Secret Santa Read online

  Also by Andrew Shaffer

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  Hope Rides Again

  Hope Never Dies

  Parodies and Satires

  The Day of the Donald: Trump Trumps America!

  Ghosts from Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively: The Study of the Paranormal

  Catsby: A Parody

  How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters

  Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody

  Nonfiction

  Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors

  Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

  This is a work of fiction. All names, places, and characters are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental. In particular, it should be noted that Staten Island is a complete fabrication on the author’s part. If some mansplainer tries to tell you they’ve been there, nod your head and say, “Yeah, buddy, sure you have. And I’ve been to the moon.”

  Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Shaffer

  All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Full Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available upon request.

  ISBN 9781683692058

  Ebook ISBN 9781683692065

  Book design by Ryan Hayes, adapted for ebook

  Cover illustration by Adam Rabalais

  Production management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.com

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Andrew Shaffer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Dedicated to the memory of my middle school English teacher, Kate “Kathleen” Finn, who told me I could be the next Stephen King if I kept writing. Alas, there’s only one King of Horror, but her encouragement was one of the cornerstones to finding my own voice.

  “A gift isn’t a gift unless it has meaning.”

  —Oprah Winfrey

  “What’s in the box?”

  —Brad Pitt, Se7en

  PROLOGUE

  Merkers, Germany

  December 25, 1945

  The war was over. Millions of Allied troops had already returned home. In a few hours they would begin waking up to the sound of delighted squeals as Santa’s bounty was discovered under the tree. They might turn over, notice the indent in their wife’s mattress. Hear the coffee machine percolating—not Army mud, but real, fresh-ground beans. Smell the sweet aroma of sizzling bacon strips. Wonder what in God’s name they’d done to get so lucky.

  Xavier Blackwood, MP with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, wasn’t lucky. Some fathead in the War Department had concocted a point system for demobilization. It was complicated, but favored those with children. Those with families of their own. For Xavier, who hadn’t had the foresight to knock some rusty hen up before being shipped out, the war continued.

  “So this is Christmas,” he said, slipping a cigarette from his deck. With the blustering wind, it took him three tries to light it. He passed the lighter to Duluth, a fellow MP on the night shift. The two of them were deep in the woods behind the barracks; a light snow was falling. They’d abandoned their posts at 0500 hours, telling no one where they were going. Secrecy was of the utmost importance. Not even their superiors had been briefed. Xavier and Duluth had concocted the mission themselves, after many hours of passing a bottle of Hennessy cognac back and forth: they were going to surprise the boys back at base with a real live Christmas tree.

  “You hear about Manila?” Duluth said, trudging through the snow.

  Xavier nodded. Thousands of disgruntled soldiers had staged a protest over the bungled demobilization strategy. At least, that was the rumor. Sounded a lot like mutiny to Xavier. Whatever you called it, the natives were getting restless.

  “You’re a three-year man like me, right?” the kid continued.

  “Come April,” Xavier said.

  “Same. We should be able to get the hell out of here by then. My girl said she would keep the tree up in our apartment until I got back. Told her the only present I wanted was her under it, wearing nothing but a bow.”

  Xavier blew out a smoke ring. He hadn’t been a smoker prior to the war. “She won’t last that long.”

  “The tree? Sure she will. It’s one of those new, whaddaya-call-it, artificial trees.”

  “I was talking about your girl,” Xavier said.

  The kid spun on him, throwing an elbow into his gut. The fireman’s axe slipped from Xavier’s fingers into the snow. He doubled over to catch his breath. When he righted himself, he leaned on the trunk of a barren oak.

  The kid was laughing now, bent over. Tears streaming down his face.

  Xavier picked up the axe, dusted the snow off it. “The hell’s so funny?”

  “I don’t have a girl back home,” Duluth said. “I had one, but she stopped writing me.” He stood up straight. “Hit me. Then we’ll be hunky-dory. Not with the axe, though—I want to get out of this godforsaken country, but not that bad.”

  “Listen to you, wanting to be the next Houdini.”

  The kid looked at him blankly.

  “Before your time, I guess,” Xavier said. Duluth was an infantryman from Minnesota who had joined them at Merkers. “Duluth” was his hometown; Xavier had forgotten the kid’s Christian name. Said he was twenty-one in ten days, but he didn’t look old enough to drive. Xavier would be thirty this year. In the war, however, age wasn’t important. All that mattered was time served. In that respect, they were equals.

