Dangerous times.
Oswald sipped his coffee.
These were dangerous times to be a bird that couldn’t
fly. Every night, a new story swirled around the Iceberg during the
ill-named happy hour, and then every night for the rest of the night, it
floated above the patrons like contagion making each breath heavy with
dread. Second story men, push-in robbers and even garden variety
henchmen reported run-ins with a fear-crazed populace nursing fantasies of
defending themselves against all comers. They weren’t as particular as
Batman when it came to pointing a weapon and weren’t nearly as precise about
where they were pointing. The distinction that law enforcement
deemed “lethal force” was unknown to them, as apparently was the result of
firing bullets into pressurized canisters. Half his customers were
complimentary when they spoke of Batman now. Hardly a story was
told anymore where a run-in was related with anything but nostalgia–kwak–if
not outright admiration for the Dark Knight’s cool head and unwavering
professionalism. That wretched development would have to be
dealt with when the dark times were passed, but for now, survival was
paramount.
Oswald would have liked to leave town as Catty had,
honeymooning in some gleaming seaside paradise. A villa on the Amalfi
coast perhaps; that would be her style. (Though he himself would opt
for a nice Caribbean tax haven–kwak!) But flying off wasn’t
feasible. His operation had seen two attempted coups already. If
he left town to wait out the trouble, the nightclub would be lost and at
least a third of the underground operations it hid, probably more.
He sipped his coffee…
So there was nothing to do but wait it out.
Gotham Keepers had seven locations throughout the city.
The ones in the outer boroughs were spread out, but the storage facility on
39th Street was vertical, its footprint just under a quarter of the block
but extending upward for eight stories.
Detective Rowanski served the warrant at the front desk
while at virtually the same moment, the FBI advance team pivoted around a
fifth floor corner, the tactical light on a high powered rifle creating a
dramatic visual. As lighting, it was superfluous thanks to a tall
east-facing window illuminating the hallway, but it closed the drama gap
created by the Batman’s presence. The lead agent stepped forward and
four others fell into place behind him: feds and GCPD dramatically backlit
by the window.
“Hall’s clear,” the lead called, and the last man ran
forward to squat before storage unit 508, snip a chain and drill.
The door opened, and the advance team swarmed in.
“Unit’s clear,” rang out, followed by a distant “Stairs
clear” and a louder “All clear!” down the hall. After a beat,
Gordon and Batman entered, followed by Detective Rowanski.
Batman’s eyes swept the room in a series of swift
glances while Gordon’s darted methodically left to right and Rowanski’s head
turned slowly like a mechanical scanner. The first thing they all
noticed was paper, single sheets of paper hanging from fishing wire, most at
face height but some higher. Following the wires up, there was fishing
net nailed to the ceiling tiles, with the fishing line tied to the netting.
One of the feds began expounding on “the unsub’s religious fixation” noting
that four of the apostles were fishermen and two were
repairing their nets when Jesus called them.
“Yeah, there’s that,” Rowanski
muttered, touching one of the suspended sheets. “Plus the fact that
that these are all pages from a bible.”
The back wall was covered in a
collage of the type associated with psychopaths, centered between two murals
that displayed considerable artistic ability. The collage was made of
headlines, clippings and magazine covers related to his crimes, profile pics
from his victims’ social media and printouts of their tweets arranged in a
mosaic. The image thus produced was a mountain fortress of some kind.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and
say that’s in Israel,” the least robotic of the special agents guessed,
snapping a picture.
The left mural was a woman, quite
beautiful and quite pale, with dark hair, big eyes, and sensuous red lips
where the paint was extra thick. That portion of the image had been
slaved over. Over the bottom lip, just at the top center where the
lips parted, the corner of a headline was placed as if the bewitching woman
was speaking it—a headline cut down to a single word: MURDER.
The mural to the right looked like
a bible illustration: the torso of a man with the head of a bull, its lower
body merged into a burning furnace. Within the furnace, the flames
were depicted with the same thick paint as the woman’s lips and in the same
painstaking detail, the highlights and lowlights in the flames punching out
a thick letter M in the same vivid red.
“Exodus,” Gordon said, examining
the page hanging closest to his face. “A verse is underlined. ‘You
unleash your blazing fury; it consumes’ Underlined in red.”
“This one’s Exodus too,” Rowanski
said. “Thou sendest forth thy wrath which devoured them.”
“A different translation of the
same passage,” Batman said together with one of the feds, the latter going
on to specify the first quote was the New Living Translation and the second,
King James.
“’Thou
sentest thine ire that devoured them,’” Rowanski read from a third leaf.
“Still the same page. Are they all different translations of that one
sentence?”
“This one’s Deuteronomy,” Gordon
said. “A fire is kindled in my anger and shall burn into the lowest
hell.”
“And this is Exodus again, Jewish
Orthodox,” said Batman. “Thou sentest forth Thy charon which consumed
them as stubble.”
“Charon. Well there it is,”
Gordon said bleakly. “He signs his work. Charon… God’s wrath… We
knew there wasn’t going to be a reason when we caught up with this monster
but actually seeing it makes it worse.
“Agent, analyze whatever
substance he used to underline those words. See if it’s ink or what
we’re all thinking.”
“The murals too,” the fed added,
pointing to the letter M superimposed on the flames in the furnace.
“M for murder? Seems a
little on the nose,” Rowanski said wearily.
“I’m thinking it stands for
Moloch, the demon god of the Canaanites. He’s sometimes depicted
besmeared with the blood of human sacrifice, sacrifices that were made to
appease his wrath. Seems to fit the theme.”
“Later,” Batman said, looking at
the collage. “Judging by the dates of these clippings, he adds to it
every six days. He’s coming back today. Everyone clear
out, now!”
Near the west side spur of the old Gotham Central
Railroad, a deceptively small and unobtrusive door behind the Biergarten led
to a large and complex living space that was recreated in miniature on a
central work table.
The problem represented by an arrangement of chessmen,
Ritz crackers and a cherry on Jervis’s model was not a simple one, for the
etiquette of a tea party is what made it a tea party rather than just
a bunch of hatted drones sitting around a pot of tea. “Bread and
butter before cake” as mater always said, though sandwiches counted as bread
and butter and both were currently represented by the Ritz cracker.
Cake denoted any sweets, in this case the boysenberry tarts represented by
the cherry, which was over-ripe and caused him to leave ominous red
fingerprints all over his papers. At least he hoped they were ominous;
he really couldn’t decide. If they looked like a toddler’s sticky jam
fingers, then it wasn’t exactly threatening, but if they looked like the
bloody marks of a recently departed killer, that was worth keeping.
Batman always threw prudent entry out the window if he thought a life was in
danger, so it was best to let him think the Queen might be ready to screech
“Off with its head” at any minute if it was feasible.
Which was all neither here nor there, as the Dormouse told
the Caterpillar. The point was that the stage management of a tea
party was not simple. Especially one presented for a Bat who would
(hopefully) come through the north window or else the west door in which
case the chute would (hopefully squared) deposit him on the target spot to
line up, more or less, with the imagined landing point from the north window
and (hopefully cubed) the same sightlines to take in the tea party…
The tea party whose exact dimensions and choreography
he couldn’t work out—drat!—even with the addition of a table
represented by a long box of sealing wax. It was so frustrating, he
decided to go out and get some real props.
