Silent (but Deadly) Night

by Jo Nesbo

  “And maybe you should say this in French, so your relatives in Paris will understand you,” Lisa said.

  “Yes, good point! Uh . . . parlez-vous français? Uhh . . . Je suis Saint Nicolas . . . Uhh . . . Nilly est un garçon in need of assistance . . . uhh . . .”

  While Stanislaw bumbled his way along in French, Doctor Proctor and Lisa walked over to the fireplace to warm themselves up.

  “Well, there goes Christmas,” Doctor Proctor said, eyeing the elf robots that were still making and wrapping presents, which were amassing in a massive pile at the end of the long gift-wrapping table. “Even if we do get Nilly home, we won’t get all the Christmas presents delivered now, not since the rest of the time soap wound up in the fountain.”

  “I know,” Lisa said, looking at the empty picture frame over the fireplace. “But at least in a way we did get Nilly a Christmas present.”

  “We did indeed.”

  “Isn’t it strange?” Lisa said. “Every Christmas we just think about all the new stuff we’re going to get. But we forget that an even bigger Christmas gift is being lucky enough to keep all the wonderful things we already have.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That’s the only Christmas present I’m going to wish for from now on, to get to hold on to everyone I love, like Nilly, you and Juliette, my mom and dad. To get to keep the house we live in, my dad’s old car, and my bed, because it’s so good. And the Game Boy I inherited from my Uncle Torjus. And the princess shoes you and Juliette gave me for Christmas last year. I wouldn’t trade any of those for . . . for . . . well, I can hardly think of anything I don’t already have. We have everything. It’s just too bad that Thrane Inc. cheated all the people who might have really needed a Christmas present out of it.”

  “You’re a smart girl, Lisa,” Doctor Proctor said with a smile.

  “I know,” Lisa said, squinting at the empty picture frame. “What does that say, right there?” She pointed.

  “Say?” Doctor Proctor said. “It doesn’t say anything. It’s an empty frame.”

  “Look in the corner of the frame. It looks like a little piece of the picture tore off and is still in there.”

  The professor got up on his tiptoes and adjusted his swim goggles.

  “Hmm, you’re right. It’s a small piece of torn paper, and it says Oslo District Court. Why?”

  “Can you pick me up so I can look at it more closely?”

  “All right. Although there’s not really much to look at in an empty picture frame,” Doctor Proctor said, and bent down so Lisa could climb up and sit on his shoulders. Then he stood back up.

  “Not the empty one,” Lisa said as she swayed back and forth on top of the skinny, wobbly genius inventor. “The other one. Two steps to your right, please. Yeah, like that.”

  Lisa studied the old photograph of all the elves gift wrapping under a younger Stanislaw’s watchful eye. She leaned closer. And there in the picture, over the fireplace, hung the same empty frame. Only it wasn’t empty. In the picture the frame contained something that looked like a letter. It looked like it was a written document, anyway.

  “Hey, did you bring the mega-super-ultra-magnifying-glass?” Lisa asked.

  “Always,” Doctor Proctor said, and wobbled even more as he let go of one of Lisa’s feet and pulled a magnifying glass out of his jacket pocket.

  “Thanks,” Lisa said, and took the magnifying glass, which actually looked remarkably normal. “How do I activate the mega-super-ultra-enlargement?” she asked.

  “Push the button on the handle where it says mega-super-ultra . . .”

  “I see it. Now, try to stand totally still.” Lisa pushed the button, and immediately she was able to see the writing on the framed letter. In one corner, sure enough, it said Oslo District Court. And the title said DEED OF REGISTRATION. She proceeded to read out loud:

  Oslo, 3rd July, 1822

  All rights, appurtenances, privileges, and intellectual property associated with Christmas—including but not limited to Little Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day proper, the Second Day of Christmas, the Third Day of Christmas, and all intervening holiday days between Christmas and New Year’s—are hereby bargained, granted, sold, enfeoffed, set over, and confirmed as belonging unto Mr. Stanislaw Hansen, hereinafter called and known by the name of Santa Claus.

  “Eureka!” Doctor Proctor exclaimed, but that set him wobbling and lurching so much from side to side that Lisa had to hold on tight to his thin wisps of hair to keep from falling off.

