The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  Santa-ing was not an easy undertaking. It was not a task for sissies. And while the Usual Santas didn’t always do things by the book, by God, they got the job done!

  And each year, once they’d managed just that—after the shops had lowered shutters on Christmas Eve, and Whiteoaks slumbered, preparatory to the Boxing Day rush—the Santas met in a hospitality room adjoining the security suite, and relaxed over a buffet provided by the grateful merchants of the quarter, and exchanged war stories until the hour grew late, and generally luxuriated in the absence of children.

  But however relaxed they grew, they kept their beards on. And remained zipped inside their red suits. And never addressed each other as anything other than “Santa”; and in fact, would have been unable to do so had they wanted, because while they might, for all they knew, be friends and neighbors in civvy street—might drink in the same pub, or regularly catch the same bus to the same football ground—on duty they remained in uniformed character, and always had done. This had started in jest but had quickly hardened into custom. Not long after that, it calcified into superstition. In their dealings with toddlers and hyperactive infants, the Usual Santas had suffered in undignified, frequently unhygienic ways that had bonded them in a manner few civilians could hope to understand, but on every other level they were strangers to each other. And with this, they were perfectly comfortable.

  Until, one day . . .

  ***

  The buffet that year was particularly handsome. There were sausage rolls and bowls of crisps; there were slices of ham and fingers of fish; there were rice salads, and things on cocktail sticks, and mince pies, and individual plum puddings. There was a huge plateful of turkey-and-stuffing sandwiches. There were Christmas pizzas: deep and crisp and even more cheesy. There were eight paper plates, and eight plastic knives and forks. There were eight red napkins, with jolly Rudolph patterns. And, most crucially of all, there were several large bottles of brandy, and eight glass snifters.

  The Santas turned up one by one. Whiteoaks had emptied of punters, but still: it would never do for two Santas to be seen together in public.

  The first to arrive poured himself a brandy, downed it in a single swallow, poured another, then helped himself to a turkey sandwich. “Ho, ho, ho!” he said as the door opened behind him.

  “Ho, ho, ho! Indeed,” the incoming Santa agreed. He too headed straight for the brandy. “What a day,” he said. “What. A. Day.”

  “Christmas Eve.”

  They both nodded. The words carried a weight a non-Santa couldn’t hope to understand.

  “You know what happened to me? I was—”

  “Ho, ho, ho!”

  “Ho, ho, ho!” they both replied as another Santa entered.

  Whatever had happened to Santa became lost in a general flurry of opening doors and greetings and fillings of glasses. Joe, the security guard popped his head in too. He wouldn’t stop for a drink.

  “Let yourselves out through the emergency exit, yes? I’ll leave you the master so the alarm doesn’t go off. Just pop it through the box when you’re done.”

  “Of course,” said Santa. He put the key on the table. “Merry Christmas, Joe.”

  “Merry Christmas, Santas. Mind how you go with that brandy.”

  “Ho, ho, ho!”

  Joe left.

  And Santa arrived. “Ho, ho, ho!” he said.

  “Ho, ho, ho!”

  “Blimey. Christmas Eve, eh?”

  Christmas Eve, they agreed.

  Soon the room was full of Santas, bundled round the buffet table; each with glass or plate in hand, and most of them talking at once.

  “Blinking cheek of him! Sitting on my knee, bold as brass, says if you’re the real Santa, how come your reindeer’s plastic?”

  “So I said, you know like on Dr. Who? You know like this Tardis? Bigger on the inside? So’s my sleigh. And that’s how come it fits all the presents in.”

  “I don’t have a glass.”

  “I told her, course you don’t need a chimney, darlin’. I carry a magic chimney with me. Pop it on your roof, bob’s your uncle. That dried her tears, I can tell you. You can borrow that line, if you like. No charge for a fellow Santa!”

  “I don’t have a glass.”

  “The next flamin’ elf who tries to tell me Santa’s suit should really be green, I’ll—”

  “Excuse me,” said Santa in a loud voice. “But I don’t have a glass!”

  The Santas’ chatter died away.

  “Well, someone must have two,” said Santa, jovially. “There were eight when we started.”

  “Nobody’s got two,” Santa said. “That’s the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “There aren’t eight of us here,” Santa said. “There are nine.”

  There was a communal intake of yuletide breath.

  “Ha!” said Santa. “I mean, ho! You must have added up wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. You try.”

  The Santas fell to counting.

  Then all started talking at once.

  “But—?”

  “What—?”

  “I—?”

  “Ho—!”

  At length, Santa quietened the assembly by tapping his glass on the table. “Well,” he said. “It seems I owe Santa an apology. One of us appears to be an imposter.”

  “Pretending to be Santa!” Santa said angrily. “I never heard of such a thing in my life!”

  The Santas looked at him.

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “Perhaps,” Santa said, “we should have a quick roll call.”

  “What, where you call out ‘Santa’ and we say “Present”?” Santa asked. “Did you see what I did there?” he added.

  “That’s not what I meant, no,” Santa said. “I meant, we should all state clearly where we were today. The imposter Santa will have an impossible itinerary.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Santa admitted. “Who’s going first?”