As far as Batman was concerned,
the GCPD and FBI surveillance teams were one team too many. He
performed his customary vanish while everyone’s attention was focused on
their withdrawal from the storage unit, and he monitored the chatter without
intending to involve himself again.
..::Agent Brandize,
my surveillance team is moving into position now.::..
..::Copy that, standing by::..
..::Commissioner, SWAT is in
position.::..
..::Roger that.::..
..::Acknowledged.::..
Didn’t intend to involve himself
unless it was absolutely necessary. He didn’t like this. Gordon
had to know the balancing act an operation of this kind required. He
had to know it meant bringing enough men to take down the target but not so
many that he would sense a trap.
..::Be advised. According to the facility staff,
subject is a white male, approximately six foot, 220 pounds.::..
The FBI were inconsistent in
Gotham, sometimes subtle and efficient, sometimes overplaying their hand,
and even at their best, adding numbers that Gordon was not allowing for.
On top of that, he’d brought Batman into the operation—and for no reason
that Bruce could assess beyond leverage with the feds. It felt
wrong.
..::Profile also suggests extreme technical
sophistication. Awareness of traffic cameras, sightlines.::..
It felt wrong.
The rooftops in this area were hopeless and Batman had
taken up a position in a recess of the loading dock with a wide view.
And he could feel them. Gordon, SWAT, FBI,
the taxi driver, the mailman, the burger and coffee
outside the café. Too many eyes.
..::Brandize, tell our guy on the roof to find
another spot. I can see him from the street.::..
Too many eyes on alert, too much tension in the air,
too many people with guns, too many people.
..::Say again?::..
A martial arts master could sense it. Hell, a yellow belt could sense it. But would an ordinary man on the
street? How far down would you have to go until they couldn’t feel how
many people were scattered around this street, waiting—
..::The guy on the roof, northeast corner. The one
with the binocs.::..
Northeast corner? The Phelps Building?
Batman smashed the switch on his utility belt breaking into both networks as
he sprang into motion.
“You’re blown! No operative would take a
position there. It’s HIM! MOVE!”
..::We’re blown. We’re blown. All units, go hot
now.::..
..::Subject is on the roof. Repeat subject is
on the roof.::..
..:: All units, be advised. We have contact,
northeast corner 39th and Bedford. Repeat...::..
Within the first year running the Iceberg, Oswald
discovered he had a soft spot for a certain type who found their way to his
door who were unlike the prospective henchmen he dealt with when he worked
exclusively as the Penguin. He liked the transplants who came to
Gotham with ambition, just a little naiveté, and the wherewithal to
take a punch. The ones who stayed when the city smacked around their
expectations and stood their ground like proud emperor penguins, placing
their weight on their heels to endure the harsh chill when others limped
back to wherever the hell they came from.
The first such creature he’d designated Wren.
She was very pretty, but alas, too young for him. Even so he’d
been quite relieved when she showed up for work that one wintery night,
having obviously weathered whatever crisis had her on the brink of quitting
the week before. He remembered watching her that night when Harvey
condescended to share a bottle of his private reserve…
“The thing about Gotham,” he’d waxed like a philosophic
drunk, mangling something he’d heard on TV as if it was his own thought “is
the threshold for citizenship is quite modest. Two years, I should
say. –kwak– If you come to Gotham and still like it after two
years, you’re still having a good time and haven’t been totally ground down,
then you’re in–kwak.”
Harvey downed a shot and took out his coin, flipped,
and began talking with that opening statements air that meant he was going
to be a while:
“We appreciate the nod to our theme,” he said as Oswald
topped off his glass. “Two years is an adequate time, we agree (as you
knew we would), but we do feel some second criteria must be met. There
are aspects of Gotham life that invisibly link its residents—caped, rogue
and civilian—and separate them from outsiders—caped, rogue and civilian.
Breakfast for instance. Whether you have it at 6 am or noon, any
real Gothamite, anyone worthy of that title, has found a particular
place—or two—that is their spot. Whether it’s a
bacon-egg-and-cheese, the Gotham Post and a cigarette at the corner bodega
or nova eggs with the Times at Barney Greengrass, it is their spot,
they discovered it, and it belongs to them. That is where the
Gotham day begins.”
Barney Greengrass being the city’s temple of smoked
fish, the words had sizzled through Oswald’s buzz and seared themselves into
his soul… Quite right –kwak– eggs with sturgeon –kwak–
eggs with salmon –kwak– eggs with sable …But he never realized the
Gotham slant had made an impression, he was thinking only of that menu: eggs
with whitefish–kwak! Yet today, all these years later, he was
strangely proud of having found Catskill Grocery since his injured
cassowaries brought him to Brooklyn, and he’d come to feel, indeed, just as
Harvey said, that this is where the Gotham Day began.
Down the street, Doctor Maiya had a clinic in a boarded
up Catholic School, and she paid the Iceberg a nice referral for all the
banged up crooks sent her way. Her business now might be gunshot
wounds, stabbings, and the occasional slice from a batarang, but Maiya
had been a veterinarian before all the Bat-contusions and fractured
ribs. That was her training. It seemed to Oswald she should be
able to treat his cassowaries as well any anyone, and he was reasonably sure
a more legit operation wouldn’t make bones heal any faster. So every
third day he hopped on a train and ventured into this once foreign
neighborhood to check on Kiwi and Wop-wop, monitor their progress and adjust
his timeline for his revenge on the Bat who broke them—KWAK!
By the end of the first week he’d found Catskill, with
the counter inside and this pleasant outdoor courtyard in the back.
Before 10 am, there was fresh pastry and coffee brewed with Brooklyn’s
Catskill Mountain water. After 10, a fuller menu featured breakfast
gnocchi, lemon ricotta pancakes and pumpernickel-crusted quiche—kwak!—which
started his wheels turning.
Only the vilest of cynics would doubt the romance in
Oswald’s soul simply because he acknowledged the commercial possibilities.
There were over seven billion people on the planet for the simple reason
that boys like girls. It took a peculiar brand of stupidity to
ignore that kind of math, one of which Oswald was happily
incapable—particularly when the process by which boys and girls made those
seven billion people was colloquially referred to as the birds and the
bees.
That was his recurring thought as he sat in this
unexpectedly civilized corner of Brooklyn week after week, sipping coffee
that somehow made good on the management’s claims of superiority based on
the mineral content of their tap water. It was a fine day to be a
romantic when it began, before the city’s collective obsession with a
mystery killer: Selina married off in an act of conspicuous consumption that
filled the heart with joy and his cassowaries on the mend after their
spirited defense of his South Side warehouse.
The day after that victory, once his valiant
cassowaries were entrusted to the ministrations of Doctor Maiya, he’d
visited the Robinson Park zoo, for a win like that demanded penguins, live
and in the feathers! He hadn’t realized how long it had been until he
saw the fuzzy chicks of his previous visit had molted into their adult
plumage.
