Chapter 3: Beginner's Luck
“So what’s this?” Tommy demanded, standing in front of
the Riddler’s booth.
Game Theory buffed a nail, looking bored.
“Testosterone storm cloud,” she murmured, pursing her lips and then shook
her head dismissively. “Impending testosterone, no… imminent
testosterone storm… Ulgh, no.” She looked to Nigma as if to get his
opinion, but he was engaged in a performance of his own, looking around
theatrically as if confirming the question with invisible associates.
“I think the riddle is a fairly well-known concept,” he
said finally. “If you’re not sure how it works, consult the nearest
5-year old.”
“Very funny. What’s it mean? What have I
ever done to you?”
Nigma smiled.
“You do ask a gratifying number of questions,” he
smiled. “That’s the sign of a superior intellect. I don’t
actually know who you are, but keep up that ratio of question marks and
we’ll get along fine.”
“If you don’t know who I am, why did you want to talk
to me?” Tommy asked, conveying a quick-fraying patience that few would dare
with a man who’d made himself the king of the Gotham Rogues.
“I didn’t,” Eddie said simply.
“But—”
“Does anything on that slip of paper say to come see
me?”
“I—” Tommy sputtered, checking the paper in his hand.
“I was asked to devise a riddle summoning you to a
certain spot.”
Tommy bent forward, leaning over the front of the table
very slightly, his hands curled into powerful fists, yet projecting an aura
of respect rather than menace. It was a show of strength rather than a
threat, from one confident enough that he didn’t need to threaten and
posture—but who wasn’t about to be treated like a toy.
“Why?” he asked bluntly, and Nigma’s polite but
patronizing smile returned.
“You really are good at keeping up that ratio,” he said
pleasantly.
“Why?” Tommy repeated.
“I don’t know. Trivia bores me.”
“By whom, then?” Tommy growled.
Nigma smiled wider, menacingly, teasingly…
“I guess you better solve it and find out.”
Though unintentional, the sheer number of questions
Tommy had asked without ever attempting to solve the riddle provided an
effective way to separate Coronet from Batman. Once he was alone
outside the Iceberg, it seemed safe to do so. He went around to the
spot by the staff door where employees and the occasional customer smoked,
and where Ghost Dragons beat up those who had crossed King Snake. He
decided it should take him no more than a minute to calm himself and collect
his thoughts, and no more than three to solve the riddle.
A diamond in the
rough… claws reddened not with blood… head to toe… scrawling… curry and
cowboys… It was inelegant. As Riddler clues went, it was
rushed, sloppy, none of his usual rhythms or structure, not a hint of
cleverness. Clearly something he’d dashed off as a favor between bites
of his vegetable spring roll, judging by the thumb-smudge and the faint
smell of sweet chili sauce… What that all added up to was a clue that
could be taken at face value. All the words meant what they appeared
to mean, no puns or double entendres, and the solution pointed to the true
meeting place not a decoy location or trap.
The meeting place was a half-block of shops and
restaurants like a hundred others. A pawn shop on the corner with a
tacky old-fashioned diamond on its sign. On one side: a shoe store,
Tex-Mex, empty retail space for rent, an Indian restaurant, nail salon,
grocery and shoe repair. The other side was an electronics store, a
well graffiti’d safety door, eyewear, Western Union, and a tailor.
There was nothing special about it; even its location a convenient
quarter-mile from the Iceberg was shared by a number of similar corners.
Batman strained to find an angle he might have missed as Tommy walked to the
rendezvous by the most obvious route, and when he got there, he searched.
There was no one on the sidewalk. No one waiting in the Tex-Mex.
No one loitering by the retail space. No additional clues, nothing in
the graffiti or… on the fire escape.
His lip twitched at a fresh scratch and a can of WD40
left on the bottom tier. He leapt up and pulled on the scissored
staircase, noting the well-oiled silence as it folded down, and then he
climbed to the roof.
A violent blur flashed before his face a split-second
before the once-familiar clap of a whip cracking below his waist.
Unlike most occasions, there was no sting of contact through body armor, so
at least she’d aimed short. The crack was to get his attention, and
though Batman put all the sensory data together several seconds before Tommy
could have, Catwoman was in motion by the time the thought solidified.
