Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  I try talking some sense to the kid, but, no, not Rudolph. Little goody-goody’s always gotta suck up to Management.

  So I light another stogie and give it to Santa with both barrels. I say, What about the goddamn union rules, huh, fatboy? You gonna flush seniority down the toilet, huh, Santa?

  Santa just smiles and says, Ho-ho-ho, call my lawyer.

  Uh-huh, so I get on the horn and the union sends over some guys in suits, OSHA guys. Turns out that little Rudolph’s nose does not, like the OSHA guys said, supply sufficient illumination for an aircraft of that class.

  So tough luck, Santa, ya union-buster. Yeah, yeah, I know all about the little tykes and visions of sugarplums and all that crap, but, shit, rules are rules.

  We crack open another 12-pack and deal another hand. Life’s pretty good when you stick up for yourself. The cigar tastes damn good.

  Stephen Gallagher

  TO DANCE BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK on New Year’s Eve, Mercedes Medina read the news.

  She was the only newsroom staffer on the station at this hour, and so the bulletin was no more than an update from the IRN teletype; she was off the air at three minutes past, the red light in the news studio dying as the all-night DJ pulled the sound fader out. Mercedes could see him through the double-thickness window along with his tech operator, Derek, who’d got his chair tipped right back against the wall by the door. As she stood, Derek rocked forward and signaled to show that he wanted to speak to her; so she mimed holding a coffee cup, and then she went out.

  There was an empty-office silence out in the corridor, and the musty-new smell of carpets recently relaid. Mercedes had been with the radio station since its second year of operation when money had been tight and everything had been run on a shoestring, and she wasn’t sure that she liked the new image that the place was now taking on. It had all started to happen when they’d swung into profit; everybody started getting more image-conscious with the next round of franchise competition only two years away, because in a field where most people were newcomers there was an edge to be gained in becoming the establishment as quickly as possible.

  Everything considered, Mercedes didn’t like the new situation much. But she doubted that she’d be saying so.

  She stepped into a small room beside the promotions office. It had one low vinyl settee, a drinks machine, a food machine, and one bag- lined waste bin. Mercedes dialed the code number for a black coffee, and decided to stick at that because the drinks were free whilst the crisps and snacks weren’t. The second machine also had a habit, seemingly inherited from its predecessor which had been around the comer before the big overhaul, of keeping money and delivering nothing—a tendency which had earned it the nickname of the Diet Machine.

  ‘Had someone on the line for you before,’ Derek said from behind her as a cup dropped and something that would (hopefully) be coffee started to run. ‘I told her to ring you back.’

  Mercedes turned. Derek was unbelievably tall, around six-four, and unbelievably thin. His sweatshirt sleeves had been rolled back to show arms that looked as if they’d just been cut out of plaster casts.

  She said, ‘When was this?’

  ‘Just as you were getting ready to go on-air. She said she’d call you on the newsroom line right after the bulletin.’

  ‘You didn’t give her the number, did you?’

  Derek held up his hands in a kind of defense. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘She already had it, but don’t ask me how. You going to talk to her?’ Mercedes half-shrugged. ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Could be a hot tip. Deep Throat stuff, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet,’ Mercedes said disbelievingly, and she bent to raise the machine’s perspex gate and take out her coffee. It seemed to be more or less what she’d wanted, not counting the slight odor of chicken soup. ‘What’s happening at your end?’

  ‘Don’s usual bunch of rough schoolgirls due to arrive any time now. He’s put on something long and slow so that he can run down and let them in.’ Something long and slow, in this case, meant an album track which would play to an empty studio during the time that it took for the DJ to race down to the ground-level fire door where his friends/associates/ hangers-on would be waiting. Don’s taste seemed to be for noisy, knowing, under-age girls. Derek shook his head, and said, ‘I don’t know where he finds them. ’

  ‘I don’t know how he gets away with it. ’

  ‘Only because the ones with the big tits get passed along to the boss. You think if I had a perm and got some tinted glasses, I’d have the same kind of luck?’

  ‘No,’ Mercedes told him as she shouldered the door open to leave. ‘Those are just accessories. It’s the basics you’re missing.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A total lack of discrimination, and an ego bigger than a telephone box. See you later.’

  Derek held the door as she slid through it, her cup in one hand and the yellow flimsies of the eleven o’clock bulletin in the other; and then, as she started off down the empty corridor towards the newsroom, he called, ‘Hey, Mercedes!’

  She turned to look back; he was still in the doorway, a huge stick- insect less than a year out of college, mousy-haired and with something that, in better light, might have been the beginnings of a beard. He said, ‘In case you’re busy. Happy New Year.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you at midnight,’ she told him, and walked on.

  The newsroom corridor was low-lit and silent, and windowless like the rest of the complex. In the background was the murmur of the late-night show being relayed through corridor speakers turned as low as they would go. The station was in a tiny comer of a huge plaza of shops, offices, a multi-level car park and a high-rise hotel; at this time, when all of the office staff had gone home and there was barely more than a handful of people in the entire building, it was possible to detect a once-a-minute vibration that rumbled through the floors and the walls as if the whole plaza structure was in tune with the deep heartbeat of the city.