His cheer then vanished when, coming out of the Penguin
House, he spotted Victor on his way to Polar Bear Cove. He’d waddled
as quickly as he could behind a tree, hoping he wasn’t seen. The last
time the two men had run into each other this way, Victor had been so
miserably fatalist about Selina’s engagement to Bruce Wayne. The
encounter had soured his day and the mere memory nearly did so again,
sparking a realization about the Iceberg that was more depressing than all
of Victor’s pronouncements about marriage and death:
Since the end of the Rogue War, business was booming—except
for the couples. Before the war, the delightful Piculet sisters
had come to him as a gift from the Feathered Fates. Tawny the aspiring
chef and Pitta the lounge singer had brought a phenomenal rise in tourist
business: out of town, bridge and tunnel, and uptown gawkers. They
came first for the thrill of dining among Rogues, but they returned in pairs
for Tawny’s truffle mac n’ cheese and they lingered over round after round
of expensive liqueurs, rapt by Pitta’s romantic warbling.
Oswald had huffed for a block rather than hailing a
cab, the word “reparations”—KWAK!—echoing in his thoughts. How he
should have demanded reparations for that ruffian Falcone shooting up
the place, how the sum paid to replace the gold leaf did not begin to
compensate for the patronage and the prestige those talented Piculets had
brought to the ‘Berg.
In the weeks since, as a killer stalked Gotham,
Oswald’s anger mingled with those other musings on romance and greed. A
Love Birds initiative could be devised to restore that part of the
Iceberg’s business. He doubted any inducement would get the sisters to
return, but there were other chefs and lounge singers in the world, even if
they weren’t named for birds. The very menu before him – lemon
ricotta pancakes with caramelized apple, maple mascarpone, candied pecans
and maple syrup; pumpernickle-crust quiche with house cured salmon, kale &
crème fraiche – a new chef who could dream up gourmet morsels like
Tawny’s mac n’ cheese, outdoor seating in a romantic courtyard, and some way
to package it with the love birds theme.
Of course it would mean an investment, and he had sunk
quite enough of his own money into the business this month—the real
business, the hidden-beneath-the-surface business that produced a return the
tip of the iceberg would never match. Besides, it was Falcone’s
fault, and the Wrath of the Penguin demanded Falcone pay, somehow.
The man himself was out of reach, unfortunately, but his organization
remained. There were remnants of an Italian mob in Gotham, even if it
wasn’t what it had been, and there were remnants of another kind.
Falcone had enormous legal bills, and there is always flotsam when a great
fortune is liquidated… which brought him to a third item of
business in what was shaping up to be a very busy day.
Again he sipped, his eyes falling on a waiter
circulating with a coffee pot. There was one other arrangement he
should make, for the future.
“Rory,” he called as if he were the proprietor rather
than a semi-regular customer, and he broke into a greedy smile at the boy’s
prompt response.
“More coffee?” Rory asked, the pot in one hand poised
over the half-filled cup, milk pitcher in the other resting on a saucer.
“Freshly brewed?” Oswald asked archly, and Rory nodded.
“Just a heater, then sit,” Oswald replied, indicating
the space across from him and forestalling the objection with “Oh don’t
worry about the unscheduled break; you won’t be needing this job anymore…
You know who I am?”
“Order 41,” Rory said, indicating the plastic triangle
that told the staff where to bring his quiche.
“Don’t be coy. You’ve known who I am since my
second or third visit. You make it your business to be the one that
brings out my order, you remember extra salmon with the quiche, don’t have
to tell you twice. Real half-and-half, not some faux nut-flavored
milk, and the little plate under the cream pitcher is an especially nice
touch. Sit.”
The tone was that of a theme rogue who could command
the obedience of a bank manager, five tellers and armed guard with an
umbrella. Rory sat.
“This area has changed, kwak. Gentrified
now, but ascended plebs don’t tip for breakfast, now do they?
You’ll do much better working for me. Personal assistant, kwak,
and once I’m through with you for the day, you can hang around the ‘Berg’ if
you want, earn some real tips. Or whatever, kwak.”
Rory hesitated, and Oswald could read his thoughts:
everyone knew the kind of business the Iceberg patrons were in. Did
Oswald mean literally waiting tables for the tips or did he mean making real
money in the back room? The gambling, Talon’s phone cards, whatever fell
off the truck behind Crow’s garage? The truth was Oswald didn’t care, but
he wasn’t going to specify. ‘Or whatever, kwak.’ was clear enough to
anyone worth his time. If Rory couldn’t work it out, there was no
point in recruiting him.
And there it was, the greedy gleam.
Oswald had a new assistant. Now what to call him?
Auk perhaps, or Laridae? He didn’t really look like a Laridae.
Grebes maybe? Sandpiper? Well, there was time to work it out.
MANHUNT. It seemed a word from another era,
before entire news cycles ran their course in the time it took to microwave
popcorn. Before a phalanx of dedicated news channels could string
pundits together to dissect the details of a chosen story 24 hours a day, and
before that coverage could follow viewers in their pockets rather than
require communal groupings around a television.
But MANHUNT was the word - in extra bold, extra fat
type - emblazoned above the news crawls, except for GCN where it was
STATEWIDE MANHUNT in a narrow font, italicized and outlined in yellow to
compensate for the loss in typeface gravitas.
The scene outside the 28th Precinct lived up to the
drama promised by the word: sirens blazed over indistinct radio chatter.
Uniforms ran with rifles and loaded them into the trunks of squad cars while
blue and red lights flashed overhead. A black-and-white would speed
off followed by an unmarked Crown Victoria and a half-dozen journalists
toting all sizes of cameras, their press lanyards flapping wildly as they
raced to logoed vans sporting satellites on their roofs. Then the vans
sped off as well as the wail of sirens doubled and was joined by the roaring
flutter of a helicopter.
Afeter visiting his cassowaries and getting Maiya’s
assurance that they were fully healed and ready for a rematch with Batman,
Oswald withdrew a folded green flyer from his pocket, snatched from the
community bulletin board on an earlier visit to Catskill. He
double-checked the address and headed to his final errand in Brooklyn.
He crossed Prospect Park under a canopy of oaks and maples, passed a row of
pre-war brownstones (that had quadrupled in value since the time he
considered using one as a hideout—kwak!) and finally reached the
Botanical Gardens where the Lily Pool Terrace, Magnolia Plaza and
Shakespeare Garden had been temporarily joined by a mysterious pop-up shop.
For two weeks, Orchis was set up beside the Water Garden, offering a variety
of “living floral” personal products from lilac hand cream to honeysuckle
bar soap. Oswald looked uneasily at the orchids hanging down as he
entered the strange enclave, but while they resembled the vine curtain
around Ivy’s booth at the Iceberg, they didn’t seem animated the way her
plants did when their mistress was in residence.
At the center of the shop was a strange configuration
of metal rods clamped together like a steampunk art project, with coils of
flowering vines clustered around clear glass balls, like oversized
lightbulbs with two or three glass tubes attached. Inside each ball
was a flower.
“Each bloom is coaxed into one a them glass balls,” a
familiar voice squeaked. “So we get the scent without killing ‘em.