He gave chase. A rooftop chase without bat-line or batarangs wasn’t
ideal, but he’d made sure his shoes were up to the
job and—for some reason he would work out later—Tommy was a master of
parkour.
He caught up with her where she’d obviously intended,
judging by the bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket.
“So, Mr. Coronet, you’ve been bloodied,” she observed,
pulling glasses from her loot sack and pouring.
“Is that what was supposed to happen?” he said
acidly.
“Welcome to Gotham,” she said, handing him a glass.
“Sorry to disappoint, sensei. I came out
with the fence and the bank lead I was sent in for, and without a scratch.”
“Imagine that,” Selina said, a canary-feather smile as
she sipped. “So tell me, was there anyone in there tonight who’s
smarter than you? No false modesty now, and no qualifiers. Yes
or no.”
“No,” he graveled.
“And with the possible exception of Eddie having a
really good ten minutes on his best day, was there anyone more resourceful
or better informed than you?”
“Of course not.”
“More observant?”
“No. What are you getting at, Catwoman?”
“Is that how you got out unbloodied? Because dumb
criminals make mistakes, fail to notice things or connect the dots…”
“I’m really not following.”
“No, I don’t imagine you are,” she said curtly. “Hubris.
You’ve been preloading Tommy with blind spots. Pride,
overconfidence—maybe a few other failings you figure a criminal must have.
And I’m betting you jettisoned every single one of them tonight,
because you didn’t want to get killed.”
“Again, I’m not following.”
She sipped.
“I know you, handsome. You went in as yourself,
because the way you think of Tommy, it would have been too dangerous to only
see what he’d see, only know what he’d know… You’re fine with being
less than you should be against police, feds and crimefighters but—”
“Selina, this all started with you storming into the
study to point out the police being, to use your word, ‘pinheads’ about the
bank job in Queens. So as a thief, do I have a realistic respect for
law enforcement and their abilities or do I assume they’re idiots?”
“You really don’t get it, do you? You know
everybody in that club tonight is dumber than you, and you know
they can still pose a threat. That’s why you ditched all the failings
you gave Tommy. In the Iceberg, surrounded by criminals, you brought
your best game. You don’t bring me any less.”
“Hai, sensei.”
“I really don’t think you mean that.”
“You made your point. I accept it. I don’t
agree, but—”
“I have not begun to make my point,” Selina said, in a
tone that really did evoke the dojo more than Bat-Cat rooftops or aggrieved
girlfriends. “Are there any of those over-sugared virtue jockeys in
the Justice League that you didn’t write a protocol for because, for
all their abilities, they’re so laughably beneath you that you could dash
into the kitchen right now and improvise something with a little salt water,
some tin foil and a match?”
“No, there is no one I didn’t write a protocol for,
but—”
“And is there not at least one individual whose
personal and professional limitations fit that description?”
“No!”
“I count four.”
“Selina.”
“Bruce, I’ve spanked three of them.”
“Selina.”
“Without the foil. Without a superpower, and in
two cases, without a plan. So don’t bullshit a bullshitter.
You made a protocol for each and every one of them because you know dumb
can still be dangerous… That’s what you give Tommy: that mind,
that nerve, that will, that focus and determination… that’s what you bring
when we’re going up against Scotland Yard or Interpol or a 1940
triple-walled Mackenzie with a Kesselrig keypad.”
His lip twitched.
“And you don’t want to hear ‘Hai, sensei,’” he noted.
“What I want to hear is that, deep down, you no
longer think ‘criminal’ means less than law enforcement and law abiding
people. You think you’re superior to Matches, and that’s fine; he’s an
adorable loser and a dumb brick. But when you think you’re better than
Tommy, someone we’re building from the ground up, and you decide that
‘playing him honestly’ means making him inferior—for no other reason than
he’s someone who’s choosing to break the law? Well, there it is, isn’t
it: you think you’re better than me.”
“That is absolutely not true,” Bruce said instantly.
“Prove it,” Selina said like a slap. “I’m gone.
I’m pissed, so I’m doing what I do—what any self-respecting cat would
do. Done with you. I am out of here.” She paused, letting
the words sink in as she stretched out her hand and slowly poured the
contents of her glass into the ground between them. And then… she took
a slow, deliberate, seductive step forward as she said “Batman would be able
to find me. When Tommy can, he’ll be worth my time.”