  Xavier handed him the fire axe. “I’ll let you do the chopping when we find—”

  “What about this on
e?” Duluth said, pointing the axe at an evergreen that stretched to the heavens.

  Xavier weighed their options. They’d been walking through the woods for almost an hour. Searching for the right-sized tree. Maybe there was no right-sized tree. The sun would be up soon. The morning crew would be coming around to relieve them and notice them missing. Xavier didn’t want to wind up on spud duty again.

  “Show me what you got, kid.”

  Duluth lined up his shot at the base and swung. The fire axe flew from his hand like a shot put, sailing past the tree and landing in a dense thatch of twigs, where the snow erupted into a small mushroom cloud. Duluth dropped to his knees and began pounding the tree with closed fists.

  Xavier stared on, stone-faced. Perhaps he should have slugged the punk when he had the chance. Knock some sense into him. He lowered his head and started for the axe. Xavier was sobering up now. Fast. The stupidity of their “mission” was only now hitting him. What were they going to decorate the tree with, anyway? They had no ornaments, no tinsel. No lights. No gifts to stack underneath.

  He saw the glimmer of metal in the snow and bent to pick it up.

  Only it wasn’t the axe.

  Xavier’s breath hitched. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the half-buried object glittering in the moonlight looked an awful lot like the rounded edge of a land mine. He didn’t have any interest in dusting the snow off and investigating. Before the war, he’d just been a gangly fellow working behind the circulation desk of the Brooklyn branch of the New York Public Library. He wanted to return, long limbs and all.

  “Hurry up, I’m freezing out here,” Duluth said, stumbling toward him. “My wool underwear is starting to itch. At least I hope it’s my underwear that’s itching.”

  Xavier turned in time to see the kid trip on a fallen trunk and hurtle toward him. There was no time to scream. They tumbled backward in a heap, landing squarely on whatever was buried in the snow. For a split second—a split second was long enough, though—Xavier felt the rounded metal edge digging into his lower back.

  He threw Duluth off him and rolled to the side in one fluid motion, holding onto his helmet in hopes it would protect his brain from the worst of the shrapnel.

  Seconds passed. Xavier heard the kid laughing. Xavier rolled up to a sitting position, head and limbs intact. The axe lay next to him. He could see now that what they’d rolled over wasn’t a land mine, but the steel-toed sole of a boot. A body, buried in a winter wonderland.

  Xavier hurriedly shoveled snow away from the frozen figure. A Luger pistol shone in the half-moon next to the rigid body. If there’d been any question, the red armband around the upper right arm confirmed it.

  “A dead rat,” Duluth said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  Xavier brushed the snow away from the corpse’s face to get a look at the man. Only there was no face. Just a black hole. Xavier shined the right-angle head of his flashlight on the caved-in skull. Teeth and red bits of muscle spilled from the hole like guts of a jack-o-lantern left on the porch too long.

  Xavier heard the kid vomit. It smelled of cognac and corned-beef hash.

  The dead body had no smell.

  “Where’s his face?” Duluth said. “Something ate his face.”

  Xavier shook his head. “He killed himself. I’ve seen this type of injury before. Muzzle in the mouth, pointed upward. Blew the front of his face off.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He was lucky,” Xavier said. “Sometimes they live.”

  The dead man had clearly come out here with one purpose in mind. You didn’t get dressed up in your SS best just to go for a holiday stroll through the woods. Something else struck Xavier as odd. He had no idea how long the body had been out here, but scavengers should have come by now. Vultures. Wolves. It was like they could smell the evil on this man, the poison in his veins. Nazis were so foul that not even flies would lay eggs in their corpses.

  Duluth kicked at a wooden box next to the man. “What is this? A Christmas present?” he said. The box was rectangular, about half the size of a rucksack. An iron padlock held the clasp together.

  Xavier gripped the axe. “Step aside.”

  Duluth moved away from the box. Xavier brought the axe down on the lock once, twice. On the third try, the iron split apart. He crouched and tossed the pieces aside. The lid lifted with ease. Xavier shined his flashlight into the box…and, though he didn’t yet know what he was looking at, he knew at once what it could do.

  Xavier felt something wash over him.

  Warm.

  Dark.

  Terrifying.

  Thrilling.

  He wanted to hold on to the feeling forever.

