The Elf Service, Episode 18

In which Marion Krimble starts an Elf Service of his own

All over the city children post letters to Santa Claus and they go undelivered and unanswered. Until Irving Jefferson founds the Elf Service, that is. The Elf Service is the story of charity, journalism and mayhem, the extraordinary story of an extraordinary young man, his extraordinary plan to make Christmas happen for the children of his city and all the extraordinary ways in which that plan goes extraordinarily wrong.

The basement under the Hotel Metropolitan that had once been a bierkeller and had latterly been the offices of the Elf Service was quiet. All the letters and equipment that the Service had brought there from the Post Office had gone but the decorations were all still up. Felix Savoir had a sentimental streak and was not yet quite ready to order them taken down. Although it must be admitted that his sentimental streak had a commercial streak and that he was already wondering whether he could just repurpose it as a Grotto for the rest of the season. He had made a note to call Otto Krampus to see if they could work something out.

Miss Saltadora, who had come by, she told herself, to look for a pen that Roger had loaned her and which she had left there, but who was really there just in case someone else was with whom she could commiserate, wandered disconsolately under the limp tinsel, murmuring to herself. Even when on her own she kept up a constant stream of monologue, as if keeping herself company.

But despite the tree and the lights and swags, all Christmas had left the cellar. It was full, instead, of anticlimax. A promise unfulfilled, a present never opened.

Miss Saltadora did not find the pen. She stood on the corner of the stairs, taking one last look.

“Goodbye,” she said, and then, “I don’t know why I’m saying goodbye to a room as if it can hear me, although perhaps a room is more the people that occupy it - or occupied it. How sad the past tense is. I shall have to buy Roger a new pen. Future tense, much more hopeful. I shall try Krampus.”

She trudged up the stairs, turned out the light, and closed the door on the Elf Service.

Where the pen was, was entirely over the other side of town, on the third floor of the new council offices in the business district. As the Elf Service was closing, Special Seasonal Post Office Department #1 was opening.

The pen was there, sitting at the bottom of a cardboard box in the corner, but the decorations weren’t. The office was long and thin and anonymous, just a row of desks, one behind another, so that the occupant at each desk had only the back of the head of the worker in front of them to look at, apart from one desk at the far end, by the entrance, that was set to face all the others, like a teacher’s in a classroom, so that whoever sat there could watch the whole room and, more specifically, anyone who tried to make a break for it through the door.

The closest thing to a decoration was a tiny wooden Christmas tree on this desk at the front, a little carved thing with baubles painted on. One of these had been grudgingly handed out to every office in the building at the start of December and it did not mark out what had once been the Elf Service from any other official department.

For this is what it was. The Elf Service in everything but name. Well, not quite everything.

Irving Jefferson had not just left behind him ignominy, he had also left behind him a lot of letters to Santa. He might have been too successful at duping the great and good of the city, but he had also been too successful at running the Service. There were more letters pouring into the Post Office everyday than they had seen in a whole December in previous years. Everyone expected the letters to be answered now, after all, so everyone sent them.

Fortunately, they now had a system for dealing with them. Jefferson’s system: the Elf Service. Of course, being Jefferson’s system, a system devised by an acknowledged confidence trickster now on the run from the authorities, they might need to make some adjustments.

Jefferson had gone, for a start. He had to be replaced. And who better than the man who had seen through him from the beginning, who had tirelessly campaigned to remove him, who had wanted the position all along? Enter Councillor Marion Krimble, new head of the Elf Service.

Elf Service? No, that would have to go too. Entirely too frivolous a title for such a serious undertaking. Besides, the name was tarnished now by Jefferson’s shenanigans. If the Service was to be rehabilitated, it could no longer be the Service. It must be sober and grown up and official. A nice boring name that wouldn’t attract too much attention. Special Seasonal Post Office Department #1 would do nicely.

The grotto would have to go too. This was an official operation now and you couldn’t have a department of the Post Office camping out in the basement of a hotel. Unpleasantly commercial, to Krimble’s eye. Besides, as it turned out, Felix Savoir had no more desire to have a Post Office department in his cellar than Krimble wished it to be there. They had plenty of empty offices in the new building. It was where it belonged.

The decorations had gone too. They had been, technically, the hotel’s anyway, but this was only a seasonal department, after all, no point in spending time and effort decorating something that would be gone in a week’s time. Not that Krimble had the budget for such trivialities, anyway.

The Newsies? Definitely gone. They had been the first people to know, after Krimble, that the Service was moving, they knew everything before everybody anyway. The morning after Jefferson had disappeared, a ragged but determined deputation had assembled in the lobby of the council buildings, reporting for duty. But duty did not call. In fact, it told them, in no uncertain terms, to go away. It chased them around the lobby and then, when that didn’t quite work, around the building.