That night Gotham experienced a Batman it hadn’t seen for a long time,
though they had no way of knowing it. The portion they interacted with
was the same as always: the detective and the crimefighter, the fist that
couldn’t be outmaneuvered, the car that couldn’t be outrun, the shadow that
somehow appeared when there was no possible way for it to find you, which
sprung to life and blocked the only route of escape… The actions and
intellect were the same Dark Knight that patrolled every night. Only
the emotional core wasn’t present. The real living man had locked it
down so his raging turmoil couldn’t intrude on the
night’s work.
The unwavering discipline that was Batman remained
through writing the logs—with just an occasional lapse whenever he typed the
letters c-a-t. Then his subconscious registered the cause of the rage
he was suppressing, that it was same blasted woman it had always been—Damn
her!—and how, in the past, she would have been a featured player in the log
he was typing. Fortunately, before a second “Damn her” catapulted the
thought into his conscious mind, the lockdown reengaged. He finished
the account of a stolen car ring without being aware his focus had faltered
for more than a second. Then an email to Lucius cleared Bruce Wayne’s
schedule for the next several days, so there was no reason not to spend the
night at Coronet’s.
At that point with Batman’s work finished, ego asserted
itself briefly as Tommy eschewed the subway and made his way home by
rooftop. Who did she think she was, sending him to the Iceberg—the
goddamn Iceberg—to make a point?
She thinks she’s your sensei, the
measured, discipline of The Batman responded.
Yes, okay, technically it’s her prerogative to give
a lesson however she wants. But I know how to maintain a secret
identity. I know how to run an undercover operation. I know how
to— MI-6! Interpol!—
And you’d mastered attacks against superpowers
with Maki Sensei before Sifu Lin covered most of the same ground against
magic users. You put your imagined expertise in a box and learned a
lot more.
Hmph.
It began to rain, and he adjusted his stride
effortlessly.
The Batman part of his mind noted it, and the thoughts
began mushrooming like an atomic cloud: There was no thought, no effort, not
a split second’s alteration in pace as he adjusted to the rain.
Balance, breathing, heartbeat and pulse were completely undisturbed.
Tommy did it instinctively because Batman did. Batman’s ability was
Tommy’s ability. Every firing synapse, every cell of his body…
But ability wasn’t… it wasn’t connected to the moral
fiber of a person. It required raw gifts like intelligence and a
healthy body, certainly, but after that it was a function of hard work,
discipline, determination and will. The kind of person who
used their gifts to break the law rather than earn a living in an honest
way, according to the rules society established, would hardly have the
wherewithal to—
What I do is not legal, he thought
suddenly.
He awoke with a jolt. He sat up in bed and
snatched the thought-echo of the fast-receding dream.
He went to the washroom and splashed his face with
water, then considered his reflection.
Trespassing, breaking and entering, assault,
intimidation… vigilantism. None of it was legal. He did it
anyway. He did what he wanted, what he felt he needed to do to
make his life work, even though society decided it was wrong and made laws
against it.
And he certainly didn’t consider himself less
than people who didn’t. Less than— (What were the words Catwoman
used?) —law enforcement and the law abiding.
So it… it should be possible to portray Tommy fairly
and still endow him with all his ability and insight.
It should… Even though he was a criminal… He should be
able to give Thomas Coronet “his best,” as Selina put it.
Even though he was a criminal.
It was perfectly possible, it would just take practice.
With some agitation, he went to the living room and
picked up a stick of incense, then paused as he reached for a box of matches
from a famous Japanese restaurant. He returned to the bedroom and
fished a similar box from his pocket, this one from the Iceberg Lounge.
Symbols were where you made them, after all, just like Selina’s agnostic nod
to beginner’s luck.
He went into the exercise room, bypassed the weights,
and he settled in the center, assuming the lotus position and lighting his
stick of sandalwood. He focused on his breathing as he watched the
wispy thread of smoke rise from the stick.
There had been false starts before. And many,
many new dojos, new sensei, new disciplines. He would perform a
studied meditation to clear his mind and start over, and when he was done,
he would begin his first day as Thomas Coronet 2.0.
