Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (31 page)

They shook hands.
McMurtrie ordered an ale and sat down at a table in the empty bar. Burns joined
him a moment later carrying two bottles and glasses.

“I’ll have an ale wi’ ye,
Mac.”

“On me, if ye like. Looks
to me, Matey, like you’ve driven all your trade away wi’ that racket over the
front door.”

“A racket ye call it! Don’t
be blasphemous, Mac. ’Tis one of God’s songs, and there’s others to come. I’ve
been playing it every night now, except Sundays, for the past ten nights. ’Tis
weather that’s driven the trade away and not my offering passers-by a bit of
warmth and Christmas cheer.”

“Hmph!” McMurtrie
swallowed some ale, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. “And would ye have a
permit, Burns, to play that thing? Seems to me the good folks on this street
would be kicking with you disturbing their TV and their sleep.”

“’Tis you who know
perfectly well I have a permit, McMurtrie. Even though I’m outside of the city
line, who but you has poked his long nose in here every chance he gets,
checking every license and permit. And as for the folks on this street kicking,
they’re all good customers and friends of mine and glad of a little music.”

“All?” Det. McMurtrie
narrowed his bushy brows. “Now there was one I recalled that you turned in for
making subversive talk here during the war. What was his name?”

“Zwicker,” Burns said. “Francois
Zwicker.” Burns held up his glass of sparkling ale and looked at the bubbles
against the light. “He owns the house right across the street. Number 3. God be
praised, a year ago he lost his job at the Electric, where he was engineer, and
moved away. The house stood vacant for a spell; then was rented for three
months in the summer, to be vacant again until just this last Saturday.”

“Rented?”

“No, he and his missus
are back, but it won’t be long, mark me. He’ll hold a job nowhere with his
anarchistic tongue. I’ve forbid him my place. His missus is no prize, either.
Louise is her name, a Frenchie like him. Quebec or Three Rivers. She’s there by
herself right now. He’s off again, hunting another job, I’ll say. Not that he’ll
keep it long.”

A party of four came in.
Burns finished his ale and got up to greet them. “The ale’s on me, Mac. Drop in
again, and a Merry Christmas to ye!”

Outside, the detective
got in a big black car where four men were waiting for him. “Let’s go and get
the search warrant,” he said. “Zwicker’s the name. The house is No. 3.” The car
moved off.

An hour later to the
accompaniment of Bing’s voice singing. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” McMurtrie
rang the doorbell of No. 3. The door was opened finally by a white-faced woman
with burning black eyes and raven hair.

“Provincial Police, Mrs.
Zwicker,” McMurtrie said. “There are four men posted about the house, and we
have a search warrant. Let me in, please. We’ve come to get the boy.”

At 6:00
P.M.
,
on
Saturday, Dec. 21st, Alan Connatser’s Cessna Twin took off from the air strip
at Connatser Products, on Long Island. With Steven Donegan, and Connatser, at
the twin controls, it headed south as ordered. Instead of a
phosphorescent-painted portmanteau, it was carrying Special Agent Hank Weeks,
member of the F.B.I.

Ronnie, safely home with
his mother, had made it in time for Macy’s Christmas Parade.

Contact by radio was made
at 8:20, and almost instantly a red flasher was turned-on on the ground in a
large open area some twenty miles north of New Bern, North Carolina. As the
Cessna headed for a point directly over the flasher, Hank Weeks spoke into the
microphone:

“Zwicker, hear this now!
This is a Special Agent of the F.B.I, speaking to you from the Cessna. Your
wife has been arrested and we have the boy. She gave us the name of Walter
Vollmer, the County Official who is with you now in that Patrol Car. You were
followed and we know exactly where you are—in between Vanceboro and Blount
Creek. You are hopelessly trapped, for cars are posted all along U.S. 17 and
along State Road 33, as well as the country road you came in on. They have
heard this and are closing in right now. That’s all! There’s no use your trying
to escape.”

The Cessna began to
climb. “There’s just one thing that gripes me, Hank,” Connatser said
disgruntedly. “Think of all the trouble you’d have saved if you’d done what
Steve and I wanted to—loaded that portmanteau with just one little ol’ bomb!”

Way up north in the Maple
Leaf Tavern, Mr. Burns turned over the “Merry Christmas” record for the third
time and started “Silent Night” again. On guard in the empty house across the
street, in the event that the plans went wrong and Zwicker returned to his
home, two members of the Ontario Provincial Police were engaged in a game of
Rummy.