We capture the, whatcha call it, ‘molecular scent signature’ that’s used to
develop the fragrance, see?” She opened one of the tubes and extracted
a needle-like probe from the flower, and held it out for a patron to smell.
“We got all kinds a soaps and moisturizers and stuff made with the
fragrance, plus the usual eau de parfume and stuff, natch.”
While Harley babbled happily, Oswald heard a more
somber version of the sales pitch in an equally familiar voice. It was
coming from behind a curtain of vines that seemed to demark the tiny shop’s
back room, and he edged closer to make out the words “Each flower is gently
coaxed into a round glass bauble to capture the bloom’s molecular scent
signature, which is directly used to develop the fragrance. It was of
course a revelation to the perfumer (such an arrogant man, French of course)
that such diversity could be revealed once you let the precious blossoms
live. Dead, a rose is a rose and he considered the scent ‘basic.’
But in a garden like this, there are over two-hundred variations that emerge
with the proper care. He was here for hours trying to pick one.
‘They’re all so different.’ One rose has notes of star anise and
leather, another that’s identical to the eye has the scent of dried
apricot…” she laughed musically. “The poor fool would still be here if
I hadn’t intervened.”
Oswald returned to the cheerier front of the store, and
Harley squealed when she saw him. His shrewd eyes noted more suspicion
in her manner than surprise, which was curious but useful. He pointed
discreetly to the door, then gestured with the map they’d given him at the
entrance. He flashed one finger, then two, and left. A few
minutes later, Harley joined him at the Bonsai Pavilion designated 12 on the
map.
“Hiya, Ozzy. What’s new?” She tilted her head at
a guileless cute-puppy angle, and Oswald’s suspicions doubled.
“You, for one thing,” he said smoothly. “We
haven’t seen you at the Iceberg in some time. You or Pamela, not since
you came to purchase an alibi for Catty’s girl’s night.”
“Oh! Yeah! That!” Harley exclaimed with
excessive breath on each word.
Relief? Oswald though; not the reaction he was
expecting. He went on.
“I certainly hope you and Pamela aren’t avoiding us.
True, the Friday night crowd is a little more spirited these days, as well
as the Thursday night. And the Wednesday. Henchmen are a bit
nervy, and the groupies seem to have formed some kind of underground
workshop ‘theming’ tasers and pepper spray. It’s quite distasteful—kwak!
Some people are not cut out for creative expression in the Rogue line and
oughtn’t to try it. Happy hour can be a bit volatile now—but
what’s that to the likes of Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, eh?!”
“I dunno, Ozzy, Red just hasn’t been in the mood ta go
out much.”
“I’ve had this on my desk for weeks, waiting to give it
to you when you came in. But you never did,” he pronounced severely,
handing over a magazine called Audubon Monthly with a close-up of a
magnificent creature on the cover, its dark blue/nearly black plumage broken
up by tufts of red.
“It is a Harlequin Duck,” Oswald explained. “The
article makes an appeal, doomed I fear, to change its name to a Harley Quinn
duck. While the campaign is not likely to receive support in
bird-watching circles, the article is quite complimentary. I thought
you might enjoy it.”
“Wow, nice, thanks Ozzy,” Harley said, failing to
notice that the magazine was too old to be a recent discovery.
“As I said, I had been planning to give it to you when
you next came to the Iceberg, but you haven’t.”
“Oh well, you know how it is—” Harley started to say
when Oswald spoke over her.
“Or perhaps I should say, you never came to see me
on your many visits since that night, when you came by the Iceberg before we
were open for business. Gina allowed you to copy her key, I believe,
the stupid girl. $400 to let you copy a key rather than letting you in
herself and charging fifty to a hundred on each occasion.”
“Now Ozzy, look—”
“Do not think of compounding the offense by lying to
me, Harley. I am very fond of you, but I was robbing banks with
umbrellas before it occurred to you to get yourself employed at Arkham
with fraudulently obtained credentials. I will not tolerate your
nonsense. Kindly tell me for what purpose you have been sneaking into
my club.”
Harley let out an angry puff. She obviously
didn’t like his tone, but she was cornered and she knew it.
“Look, if I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to tell
Red.”
“I thought as much,” Oswald preened. “This has
something to do with the curtain of vines and greenery around her booth?”
“Well if you knew that much—” Harley began.
“It seemed to be dying and now it’s not.”
“—why didn’t you say something?”
“I wanted to know if you would tell me the truth.
And that’s much easier to determine if you don’t know how much I know,
obviously, kwak. Now, what precisely is going on?”
“Nuthin’… much. Red is just havin’ some trouble
maintaining the plants long distance, I guess. It’s like the plant
version of woman troubles. But if people found out, people y’know, she
got on the wrong side of, like Jonathan and Matt and Puddin’ and Roxy and
Maxie Zeus and Croc and those Demons, and KGBeast, Double Dare, King Snake—”
“Indeed,” Oswald said to move things along.
“They might take it as weakness and come after her,”
Harley concluded. “So I been watering them an’ stuff. You’re not
going to tell, are you, Ozzy?”
“Ordinarily, I would blackmail you both,” he said
haughtily. “Six months at least, as punishment.” He maintained
the mock-sterness for a beat, then said “But” and paused again for effect.
“You both did buy an alibi package on very generous terms, and as you know
that obligates all of the Iceberg staff, myself included, to keep your
secret in the face of the severest Bat-interrogation. And absolutely
no one came asking about your whereabouts that night. No one at all,
not even ordinary police. So I figure you’re owed one.” He gave
a sly smile that said he intended to keep her secret all along, and she
gushed her thanks.
“I will ask a favor,” he said then. “A favor I’m quite
sure you’ll enjoy, being the most, shall we say, romantically-minded
of the Iceberg’s top-tier clientele…” He explained about the
Love Birds package, his desire to convert the smoker’s alley into an
enclosed courtyard, and any other input she wanted to offer to help him
appeal to couples.
Jervis zig-zagged his way around the ping pong tables,
pretzel and sausage vendors of the Biergarten under the High Line, burdened
with shopping bags and boxes. He had gone to two stores specializing
in miniature furniture for doll houses. Dainty & Co. in Gramercy was
run by a rude couple who had the television on (with the volume higher than
it had to be unless one of them was hard of hearing) and could barely be
pried away from it to wait on him. It was Channel 13, local news,
something about the Charah Killer and the string of murders beginning with
Alan Seevers on Express Platform 7 at Gotham Central Terminus. News
about non-theme crimes was always such a dreary affair, and Jervis tried to
ignore the distraction and shop.
The police had a suspect apparently, called Gus Robert
Payne, and the old man remarked how “all these psychos” had three names.
Paul John Knowles, John Wayne Gacy, Victor Gellert Zsasz… It was
nonsense, and NOT the tasty kind of nonsense that went down like a rich
teacake. It was the other nonsense that didn’t hold up to the
slightest bit of critical thought, but which they stuck to because it gave
them something to say. Jervis made a note to return and hat the couple
for the roles of Queen of Hearts and bumbling second footman when the time
came. Then he left and headed uptown to Miniature Mercantile.
