Kringle, fresh from a failed attempt to float a loan from the gnomes of Zurich, was depressed and well in need of Al as a drinking buddy. For her part, Mattie used her doll-face skills to bring efficiency to the whole North Pole operation. The Claussins’ honeymoon stretched into several years. But by 1933, all Kringle could leave in good little boys’ and girls’ stockings were licorice whips gussied up with a bright bow. He came home with the disappointed cries of good little children everywhere ringing in his ears. Stepping down from the sleigh, he staggered and fell into Claussin’s arms, dead of a broken heart.
The Elf Council of Elders asked Al to take Kringle’s place. “Doll-Face,” he said, “working with kids, that’s the way to change the world. Like Billy Wordsworth wrote, ‘The Child is father of the Man.’” Mattie knew how much he wanted the job and urged him to take it.
For starters, the elves suggested Al shorten his name from Claussin to Claus. Keeping the “sin” in, they said, might give naughty boys and girls the wrong idea. But Al Claus didn’t trip that lightly on the elf in tongue so they asked what Al stood for. Albert? Alfred? Alexander, he told them. They brightened. Sandy Claus was good. But why not make it Santa in honor of his predecessor but one?
Al Claussin, a.k.a. Santa Claus, worked very hard at his new role, gaining weight, growing a beard which he whitened with bluing in the wash water, and practicing his ho-ho-hos in the bath.
Meanwhile, militaristic regimes with duces, caudillos, and fuehrers were springing up everywhere and with them the price of kriskringlite, which was also a key ingredient in the manufacture of insignias of rank and medals.
A few days after their North Pole work was wrapped up, footsteps in the hall and a knock on the door announced Claussin Private Investigations’ first client. The elves shooting craps on the carpet quickly replaced the dice and money with tiddlywinks, and Nutkin, already dressed in his blond doll-face wig and blouse, climbed up onto a stack of books on the receptionist’s chair. “Come in,” he piped sweetly.
An elderly couple entered, he wearing a brown overcoat with a large herringbone in it and carrying a homburg, she in gray fur with a matching hat.
Nutkin read their business card aloud. “Mr. and Mrs. Westerly of the Snowmen’s Aid Society.”
Mattie rose to greet them as they passed through the railing into the office proper. Offering them seats next to her desk, she nodded at the tiddlywinkers on the carpet and explained, “I’m babysitting several of my operatives’ children. Now how can I help you?”
“Perhaps you are unaware of our society’s work,” said Westerly. “We — that is to say Mrs. Westerly and her knitting circle — provide Toronto’s snowmen with scarves to brighten their winter months.”
“How nice,” said Mattie.
Westerly bowed. “But for two years now some person or persons unknown have been savagely murdering the snowmen hereabouts.”
Mattie saw her elves heads pop up. “Murdered how?” she asked, though she suspected she knew.
“Heads, carrot noses, coal buttons, twig arms, the whole lot gone,” said Westerly, adding indignantly, “Oh, the authorities refuse to take us seriously. But these murders strike at our nation’s soul. Wasn’t it Voltaire who called Canada ‘A few acres of snowmen. Quelques arpents des bonhommes de neige’?”
“Mais oui,” insisted Mrs. Westerly.
“Oolala,” piped Nutkin.
“The Snowmen’s Aid Society wishes to employ your agency to catch the perpetrators of these heinous murders,” said Westerly. “We can’t do it ourselves. Moss Park and hereabouts isn’t a place to send our ladies at the best of times. Certainly not at night.”
On her way home yesterday Mattie had passed a snowdrifter, as the winter homeless were called, huddled in a doorway. He wore a bright knitted scarf. “Nice,” she said and asked him where he got it. “From Father Christmas,” he replied. A likely story. Were the snowdrifters stealing the snowmen’s scarves to keep themselves warm? But why take all the other stuff?
The Westerlys gave Mattie an advance for her services and took their leave. In the doorway, Mrs. Westerly turned, inhaled deeply, and said, “Oh, it smells so nice in here. Lavender, isn’t it?”
“Close enough,” said Mattie.
Later that afternoon, Claussin Private Investigations did a reconnoiter of the Moss Park area, going up Sherbourne, where the old shoveled snow stood in gray three-foot heaps along the curb, ramparts the elves enjoyed running atop and staring passersby right in the eye. Then Mattie led them left onto Shuter Street, whose yardless houses crowded the sidewalk, and passed the small Moss Park community center guarded by a bronze lion neck-deep in snow like a lost creature from an arctic carousel.
Mattie thought nearby Pembroke Street would be prime snowman country. She’d visited there looking for a place to stay. Well set back from the street, many of these substantial homes had been cut up into rooms for rent. In every other yard stood a snow torso, a cenotaph to a dead snowman. Were they going to rebuild their handiwork? Mattie asked some children coming home from school, and got the precocious reply, “We don’t do five-o’clock shadow snow.” Mattie understood. A day or two of coal-fired furnaces and chimneys stubbled things fast.
They continued up to Gerrard, then back over to Sherbourne and down to the office. That was the area they’d focus on when the next substantial snow came. They couldn’t stop the vandals, but maybe they could follow them back to where they were taking their snowman loot and find out why.
The following Monday the radio called for snow overnight. But it came early. By the time school let out, a good six inches of fresh snow had accumulated atop the old. An hour later, Mattie trudged around the area through a heavy fall of snow. Freshly made snowmen, hockey sticks at the ready, greeted her in many yards. She understood that in better parts of town the snowmen held brooms, associating the neighborhood with the more fashionable sport of curling. But here it was hockey sticks.
On one Sunday museum visit she and the elves saw an exhibit on the history of ice hockey. They learned that in his later years Hans Brinker, he of the silver skates, found a strange object in a Dutch curio shop. It looked like a boomerang with one wing many times longer than the other. The shop owner called it an ishuki stick, a primitive American Indian war club made obsolete by the invention of the tomahawk. Brinker bought the thing and pondered on it long and hard before coming up with a game he named ice hockey after that same stick.
Back at the office, Mattie assigned the elves their places and sent them out after nightfall. She’d make the circuit every hour to get their reports, bringing along a thermos of hot grog heated on the office hot plate to buoy their spirits.
By her first go-around, the stiffening wind was blowing the fresh surface snow ahead of it like spray on a stormy sea. The elves were cold, but they’d nothing to report. An hour later, a Sherbourne streetcar equipped with a snowplow had cleared the tracks so she took that easier path until she got parallel to Nutkin’s hiding place behind an old snowman torso. She trudged over and found the snow had drifted around the poor elf, leaving him in a deep hole. His jumping-jack effort to see above the snow and keep guard over the nearby snowmen had left him utterly exhausted. Mattie ordered him back to the office to warm up and wait for her. Then she continued her rounds.
Over on Gerrard, Mattie heard Timkin’s snore and found him sleeping on a porch glider. She suspected he’d brought his own pocket flask of rum against the cold. She prodded him awake, ordered him home, too, and watched him stagger out of sight. His snowmen were still intact and so were those at the top of Pembroke, where Bodkin had escaped the snow by clambering up the metal footholds on a telephone pole. Visibility was getting very bad. Mattie was ready to call off the whole operation. But after a good shot of grog in him Bodkin vowed to soldier on. Farther down Pembroke, Hopkin, sheltered in the lower branches of a fir tree in a yard with a pair of snowmen in it, vowed through chattering teeth that he’d stay, too.