Chapter 16: The Miracle of Christmas.

Eleni sat alone, rocking back and forth on the floor of the bedroom suite she shared with Sergei in the Royal West Belgian palace. Sergei and Coronado had departed to attend the grand unveiling of Sergei's pet project, the enormous, space-visible velvet painting of Stevie Nicks he had wanted since he was a little girl. The project hardly needed unveiling, since most of the citizenry was well-aware of its completion, having not seen the sun in several weeks. They did, however, get a lovely view of Stevie Nicks where it used to be.

Eventually, Sergei would return, covered in confetti and reeking of lemon Pledge, his favorite sexual condiment. They would make "love" for several minutes, and then she would settle down to hear his speech about how much of a man he was, and how this had never happened before. During the course of their brief affair, she had noticed it had become so rote that he no longer had to read it off of his index cards. Where was the heart in his performance? Sure, he had memorized the lines, but sometimes she didn't believe him as an impotent middle-aged strongman masturbating his ego.

But this all had to wait. Sergei had a full roster of public events that morning, from unveiling his painting to stealing Christmas. For Christmastime it was, and Sergei had issued orders to Coronado, his newly-crowned puppet king, to settle an old score once and for all with Kris Kringle, who he blamed for a lifetime of letdowns. Sergei arranged for weapons of mass destruction to be planted at the geographic north pole, and asked Coronado to publicly call for sanctions and a possible invasion. The public laughed nervously, then stopped when they realized he was serious. Then they built bomb shelters and stocked up on duct tape.

Yes, Sergei hated Santa with a passion that burned like jock itch in a volcano. His parents had failed to inform him of the fictionality of Santa Claus. Probably because he executed them on his fifth birthday, when he didn't get an "OB-GYN Elmo" doll like he had asked for in a notarized document. When Santa mysteriously failed to show up that Christmas, or any subsequent year, Sergei added him to his List of Enemies, which at various points included the Dalai Lama and half the cast of "Petticoat Junction," who he felt had belittled the important subject of petticoats. He hated them for this injustice, with a passion that burned like acid reflux from a disgruntled wildebeest.

In any event, chemical weapons were now buried somewhere in Greenland, and Inuit hunters would be digging them up any moment and arming themselves for sweet, sweet freedom from the Danes. This has no bearing on our plot, but is something for you to chew on.

But back we go to Eleni, still rocking on the floor like a Romanian orphan on speed, although she was actually on crystal meth. Eleni had one thing on her list that year- an official Red Ryder carbine-action air rifle with a compass in the stock and this... thing... that tells time. She had put it onto her Amazon Wish List, only to be told that it was out of stock, and she'd shoot her eye out. If she was to get anything this year, it would have to come from a Christmas miracle, or grand larceny.

And so, under the cover of the giant velvet painting that had plunged West Belgium into eternal darkness, she wielded a sawed-off shotgun and took a Humvee from a local dealership. "This was the best Christmas ever," she thought to herself, and as she drove off the lot and realized her heart had grown to three times its former size, she also realized that perhaps Sergei was right; Santa and the elves were a threat to democracy.

That night, Sergei was visited by three ghosts, who taught him the error of his ways. When he awoke to tell Eleni that he was converting to Judaism, he found her gone. Eleni had taken her Hummer and left for the North Pole. If the UN was going to keep laughing at the global threat posed by that jolly old elf, she was going to have to act unilaterally.