‘Sweet talker,’ she said.
‘So where do you want to eat?’ he said. ‘McDonald’s?’
‘Big spender, too,’ she said, pausing again. ‘And what?’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘Beautiful and feminine and sexy and what?’
‘And I love you,’ he said.
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
‘With all the umpteen million other women in this city... ?’
‘You’re the only woman in this city,’ he said.
She looked at him. She nodded.
‘Thank you,’ she said softly and rose from the bed. ‘Let me shower and change,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ she said again and kissed him on the mouth and then went into the bathroom.
He heard the shower when she turned it on.
He picked up the stack of mail again. He opened several Christmas cards and then picked up a red envelope and tore open the flap. The card inside read:
Scrawled on the flap on the card in the same handwriting was the message:
The door to the bathroom opened. Eileen poked her head around the jamb. ‘Wanna come shower with me?’ she asked.
* * * *
Christmas Day would fall on a Sunday this year.
This was good for the department stores. Normally sales fell off a bit on Christmas Eve. You had your last-minute shoppers, sure, and the stores all stayed open till six o’clock to accommodate even the tardiest, but the volume was nowhere as great as it was at any other time during that last hectic week before the big event. Unless Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday. Then, miraculously, sales perked up. This may have had something to do with the fact that working people were used to shopping on Saturdays. Maybe they felt this was just another Saturday, same as all the rest in the year, time to get out there and spend Friday’s paycheck. Or maybe the Christmas bonuses had something to do with it, get that big fat extra wad of money on Friday, good time to spend it was Saturday, right? It was funny the way a Saturday Christmas Eve brought out the customers in droves. Statistics showed that it didn’t work that way if Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday. Not as many shoppers. Even God rested on Sunday. This year, with prosperity lingering for yet a little while and with Christmas Eve coming on a Saturday, storekeepers, all over the city were anticipating a banner day.
On Thursday, December 22, the detectives of I he 87th Squad received what they surmised was almost the last of the Deaf Man’s communications.
It was Arthur Brown, in fact, who guessed this one was the penultimate one. The single white sheet of paper in the now-familiar typewritten envelope showed:
‘Number twelve,’ Brown said.
‘Twelve roast pigs,’ Carella said.
‘Only one more to go,’ Brown said.
‘How do you figure that?’
‘It’s the twelve days of Christmas, don’t you get it?’ Brown said. ‘Two nightsticks, three pairs of handcuffs, four police hats ... the twelve days of Christmas.’
‘He’s just wishing us a Merry Christmas, huh?’ Carella said.
‘Fat chance,’ Brown said. ‘But all that’s missing now is the first day. It’s the twelve days of Christmas, Steve. I’ll bet next month’s salary on it.’
‘So what’ll the first day be?’
‘Take a guess,’ Brown said, grinning.
* * * *
Brown did not like putting up Christmas trees.
He also did not like what Christmas trees cost nowadays. When he was a kid, you could get a huge tree for five bucks. The seven-foot tree he’d bought this year had cost him thirty-five dollars. Highway robbery. He would not have bought a tree at all if it weren’t for Connie, his eight-year-old daughter. Connie still believed in Santa Claus. There was no fireplace and hence no chimney in the Brown apartment, but Connie always left a glass of milk and a platter of chocolate-chip cookies under the tree for Santa. Every Christmas Brown had to drink the goddamn glass of milk before he went to bed. He also had to eat some of the chocolate-chip cookies.
The first thing he did not like about putting up a Christmas tree was the lights. It seemed to Brown that if the United States could put a man on the moon, then some brilliant scientist someplace could also figure out a way to make Christmas tree lights that didn’t have wires. Brown was no brilliant scientist, but he himself had figured out a very simple way to do this, and if some starving inventor out there wanted to cash in on a bonanza, he was willing to divulge it for a hefty piece of the action. He knew just how it would work in principle, but he didn’t have the electrical engineering know-how to put it on paper. He had never discussed his idea out loud with anyone because he didn’t want it stolen from him. There were a lot of crooks in this world, as he well knew, and it seemed likely to him that his multimillion-dollar idea would be stolen the moment he talked to anyone about it. He already had a name for the product: No Strings. If he and somebody went partners on it, they could sell billions and billions of Christmas tree lights every year. No strings. No wires to loop around branches. Each Christmas tree light an individual entity that could be hung anyplace on the tree. All anybody had to do was contact him, write to him care of the 87th Precinct, make him an offer. He was willing to listen.
Meanwhile, he struggled with the damn lights.
Nobody helped him.
That was the second thing he disliked about putting up the tree.
His wife, Caroline, was in the kitchen baking the chocolate-chip cookies Connie would put under the tree on Christmas Eve, some of which Brown would later have to eat while he drank the goddamn glass of milk. Connie herself was in the den watching television. All alone in the living room Brown struggled first with the lights and then with the Christmas balls, which was the third thing he disliked about putting up a tree. Not the Christmas balls themselves—except when one fell off the tree and crashed to the floor, leaving all those silvery splinters that were impossible to pick up—but the little hooks that held the balls to the tree. Why was it that no matter how carefully you packed all the ornaments away after Christmas, there were always more balls than there were hooks? Brown suspected there was an international ring of ornament-hook thieves.
The smell of baking cookies filled the apartment.
The sound of animated cartoon characters filled the apartment.
Brown worked on the tree.
Only two more days to go, he thought.
His daughter, Connie, suddenly appeared in the doorway.
‘How come there’s no black Santa Clauses?’ she asked.
Brown sighed.
* * * *
The twelve days of Christmas.
Twelfth Night.
The eve of Epiphany.