  “Well, I was at the food hall this morning,” Santa said. “Then electronics. No, then leisure. After that I was at—”

  “You can’t have been at electronics next,” Santa objected. “I was electronics, second shift.”

  “No, that’s what I said,” said Santa. “Then leisure, then—”

  “I finished up at leisure,” Santa said. “Before that, I was at clothing, and before that books. Or was that yesterday?”

  “Must have been today,” Santa offered through a mouthful of sausage roll. “Because that’s what I did yesterday.”

  “Oh, this is hopeless,” said Santa. “Could we all just stop milling about?”

  “If we all stop milling about,” Santa said, “the Santas nearest the table will eat all the food.”

  There was general assent to this. Some of the more suspicious Santas immediately reloaded their plates.

  “We need order,” Santa said. “We need clarity. Everyone should write down their day’s shifts.”

  “That’s right,” Santa said, reaching past him for a sandwich. “We should make a list.”

  “We should check it twice,” Santa muttered.

  “I heard that.”

  “Does anyone have a pen and paper?” Santa asked.

  Nobody had a pen and paper.

  “There’s an elf behind this,” said Santa. “Mark my words.”

  The elves were not popular with the Santas. They tended to be disruptive, and argumentative, and frequently indulged in non-traditional banter.

  Santa said, “Why don’t we take our suits off? See who we really are?”

  “Which would help how?” Santa enquired testily.

  “I was only saying,” Santa mumbled into his beard.

 
“No, Santa has a point,” Santa said. “We’d soon find out if we had an elf among us, if we took our suits off.”

  “Nobody is taking their suit off,” Santa said sternly. “It would be—well, it wouldn’t be right!”

  “Hmm,” Santa said. “That’s exactly what an elf would say, if he was about to be unmasked.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting,” warned Santa.

  “Everyone calm down,” Santa said. “It’s clear none of us is an elf. We’re all far too shapely.”

  “Quite,” Santa agreed. “Anyway, the elves are at their own party. They’ve gone clubbing.”

  The Santas shuddered.

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask the imposter to put his hand up?” Santa suggested. “On an amnesty basis? He’s welcome to stay and enjoy the buffet.”

  “Do you mean that?” Santa asked. “Or do you really think we should beat him up?”

  Santa sighed. “Well, he’s hardly likely to put his hand up now, is he?”

  “Oh,” said Santa. “Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. I shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

  Everyone helped themselves to more food and brandy. The Santa without a glass was making do with a hastily scraped-out trifle dish, though—as he pointed out several times—being last to arrive did not make him the imposter; on the contrary, the fact that he’d had farthest to come—all the way from Gardening—proved he was the genuine article, as well as indicating high career-commitment. Since his bowl held three times as much as a glass, and he was emptying it twice as quickly, the other Santas agreed with him, then sat him down in a chair.

  “Well,” Santa said at last. “Anyone got any ideas?”

  Santas hummed and Santas hah-ed.

  At length, a Santa spoke. “Suppose . . .”

  A hush dropped over the assembly like a cloth on a budgie’s cage.

  “Yes?” Santa prompted.

  ‘Suppose . . .” said Santa. “Well, suppose this imposter is the real Santa?”

  A subtly different silence fell.

  “Twit,” said Santa, sotto voce.

  “I heard that.”

  “There’s no such thing as Santa,” Santa pointed out.

  “I can count nine of us.”

  “A real Santa, Santa meant.”

  “Who’s to say—”

  “Don’t!” Santa interrupted. “Don’t say, who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t! Because I hate that sort of nonsense!”

  “I was only going to say,” Santa continued, “that in order to be the real Santa, our friend would simply need to believe that he’s the real Santa.”

  The Santas considered this.

  “That’s pretty much what Santa told you not to say,” Santa said at last.

  “No, it’s a different thing entirely.”

  “And anyway,” Santa began.

  “Anyway what?”

  “If there is a real Santa—”

  “Big if!”

  “—or even just someone who believes he’s the real Santa—”

  “Which would make him a bloomin’ loony,” Santa muttered.

  “—then why on earth would he come to Whiteoaks?”

  The Santas considered this.

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Santa asked.

  “Because it’s a disgusting, crass, horrible place,” Santa said. “That’s why not!”

  The Santas recoiled in horror.

  “There!” said Santa. “I’ve said it!”

  “Shh!”

  “Quiet!”

  “Don’t!”

  One by one, the Santas looked towards the door to the adjoining security room, where banks of closed-circuit monitors hummed; and where, just possibly, subversive and treasonous opinion was being recorded for later investigation.

  “It’s all right,” Santa said. “We’re the last ones here.”

  The Santas relaxed.

  “And besides, it’s true.”

  A delicious guilty knowledge susurrated through the Santas, like a winter’s wind adjusting a snowdrift.

  “We-ell . . .”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Well, yes, it is.”

  The Santas nodded, one after the other. It was true. Whiteoaks was horrible, unless you liked autonomous commercialism writ huge, in which any suspicion of non-franchised individuality was stamped on before it made waves. The trouble was, the Santas had few alternatives as far as employment went. The local shops they’d once Santa-ed for had closed when Whiteoaks opened.