  The phone had started to ring even before she was through the door; half-hoping that it might cut out before she had to answer it, she went over to the big table that ran down the middle of the room and put the bulletin sheets on the spike for the office junior to sort out and file in the morning. Over by the window, the IRN teletype was already hammering out updates for the midnight news; the full-length glass behind it looked out into the main concourse of the darkened plaza, a goldfish-bowl effect that all the staffers hated because of the crowds of kids who gathered in the afternoons to gawp and to tap on the glass as if they were trying to wake the lizards in a reptile house. Now Mercedes saw only herself, a half-real reflection in a room that was a mess of half-read old newspapers, dead press kits, and stacks of directories: a ghost-girl that stared back at her, the skin of a dusty olive and hair of the blackest jet.

  And the phone was still ringing.

  She hitched herself onto the side of the desk, and moved aside somebody’s discarded pullover to reach the receiver. ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously, expecting to find herself landed with some long and involved message for one of the other staffers. They weren’t supposed to give out this unlisted number for personal use, but they all did it.

  ‘They said to call back,’ a woman’s voice said. It was a terrible line. ‘Can you talk to me now?’

  ‘How did you get hold of this number?’ Mercedes said. Not a message for someone else, after all; her interest began to warm a little.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. What I need to know is, can I trust you?’

  ‘That depends. What are you going to tell me?’

  ‘You’re recording this,’ the woman said suspiciously.

  ‘We don’t record calls. We’re just a small station and this is just an ordinary phone. Is it something you’ve done?’

  ‘No. But I know someone who has.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Mercedes said. ‘Perhaps I can help.’ Or perhaps you’re just going to waste my
time as you try to make trouble for somebody you’ve decided deserves it; and then you won’t give me your name, and then I’ll forget all about it. She lowered herself into one of the well-worn typist’s chairs, and reached for a noteblock. Just in case.

  ‘It’s about that girl,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘The student who was killed. You did a story on her last week, and tonight you said that the police aren’t getting anywhere. Well, I know the person who did it.’

  Mercedes was bolt upright now, looking desperately around for the portable UHER recorder that was supposed to be kept on permanent standby in the office. Either it was buried under the rubbish somewhere, or else someone had taken it home. ‘Do the police know about this?’ she said, swearing to herself that she’d find whoever was responsible first thing in the morning and dig out selected internal organs with a rusty fork.

  ‘I can’t trust the police,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘The question is, can I trust you?’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ Mercedes said firmly. ‘I’ve never let down a source yet.’ Or even had a source worth letting down, she thought as she hitched the chair in close to the table and started to jot down verbatim everything that had been said so far. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. He’s someone close and it would come back to me, you see what I mean? He needs to be caught, I think he even wants it. But he mustn’t ever know that I had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Is he your boyfriend? Your husband?’

  ‘I’m going to hang up,’ the voice threatened, and Mercedes scrambled to give reassurance.

  ‘Wait wait wait,’ she said. ‘All right. I’m not going to push you. But with something like this, you get calls from all kinds of people and they aren’t always one hundred per cent genuine. Now, I’m not suggesting that this means you . . . but you see my problem? You’ve got to give me something I can show around. I’m talking about credibility. ’

  A breath. Then: ‘She was wearing powder-blue underclothes. A matching set. He took a piece away with him. ’

  ‘Okay,’ Mercedes said, soothingly as if a big hurdle had just been overcome here. The truth of it was that she had no idea whether the information was accurate or not; the body had been discovered only half a mile away across the city centre and she’d been the first of the press to reach the scene, but the actual information that she’d received from the investigating officers had been the same as that in the official release. The important thing was that her caller didn’t know this; and if the detail was as genuine as it sounded, it already gave her an edge on the competition.

  Big time, here I come, she thought, and she prepared to apply the squeeze. ‘So you’re not giving me your name,’ she said, ‘you’re not giving me his name, you won’t even say what your relationship to him is. Why exactly are we talking, here?’

  ‘I told you, he needs to get caught. I know he left things, and the police didn’t even see them.’

  It really was a lousy line; and the woman seemed to be trying to disguise her voice as well, which didn’t help. Mercedes said, ‘What do you mean, things? You mean clues?’

  ‘He even wrote on the wall, right there where it happened, and they didn’t even see it. They probably thought it was kids. You could make them listen, though.’

  ‘And what exactly did he write?’ An even darker possibility occurred to Mercedes. ‘Were you with him?’

  ‘I’ve got to go. ’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘He’s coming. He’ll hear me.’

  ‘Well, let’s work out some way that we can talk again . . .’ she began, but she was wasting her time; the line had already gone dead.

  Mercedes hung up; gently, reverently, as if the receiver was of thin glass and filled with gold dust. And then, alone in the newsroom with just the quiet clatter of the teletype as background, she took a moment out to think.

  She knew as well as anybody the dangers of believing in hoax calls in a case like this. That would be how she’d have to treat it, until she knew better; but it was the detail about the powder-blue underwear that already had her halfway convinced. She couldn’t confirm it, but it hadn’t sounded like an off-the-cuff invention. Now, to keep it one hundred-per-cent legal and by the book, she ought to call the police and tell them what she had.

