“Hello!” the little elf cried enthusiastically.
If Teeny taught me anything it’s that I’m lousy at pegging elf ages, but I guessed this one as a youngster of probably just barely over one hundred. He had the boundless energy of youth, bright eyes without a hint of guile and very little ear hair.
“Zippy says I’m s’posed to show you around.” He stuck out his tiny hand. “My name is Mannix.”
“Right. And your old man was Quinn Martin.”
Mannix frowned confusion. “My pa’s name is Grimpy. He’s not a toymaker. He lives in the hollow of an oak tree in the Black Forest. Do you know my pa?”
“Nah, forget it, kid.” I shook his little hand and this seemed to give him no end of joy. He was a creature who dedicated his life to making toys for humans, but I got the distinct impression that I was the first one he’d ever met. Poor kid didn’t know enough to be disappointed. For that, I liked him right off the bat.
The guest rooms into which Zippy the butler elf had unceremoniously dumped me looked like they’d been swiped from a five-star hotel back when Admiral Robert Peary was searching for Santa’s workshop to grouse about a pair of wool socks he’d gotten from Big Red as a kid. All he’d really wanted was a toy boat.
There was a four-poster bed surrounded by heavy drapes and a basin with matching porcelain water pitcher. There was no bathroom but there was a convenient bed pan tucked under the nightstand. Lucky for me most of my meals are liquid.
Mannix was excited to give me a tour, and he assumed I’d want to see some of the toy manufacturing areas. He was a little let down when I had him take me straight to Teeny’s room, but his natural enthusiasm quickly overcame his disappointment.
The elf quarters were a multilevel honeycomb of hallways lined with hundreds of five foot high doors. It looked to me like a cruise ship crossed with a hedge maze and I imagined it’d be easy for anyone who wasn’t an elf to get lost without a trail of bread crumbs to lead them back out. Not that that always works. I worked a case where a couple of juvies tried that and wound up lost in the woods. Punks ate some poor old lady’s gingerbread house then shoved her in her own oven, roasted her to death and robbed her. Little bastard sociopaths were tried as minors. Probably back out on the streets. They’d be over twenty-one by now. Rotten damn system.
Mannix navigated the hallways of the elf quarters and the connecting ancient elevators with the confidence of a long-time resident.
We met dozens of curious elves as we marched through the labyrinth, and each time we passed a group of them, Mannix announced, “Sorry, I can’t stop to chat. I’m showing Mr. Crag around. He’s a human grownup.”
After nearly twenty minutes, we stopped in front of a little unmarked door which my elf guide declared had been Teeny’s apartment.
The brass knob was dull and I had to stoop to get through the doorway. Inside, the ceiling was high enough that I could stand upright, but my hair brushed the plaster. It felt like one of those rooms in the spy movies where the walls and ceiling close in, and I made a point to listen for creaking gears beyond the wallpaper.
“Are you sure this is where Teeny lived?” I asked Mannix after a quick look-see.
“Yes, Mr. Crag,” my elf guide said. “This was his room for thirty years. He moved here when they bulldozed the old barracks to expand doll production back in the Eighties. Cabbage Patch Kids took up lots more space than Barbies.”
The room was immaculate, yet the bed was unmade. I opened a few drawers in the brightly painted yellow bureau. The clothes were folded neatly. I slid the drawer full of elf-size socks and underwear closed and ran my finger along the mirror that was attached to the back of the bureau. “Do you know how long ago Teeny left?”
“Over a week ago. After he took Comet, they sent out a search party but they couldn’t find him. Flying reindeer aren’t too easy to track but it’s not impossible if you know how to do it. They leave a trail of glitter. It’s easier to spot with the whole sleigh team. That’s why they took so long to find him.”
According to Jenkins, Comet had found his own way home after Wu Fong chased him from the alley behind O’Hale’s. “What do you mean they found him?”
The elf looked suddenly worried, realizing he’d said too much. “You know, found him downstairs. He was pawing at the door to the stables.”
“So you’re saying the search party found him by opening the back door.”
The elf only shrugged incomprehension and kept his lips glued shut.
I stepped out the little door and ran the toe of my shoe across the hallway floor. It left a trailing arc of dust on the hardwood. I ducked back inside.
Mannix had taken down a framed black and white photograph from a shelf. It was a picture of Teeny surrounded by two dozen grinning elves. In the center of the front row, Teeny held a trophy in his tiny hand while the rest of the first row elves displayed a banner on which was printed “#1 Hula Hoop Production Crew, 1959.“ I spotted Mannix with some younger elves in the back row. If Teeny was as unpopular with the rest of the elves as Mrs. Claus suggested, the photo sure didn’t make it seem the case.
Mannix caught my curiously raised brow and rapidly returned the frame to its shelf. He seemed suddenly to find the doorjamb infinitely fascinating.
There were other photographs on the shelf. They went from crisp digital images to very old Kodachromes and back even further to a pair of daguerreotypes. The last image was an etching in very old wood of two very proud elf parents, the mother holding a little bundle in her arms. The pictures were a record of Teeny’s entire life.
