I gestured to the big garbage bag into which I had stuffed Satsy's Santa costume. "Hey, can you do us a favor and take this upstairs to the costume mistress? Tell her there's been an accident and it'll need to be repaired or replaced-preferably by this afternoon?"
She looked at the bag, then looked at me. "No. I am not your servant."
I blinked. "I didn't mean you were my servant. I just thought maybe you could . . ." I said to her back as she stalked out of the room. ". . . do us this favor?" I called after her, "Elves are Santa's helpers. Have you forgotten that?"
Twinkle, who passed the Russian elf as he came into the break room, said, "What-the bitch queen wouldn't help you with something? What a surprise."
"I guess you've worked with her?" I said.
"Oh, yeah." He gave a dramatic shudder, which made his bells tinkle.
"You're on break now?" When the bespectacled elf responded with a nod, I said, "Good. Can you stay here with Drag Queen Santa for a while? I need to take his costume upstairs."
"Sure," said Twinkle.
"Don't leave him alone," I said. "He's had a shock today."
"So have we all," said Twinkle.
Satsy asked the elf, "How did your alpaca story end? I think I missed that part."
"Ah! Well . . ."
"Okay," I said quickly, gathering up the garbage bag. "I'm out of here. Oh, and then I'll check out, um, that thing, Satsy."
"What thing?" he asked, his lashes fluttering.
"The place where you . . . had your shock."
"Oh! Right. Oh, my God. Be careful, Esther."
"Absolutely." I exited the break room. In the hallway that ran alongside it and the locker rooms, I bumped into Jeffrey Clark. "Hey, you got here fast!"
"I was on my way to the subway when Miles called my cell," Jeff said with a shrug. "I had just been wondering how to pay for a Christmas present for Puma, so it seemed like a good idea to cancel my plans and come here when Miles offered me the extra hours."
Puma Garland was Jeff's girlfriend, whom he'd been dating since summer. I had introduced them, in a sense, when dragging Jeff along with me to her voodoo shop one hot day while investigating some mystical mayhem in Harlem with my friend Max. A lady of strict ethics, Puma had asked for my blessing when romance developed between her and Jeff, since I'd previously been his girlfriend. Way previously, in fact. There had been a gap of four years between when I had broken up with Jeff (and, nope, no regrets) and when we'd unexpectedly reconnected this past summer. Puma was a fine woman and undoubtedly better than Jeff deserved, and I had granted the relationship my dubious blessing.
I asked Jeff, "Did Miles tell you we had some unexpected excitement this morning?"
He shook his head, which was now covered by a light fuzz of hair. He had been shaving his head regularly in recent months, for his previous job. Jeff was a handsome man, but I thought the cue ball look didn't suit him at all. I was glad to see he was abandoning it, now that he was no longer playing a gladiator at the Imperial Food Forum, a Roman-themed gourmet superstore that had recently gone bust.
Jeff said, "Miles only told me that Moody Santa's gone AWOL and they needed a replacement ASAP."
"Two replacements," I said.
He raised his eyebrows. "No one showed up for the shift? Man, people are dropping like flies around here."
"The guys in the break room can tell you about it. I need to go deal with this." I hefted the plastic bag over my shoulder.
"They're making us take out the garbage now?" Jeff said, outraged. "God, I hate this job."
"No, it's . . . never mind." As I moved past him, he asked me who the other shift Santa would be. I answered, "Rick, I think."
"Super Santa? Oh, great. I can't stand that guy."
"I know."
Most of the Santas resented Rick to some degree; he was so good at the job and so popular in the role, they felt inadequate by comparison. But I thought Jeff mostly disliked him for enjoying the job.
"Who are Santa's elves this morning?" Jeff asked. "Am I working with you?"
"I was assigned to Santa," I said. "But I've got to go deal with this costume and then-"
"Oh, please tell me I won't be working with that Russian chick again."
"Um, actually, she's on the clock now, so she might be your-"
"Shit." Jeff stomped off toward the men's locker room. "Why am I always the lucky one?"