Tommy’s day officially began when he extracted an odd
little device from a kitchen drawer, along with a pair of specialized
needle-nose pliers. The strange object covered in gears was the
Swiss-made, 13-jewel time lock for a Zurich bank vault. With the
pliers, he gave a protruding rod a quarter twist, and the mechanism began to
tick. He stared for a moment, admiring the beautiful precision of the
topmost gears making their clockwork music. It was the score to which
he would prepare his breakfast: two raw eggs mixed in white rice with natto,
an apple, and a pot of sencha—light, nutritious, and virtually identical to
the breakfast Bruce himself had eaten training in Tokyo, so he could hardly
be accused of making Tommy ‘inferior’ on that count.
(Damn her.)
While the tea steeped and the rice maker did its thing,
he took a tension wrench, a half-diamond pick and a clear master lock from
the drawer and proceeded to pick it a half dozen times until his breakfast
was ready. While he ate, he perused a few news stories which—in his
expert opinion as a detective and criminologist—were as likely to come up on
Batman’s feed and Tommy Coronet’s:
Her Majesty the Queen had toured the new National Cyber
Security Centre in London, and he absorbed every detail about that facility
rather than simply noting her jewelry. For he was certainly not the
kind of limited, inferior intellect who would focus only on the
triple string of pearls, Queen Mary’s button pearl earrings, and the round
Cambridge Emerald brooch without also understanding every nuance
of the operational nerve center in Great Britain’s fight against
cyber-attacks.
(Damn her.)
Damn her.
Why was this so hard? She was right. About
Tommy, about all of it. She was right. If he could see that, why
couldn’t he go all in? Do what needed to be done and do it without
compromise—and without taking petty little shots every step of the way?
The next story was the burglary of a London warehouse
where thieves had absconded with $2.5 million worth of rare books, 160 books
in total, including a copy of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by
Nicolaus Copernicus, dating from 1566 and worth over a quarter of a million.
Bruce’s psyche screamed trying to organize the
competing analyses in his mind. His core, his instincts—Batman—was
ferociously highlighting all the details that could ultimately identify the
thieves: the warehouse was near Heathrow, the books on their way to a book
fair in California. That wasn’t like hitting a jewelry store with a
vault full of diamonds every day of the year. The thieves had
specific, insider knowledge, right down to the individual crates which
contained the most valuable works.
At the same time, Tommy seized on the mechanics of the
crime: a trio of thieves (so two accomplices needed and a three-way split)
used glass cutters to come in through the skylight, evading motion
detectors. They rappelled forty feet, opened six specific containers
and, according to one theory of the crime, spent “hours” selecting the
specific items they were after.
His inner Selina throbbed at the quotes from a police
“expert” in art recovery whose logic was painfully hard to grasp. The
pinhead said the books would be impossible to fence and speculated that
there must be a collector behind it, amassing a fabulous collection.
He thought the books might be cut up so their illustrations might be “traded
in the art market.” He compared the heist to the movie Goodfellas.
He compared the loot with “Picassos, Rembrandts and gold bars.” As
both a criminal and a crimefighter, there was a daunting amount of
wrong-headed thinking to catalog.
The thieves knew which crates to open, no others were
touched, so of course they didn’t spend hours sifting to select their
loot; the notion was absurd. They had the bulk of their haul in the four
most valuable works—in addition to Copernicus, there were 16th
century volumes by Dante, da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton—and they knew
exactly where those were. So the bulk of the 160 books taken was a
blind. The stolen books were the property of three different dealers,
so it was possible one of them was involved. One or more of the six
crates could have been random, creating the effect of a larger
targeted heist to conceal only one act of insurance fraud. It could
also be one acquisition of one desired piece with the others taken to pay
off accomplices…
Even his inner Alfred added to the mental chaos, noting
that Copernicus brought a complete and terrifying reversal of the most basic
aspects of human thinking. Everyone knew the Earth was the center of
everything, that God had placed man at the center of His creation, and to
entertain for a moment the possibility that it might be the other way around
was to face the abyss. Men who believed they knew everything about
their world and how it worked faced with the possibility that they were
wrong in every detail…
Aspirin. The simple act of eating breakfast had
left him with a whopping headache, and if there was one thing Bruce hated it
was going into his morning workout with a throbbing head. He left the
dirty dishes on the table as he stalked off to the weight room. It was
not an auspicious beginning for Tommy 2.0.
“Batman would be able to find me. When Tommy
can, he’ll be worth my time.”