  “Does that mean what I think it does?” Lisa said.

  “Yes, it does!”

  “Stanislaw!” Lisa adjusted herself upright a little, then dismounted, sliding down Doctor Proctor’s back. She ran over to the former Santa Claus.

  “Merci, merci, Isabelle,” Stanislaw said into the microphone before turning to Lisa. “The sleigh is all taken care of,” he said. “Nilly should be here in about forty-five minutes or so.”

  “The king didn’t own Christmas,” Lisa said. “You did!”

  “Me?”

  “Yes! It was registered in your name! Don’t you remember?”

  “I’m two hundred and forty years old, Lisa. So many things have happened . . . . But, you know, actually, now that you mention it, I think I do remember registering my ownership of Christmas sometime back in the eighteen hundreds.”

  “It was in 1822! You even had a document proving it, a framed deed of registration that used to hang over the fireplace!”

  “The deed of registration from over the fireplace!” Stanislaw exclaimed. “Of course, how could I forget?”

  “That means,” Doctor Proctor said, “that Mr. Thrane’s agreement with the king is invalid, and that Thrane Inc. doesn’t own Christmas. Everyone has the right to celebrate it!”

  “Hurray!” Lisa cheered. “Christmas is back!”

  “Um . . . ,” Doctor Proctor began.

  “What is it?” Lisa asked.

  “Well, if Stanislaw doesn’t remember what he did with the deed of registration . . .”

  “Stanislaw?” Lisa said.

  Stanislaw slumped lower and lower in his chair, looking at them with sad, puppy-dog eyes.

  “You . . . you haven’t forgotten . . . ?” Lisa began.

  Stanislaw shrugged.

  “You don’t have any idea?” Doctor Proctor asked.

  “Not the foggiest.” Stanislaw sighed.

  “All right. All right,” Lisa said. “It’s no big deal. Juliette told me that they keep a copy of all the deeds at the courthouse. Luckily.”

  “Phew. Luckily,” Doctor Proctor said.

  “Luckily!” Stanislaw cried, relieved. “Ho-ho, luckily!”

  LUCKILY, MR. THRANE thought.

  Luckily, he had managed to claw his way out of the frigid water, back up onto the ice, and crawl over to the islet with the lighthouse decorated with the pretty pine boughs. Luckily, it was only twenty-two degrees out and not, say, twelve degrees, since, unluckily, he was soaking wet. Luckily, he had a lighter, which still worked, and luckily, there was some driftwood under the snow to make a bonfire. But unluckily, he didn’t have any kindling. If only he were lucky enough to have a piece of dry paper he could have used, the way he’d set fire to that dry, brittle deed of registration he’d found at the courthouse in Oslo.

  He’d gone there after he’d bought Christmas from the king, to register Thrane Inc. as the new owner of Christmas.

  “First we have to check and make sure that no one already owns this Christmas you speak of,” the old, gray-haired registrar had told him in her creaky voice, sitting there behind a dusty desk in a dusty office with dusty windows and flipping through a binder of registration deeds that were so dry and old that they looked like they would turn into dust soon themselves. And right when Mr. Thrane thought she would snap the binder shut and say that no one else owned Christmas, she had pointed a crooked finger at a very old piece of paper.

  “What’s this?” she had said. “Looks like
a someone named . . .” She had pushed her thick glasses farther up her nose and leaned closer to the sheet of paper. “ . . . Stanislaw Hansen already owns Christmas and has since 1822.”

  Mr. Thrane had coughed a single cough, and she had looked up at him. “Mold,” he’d said. “It causes coughing.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “On the wall behind you,” Mr. Thrane said. “It’s not so easy for the untrained eye to see, but I’m a fungal inspector, and that there is a massive mold infestation.” Then he had coughed.

  And the gullible elderly woman had turned around and studied the wall thoroughly for a long time, while Mr. Thrane had coughed so loudly that she couldn’t hear the sound of a piece of paper being unceremoniously ripped out of a binder.

  “I don’t see anything,” she had finally said.