  Duluth asked what was in the box. “Nazi gold? Please tell me it’s Nazi gold. I could use some spending money.”

  Xavier backed away to let the kid have a look.

  “What…that’s it?” Duluth said, his voice full of disappointment.

  Xavier dropped the flashlight into the snow. The beam angled up, its light going on and off at intervals like orange bursts from a machine gun at night. “Your batteries die?” Duluth asked. “I think I’ve got some spares…” The kid’s voice trailed off as he slowly raised his eyes to meet Xavier’s. “Everything okay, man? You don’t look so good.”

  Xavier Blackwood, MP with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, raised the axe high overhead. “Everything’s…hunky-dory,” he said in the flickering light.

  CHAPTER ONE

  New York City

  December 1, 1986

  Lussi walked up to the front of the Blackwood Building on Avenue A. Although she’d heard the publisher’s East Village headquarters was unusual, she wasn’t prepared for it to be this unusual. The four-story brownstone was black. Solid black. At first she thought it was a paint job to make it look sleek and modern, but as she lowered her sunglasses she could see that any appearance of modernity was an illusion. The sandstone was blackened with soot and city grime, the result of decades of neglect. Even more unusual were the wrought-iron bars on the windows—not just the street-level windows, but all four stories. Was this a publishing house or a Victorian insane asylum? Needless to say, it was love at first sight.

  “Move it or lose it, yuppie scum,” a geriatric bag lady said, emerging from the shadows of the alley wheeling a cart full of empty liquor bottles.

  “Did you call me a yuppie?” Lussi said, clutching her Coach purse under her armpit and stepping out of the woman’s way. The name-brand purse wasn’t even hers; she’d borrowed it from her roommate. Lussi noticed more down-on-their-luck sorts across the street. So this was Tompkins Square Park. She’d read in the papers that it had been taken over by a homeless camp, which she could now see for herself. Amidst the tents and tarps, rough-looking men were huddled around burning barrels. A tall, thin man in a fedora from some bygone era was standing beyond the barrels. Through the smoke, he seemed to be studying her with intense curiosity.

  Lussi turned sharply back to the building. She took a deep breath and smoothed her houndstooth print skirt. Her best stirrup pants were tucked into her polished Mary Janes. She checked her makeup in her compact. Maybe I am yuppie scum, she thought, smoothing her ponytail in its black velvet scrunchie.

  She marched up the imposing stone steps and hit the buzzer.

  “Name,” a voice full of static demanded.

  “Lussi Meyer,” she said.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “An interview. My name sounds like ‘Lucy,’ but it’s spelled L-U-S—”

  There was a whir, followed by a clank. She tried the door, but it didn’t budge.

  “Wait for the rest, please,” the voice said.

  Lussi stepped back as the whirring and clanking continued. She counted six locks before the iron door finally creaked open an inch. It was so heavy, she had to wedge her shoulder against
it and push. It almost felt like the door was pushing back, like it didn’t want to let her in. Eventually, it gave in and swung open, sending Lussi stumbling into the cavernous lobby. She came to a stop a foot from bowling over a decorated Christmas tree. A trim receptionist, seated behind a wide desk, raised a sculpted eyebrow. Above, on the third-floor landing, an elegant woman with a fashionable bottle-blond buzz cut sipped from a highball glass, eyes on Lussi.

  Lussi approached the front desk. “I have an eleven thirty with Mr. Blackwood.”

  The receptionist put a hand over her headset’s mouthpiece and pointed to the stairs. “Fourth floor. Oh, and I love your purse.”

  “Thank you,” she said, mounting the winding staircase strung with white Christmas lights. “I love yours…too…”

  Lussi’s voice trailed off as she found herself mesmerized not by the woman’s purse—there wasn’t one on her desk—but by the interior of the building. It was all tarnished brass and chipped marble, carved wood accents and warm lighting. So different from the harsh fluorescents and bare drywall at her last job.

  She paused on the third-floor landing to listen to the click-clacking chorus of typewriters from deep within the building. None of those electric gizmos, either. Heavy, manual typewriters that sounded like her mother’s. Lussi scanned the postings on a rectangular corkboard, hoping to gain some insight into the company culture. Amidst workplace safety regulations and minimum-wage posters was a handwritten memo about the company-wide Secret Santa gift exchange, scheduled for December 12. Leave your presents under the tree anytime between now and then, but remember!! It’s supposed to be anonymous, so leave YOUR name off!!