One thing Bruce learned in the dojo that had served the
playboy in dealing with women as much as the crimefighter dealing with theme
rogues: Some things are meant to be taken literally and some have a greater
meaning which focusing on the literal will only obscure. Instinct was
the only way to know the difference. A guess could lead to a cracked
rib or a broken bone, so instinct developed quickly. And instinct said
the task was not to find Selina but to make Tommy worthy of the her
instruction.
He wasn’t meant to be actively looking for her; he was
meant to be living his life as Coronet and if he got it right, somehow, in
the realm of criminal superstition and/or feline logic, there she would be.
So the logical thing was to pick up where the lesson left off. The
Iceberg had brought him Cobblepot as a fencing and smuggling connection, and
a lead on no-questions off-shore banking…
The Ottoman Union Bank was one of the stranger patches
of Little Odessa. An older building, its rundown façade might have
once been impressive: an ornate gate over the doors, a brass name plate on a
column next to that, like the ones discreetly announcing a law office or a
medical practice. The interior was nothing remarkable, just an
ordinary suburban bank—until he signed the book at the unattended reception
desk. He was then approached by a statuesque blonde, unnaturally thin
and showing too much cleavage for a place of business. She was either
a model doing a photoshoot as a bank teller or one of the Russians’ whores
who’d been promoted. He said he wanted to open an account and dropped
Ilya’s name, and she showed him to a back office like a stewardess in a Bond
film. He half-expected the hackneyed
‘If there's
anything else you want. Anything at all…’ as she opened the door
to the richly appointed office.
In place of the come-on, he was offered coffee from a
silver Turkish pot. It, like the carved paneling, mahogany desk and
Peshawar rug seemed out of place in the small room. There was also a
sticky sweet roll covered in black sesame seeds and chopped pistachios.
Superficially, it was like any other business offering refreshment to a
client while he waited, but given the criminal nature of this business,
there was an unshakable echo of Ra’s al Ghul’s cloying hospitality.
The banker himself, a Mr. Sadik, did nothing to lessen
the impression. He was practically a caricature: freakish
salt-and-pepper curls and a thick mustache, an expensive but ill-fitting
suit, a voracious smile showing too many teeth, and a hungry enthusiasm for
particular words relating to the proposed account. “Excellent”
and “It’s a pleasure” were on his lips constantly as they discussed
the details of Tommy’s deposits, and with each repetition his eyes shown
like a glutton’s before a thick, juicy steak.
The performance did convey what the Ottoman Bank really
offered. Few depositors had accounts there for anything but a debit
card that drew from a local bank rather than an offshore one. The
Ottoman acted as your introduction setting up these offshore accounts, and
Mr. Sadik was clearly not particular about the quality of your passport and
other documents. Any briefcase of cash, or in Tommy’s case bearer
bonds, held his attention so that he barely glanced at the other paperwork.
Tommy left with his ‘deposit’ spread over three
accounts in the British Virgin Islands, Belize and Seychelles, having found
the minimum deposits in Switzerland and Luxembourg too high (too high to
entrust to Sadik and the Ottoman Bank, in any case) and the Cayman Islands
too complicated to decide on the spur of the moment. He took some
literature and promised to consider an alternative distribution once he had
a chance to study them. Then he rushed out to enjoy a clean breath of
air that didn’t reek of Turkish coffee and a Russian whore’s perfume.
Well… a clean breath of air for Brooklyn.
It was Tommy Coronet’s first time in Brooklyn and Bruce
considered his options. Perhaps he’d want to view the cluster of
warehouses owned by Fredericka Mandelbaum, a 19th century, Prussian-born
fence who made them available to the godfather of modern burglary: George
Leonidas Leslie. The man who pioneered the training grounds seen in
Hollywood movies, building full-scale copies of banks and other targets
right down to the furniture that might get in the way, where his crew could…
could rehearse their crimes... buying black market copies of private safes
and installing them all like… like a burglar’s showroom…
His internal monologue ran down to nothing as he felt
he was being stared at. He glanced around, but no pair of hostile eyes
were watching. As he walked back to his car, he realized it was that
inner-Selina glaring. The idea of sightseeing like some kind of
criminal tourist was wrong—tragically wrong. He had to stop making
‘criminal’ the prevailing thought in finding Tommy’s character. He was
new to Gotham and he was in Brooklyn. What would be the logical thing
to do, considering it was too early for pizza?