“It would be a silent
night if Burns would shut that blasted thing off,” one said to the other,
slapping a card on the table.

“Aye,” said the other, “still
as the dead, if you’re asking me!”

They went on playing
unaware of the noise that filled every room, every cranny and every house and
every street for miles around. They had lived in the midst of its deep
reverberation far too long to hear it—the stunning boom of the Horseshoe Falls
of Niagara, dumping its endless deafening millions of gallons down a drop of a
hundred and fifty-eight feet just a half block away.

.

W. C. Fields, the great American comedian
and humorist, died Christmas Day, 1946 in Pasadena. He had made a career out of
playing cheats and cowards. He is on record as not liking children ("only
if they are properly cooked.") And, it takes no stretch of the imagination
to assume this contempt extended to Christmas and Santa Claus. (Try imagining Fields
in
Miracle
on
Thirty-Fourth Street.)

For his epitaph, he once suggested, "I'd rather be
playing in Philadelphia." Philadelphia was not known then as one of the
high points of the Vaudeville circuit. Come to think of it, it still isn't.

In
1944, Lillian de la Torre, the wife of an English professor, introduced the
noted eighteenth century lexicographer and literary arbiter Dr. Samuel Johnson
to the world in the surprising role of detective. She decided that Johnson,
perhaps the most imposing personality of his time, had many of the keen
intellectual qualities necessary to a great detective. Conveniently, he also
has a built-in Watson in the person of his biographer James Boswell.

A collection of Dr. Johnson stories
appeared in 1946 under the title
Dr.
Sam: Johnson, Detector.
It met with considerable success among the critics,
including the
New York Times’s
revered Anthony Boucher
who called it “perhaps the most attractive book of detective shorts ever
published.”

A second collection was assembled in
1960, bringing the total number of stories close to thirty; a third collection
has been scheduled. In each case, de la Torre was able to present style and
period flavor without compromising accessibility.

“The Stolen Christmas Box” is one of
the earliest in the series and features an intriguing problem of interlocking
puzzles.

The
disappearance of little Fanny Plumbe’s Christmas box was but a
prelude
to a greater and more daring theft; and was itself heralded by certain uneasy
signs and tokens. Of these was the strange cypher message which Mrs. Thrale
intercepted; while I myself was never easy in my mind after seeing the old
sailorman with the very particular wooden leg.

Dr. Sam: Johnson and I
passed him on Streatham common as we approached the estate of the Thrales,
there to spend our Christmas. He sat on a stone hard by the gates in the
unseasonable sunshine, and whittled. He wore the neckerchief and loose
pantaloons of a sea-faring man. He had a wind-beaten, heavy, lowering face, and
a burly, stooped frame. His stump stuck out straight before him, the pantaloon
drooping from it. That on which he whittled was his own wooden leg.

’Twas a very particular
wooden leg. The cradle that accommodated his stump was high-pooped and
arabesqued about like a man-of-war’s bow with carvings, upon the embellishment
of which he was at the moment engaged. Into the butt was screwed a cylindrical
post of about half the bigness of my wrist, turned in a lathe and wickedly shod
with iron.

As the carriage passed
him at an easy pace, I stared down upon him. He extended his greasy flapped
hat, and my venerable companion dropped into it a gratuity.

We found the Thrale
household pernitious dumpish, for all it was nigh onto Christmas. The tall,
silent brew-master Thrale greeted us with his usual cold courtesy, his
diminutive rattle of a wife with her usual peacock screeches of delight. Of the
party also were Thrale’s grenadier of a sister, a strapping virago born to
support the robes of a Lady Mayoress, and well on her way to that honour on the
coat-tails of her husband, Alderman Plumbe. Plumbe topped his brother-in-law in
height and doubled him in girth. His features were knobby and his temper
cholerick. He scowled upon his children, Master Ralph, a lubber of fourteen,
and Miss Fanny, a year older.

Master Ralph was rapidly
shooting to his parents’ height, but unable to keep pace in solidity. He
continually closed his short upper lip over his long upper teeth, which as
continually protruded again. He bowed and grinned and twisted his wrists in our
honour.

Miss Fanny executed her
duty curtsey with downcast eyes. Her person was tall and agreeably rounded, and
sensibility played in red and white upon her cheek, playing the while, I own
it, on the sensitive strings of my heart. Indeed, I could have been a
knight-errant for Miss Fanny, had not I found below-stairs the veriest little
witch of a serving-wench, pretty Sally, she who... but I digress.