“So what?” asked the colonel.
“So up ahead a couple of miles there’s this pine grove. It’s well off the road to the north. Two toys carrying a couple of sacks of tinsel each could lay a trail back into it.”
Abruptly the caravan slowed and rolled to a stop atop a narrow stone bridge over a creek. The colonel cursed and leaped out the back. He was starting the first turn of the wind-up key when a rat cavalry patrol came galloping up. They must’ve found the rats in the garage and followed the tinsel trail.
When the six rat dragoons saw the nutcracker, they dismounted, becoming twelve. De Filbert drew his weapon. If they captured the caravan now, the rats would still have time to double back with it and get the beaver back on course. That mustn’t happen. He ran the first two rats through the body as they charged. Then he snapped off the head of a third with his terrible jaws and spat it into the road.
The nine rats remaining fell back, panting and wary, for nutcrackers had a formidable reputation among their enemies. The colonel shouted to Von Ratte for help. But his companion was hunched over in the driver’s seat, his fingers on his temples. Damn fine time to get a headache!
With a show of sharp yellow teeth, the rats charged again. De Filbert ran another through. A second rat wrapped his tail around the nutcracker’s leg like a whip and tried to pull him off balance. When that failed he buried his teeth in the nutcracker’s sword arm.
Tossing his weapon to his other hand, the Colonel severed the rat’s head and fought on encumbered for several minutes until the dead rat’s tail uncoiled from around his leg and the head released its grip on his sword arm.
Now a cheer went up from his attackers. A patrol of rat lancers arrived, the vanguard of the beaver herd. Behind them he heard the cries of the wranglers and the huff and puff of the beaver. Then he saw the herd itself, shapes moving beneath a tarpaulin of darkness.
About to be overwhelmed, the colonel pulled out the caravan’s brass wind-up key, put it between his jaws, and bit it in half. As the taste of brass filled his mouth he heard creaking timber and a loud snap. His jaw had broken. De Filbert stood there agape, with his lower jaw resting on his chest, sword in hand, ready for death and immortality.
Just then the beaver herd arrived in a great pile-up. Promised the tinsel trail would lead them to breakfast, they milled about in truculent confusion, knocking riders from their mounts as they searched for their food with feeble eyes.
Suddenly Oliver, the beaver who’d asked for more, saw a shimmering figure running down the road beyond the caravan. “Follow that Glitterati,” he shouted. In an unstoppable rush the beaver shouldered the rats aside and pushed their way between the caravan and the bridge rampart, setting the vehicle rocking back and forth on its wheels. As the last beaver passed, the caravan overturned, blocking the bridge.
The colonel knew the will-o’-the-wisp was his comrade-in-arms Von Ratte, running naked toward the distant grove of pine to draw the beaver after him.
As the herd disappeared up the road, De Filbert waved his saber at the rats, inviting death. But they had their hands full dragging the caravan out of the way. It was some time before the rat cavalry could ride off after the beaver.
The wranglers, being civilians, stayed behind. They ignored De Filbert, made a campfire on the spot, and hunkered down around it. An old toothless one with a guitar struck up a homesick lament about how he missed Pickled Flats. Or was it pickled sprats? The colonel wasn’t sure, for just then the cork artillery opened up from the Toyland lines. The Big Push had begun.
An hour later, his broken jaw bound up with a strip of gunny-sacking, the Colonel came trudging up the road. He imagined he looked much like the dead Jacob Marley in a dream he had once, come back to haunt his partner Ebenezer Scrooge into changing his skinflint ways. Crazy the names you find in sleep.
Distant toy trumpets were sounding another advance when he found the place by the roadside where the underbrush was heavily trampled down. Soon he came to a half-demolished stand of pine trees and a heap of snoring and sated young beaver. He searched on. Of course the rats had returned to their regiments. It was Von Ratte he was looking for.
Finally he saw a glow as faint as fireflies through the trees. Hurrying over, he found his companion, or what the rats had left of him, scattered across a clearing, slashed by saber blades and pierced by lance heads.
The colonel gathered the bits and pieces into a pile like a heap of faint embers. Then, as he watched, the glow dimmed and was gone. He spread his greatcoat over the dark remains and stood there.
Whether Von Ratte believed it or not, toys who fall in the Battle for Christmas never die. Someday some aspiring cartoonist in a dull day-job business meeting will look down to find he’s doodled Richthofen von Ratte’s face on his notepad, the big ears, the disks for eyes. He’ll smile and raise his pencil, meaning to hide what he’s done behind a graphite downpour before his supervisor sees it.
But then he’ll stop and smile again, half-remembering something, and he’ll draw the hero’s lederhosen shorts and add a buttoned front. Now the name Ricky von Rat will come to mind and be dismissed. No, not a rat. It doesn’t even look like a rat. Besides, mice are nicer. Ricky von Mouse? Maybe. But let’s lose the “von.” Milton Mouse? Manny? No. But he thought he was on to something. Resolving to work on the name, he’ll fold the drawing and put it in his pocket.
A line of wooden soldiers with fixed bayonets moved across the clearing. The colonel watched them disappear through the trees, knowing he himself would never see action again or have another chance at immortality. Oh, old Toby’s colleagues the glue doctors would give him back a profile as good as new. But his jaw would never be combat-worthy again.
No, Gilbert de Filbert, colonel of the Nutcrackers, would end his days an unsung commissariat desk jockey. Meanwhile, and you could bet on it, Richthofen von Ratte, a.k.a. Mr. Whatever, God bless him, would be a star with his name up there in lights.
Copyright ©2006 by James Powell
The Theft of the Five-Pound
by Edward D. Hoch
Far the most popular of all of Edward D. Hoch’s series characters, eccentric thief Nick Velvet returns this month in a tale that takes him to Britain’s Isle of Wight. Nick has traveled well around the world, with several volumes of the series’ stories in print in distant places such as Japan. The most recent Hoch collection, however, is More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru.)
The woman who was paying Nick Velvet thirty thousand pounds to steal a five-pound British bank-note on the Isle of Wight had arranged to meet him at a casino in Berkeley Square. The name she’d given Nick was Mona Walsh and he wasn’t too concerned about its authenticity so long as her money was authentic.
She said she’d be at the roulette table at nine o’clock, and he’d see her name. He should tell the man at the door that he was her guest.
Passing through a red velvet drape, he found himself in a moderately sized casino that bore little resemblance to those back home. The noise level was considerably lower due to the absence of slot machines, though he knew some London casinos had a few to satisfy American tourists, along with the Texas Hold ‘Em poker tables that had become so popular. Looking over the roulette tables, Nick could find no one who seemed a likely client. There were only three women at the roulette tables and all were firmly attached to middle-aged males.
Then he noticed one of the croupiers. She had an Irish face to go with a name like Walsh, and as he edged closer he saw that the name badge on her jacket read Mona. Just a moment after nine another young woman came to relieve her. Nick edged over a bit and followed her out of the casino into the adjoining hotel lobby. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked quietly as he caught up with her.