I rolled my eyes and headed toward the staff elevator. Then, recalling Satsy's experience, I changed my mind and decided to take the stairs.
Jeff was not a negative person by nature. He was just unhappy these days. Four years ago, shortly after we broke up, he had left New York with high hopes for the original new show he was cast in, but it had died in Boston. (Since it was called Idi Amin: The Musical, I thought its fate seemed not entirely unpredictable. But Jeff was very disappointed.) For several years after that, he tried to launch a TV career in Los Angeles, but his efforts didn't lead to anything.
Now he was back in New York . . . and so far, since returning to the Big Apple earlier this year, he'd gotten work as a gladiator play-acting with a sword at an uptown store for rich food-fetishists and as Diversity Santa at Fenster & Co. (He blamed me for the latter, since I had introduced him to his job the way Satsy had introduced me to mine.) Jeff was a dedicated actor who increasingly felt his talent was going to waste (and, although I was rarely in the mood to tell him so, I agreed that he deserved much better opportunities than he was getting), and he thought the jobs he was reduced to working were unseemly for a man in his thirties.
I wasn't too crazy about some of the jobs I had to take, either-particularly this one. But my stint as Santa's helper notwithstanding, I'd certainly had a much better year than Jeff. I'd worked in the chorus of Sorcerer!, a short-lived Off-Broadway musical. I'd had a plum guest role on The Dirty Thirty, a cult hit cable TV series in the Crime and Punishment spin-off empire of award-winning police dramas. And I'd spent the autumn as a female lead in a sold-out Off-Broadway adaptation of Dr. John Polidori's influential nineteenth-century tale, The Vampyre. (Though, admittedly, it was only sold-out because hordes of feverish fans flocked to the show to see its leading man, Daemon Ravel, who claimed to be a vampire. And thereby hangs a tale . . .)
I also had a dedicated, hardworking agent who believed in my future (and who shared an additional bond with me, since we'd supported each other through a nasty vampire incident during the limited run of The Vampyre). Whereas Jeff's agent had dumped him last year-something that too many agents tend to do whenever a client's career requires them to do some actual work-and he'd so far been unable to get another. I had introduced him to mine, Thackeray Shackleton (not his real name), but Thack, though he liked Jeff's audition and suggested some other agents for him to contact, had declined to take him on as a client. Thack had told Jeff candidly that he already had two African-American men of similar age, build, and type on his client list, and there just wasn't enough work available for black actors for him to serve a third such client well, too.
That had put Jeff in an understandably dark mood even before he lost his gladiator job and wound up, at my urging, applying to Fenster's about a week ago. He considered his role as Diversity Santa a real low point in his career, and that was without regularly overhearing parents asking the elves if there wasn't a white Santa available whom their children could visit instead.
So although a year of dating him, back in the day, had taught me the folly of putting up with Jeff's foibles and twitches in silence, I was mostly letting his ill-humor at Fenster's roll off my back. He had his reasons for being grumpy, and I understood them.
The costume room, where I was headed with Satsy's wrecked Santa outfit, shared the sixth floor with the store's various administrative offices. This floor was closed to the public and accessible only by climbing these stairs, taking the staff elevator, or using a special key (which wasn't issued to seasonal employees) in the public elevators.
I opened the door from the stairwell and started to enter the hallway. At that moment, I heard a man scream.
Startled, I staggered backward into the stairwell. As I did so, a chubby white man walked past me in the hall, moving so quickly that he didn't seem to notice me or the swinging door. I thought he looked slightly familiar, even though his face was hideously contorted by strong emotion as he stormed past me, screaming, "Freddie!"
3
I stood in the stairwell, blinking in surprise and confusion as the door swung shut, muffling the man's scream.
He hadn't looked like he needed help. He'd seemed enraged.
"Oh . . ."
I realized now why the man looked familiar. He was Preston Fenster, one of the company executives and private stockholders in this family-owned retail empire. I had seen him briefly twice before, both times when I'd been on this floor: once during the hiring process and once when being fitted for my costume. He had been noisily enraged on both of those occasions, too. It seemed to be his natural state.