He fished in his pocket and pulled out the brochure for
Crispin Fine Art Storage. It wasn’t the kind of place that took
walk-ins, but… he took out his phone. He first considered being his
own PA, but at the last second he decided—or perhaps that inner Selina
suggested—he should get in the habit of keeping Bruce Wayne closer to
the surface.
“Thomas Coronet,” he announced smoothly. “I’ve
just flown in from London and it seems my PA dropped the ball arranging an
appointment. I know it’s awfully short notice, but if one of your
sales associates could accommodate me…”
Thirty minutes later, he was pulling into an industrial
area on the East River that was, at a glance, the least likely spot in
Gotham to contain a treasure trove—or 140 treasure troves—of priceless art.
The Crispin Storage Facility was a warehouse built in
1913 as part of the Gotham Dock Company’s sprawling network. Almost
two hundred warehouses once spread over thirty-nine piers; today the Crispin
building was one of two that remained. Its sister stood beside it:
gutted, derelict and shrouded in black netting, while it gleamed as her
modernized, ultra-high security twin. The only possible reason
Two-Face had never hit it was that he didn’t know about it, and Batman kept
his files up to date preparing for the day he found out. He patrolled
the area whenever Two-Face was active and always checked the derelict shell
as a likely spot for a hideout.
It made the tour, from a sales associate called
Samantha Lowell, the most productive exercise since the extraordinary
morning in Kyoto when he had a breakthrough, learning to discard the
technique he wanted to work on and letting instinct guide his body
through whatever moves the fight required.
Thanks to Two-Face, he’d already studied the building.
The layout, climate controls and security were all familiar. That
allowed him to approach something completely new to Tommy while giving it
the full benefit of Batman’s intellect and expertise—and while
maintaining a persona similar to Bruce Wayne. He’d gone in thinking it
would be a baptism of fire, but he came out feeling… relaxed.
It was easy. Like that day in Kyoto, he had just…
done it. Samantha was an attractive woman. Tommy was pretending to be
a man very much like Wayne. The habits of a hundred meetings with
bimbos prompted that smile, the playboy charm. Tommy was a
criminal, a con man, his instinct would be to ingratiate himself, he would
flirt… But it didn’t feel right. So he simply… didn’t. He
let instinct stop him as he stretched out his hand and he shook her hand
with an ordinary smile he would bring to any new acquaintance. Almost
a half-minute later, the reason caught up with him: The playboy was meant to
be remembered, and he wouldn’t want that. Tommy was presenting
‘a man like Wayne’ only in that he was rich enough to be a likely Crispin’s
customer. The slightly older, vaguely West Coast version of his
business persona that he’d dropped into by default was forgettably dull,
inconspicuous… Just perfect.
Behind that pleasant façade, his focus split to three
fronts. There was the security, of course. Guards monitoring the
extensive electronic surveillance 24/7, that surveillance consisting of high
resolution CCTV, motion sensors, intruder alarms and biometric scanners…
Exactly what was to be expected with the type of art displayed in World
Class Museums, apart from the European ones cutting corners.
While a part of his mind checked off boxes and
confirmed that there were no surprises on the security front, another began
logging vulnerabilities—potential ones, at least—from all the climate
controls. All he had to do was appear bored by the security as
something to be taken for granted with the service they were offering, but
be crucially interested in the archival and preservation standards.
Like any salesman, Ms. Lowell played to the customer’s preferences.
Once he started asking questions, she pointed out all the visible mechanisms
for the humidity and temperature controls that maintained a constant
70-degrees with 50 percent relative humidity. She boasted of the air
filtration system constantly filtering impurities and exceeding even the
American Museum Association’s standards. Tommy smiled to himself.
Had she but known it, Ms. Lowell was describing dozens of access points (for
maintenance men to change filters), pipes and power going to heating and
cooling units, and a host of options for the thinking burglar to consider.
A third part of his mind analyzed the staff he was able
to see. Small impoverished museums were more likely to skimp on poorly
vetted guards, but even so, well-funded didn’t always mean well-trained.
The guards he saw, however, had the bearing (and in several cases, the
haircuts) of ex-military. As for Ms. Lowell, well, she had almost
certainly changed her name. The Lowell was a boutique hotel on the
Upper East Side that underwent a conspicuous renovation six years ago, and
around her neck she wore the particular setting popular at Tiffany that year
for divorcées having the diamonds from their engagement rings reset.