The store was such a delight, Jervis forgot his
troubles for an hour and left with a bag of adorable miniatures, having
spent much more than he intended but knowing it was worth every penny.
His imagination was ablaze with possibilities, and he returned to his lair
invigorated and— oh dear.
“Oswald,” he said cautiously, greeting the fellow Rogue
who was eying the beer taps with suspicion. A low, growling “kwaaaak”
appeared to sum up Oswald’s distaste for the spectacle: a sign inviting the
beer-drinking public to simply walk up to a tap and pour their own.
“I hear whispers that Batman’s first run-in with your
cassowaries went the way of the White Queen’s seashell,” Jervis said
discreetly. “I hope you’re not here to register a complaint. I
warned you my gear is not meant for a skull of that size, and there was no
telling how that dinosaur crest was going to complicate things.
Nevertheless, as the March Hare told the Dormouse, ‘we do not do refunds.’”
Oswald assured Jervis that he hadn’t come for a
refund—though he was curious how Jervis heard about the incident. As
usual, Jervis Tetch was tightlipped about his sources but eager to talk
about anything else. While he kept up a stream of gossipy nonsense, he
ushered Oswald to a door marked with a stylized H denoting an entrance to
the High Line, though it had been worn, sunbleached and graffiti’d to
resemble a runic hat.
Through the appropriately incongruous door they came to
a predictably narrow passage—where Jervis said he planned to install black
and white squares of linoleum for a more Wonderland-appropriate floor that
would enhance the optical illusion that they were traveling down and getting
smaller—to finally reach the lair itself. Inside, Oswald was –kwak–
“invited” to witness the transformation of the working model tea
party/Bat-trap as Jervis installed all of his frabjous new purchases from
Miniature Mercantile, the dollhouse store…
Well. It was the price you paid when you visited
Jervis. Oswald knew that, though that word invited implied a
choice you never felt you had, even without a hat. When you met Jervis
on his turf rather than yours, there was some sort of tea, some sort of
fruit tart and you watched him work. Last time it was theta waves with
a pinch of 5 Hz and pastry with gooseberry jam. Today it was blackberry
macarons (full size) and tiny doll house cinnamon buns, dainty monogrammed plates on dainty
miniature chargers, miniature spoons on miniature napkins, and a
frightful account of the serial killer that had half the city in a twist.
The killer who was destroying Oswald’s Happy Hour night by night, had
henchmen admiring Batman and groupies theming tasers. In short—kwak—it
was more pertinent than Jervis’s usual workshop blather:
“They found one of those serial killer shrines, don’t
you know, with trophies. ‘Cray-cray’ as the March Hare told the
Caterpillar. Oh, now look at these darling little gift bags. I
don’t really need them, but they’re so dainty and sweet, I couldn’t resist.
I thought they could go on the table like party favors, but only behind the
women’s place settings, none for the men, so the table doesn’t look too
cluttered…”
“Very nice,” Oswald said crisply. “But um, ‘one
of those serial killer shrines’?”
“Oh didn’t I tell you? The first store I went to,
the couple was glued to the TV and the news was going on and on like they do
when they’re just killing time waiting for something to happen. The
Blunders-in-Blue found a storage unit with this cray-cray shrine and they
staked it out, but the killer got away. Or possibly something at the
storage unit pointed them to his house, and that’s what they staked out, and
he got away. I’m not sure, you see at that point, I thought the best I
could do for the tea set was Royal Albert Old Country Roses. It’s not
too busy and the handles are so delicate. But there are only two cups
and I needed at least six because as you see, Batman could come in through
the skylight, the north window or the door, and it has to read from all the
sightlines, two cups just isn’t enough to get the job done… Well you
don’t care about that, as the unicorn told the Duchess, but I was occupied
with the teacups and really didn’t get the details. But wherever the
stakeout was, the killer got away. And I think he has three names.
Anyway, there’s a spectacular manhunt going on as we speak.”
“No!” Oswald exclaimed falling into full gossip mode.
Twenty minutes later, he left with the information he
came for: the location of the Riddler’s current hideout as well as Jervis’s
gut reaction to Love Bird packages. His Alices were few and far
between, but there were always a few groupies hanging out hoping to become a
White Rabbit.
His lucky “Malay Penguin” Umbrella removed from its
display case for the occasion, Oswald rapped the handle formally against the
buzzer at the Archie Dems Recording Studio, and was pleased when Doris
herself opened the door. That would save time.
“Archimedes?” he asked, referring to the Archie Dems
sign, and she nodded.
“Come on in, Mr. Cobblepot.”
“Today, I would be very pleased if you called me
‘Penguin,’” he said, placing both hands on hers in a show of sincerity as
she reached to take his umbrella.
“Then I guess you can call me ‘Game Theory,’” she said
sportingly.
“Oswald, to what do we owe the pleasure,” Nigma said,
glaring pointedly at Oswald’s hands on Doris’s hand on the umbrella.
“Kwak!” he answered sharply. “Not sure what the
etiquette is these days. Time was, it would have been quite an offense
to make an offer to a henchwench without asking first if I might make use of
her services. But I gather Game Theory is not a wench but more of an
independent contractor—kwak.”
“Partner,” Eddie said with emphasis.
“Yes, kwak, partner, quite,” Oswald echoed
quickly and directed the rest of his statement to Doris. “So I imagine
it’s a greater faux pas if I brought this to him before you.”
Doris and Eddie exchanged looks.
“Well, since you found us together, it’s a motion pot,”
Eddie said, while Doris mouthed ‘moot point’ in case Oswald didn’t get it.
“Come in. We were watching the chase, have you seen it?”
“The um, Charah chap,” Oswald said hesitantly.
“His name is Gus Robert Payne,” Eddie said.
“Three names,” Oswald noted. “I heard something
from Jervis, but it was, eh, hatterized. Botched stakeout, I take it?”
“That was only Act I,” Eddie laughed. “What
exactly happened is murky, but it sounds like, crazy or not, this guy is
savvy enough to get where he’s going by rooftop. On his way to his
creepy psycho killer holy of holies, he ran into the sniper SWAT had perched
to keep an eye on the door. Went downhill from there: he’s gone before
the cops know they’re busted, but they have a lead on where he lives, so
they go rolling into the Dixon Complex like it’s a war movie. I mean tanks
and troop transports and a line of squad cars, starts a roaring panic, the
South Side’s on fire—and again, Payne gets away. Well almost.
He’s in a red SUV heading for the interstate, a dozen police cars and
helicopters following him. O.J. for a new generation.”
Oswald chuckled and Eddie declared he “almost felt
sorry for Gordon,” which made Oswald squawk.
Five minutes later, Oswald found himself in a
comfortable enough chair, though it was certainly a brighter green than it
had to be, with a glass of iced tea sitting on a giant Rubik’s Cube end
table. Doris sat across from him with an improbably large jig saw
puzzle between them.
“London Bridge?” he asked as Eddie picked up a piece of
sky.
“Bat trap,” Eddie replied, hurling the puzzle piece
like a ninja star to stick into the back wall and burst into a puff of
yellowish gas. “Whatever you do, don’t touch any piece that might be a
reflection in the water,” he warned as he left them alone.
