacked en route,” his sister said tersely.

“What?” I blurted. “Seriously?”

“Oh, yes,” Arthur said with a nod. “Three trucks have been seized at gunpoint in the past ten days. The trucks have been found afterward, but not until after the culprits and all the goods are long gone.”

“Has anyone been hurt?”

“No,” said Helen.

“Not yet,” Arthur added anxiously.

“Wow, I had no idea.” There was a lot of staff gossip about shoplifting, which was an obsession with Fenster managers and security guards, but I didn’t think I’d heard anything about hijackings. Which made sense, I supposed. If the trucks were being hijacked out on the road, the heists wouldn’t involve store premises or affect anyone whom the seasonal staff knew. I wondered if the guys down on the docks had mentioned the hijackings to Satsy, since they might know some of the truckers affected by it.

“Don’t you follow the news?” Helen said, looking at me critically. “This has been all over the media.”

“
All
over,” Arthur added, looking distressed.

“I haven’t had time for the news lately. I’m always
here,”
I said. “Armed robberies? That’s scary.”

“Also expensive.” Helen gave Preston a pointed look. “Of course, we
could
put a stop to it.”

“You could?” I asked, puzzled.

“The
police
will put a stop to it,” her brother said brusquely.

Helen said, “All we’d have to do—”

“
No
,” said Preston. “Fenster’s is
through
dealing with criminals and giving in to extortion!”

Helen persisted, “This mess is turning order fulfillment into a catastrophe and costing—”

“The police will take care of this,” Preston snapped.

His sister shook her head. “My God, you’re naïve. Doesn’t it even
occur
to you that the police might be in their pockets?”

“Whose pockets?” I asked.

“Anyhow, I wasn’t talking about that when I referred to our losses,” Preston said impatiently. “I was talking about your goddamn Solsticeland! It’s draining us dry!”

“Really?” I said in surprise. “I thought the whole idea was that it brings a lot of people into the store. And it sure seems to work. I’m always amazed at how crowded this place is.” Since Arthur was nodding at me with approval, I continued, “Just like your ad slogan always says, ‘At Christmas,
everyone
comes to Fenster’s.’ And they come to see the holiday displays. You have the most elaborate ones in the city, after all.”

Looking bemused, Preston asked me, “Who
are
you?”

“I’m Dreidel,” I reminded him. “I sing Hanukkah songs and teach Santa’s visitors Hebrew words like
shalom
and . . . um . . . No, just
shalom.”

Sure, I had been sent to Hebrew school as a child. But I was such an inattentive student that our nice rabbi—who was unusually progressive even for the Reform movement in Judaism—eventually agreed to let me focus my studies on Yiddish theater, a unique legacy of the Jewish diaspora, for my bat mitzvah. Which is not to say that I know Yiddish any better than I know Hebrew; just that I knew, even as a child, that theater would be my lifelong vocation.