So most likely divorced, not wanting to keep her husband’s name or return to
her own, and given the extremely upscale nature of the art market… Lowell.
A name change meant extra scrutiny during a background check—and here she
was, so she’d clearly passed. It was a lot of supposition, but signs
pointed to extremely good screening. He was unlikely to find a bad
apple among the Crispin staff…
The tour was so satisfactory, Batman realized why this
seemingly irresistible target had never been hit by a burglar capable of
pulling it off. He realized at the same moment Tommy decided to become
a customer rather than casing the place as a thief. The discretion
afforded through their self-managed units went beyond privacy into the kind
of institutional force field you’d normally have to go to Switzerland to
obtain. No one outside of the facility staff—not even in other parts
of the Crispin organization—would ever know your identity, handle what you
had stored, know what it was or have access. You could theoretically
store artwork, jewelry or furniture stolen from Crispin within their
own warehouse. You were shielded from other clients too, a feature
he’d seen in action as he deduced from security and logistics cues that he
was being kept safely off the path of a visiting client who had entered the
building twenty minutes into his tour, accompanied by one or possibly two
guests, on their way to one of the private viewing rooms.
A high-end thief anywhere in the North Eastern U.S.
would be an absolute fool not to have a storage space here.
—if Gotham wasn’t Batman’s city, his alter-ego
added swiftly.
But where he once would have puffed Tommy up with fatal arrogance at that thought, he now indulged in the briefest lip-twitch. Thomas Coronet was, after all, the one thief in all the world who didn’t have to worry about Batman.
As the twitch gave way to a laugh (that Bruce
recognized as Selina’s), he realized he was giddy. He was breathing
deeper, doing it naturally without effort. The air felt cooler,
crisper—even if it didn’t smell any better. He felt great.
He could simply do this. It was easy.
It was suddenly hard to see why he ever had trouble.
It was hard to imagine not having those instincts, needing to think
about what to do, how to act, and what to think.
He decided to double down on the hunting
trip-turned-stash-acquisition and get acquainted with the neighborhood.
A smart thief planning to keep incriminating items in Crispin’s Storage
would certainly analyze the area for vulnerabilities just as Bruce did for
satellite caves and safe houses. He decided to start with Batman’s
preferred perch on the roof of the derelict twin.
Daylight offered a better view than his usual
mid-patrol visits, and he looked out into the neighborhood beyond the gated
compound: the school bus depot, an auto mechanic, fire house, plumbing
supply, the odd warehouse for rent in a sea of occupied industrial spaces…
Behind the Crispin’s gate, a covered loading dock, the considerable external
supports for the various security and fire suppression systems… His head
whipped back to the surrounding streets. Ms. Lowell had stressed the
on-site protections, but she’d also mentioned the hyper-responsiveness of
the Gotham police and fire department. Bruce-Tommy’s lip twitched
as he considered the proximity of the fire house—and that other space for
rent.
A small building on the corner across the street… but
enjoying that same hypervigilant police and fire protection because of its
proximity to the Crispin building…
A small building—yet far larger than the storage space
he was considering—available for a price right on the opposite corner, on
the same micro-grid. It shared the same water and electric as well as
the same fire and police. Its tenant would have legitimate access to
all sorts of useful information. He copied the phone number for the
rental agent and started to climb down to get a closer look, when the memory
hit like a bullet as he neared the edge of the roof. There was once
a cat lair in this neighborhood.
There was once a cat lair in this neighborhood.
It was years ago, long before F. Miller and a
fabricated East End past the made her prickly on the subject, but even then
it was a discrepancy. The grungy industrial neighborhood didn’t seem
like Catwoman’s style.
It was hardly a mystery worth thinking about. If
he noted it at all, it was a single sentence in a forgotten log. But
if she was setting up that lair shortly after Crispin bought the building,
just as they were beginning the renovations...
He took a deep breath and went in search of the
one-time cat lair. As he walked, he accessed the log and checked the
dates on his phone. The timing checked out. Catwoman would have
acquired her little piece of Red Hook just as plans were finalized for the
Crispin warehouse. She would have been on paper as a part of the
neighborhood impacted by the changes, received those notices nobody reads,
invited to the open zoning board meetings nobody ever goes to. What
had looked like nothing but “a cat lair” might have been her key to unlock
all the secrets of the Crispin building through their use of the city’s
infrastructure.