Oswald watched him go, marveling how anyone kept a roof
over their heads with such a theme. Really, birds were the only way to
go.
He briefly explained why he’d come:
“So, I was hoping I might make use of your thieving
expertise. You might help me identify –kwak– and perhaps
ultimately obtain some items of value connected to Carmine Falcone.
Ideally something of a –kwak– feathered nature. A ten percent
finder’s fee is customary for the former, I believe. Naturally if you
were to accompany me on the actual heist and lend your –kwak–
acrobatic and alarm-silencing skills, I would be prepared to offer…” he
looked at her piercingly “a seventy-thirty split.”
Doris bit her lip. It would be her first
commissioned theft for a figure of Penguin’s stature—that was nothing to
sneeze at.
“Fifty-fifty,” she said.
“Out of the question, I would be fencing the item
as well as participating in the theft, in person, as the senior rogue.”
“Fair enough, sixty-forty, final offer,” she said.
“My dear young woman, a newcomer like yourself should
be paying me to appear at your crime scene. I am the Penguin!
Just think if Batman were to surprise us.”
“He’ll ask where Riddler is,” Doris said flatly, and
Oswald sniffed.
It was true Game Theory had no reason to be star struck
the way Magpie or Roxy would have been. She was already partnered with
an A-lister…
“Very well,” he said. “Sixty-five/thirty-five,
but you must never tell a soul, not even Edward. If the others I fence
for were to hear of these terms, I would be ruined. And the
cat-and-bird jokes from Selina, I shudder to think, kwak!”
“Agreed, but only if it can wait a few weeks. The
research you’re talking about will take time, and I’m sort of in the middle
of something.”
Oswald appeared to think about it, emitting a strange
birdlike “Awwwk” sound that ended “ceptable.” Then he continued eagerly, “I
have other operations that will benefit from my personal attention while I
wait for your schedule to –kwak– open up. These thefts are to
be… call it ‘finance’ for a new project, all in the planning stages, no
timetable, but it does bring me to the other reason I’ve come. There
is another aspect of the project I thought you might help with. You
and Edward –kwak– are the most conspicuously happy couple among my
regulars, the Iceberg Love Birds, as it were. I would like your
input...”
..::We should clarify the L.E.X. Bearcat is a
non-military armored personnel carrier for law enforcement, not a ‘tank’ as
was stated earlier::.. the television droned. The newscaster was
killing time as updates on the slow-speed chase hit a lull. The main
screen offered a helicopter view of the harbor and interstate near the R.H.
Kane bridge, with a station bug reading SKY 8 LIVE in the corner, and a box
above proclaiming GCN SPECIAL REPORT courtesy of KRTV. A corner
box ran footage from earlier in the day, with a SWAT team in formation
alongside a parade of squad cars and police vans, storming through the gate
of a housing project.
..::Early reports from the Dixon Complex
where the GCPD closed in on a then-unnamed suspect in the Charah Killings
were somewhat alarmist. Residents described an “overwhelming force”
and characterized police as an occupying army “banging on doors, busting
down doors, and pulling people out of their apartments.” These reports
have since been debunked, but only after GCN reporter Janine Stefhaus had
put several accounts on the air, sparking panic and riots in the area.
One fire is still burning on the South Side, seven injuries reported, and
for a time there were additional reports of an ambulance unable to move
through the chaos… We’re now happy to report that situation is resolved.
Gotham Presbyterian reports four—not seven but four persons injured
in the riots have been admitted. They are described as having modest to
serious injuries though “none are life threatening.” We repeat, all of
those injured in the Dixon Complex riot have made it to the nearest hospital
and none are in critical condition… Mayor Capek is expected to hold a
press conference at 4 p.m. and Commissioner Gordon has released a statement
calling for calm…
..::Traffic has been cleared from Fourth Avenue to
the R.H. Kane Bridge as police engage in a prolonged pursuit unlike anything
seen since the slow-speed Bronco chase of O.J. Simpson in 1994. That
was in Los Angeles of course; nothing like this has ever happened in Gotham…
The suspect, now identified as Gus Robert Payne somehow escaped the police
dragnet at the Dixon Complex earlier today and is allegedly in the red SUV
that’s been intermittently visible. The Channel 8 helicopter has been
struggling to keep it in view. Ironically, the vehicle is a Ford
Escape, and I understand a number of memes are already circulating on social
media…::..
“Are you watching?” Oswald said, hurrying to the bar
and relieved to find Sly and Talon had made it through the throng of
redirected traffic and had the TV over the bar tuned in to the hypnotic car
chase. “I was cursed with a Lyft driver who had an absurd reverence
for orange cones. Simply refused to eschew the road blocks.
Miserable reception. I have had only spotty audio for the last twelve
minutes.”
“Riot’s done,” Talon reported. “The Bat-plane
sighting was a bust, but uh…” he pulled Oswald away from Sly and continued
with a quiet urgency: “Raven and Dove called in, Finch and Lark said they’d
be late because of the traffic situation, and the kitchen’s gonna be light.
Only one legit green card back there; nobody’s going to risk working their
way through the checkpoints.”
Oswald took it philosophically: however light the
staff, the chance of there being customers to wait on was equally thin if
the situation didn’t resolve soon.
“Well it’s not just that,” Talon whispered. “The
extra guys I hired for security since everything got crazy, they want
another three hundred each, per night.”
“Good to know you’re hiring muscle with the brains to
feather their nest,” Oswald grinned. “Terminate them.”
“But—”
“Their services are no longer required.”
“Sir?”
“Talon, why do you think there was such an overwhelming
show of force at Dixon this morning? The police are considerably more
put out than you or I by the city’s change in mood. They tried to end
it capturing this fool in a way that sent a message—kwak—made a
point—kwak! And they failed. In escaping, this Payne gave
them quite a black eye, and Gordon can’t allow that to stick. That’s
why there hasn’t been a Batmobile or a Bat-plane anywhere near this. The
GCPD needs to save face, they have to do it themselves, and they’re going to
do it tonight no matter what. By tomorrow morning, Payne will be in
custody, Gordon will get his headlines and everything will go back to
normal. I’ll have no need for extra muscle. But keep their names
on file. An extra three hundred a piece—kwak—that’s very good—kwak.
Balls—kwak. That’s what I like to see.”
In the Pearl apartment, the video screen ran GCN’s
coverage of the slow-speed chase, though Selina ignored it. In her
lap, she had an article from the Art Newspaper about a painting in the
Wellington Collection brought to London by the duke himself in 1813 after
the Battle of Vitoria in Spain. “Erroneously” attributed to an obscure
northern Italian artist, it was—surprise-surprise—recently discovered to be
a Titian. She quickly checked her notes on the table and… Yep, there
it was. On the Byron/Shelley list.
“Eppur si muove,” she whispered, imagining her
fingernail was a claw and tracing a pattern of cat’s whiskers around the
name.
Then she felt Bruce’s hands on her shoulder as he stood
behind her.
“I’ve been benched,” he announced. “Gordon
doesn’t want me out there tonight. In his mind, everything is riding
on the GCPD being the ones to take Payne in, on camera.”