I ran my index finger along the length of the shelf. Clean. Just like the bureau and exactly like everything else in the little bedroom. And completely unlike every other dirty surface throughout the entire North Pole complex.
“You got a real problem with dust up here.”
The elf seemed relieved that I didn’t ask him about the photograph. “Oh, yes, Mr. Crag. The factories are running constantly. Must keep the children happy. There are crews who do the cleaning up at night but they never seem to keep ahead of all the dust.”
“No kidding. The Claus place is covered in it too.”
“It probably didn’t used to be. I mean, I’ve never been there. I’m just an E12 level factory elf. But they had a full cleaning staff over there until September, when they transferred them all over to the mittens shop.”
“They ditched the whole staff?”
“Well, not all of it. There are a couple of cooks, but they never interact with the Kringles.” His bright, happy face grew sad. “But they definitely did transfer old Runny. He was the butler at the main house for years. He was so upset. I heard him muttering as they carried his things to his new rooms three floors down from here. He sounded like he was upset about more than just the transfer. I never got a chance to ask him what else was bothering him. Right after they transferred him, before he got to sleep one night in his new quarters, poor Runny got killed. Fell from Santa’s sleigh. I still don’t know why Santa took him up, an elf his age. Maybe he just always wanted to go on a ride-along, but then who doesn’t? I know I do, and I’ve never been up in the sleigh.”
“So Santa took him up?” I asked. “Runny wasn’t up there by himself or just joyriding with some other elves?” I was careful to keep my voice blandly conversational. I didn’t want him to get the sense I was digging or he might clam up again.
“Oh, Santa definitely took him up. No one takes the sleigh but Santa. Although I heard Mrs. Claus did borrow it for a weekend trip a few months ago. But otherwise, Santa never lets anyone else fly the sleigh. It’s his pride and joy.”
So Santa had been in the sleigh when the other elf fell. It wasn’t like Doc Minto to get a detail like that wrong. Which meant Claus was lying when he claimed he was nowhere near the sleigh when Runny met the church steeple. Could be Kringle just didn’t want to get dragged into the investigation. Could be something else.
As for Teeny’s room, I’d seen enough. Despite the unmade bed -- which had clearly been deliberately pulled apart to throw me -- the room was spotless. There was no evidence of the manifestos and conspiracies Mrs. Claus had mentioned. I didn’t see a copy of Catcher in the Rye or Earth in the Balance anywhere. Someone had searched the place from top to bottom and when they were through they had put everything back exactly where they’d found it. The place was so clean you could have made chips -- micro or potato -- in it. If Teeny had hidden anything in his quarters, it was long gone.
“I’ll take a look at the manufacturing plant now, if you don’t mind.”
Not only did Mannix not mind, he was positively giddy. Here was one elf not jaded by the job. Mannix loved humans, although he never had the opportunity to interact with any before. But he said he watched them on TV in his downtime. Humans had always been fascinating creatures to him, and he was so delighted to open a window to this special world for an actual human being that he wasn’t even bothered that the only area I was interested in seeing was the floor where Teeny had been supervisor.
Turns out Teeny’s department made Slinkies. Mannix and I had passed the Wii factory along the way, and that had been crazier than the windows at Hialeah on the first and fifteenth of the month. The Slinky floor was a morgue in comparison, yet even though a spring that walks down stairs alone or in pairs and makes a slinkity sound wasn’t exactly glamorous in a world of high-tech games, it was still good honest elf work.
Seeing the place where Teeny had spent so much of his time brought a fresh pang of guilt deep in my gut. Not so bad as before because I was determined by then to unravel whatever it was the elf had got me tangled up in. It wouldn’t bring Teeny back, but it’d at least go a little way to balancing out the cosmic scales. Not to mention maybe keeping the state from strapping me down and throwing the switch. It wasn’t an Easy-Bake Oven waiting in that room at the end of death row, and I had no intention of letting that flatfoot Jenkins applaud as my head lit up like the clown’s nose in Operation.
I didn’t know if I’d learn anything from Teeny’s coworkers, but if I’d gone in expecting a conspiracy of silence I would’ve have been right on the money.
Either his workmates knew nothing or they weren’t talking. From their choreographed answers, they’d been prepped to feed me the line that Teeny was the North Pole’s answer to Timothy McVeigh. I could see the conflict in their eyes. The poor saps didn’t want to lie about their friend, but they had no choice. The elves were scared.
I thanked the Slinky crew and Mannix led me back into the heart of the facility.
The workshop was set up in a grid pattern, like a giant crossword puzzle with wide corridors cutting between squares. Each square was a factory that produced a specific product. Teeny worked in the retro wing judging by the signs outside the factory doors. We passed the factories for Silly Putty, Slip ‘N Slide, Etch A Sketch, Frisbee, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs. Like the Slinky shop, none of these looked terribly busy even three days before Christmas.