  “But don’t you see?” Santa said. “That’s precisely why he’d come here!”

  Santa said, “How do you mean?”

  “Why would Santa bother visiting, I don’t know, an orphanage or a children’s hospital or a home for waifs and strays,” Santa asked, “when the whole point of Santa is that he goes where he’s needed?”

  “Like Whiteoaks? Ha!”

  “Ho!”

  “I meant ho!”

  “Exactly like Whiteoaks,” Santa insisted obstinately. “Look at it. It’s a soulless temple to rampant commercialism. It wouldn’t know the meaning of Christmas if it came with a buy-one, get-one-free sticker. It’s crying out for Santa, for criminy’s sake!”

  “But it has eight Santas,” Santa said. “It has us. The Usual Santas.”

  A pleading note had crept into his voice.

  “But it doesn’t have the real Santa,” Santa said quietly. “A Santa to teach it that profit isn’t everything.”

  “That money doesn’t matter.”

  “That it’s better to give than to receive.”

  “That items can’t be returned without a receipt.”

  The Santas stared.

  “Sorry,” Santa said. “I was thinking about something else.”

  The Santas fell silent.

  Santa picked the last unempty bottle from the table, and passed it round the company. One after the other, the Santas solemnly filled their glasses; by a long-practiced choreography, each pouring an exact amount (except for Santa, who poured exactly three times that amount) which precisely drained the bottle to its last drop. Then each eyed the other morosely.

  “If I have to wish one more kiddy a Merry Whiteoaks Christmas—” Santa began.

  “—or remind one more parent where to go for all their yuletide needs—” Santa continued.

  “—or explain one more time that Santa’s gifts are for children with store-validated tokens only—” Santa embellished.

  “—I don’t know what I’ll do,” Santa admitted.

  Though all agreed that it might involve punching an elf.

  Santa by Santa, they raised their glasses; Santa by Santa, they drained them dry. Then, simultaneously, they plonked them down on the table, forming a neat row of eight brandy snifters and a small trifle dish.

  “Well,” Santa said. “Do I need to spell out our next move?”

  “I think we’re of one mind,” said Santa.

  “All for one?” asked Santa.

  “And one for all,” Santa replied.

  “A Santa’s gotta do—” said Santa.

  “—what a Santa’s gotta do,” Santa agreed.

  “ . . . I can never remember the end of that quote,” said Santa, after a slight pause.

  “Gentlemen,” said Santa. “To the grottos!”

  ***

  What became known as the Great Whiteoaks Christmas Looting was never solved—whoever coordinated the daredevil heist had somehow contrived to get hold of a master key, which not only gave access to every shop on every floor of every avenue of the complex, but also allowed every alarm and CCTV monitor to be switched off. Nor, given the tendency of store
managers to estimate losses upwards for insurance purposes, was it clear exactly how much was stolen. Police investigations did suggest, however, that some very big sacks must have been used.

  And nor was there any obvious connection between the daring robbery and the appearance, on Christmas morning, of some very big sacks on the doorsteps of the surprisingly large number of children’s hospitals, orphanages and homes for waifs and strays to be found in the surrounding countryside. The sacks contained toys and games, and books and clothes, and food and drink, and sporting goods, and any number of DVDs and mobile phones and Wii consoles, and some little sewing kits, and various beauty products, and brochures containing useful information about how to consolidate debt, liquidate assets and set up a trust fund, and the odd item of gardening equipment, and some small brown muslin bags which proved to be full of not-quite-priceless but certainly very expensive jewelry. This, the governors, directors and head nurses of the various establishments concerned about swiftly liquidated into cash which they then used to set up trust funds, to ensure that all their charges’ future Christmases would be celebrated in an appropriately festive manner. And also to give themselves a small raise, because it was valuable and underappreciated work that they did.

  Back at Whiteoaks, the only thing approaching a clue that was ever discovered came to light some weeks later, when a truck arrived to collect a recycling bin that was stuffed full of Valentine’s Day cards. As it was moved, a large red and white bundle rolled into view. This turned out, on closer inspection, to be made up of nine Santa suits and nine Santa hats.

  And eight false bushy white beards.

  PX Christmas

  by Martin Limón

  Martin Limón retired from military service after twenty years in the US Army, including ten years in Korea. He is the author of eleven books in a critically acclaimed mystery series set on the US 8th Army base in Seoul, South Korea, in the early 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, when tensions between Communist North Korea and the US-allied South were at a volatile peak. The series features CID investigator George Sueño, a Mexican American US Army sergeant, who, together with his partner, Ernie Bascom, investigates crimes that involve the American soldiers stationed in South Korea. The Sueño and Bascom series includes: Jade Lady Burning, Slicky Boys, Buddha’s Money, Door to Bitterness, Wandering Ghost, GI Bones, Mr. Kill, The Joy Brigade, The Iron Sickle, The Ville Rat, Ping-Pong Heart, and the short story collection Nightmare Range. He lives near Seattle.