“He’s told you to back off before,” Selina noted.
“Do you ever listen?”
“Sometimes. Tonight I’m going to. He thinks
it’s important the city see his men putting down the panic and restoring
order.”
“He might have thought of that before he started a riot
in Dixon. This chase isn’t the only thing that looks like L.A. in the
‘90s.”
“I’m still not sure what happened at Dixon,” Bruce
said, displacing an art book to make room on the sofa beside her. “Or
at the storage center before that. I was there and I’m not sure what
happened beyond ‘somebody blundered’.”
“Well I wasn’t there but I can hazard a guess,” Selina
said. “Too many pricks. Too many agencies, too many egos, too many
guns, too many eyeballs and twitchy trigger fingers.”
“Maybe,” Bruce grunted, distrusting the easy answer but
unable to refute it.
“Between the two of us, we’ve had, what, a dozen task
forces dedicated to bringing us in over the years? Usually with some Ahab
at the helm with a dream of making everything right again. If she can
get a collar around Catwoman’s neck—or if he’s the one who finally puts a
stop to that Bat vigilante—then Daddy will love him as much as his brother,
it won’t matter that she didn’t get into UVA. She’ll get that
promotion, his kid will be able to hit a fast ball, the Great Barrier Reef
will recover, the ozone layer will grow back, and herds of wild unicorn will
roam the plains as they did in days of old. And how has it always
ended? Not with either of us on a government issue choke chain, that’s
for sure. Invariably the overwrought blowhards get in each other’s
way, trip over their egos, trip over their own feet, or shoot
themselves in the head.”
“You know Gordon’s not like that. He’s never
cared about a perp walk and he can pack as much sarcasm behind the word
‘optics’ as you do with ‘motion sensors.’”
She smiled.
“So you’re taking the night off?”
“I’ve already told Barbara. Dick is going to
Bludhaven, of course. Cassie’s going with him, and Tim is studying for
a chemistry final. Besides, you’ve been stuck on the sidelines since
the wedding, the least I can do is accept one night without grousing.”
She tilted her head. “That’s sweet. You
want in on my Regency art ring? These are seriously bad dudes. I
would be completely on your side in 19th Century London; these are criminals
who should be punched.”
“So close,” Bruce said with a lip-twitch. “Try
‘arrested.’ ‘Jailed.’ Punching is a means to an end, that end
being arrested and jailed.”
“Bruce, I believe this guy,” she pointed, “burned
Titian’s Rape of Europa in the fireplace at Carlton House. I want to
sharpen my claws on his face, break his clavicle, and then hand him over to
you and watch you tenderize him with your fists all the way to the Tower,
where he gets the smelly damp room without a window. Take the win:
Laws shouldn’t be broken, fīat jūstitia ruat cælum.”
“Wow,” Bruce graveled while Psychobat squelched
the urge for a goal celebration in the crimefighter’s instinct that it must
be a trap. “He really burned a Titian?”
“I can’t prove it in court, but I think so.
Yeah.”
“You can tell me about it later,” he said, kissing her
cheek and then grinning like his teenage self plotting a boyish escapade
behind Alfred’s back. “Tonight I thought Tommy might take Colette out.
I know a place that might be fun.”
“Who are you?” Selina asked.
“The husband of Selina Kyle Wayne,” he said sincerely.
“It turns out, I’m allowed to have fun. On my honeymoon, with an
unexpected night off and the city’s nightmare coming to an end in the
next half-hour,” he added, pointing to the vid screen, “we are
allowed to have fun. Get your things.”
Tommy Pearl got out of the cab first, having given the
driver triple the usual tip for a ride of that length, along with a wink to
thank him for his silence. He then helped his blindfolded date from
the cab, positioned her just so facing what Google had called “a happening
spot for local craft beer, wine and cocktails.” As the cab drove off, he
began narrating like a true Gotham transplant excited to be introducing a
part of the city he just discovered:
“Once the Great Melting Pot,” he began dramatically.
“No,” Colette said softly.
“Then drug supermarket and cocaine capital of the North
East.”
“…”
“And finally,” he said whipping off the blindfold,
“Hipster Apocalypse. The East End.”
Colette looked at the bar “happening spot” in
front of her, called The Belfry, and the sign reflected in its door for an
equally hip establishment behind her, called Fat Cat. She turned to
Tommy with dazed and fascinated horror.
“Why?” she whispered.
“Because we can,” he said simply. “Colette has no
connection to this part of town, and as I remember, Gina O’Malley took a
perverse pleasure including the neighborhood in her cons. So why not?”
“The words ‘Hipster Apocalypse’ for a start,” she
laughed, but it was a laugh that said she was willing to go along with his
crazy adventure. Then she whispered “I taught you too well. The
only other person who ever managed to get me down here ‘for fun,’ and on
such screwy reasoning, was Eddie.”
“I did not need to know that,” Tommy murmured.
“I’m supposed to think like a cat burglar, not a rogue.”
“Then forget I said it,” Colette soothed, sliding her
arm through his as they walked. “I’ve seen how you date,” she
gestured to The Belfry before elaborating: “opera house roof, picnic basket,
quirky romantic. I’ve had the playboy treatment: d’Annunzio’s, red
carpets and early exits, leave the Porsche double-parked near the after
party, Page Six tells the world you were there all night. And I’ve
seen the real you. When you want to impress: dinner for two in the
garden, Alfred pouring a Chambertin ’94... And the real you relaxed:
sesame noodles at my place, no wine since we’re both going out later.
I’ve even seen how Matches shows a girl a good time: oysters and Guinness at
an authentic Hell’s Kitchen Westies’ pub and then watch him gamble at his
new favorite poker room.” Her eyes shown with admiration as she
finished, “Tommy is something new. So, you’re driving.”
“Down that way,” he said, pointing, “there is a ‘Meow
Parlor,’ café with by-the-hour petting of its resident cats, sandwiches and
wi-fi. I figured that’s probably too on-the-nose.”
“Much like the Belfry,” she agreed. “You weren’t
kidding about the hipster apocalypse.”
“I think they also sell shirts,” he added.
“The Belfry or the Meow Parlor?”
“Yes.”
Wow, she mouthed to herself. Tommy cleared
his throat.
“But ‘cattiness’ is what tonight’s outing is about.
Given the history, the slurs on Catwoman’s good name this neighborhood has
been a part of, I thought you would appreciate what it would do to the
people who spun those original stories to know that planning tonight’s
outing, I consulted the blog of a
raconteur-author-lawyer-provocateur-hip-hop aficionado-restauranteur, and
there I found The. Quintessential. Expression. of that old neighborhood’s
absolute, no coming back from this ever, demise…” They came to a stop
at a storefront as Tommy announced “The trendy Asian sandwich shop.”
BAODOWN, the sign read, the two words merged
into one but distinguished by contrasting colors and a shamelessly chic
bauhaus font.