  “At your age, your eyesight probably isn’t what it once was,” Mr. Thrane had said commiseratively. “I thought, for example, that you said there was something about Christmas on the registration deed in front of you, but as far as I can see, it’s about an Edna Sivertsen, who’s registered a deed on a parcel of land for a vacation cabin in Hurum.”

  “That’s funny,” the registrar had said, staring at the sheet of paper in the binder. She had wrinkled her nose so her glasses came closer to her eyes. “But it looks like you’re right. Yes, well, then, Mr. Thrane, in that case we can write you a deed of registration to show that Christmas is yours.”

  When Mr. Thrane had walked out onto the street outside the courthouse in Oslo that day, he had pulled the crumpled registration deed belonging to Stanislaw Hansen out of his pocket, set it on fire with his lighter, and used it to light up the long, fat cigar he had stuck between his big, wet lips. And then he’d laughed the most wicked laugh, absolutely the best—in terms of wickedness—laugh in the world.

  He laughed very wickedly now as he thought back on it, too, because—even though he wasn’t going to win this year’s snowman contest and he was colder right now than any dog had ever been—he owned Christmas. Christmas was his, his and his alone, and no one could do anything about it. So ho-ho-ho! Luckily, it was almost morning. Then the Nesodden ferry would start shuttling commuters back and forth and it would be guaranteed to pick him up. Mr. Thrane saw something move across the sky, way up above the lighthouse. That must be the flight from Paris. At least it was coming from the direction of Paris. But his vision must have started to go as well, because for an instant he thought he’d seen a Santa sleigh. Ah, but he wasn’t seeing things now, because there came the Nesodden ferry. It was breaking a channel through the ice, because it had seen him. Luckily!

  The Day before Christmas Eve,

  also Known as Little Christmas Eve in Norway, Except by People Who Can’t Afford Christmas Presents, Who Are Forced to Call It “Little Eve” or Something

  IT WAS THE morning of Little Christmas Eve.

  “This super-cute French girl came over to us while we were watching the cancan performance and said we should go with her,” Nilly explained as he, Lisa, and Doctor Proctor walked up the courthouse steps.

  “How did she find you?” Lisa asked.

  “A teeny-tiny little boy with six reindeer inside the Moulin Rouge? I don’t know . . . .”

  “But she was able to hook you up with a sleigh?”

  “Yeah. She said she had no idea she could just hammer together a sleigh simple as that. Or that she was related to Santa Claus. She said a voice just popped into her head that told her that stuff. Before the reindeer and I took off from Paris, I thanked her and gave her a big and very wet kiss on the cheek.”

  “I’m sure she really appreciated that,” Lisa said wryly.

  “Right?” Nilly said contentedly.

  “Here it is,” Doctor Proctor said, and then knocked on the door that said DEED REGISTRATION OFFICE.

  “Come in!” a voice called from inside.

  They opened the door and walked into a small, dusty office with filing cabinets lining its walls and tall stacks of paper piled on top of the cabinets. Behind a desk covered with several stacks of paperwork, they spotted a gray-haired woman with big eyeglasses that magnified her eyes so much they looked like two fried eggs.

  “We’re the ones who called about that registration deed that said Stanislaw Hansen owns Christmas,” Doctor Proctor.

  “I’m so sorry,” the registrar said. “I’ve looked through all my binders, and the only copy of a deed I have is this one from a few weeks ago, and it says that Mr. Thrane—and no one else—owns Christmas.”

  “My beautiful, young madam,” Nilly said.

  “What?” the registrar said.

  “I’m down here,” Nilly said, and waited until she spotted him. “Monsieur Thrane’s registration is a sham.”

  “Well, there was indubitably something dubitable about him. He claimed we had mold in here, and we’ve had it confirmed by the fungal inspector from Gjøvik himself that we don’t. But without proof, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do.”

  Our three friends trudged out of Oslo District Court, out into the midday sun, where people—the ones who could afford it, that is—were running around finishing their last-minute Christmas shopping.

  “Now what do we do?” Lisa asked. “Stanislaw doesn’t remember what happened to the deed.”

  “Yes, what do we do now?” Doctor Proctor sighed.

  “Only one thing to do,” Nilly said.

  The other two turned to him.