He came to a stop before an ugly brick building with no
signage, painted white. It was dark gray when he’d seen it as a cat
lair, and there had been a sign for custom glass work or something of the
kind…
He looked around at the surrounding rooftops, trying to
remember which he’d used to surveil before entering… when he felt a presence
behind him.
“That was a lot faster than I expected,” Selina
cooed—and she handed him a cup of coffee.
“Really? It looks like you were expecting me,”
Bruce said, inspecting the cup with the name of a bodega down the street.
“I meant I didn’t expect you today,” she said,
pushing past him to open the door. “I’d put a sensor on your roof.
The ugly dying-to-be-a-Two-Face-hideout across from Crispin. It’s the
tallest building for miles, no other structure mars the view, the obvious
perch when you decided to get serious about this neighborhood. I just
didn’t think it would be until Friday or Saturday. Just like old
times,” she said, running her nails lightly across his chest where the bat
emblem would be. “Kitty gets settled in with a week’s reading
material, and you show up days ahead of schedule. When the roof alarm
buzzed, I figured I had half an hour until you found me here. That
wasn’t enough time to bring lunch, but enough to greet you with coffee.”
“Better than the panther,” Bruce muttered, following
her inside to the long, dark hallway where a vicious black jaguar greeted
him on his previous visit.
“Hm?” Selina asked innocently, and rather than
repeating the remark, Bruce said he never realized she had kept the place.
Selina said she never used it since building the
Catitat but it was always useful to have ‘a workshop.’ And that
concluded the preliminaries. Selina looked at him expectantly.
“You were right. My approach to Coronet was
flawed,” he said. “It’s been corrected.”
“Meow.”
“Don’t meow yet,” he warned. “You said you
weren’t expecting me to catch up with you for a few days. Let’s
pretend I didn’t. I’d like to work on a few things on my own.
Drill it in.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of this,” Selina began,
but before the words were out of her mouth, playboy charm was engaged.
Bruce had taken her hand, lifted it to his lips and then with a merciless
combo of Bat-gravel and Bruce’s piercing blue eyes, assured her that he knew
what he was doing.
Oh this is going to be bad, she thought.
For her, for Gotham, for somebody. But she knew better than anyone
that there was little that could be done once Batman had made a decision.
“How much time do you need?” she asked with a feline
edge that said this isn’t surrender, it’s giving you enough yarn to get
yourself into a terrible tangle.
“Five days should do it, if you’ll do me one favor.”
Tommy arrived home, activated his new alarm with a
touch to the fingerprint pad, and read the prompt on the slim LED screen
over the keypad.
Apple Tree No 1…
It was one of the Klimt paintings recovered after the
most horrific art theft in history: the Nazi raiding of private collections
throughout World War II. Once restored to the family, it had been sold
at auction as Lot 53… Tommy typed in 53 and the hyphen automatically
appeared on the screen after the numbers. Lot 53, Gustave Klimt’s
Apple Tree No 1 was marked down to bidder number 1762… He typed in those
digits and then unlocked his door in the usual way.
In the foyer, 53-1762 was lit on the screen of the
second keypad as a second prompt cycled through the symbols for Euros,
American Dollars, Hong Kong Dollars, Japanese Yen, Swiss Francs, and finally
came up on the British Pound. He entered the purchase price in
that currency and grunted. The system was disarmed.
He was gladder than ever that he’d kept his favorite
feature of the satellite cave installation. He opened the rock crystal
snuff box, pushed a recessed button in the lid, and the wall with A Boy
Bringing Bread by Pieter de Hooch slid into a recess hidden by the
painting, revealing an enormous plasma touch screen.
“VOXRec Initialize voiceprint Thomas Coronet,”
he ordered, then he paused. “Scratch that. Initialize voiceprint
Thomas… Pearl. Make primary. Download VOX command menu
and presets from main computer. Purge all preinstalled menus and
defaults. Display biographical information: Hobbs, Barry. Google
Earth, satellite photos and critical property data: Hobbs Trust Building,
42nd Street. Financial Overview, Paulson Hobbs Wealth Management…”
To be continued…