“Looks like kids don’t think anything is fun these days unless its got a price tag of three hundred bucks and a microchip shoved up its ass,” I commented as we walked by the ghost town that was the Lite-Brite shop.
“That’s probably why Santa is shutting this whole division down,” Mannix said.
“He’s what?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. And not just this one. This is the last Christmas for a whole bunch of divisions. I’m still safe for now. I work in remote control trucks and we do well, but even down there everybody’s on edge. Lots of elves have been laid off already. They’ve gone back home to Europe. Did you know most elves are originally from Europe? A few of my friends have written to say how much it’s changed since they left. Did you know they had two world wars there? That’s very naughty of them.”
Layoffs at Santa’s workshop. Odd, Julie had implied Teeny and all the elves would have jobs at the Pole workshop for life. I was contemplating what this new information might mean when a screeching whistle suddenly sounded throughout the complex. The noise was so loud and piercing that it rattled my fillings and put into overdrive the bass drum of a hangover that had until now been quietly pounding out the complete marches of John Philip Sousa behind my eyeballs.
Many more floors just like this one must have run deep into the polar ice if the massive freight elevators Mannix and I were approaching were any indication. The huge doors of the elevators were constantly opening on this top level and vomiting out forklifts carting crates of everything from iPads to plastic light sabers. When the whistle blew, every one of the elevators opened at the exact same time, and thousands of hardhat-wearing elves carrying lunchboxes came streaming out into the main concourse. My elf guide and I were swept up in the sea of tiny bodies with big heads as the first elf shift headed back to lonely cells for a little grub and some well earned shuteye.
Mannix navigated the madness as best he could but it was clear he was used to flying solo. He finally gave up and took my hand, leading me out of the army of elves and up a side alley to a less congested avenue.
The unmistakable aroma of chocolate filled the air and Mannix informed me we had entered the candy making heart of the North Pole workshop. But if that was so, there was definitely something missing. It took a moment for me to put my finger on it.
“I don’t smell peppermint,” I said. Teeny had reeked of the stuff, and the aroma clung like invisible fog to the walls of the elf dormitory. If there was one thing the North Pole candy factory should smell like more than anything else, it was peppermint.
Mannix lifted his nose and sniffed. “They stopped making candy canes a month ago,” he explained. “Actually, it’s unusual for them to still be operating this late in the year. Most candy production is finished long before now.” He sniffed again and seemed puzzled at the thick scent of warm chocolate in the air.
I realized why he was confused. Based solely on my trips to Walgreens for aspirin and nicotine patches, I thought all Christmas candy was out in stores by Labor Day, which would have meant the bulk of the candy work should have been done by August. This was one section of the workshop that should have had all its work completed weeks before December 25th, yet there was still some candy work going on.
I noted something in the granulated sugar that dusted the floor near the walls where the dry mops couldn’t quite reach, and I leaned over to scoop it up.
It was an eight inch long strip of green paper, but very narrow as if it had come out of a document shredder.
“What’s this?” I asked. It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen a scrap of paper like it before.
“It could be a strip of wrapping paper,” Mannix said.
I didn’t think so, yet my brain couldn’t focus through my hangover well enough to figure out why I’d recognize something so seemingly insignificant. I stuck the strip of paper in my pocket. I’d examine it more carefully once I was alone in my room.
One long corridor lined with doors was guarded by a pair of seedy looking elves. I noted that Mannix picked up his pace and did not make eye contact with the pair. He was clearly relieved when we’d passed around a corner out of sight of the guards.
“What’s going on back there?” I asked.
“Some top secret project,” Mannix replied. “Santa handpicked the elves for the job himself. I know some of them. They are not nice elves, Mr. Crag.” He pitched his voice low. “Frankly, I don’t understand what they’re even doing in candy making. Most of them worked shipping or maintenance before they were transferred. And one of them I know who used to work in toys -- Stunky is his name -- was going to get fired for making…” His voice trailed off and his face flushed. “He was making anatomically correct Bratz dolls. Stunky is a very, very naughty little elf. Santa was furious. We all knew that Stunky was as good as gone, but his hearing was cancelled before he even went before the elf review board and he got moved with a whole bunch of other mean little elves to the new secret project. He didn’t even get a reprimand.”
“This project,” I said, “it started around September?”
Mannix’s brow rose in surprise. “How did you know?”
“In a past life I took psychic lessons at the Learning Annex.”
Mannix didn’t do sarcasm. Another thing to like about the little guy. The elf just nodded as if this made perfect sense and continued on his way.
As for me, the puzzle was slowly beginning to come together, although I had no idea what the image was and I sure as hell didn’t have the picture on the box to cheat from. At the moment I only had some of the border done, a little of the farmhouse and the roof of the barn. There were still major chunks of field, sky and mountains missing. And with so much puzzle still gone, I just hoped I managed to find the last piece before Jenkins arrived on his snowmobile with noose and gallows in tow.