  He held up a long chain. Swinging back and forth at the end of the chain was his grandfather’s old pocket watch.

  “Voilà, as we say in Paris,” he said.

  “And that is . . . ?” Doctor Proctor asked.

  “The solution,” Nilly said.

  “A . . . uh, timepiece that runs slightly fast?” Lisa asked.

  “Hypnosis,” Nilly whispered.

  STANISLAW WAS SITTING in the chair in front of the control panel and leaned way back. His eyes were fixed on the pocket watch, which was swinging back and forth in front of his nose. The Santa workshop was completely quiet now. Doctor Proctor and Lisa sat with their arms folded and skeptical expressions while Nilly stood on a stool in front of the former Santa.

  “You will keep your eyes on the watch,” Nilly whispered. “You will relax completely. You are letting yourself slip into Doctor Nilly’s deep hypnosis, where everything that happened from your childhood until now will come back to you. I will count backward from ten, and when I get to zero you will be hypnotized. Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  Stanislaw’s eyes slid shut.

  “See that? Oh yeah,” Nilly said, congratulating himself and stuffing his watch back into his pocket. “It was totally easy. Okay, Stanislaw, we’re going to skip over your whole childhood and when you were a young man and all that and go straight to the registration deed that disappeared from the picture frame. What happened? Was it stolen? Why was it taken out of the frame? And where is it now?”

  Nilly watched Stanislaw tensely. But he didn’t make a sound.

  “Stanislaw? Answer Doctor Nilly, please.” Still not a peep.

  “Stanislaw, where is the deed? We don’t have all day here. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”

  Stanislaw’s eyelids started twitching, and sounds emerged from his half-open mouth. Nilly leaned in closer. He tried to interpret the words, but they were incomprehensible. It sounded more like a large-toothed saw being slowly pulled over a piece of wood. Nilly looked at the flapping lips.

  Stanislaw wasn’t talking. He was snoring.

  “Hey, that was hypnosis, not a lullaby! Hello in there? Wake up!” Nilly patted Stanislaw’s cheek, but the snoring just got louder.

  “He’s had a few strenuous days, poor guy,” Doctor Proctor said. “I mean, he’s not a kid anymore.”

  “Now what do we do?” Lisa asked.

  Just then one of the elf robots started bleating: “OUT OF PAPER! OUT OF PAPER!”

  “Arg!” Lisa yelled, pressing her hands over her ears. “I forgot I was
supposed to bring wrapping paper.”

  “And I remember . . .”

  Lisa, Nilly, and Doctor Proctor turned toward Stanislaw, who was sitting up in his chair with his eyes wide.

  “We were out of paper,” Stanislaw said. “It was just last year. The thought occurred to me that I ought to at least give one present to someone anyway. Santas get this urge as Christmas approaches. So I looked around for something I could use to wrap my present in, something I didn’t need. And my eyes came to rest on that piece of paper in the frame.”

  “ . . . which was the proof that you own Christmas,” Lisa pointed out.

  “Yes, and since I had stopped being Santa, it was a piece of paper I didn’t need anymore. Honestly, it was just an irritating reminder of what was lost. So I took it out and . . .”

  “ . . . used it as wrapping paper?” Nilly asked in disbelief.

  “Yup,” Stanislaw said, and then yawned.

  “That’s that, then,” Nilly said. “Our proof that the king and Mr. Thrane never owned Christmas is in a landfill or incinerated.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember who you gave the present to or the address where the person lives?” Lisa asked.

  “I don’t, no,” Stanislaw said. The others sighed.

  “But I remember where,” Stanislaw said.

  “What do you mean where?” Lisa asked. “You just said you don’t remember the address . . . .”

  “Fifty-nine degrees, fifty-four minutes, and forty seconds north,” Stanislaw said. “And ten degrees, forty-four minutes, and two-point-three seconds east.” Lisa and Nilly just stared at him.

  “Santas,” Doctor Proctor said after clearing his throat, “never forget the coordinates of a place they’ve delivered a present to. It’s stored in their memories forever. Now we just need to figure out exactly what place those coordinates correspond to. Let’s see . . .”

  Doctor Proctor leaned over the control panel and pushed some buttons to enlarge the map on the screen.