Lizzie, the Captain and Wilson had even managed to make it as far as the new Service offices. They stood in the doorway, staring at the miserable desks in their miserable corridor and when the security guards caught up with them, they went without a fight. Turned out duty could go hang after all.

The volunteers went the same way. Most had seen the headlines and given up the Service for good, but a few persevered. Mrs and Miss Reynarde, the latter under protest, and shown up at the new offices, Miss Donner and Mrs Fulmine too. Councillor Krimble had been happy to see them. He was a great believer in volunteering, in the city helping itself. He told them all so at great length, after which Miss Donner excused herself and never came back. Mrs Fulmine took one look at the new offices and did the same.

Mrs Reynarde felt she had something to prove to her daughter and made her stick it out until they left for lunch at half twelve. It must have been an exceptionally distracting lunch for they obviously quite forgot about the Service and their desks remained empty for the rest of the afternoon.

Even the benefactors were going. There was something distinctly less appealing about a typed form in a brown envelope from the council offices when compared the commemorative certificates and copperplate handwriting of the Elf Service. Jefferson had been in the headlines, which at first had been exciting and had then latterly turned excruciating, and they were cooling on the whole charity idea.

By the end of the day, the Elf Service, then, had become its own ghost, the shadow of a Christmas, unwrapped, unboxed, unwanted, now retagged, regifted and regretted.

Even Krimble, who dropped by the new office on his way out in the evening, had to admit to himself that it was perhaps lacking a certain seasonal something. 

He was satisfied that he had effectively rationalised the operation. He had the resources of the city council behind him, after all. The records of the social services meant that the backgrounds of all the letter writers could be exhaustively checked to ensure they were both appropriately needy and appropriately well-behaved to deserve an answer. Council officials could investigate, where overtime could be signed off, providing accurate reports on the cleanliness of children and the sobriety of parents. Clerks could be deputised from other departments - every manager always had someone they would rather be without - to categorise the letters and the recipients. Not speedily, perhaps, certainly not enthusiastically, but officially, and that was what mattered.

The whole business was being taken seriously, instead of the headline grabbing publicity stunt that the scoundrel Jefferson had been running. But still, Krimble knew, the public liked a stunt, and he was not adverse to a headline himself.

The landlady who let out the space at the bottom of her wardrobe to Midge was beginning to regret her tenant. First there had been Maddie’s piece in the Argus, which had set a lot of tongues wagging, then there had been the whole business with the child’s father, who had not been her father, that had resulted in losing several days rent and gaining a whole new level of scrutiny and now her attic was once again packed with press photographers who kept trying trying to make the baby cry for the sake of a properly miserable picture.

It was also now full of Councillor Krimble and she was now sure she liked that, either. Somehow his round neatness was even more evident in her attic. He was so relentlessly pressed and polished, so compact and neat, that the bowed ceiling and sagging furniture looked even more decrepit and down-at-heel.

What’s more she knew him, knew his type, of old. She saw the official judgement in his gaze and felt the official pity in his smile and liked neither.

On the other hand, there were the vouchers.

Technically, of course, Midge had a job. In fact she had moved up from selling leftover vegetables at the Market to apprenticing as a news girl with Tin Lizzie. This meant that the Special Seasonal Post Office Department #1 should not, strictly, be giving her a present. With a little thrift and some extra shifts, she could afford to buy herself a doll if she wanted one. It would do her good to learn the lesson of hard work and do the city good to teach it to her. But still, the child was well known, after all.

Midge had had plenty of misfortunes in her life, but she was beginning to suspect that writing that letter to Santa Claus might have been one of the more significant. Far from getting her a Christmas wish it had brought her nothing but trouble and interference.

Now it meant she had been hauled away from the Market at the busiest part of the day and made to stand next to this self-contained little man as he presented her landlady with a bunch of vouchers for groceries.

She bore the ceremony with precisely the same impassiveness as she had borne Jefferson’s brief family reunion, or the investigations of Maddie Sharp. She let the photographers take her portrait and Krimble to pat her head. She knew that it was nothing to do with her. Not really. She was just a prop in other people’s dramas. She had her own small world and she was beginning to learn that it could be dangerous and unhappy to get dragged into other people’s. She made her escape back to the Newsies as soon as she could.

Krimble returned to his desk to find a pen on it that was not his. Someone had found it in the bottom of a box that had come up from the Elf Service headquarters but it wasn’t Post Office equipment.

He spent the rest of the day in careful enquiry and by that evening he was able to personally return the pen to Miss Saltadora, who had already bought a replacement and was not entirely happy to see it, although, being a well brought up young lady, she did not say so. On the way home Krimble bought an evening paper from a scruffy little girl with red hair and was pleased to discover himself on the front page. He felt he had done much to burnish the reputation of the department, the city and, of course, himself.