He turned to his reindeer. “Did you hear that, Prancer?” he said, loudly enough for the entire lobby to hear. “We have a problem here. I think I need to check my naughty-and-nice list, Blitzen.” The list was duly produced, Santa put on a pair of spectacles, and he ran a very slow finger down it while I looked longingly over at the entrance to the theaters, where the line in front of the usher was growing longer by the minute.
“Here she is,” Santa finally announced. “Yes, definitely naughty. And what do we give naughty children for Christmas, vixen?”
“Coal!” the crowd shouted.
Santa reached into his sack and produced a lump of licorice. “Shall I give this to her or shall we give her another chance? After all, it is Christmas.”
“Coal!” the crowd bellowed, and Santa had to ask them two more times to persuade them to offer me the tickets again, which this time I had the sense to take.
“And here’s a ticket to the 2:30 showing of The Twelve Days of Christmas for being such a good sport,” he said. “Merry Christmas, ho ho ho,” and I was finally free.
I shot over to the entrance, where the line in front of the usher had miraculously disappeared, and handed the usher my ticket. “Sorry,” he said, handing it back.
“They’re still cleaning?” I asked incredulously.
“No, but you’re late. It’s 2:22. The 2:20’s already started.”
“But they do previews for the first fifteen minutes—”
“Sorry. It’s theater policy. No one’s allowed in after the start time. I think you can still get tickets to the 4:30.”
I don’t, I thought, and I know who’s responsible.
“Do you want me to check and see if there are still tickets available?” he asked.
“No, that’s okay. Never mind,” I said and went out, across the lobby, and into the wilds of the Drome to find Jack.
“A great movie! Don’t miss it!”
—Time Out Magazine
I’d expected Gusteau’s to be a bar somewhere near the dance clubs and Rick’s from Casablanca, but it wasn’t, and after consulting two maps and a Drome guide dressed as Frosty the Snowman, I found it in the depths of Munchkinland, sandwiched between the Monsters, Inc. ball pool and the Despicable Me moon drop, both of which were filled with toddlers emitting ear-slashing shrieks of joy and/or terror.
The restaurant was a replica of the French bistro in Ratatouille, with rats on the wallpaper and the tables. Jack was seated at a table at the back. “Hi,” he shouted over the din from the ball pool. “Didn’t get back in, huh?”
“No,” I said grimly.
“Sit down. Would you like something to drink? Gusteau’s is G-rated, so I can’t offer you a Pimm’s Cup, but I can get you a mouse mocha.”
“No, thank you,” I said, ignoring his invitation to sit down. “I want to know what you’re up to and why you saw to it I didn’t—”
“Hey, what happened to you?” he interrupted, pointing at my still-wet top. “Don’t tell me you collided with Hugh Grant carrying an orange juice, like in Notting Hill?”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth, “a gingerbread latte—”
“And they wouldn’t let you in because of the Drome’s dress code?”
“No, they wouldn’t let me in because the movie had already started. Because a guy with a gingerbread latte and Santa Claus kept me from getting back from the Polar Express in time, as you well know. You’re the one who put them up to it. This is just another one of your adolescent pranks, isn’t it?”
“I told you, that wasn’t a prank.”
“Then, what was it?”
“It … you remember when we watched Oceans 17, and there’s a break-in at the casino? Cops, sirens, helicopters, the whole nine yards? But that’s just a diversion, and the real crime is taking place over at the bank?”
“You’re saying the geese were a diversion?”
“Yeah. Just like Santa Claus. What did he do to delay you?”
“You know perfectly well what he did. You hired him to do it so I wouldn’t get in and I’d have to go with you. But it won’t work. I have no intention of seeing Christmas Caper with you.”
“Good,” he said, “because you’re not going to. Not today, anyway.”
“Why not? What did you do?”
“Nothing. I’m not the one responsible for any of this.”
“Really?” I said sarcastically. “And who is?”
“If you’ll sit down, I’ll tell you. I’ll also tell you why the 12:10 was sold out, why The Steampunk League sent its zeppelin over when it did, and why you couldn’t buy tickets to Christmas Caper online.”
“How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess. The ticket machines wouldn’t let you buy them either, would they?”
“No,” I said and sat down. “Why not?”
“I need to know something first. What were you doing at the Polar Express? When I left you, you were handing the usher your ticket.”
“He wouldn’t let me in. Some guy threw up in the theater.”
“Ah, yes, good old vomit. Works every time. But why didn’t you just wait there in the entryway?”
I told him about the Dr. Who and Goose Girl lines and the bench people.
“Did anything else happen while you were waiting? Anybody send you a text telling you you’d won free tickets to something?”
“Yes.” I told him about the Encore Presentation of Ghost Town. “Which you can’t tell me you didn’t put them up to. Who else would know Ghost Town was one of my favorite movies?”
“Who, indeed?” he said. “When we were in line, you said, ‘This isn’t going to turn into another Monsoon Gate.’ I take it you didn’t get in to that movie either. Why not? Did the same thing happen?”
“No,” I said. I told him about Zara trying on shoes and us missing the six o’clock showing. “And then she got a tweet saying there was going to be a special preview of Bachelorette Party—”
“Which, let me guess, was a movie she really wanted to see?”
“Yes,” I said. “So we decided to go to the ten o’clock, but when we checked its running time, it didn’t get out till—”
“After the last light rail back to Hanover,” he said, nodding. “Are you sure you don’t want something to drink? A rat root beer? A vermin vanilla coke?”
“No. Why are we here anyway?” I asked, looking around. “Surely there’s someplace we could go to that we wouldn’t have to shout.”
“This and the Tunnel of Love are the only areas not under surveillance. We could go do that.”
I had been in the Tunnel of Love with Jack before. “No,” I said.
“I heard they’ve got some new features that are really romantic—Anne Hathaway dying of consumption, Keira Knightley being hit by a train, Edward and Bella catching fire on their wedding night and burning to a crisp—”
“We are not going in the Tunnel of Love,” I said. “What do you mean, these are the only areas not under surveillance?”
“I mean, there’s no need to distract kids from going to see Ice Age 22,” he said. “Kids invented the short attention span. You, on the other hand, have been remarkably single-minded, hence the vomit. And the Gingerbread Man.”
“You’re saying the Drome was the one trying to keep me from seeing Christmas Caper?”
“Yup.”
“But why?”
“Okay, so you know how this all started, that after the Batman and Metrolux and Hobbit III massacres, movie attendance totally tanked, and they had to come up with some way to get the public back, so they turned the theaters into fortresses where people felt safe bringing their kids and sending their teenagers. But to do that, they had to introduce all kinds of security—metal detectors, full-body scans, explosives sniffers, and that meant people were standing in line for an hour and forty-five minutes to see a two-hour movie, which only made attendance drop off more. Who wants to stand in a line when you can stay home and stream movies on your ninety-inch screen? They had to come up with something new, something really spectacular—”