  Which meant that they’d move in and take over. And what would she get out of it? She was the one who’d been singled out for the call, hadn’t she?

  By the clock on the wall, she had forty-five minutes before her next on-air appearance. She started to move.

  First she dug out the contract list, and phoned for a taxi to meet her out in front of the plaza right away. She knew that they’d all be busy so late on the eve of the New Year, but she also knew that contract work took precedence over casual bookings and that they’d probably bounce back some party pick-up for a half-hour or so in order to fit her in. Then she went around all the desks, opening their drawers and looking for any kind of torch or flashlight; she found one belonging to Bob King—it was in with the rest of his stuff, anyway, amongst the pens and the stale cough drops and his dirty-book collection—and she took it out and checked it. It wasn’t much, just a cheap plastic thing running off a couple of pencells, but the batteries were good and it would be better than nothing. Then she took her heavy winter coat from its hook behind the door, and put it on.

  She was in the middle of winding her long scarf around her neck when the phone rang again.

  She almost strangled herself in her haste to answer it this time, snagging her scarf on the door handle and jerking herself up short; she snatched up the receiver and said a breathless ‘Hello?’, but all that she could hear was the electronic echo of her own voice on a dead line.

  After waiting a while and hearing nothing, she hung up.

  Don’s regular soiree—cheap wine as well as cheap women—would probably be well under way by now, and since Mercedes didn’t want to interrupt or even to get too close she decided to call Derek via the talkback system from the adjacent news studio. She stood in the narrow booth and leaned across the microphone to the talkback switch; ‘Derek?’ she said, and through the soundproofed glass she saw his attention snap around to her. He’d been sitting with his chair tilted back against the studio wall again, well apart from Don and his friends and with his face a careful mask of nothing. The main desk was out of the line of sight from where she was standing, but she could see a reflection in the window of the music studio opposite; Don was sitting with one of the girls on his knee, showing her how to run the desk and how to trigger the sequence of loaded cartridges for the commercial break. Mercedes wouldn’t have cared to guess exactly how young she was, but she made Don look very old.

  She told Derek, ‘I’m going out for half an hour to check on a late story. I’ll be back in time for the midnight bulletin. I’ll ring you from the box outside to let me in, okay?’

  Derek signaled okay through the glass, but otherwise he didn’t move. Nobody else paid any attention. She felt sorry for him; he could get up and wander around the empty station every now and again, but his job required him to base himself in the main studio to act as technical troubleshooter on the show and to handle the incoming calls when the DJ decided to open up the lines for requests or a competition. There was nothing much more for him to be doing at the moment than to sit in as witness to the spectacle of a middle-aged man trying to camp it up like some juvenile stud.

  Mercedes left them to it. She had forty minutes left, or half an hour in realistic terms because she’d still have to time and prepare the next bulletin when she got back. She hurried down the whisper-quiet corridor, past the Managing Director’s office and the sales suite, and let herself out through the door that was the boundary between the private working areas of the station and the public-access, public- arena zone of the foyer. People could come in here from the plaza to drop off requests, pick up station merchandise, or get signed photographs of the presenters; they came through an outer glass
door that could only be unlocked by remote control from behind the receptionist’s counter, so that the worst of the weirdies could be kept at bay. The counter was unmanned now, the small switchboard lit up and locked through to an answering machine. Once out of the foyer, she’d be effectively sealed out of the station until Derek emerged in response to her call to let her in.

  Stepping out through the door into the chill of the big enclosed mall, Mercedes was thinking ahead. The first and most obvious scenario that had come into her mind—apart from that of the whole thing being a motiveless hoax—had been one in which the sicko who’d killed the student persuaded an accomplice to phone and set up his next victim for him. But what did they think she’d do, walk the half-mile alone in the middle of the night? As she moved out past the boarded gaps of the plaza’s unsold shop units, she made a firm decision that she wasn’t even going to step out of the locked cab if she could help it.

  There was almost no light out here, but she was sure of her way; at the far end of the mall stood a half-hearted attempt at an indoor garden, and beyond that a bank of escalators that would take her down to ground level. The escalators wouldn’t actually be running at this time, but there was rarely more than one of them in service anyway. At the bottom, an outward-opening fire door would let her out into the plaza’s service road where her taxi would be waiting. Derek would have to make the same trek, remembering to wedge open the foyer door with a chair on his way out, in order to readmit her. It was an informal system and something of a pain, but what else could they do? The high number of unlet units in the plaza meant that the management couldn’t afford round-the-clock security. They were lucky if they got a nightly visit from a man and a dog.

  The contract minicab was waiting outside, its engine running and its headlights steaming faintly in the cold. Mercedes recognized the driver, who’d picked her up several times to run her home after night shifts; the big saloon was his own, its seats shiny and worn and the side pockets stuffed with coloring books and other children’s debris. She settled gratefully into the back, the warmth of the heater already seeping into her as they rolled out of the alley and into the main street before the plaza.