“Experts confirm that a gentrified slum has reached the
point of no return when a Taiwanese or Korean sandwich shop appears with
offerings that take two minutes to describe (but probably include pork
belly, peanuts and cilantro) and include a protein that takes more than two
hours to prepare. In this case, the pork is braised for five
hours—served with house relish, crushed peanuts, and Taiwanese red sugar—and
the chicken is brined for six hours in a Taiwanese five-spice brine, then
fried in sweet potato starch, seasoned with red pepper powder, cilantro, and
again, Taiwanese red sugar.”
Colette giggled.
“I think that sentence would cause physical pain to the
authors of those old Post articles and their trashy East End
crimefighter.”
“Plus we get to actually eat the sandwiches,” Tommy
pointed out. “They sound pretty good.”
“You are all kinds of strange, Thomas Pearl,” she said
admiringly, and they went inside.
The deep, narrow shop had a window in the back, and a
television was audible from the kitchen as they stood studying the menu.
The kid taking their order was happy to supply an up-to-the-minute update.
He was of the old neighborhood clearly, with an East End-that-was view of
cops chasing criminals, even if the criminal was Gus Robert Payne, the
Charah Killer:
“So the Ford Escape made it all the way to the seaport,
hit those old cobblestone streets and OW! it was all over but the crying.
Maybe dude thought he could make it to the bridge, I dunno. There’s a
parking lot under there used to be good for transfers and gun buys.
Maybe he thought there’d be some brothers around to run interference.
But the Bat cleared that shit out years ago. There was jus’ no one
there. Cops got him cornered outside this old hotel. Heh, if he
thought he was gonna make it inside, he must be batshit. Bam, kissing
pavement the second that door started to open. Like the split
second. On the ground, handcuffs, game over. News was sayin’
show’s over ‘til morning and they go to some Real Housewives shit, come back
like ten minutes later. Say they’re going to show the perp walk when
the cops get him back to the precinct, and after that, gonna be a press
conference. Some hotshot DA been watching all this, bitch can’t wait
‘til morning.”
Tommy and Colette took their sandwiches to one of the
small tables on sidewalk out front, and Tommy positioned his phone so they
could keep an eye on the news.
“Something’s wrong,” Colette noted, looking in his
eyes.
“I’m not sure what,” he murmured. “This should be
the end; he’s in custody. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels…
Something big is happening here.”
“What if we cut the honeymoon short?” she whispered.
“You must have an exit strategy, considering how long we made it.”
Tommy took a deep breath.
“I wanted to establish a baseline. I thought I could
show that nothing had really changed. For us, our public selves.
Maybe I wasn’t a playboy anymore, but I was still the same hedonist who’d
put my own pleasure above other considerations, and I married a woman of the
same stripe. That’s why the extended honeymoon, so in the future we
could still disappear whenever we needed to: call it golfing in Abaco or a
yacht show in Singapore…”
“I know the song,” Colette cut him off with a smile.
“One-Percenter Shock and Awe, I know it’s your favorite, if only because of
the cars involved. I like it too, and I get that you had a
plan. But I know you, love, and there are branches and
contingencies on that plan, and branches on the contingencies on the
branches. And then separate from that there’s Plan B with branches and
contingencies of its own, Plan C, D, D-alpha 1, D-alpha 2, D-alpha
Metropolis…”
He chucked into his sandwich and looked at the street
around them with concern.
“Okay, yes, I do have something that would allow us to come
back early without anyone daring to read into it. Something on a scale
that’s just ‘Wayne,’ they can’t pretend to understand and would be laughing
stocks if they tried. No one will presume to have an opinion about us
based on…” he sighed. “But it will break Clark’s heart.”
Bruce couldn’t say what he found unnerving, but
something in the day’s events prompted him to continue Tommy and Colette’s
date rather than returning home to watch the press conference in private.
He even wondered if, subconsciously, that’s why he’d brought them to the
East End in the first place: to be surrounded by ordinary Gothamites in the
aftermath of Payne’s capture.
The kid at the order window recommended a “dope little
place” down the street that was good for drinks, “real low key,” sometimes
had indie-rock bands, but there wouldn’t be anything going on tonight… Tommy
grunted. They could watch the press conference with a random group of
locals and gauge the neighborhood reaction.
The mood stepping into the bar wasn’t good. There
were steep, narrow stairs leading to a sleazily posh basement, where
mahogany paneling and antique advertisements evoked Boss Tweed's corrupt
political machine, once run from this very spot. As Tommy and Colette
descended, they could smell it: agitated uncertainty. The television
was on but muted, while the house music felt like repetitive, harmonic
itching powder. The silenced TV news was replaying the slow-motion
chase, the helicopters circling, police storming the Dixon projects “like an
occupying army,” Payne’s ultimate capture, and finally the jarringly
well-lit stillness outside the Gotham South Precinct.
Tommy and Colette’s eyes met, feeling each other’s
senses on hyper-alert. Feeling suspension. Not danger,
not yet. People balanced—just barely—near a tipping point. That
brightly lit stage in front of the precinct waiting for the next act to
begin, while that strangely agitated music thumped.
They each ordered a beer and absorbed the gripe of the
moment: Since Payne’s capture, a Twitter account had appeared calling itself
GothamDASpy. It claimed ADA Josephine Mackey—the one who called the
late night press conference—had been “stalking” through the office during
the chase. It said she made her colleagues uncomfortable with her
palpable hate as she snarled about the inevitability of Payne’s capture.
That “it made your skin crawl” according to one associate, the way “blood
and venom practically dripped from her mouth.” That she “had a
screaming fit” at one point, calling for the police to shoot out Payne’s
tires—and to shoot Payne himself if that’s what it took to end the pursuit
that was making a mockery of Gotham law enforcement. But minutes later
she was vowing to prosecute Gordon personally if the police used lethal
force, robbing her of the opportunity to bring Payne to trial and put a
needle in his arm herself.
Residents of the old East End and the new were equally
aware Gotham had abolished the death penalty, and speculation ran high that
Mackey wanted to use the Payne case to bring it back. The new East End
saw ambition; the old, blood lust. Both saw a bitch. A bitch who
was probably crazy and definitely out of control… but for all the agreement,
the fault lines were visible. The bar’s patrons were united in their
disgust for Mackey, but there were undercurrents of blame. Each side
faulted the other for the fact that an unhinged whack job had power.
On the news, the still image outside the precinct began
to show movement. The volume was turned up, and the jeering began with
the announcement that Payne’s transport would be arriving momentarily.
The heckling nearly drowned out the more important development that the
press conference had been cancelled. The fuse was now lit.
Though the press conference was rescheduled for
tomorrow at 11, all the crowd heard was the name Assistant District Attorney
Josephine Mackey. The bar erupted into the kind of violence that would
have been commonplace for the neighborhood—if Tommy and Colette weren’t
among the combatants.
Within a punch-backhand-kick-elbow on one side
and an block-duck-upswing-kick on the other, they stood side-by-side
facing away from each other. They kicked in unison, and as their
respective opponents fell away, they faced each other for a moment, eyes
blazing with excitement, then positioned back-to-back.
"We need to do this more often," Tommy breathed.
Another pair of simultaneous kicks and Tommy bent over
while Colette vaulted over his back, grabbing a tray from the bar. She
swung wide, taking out her target and a bonus who’d pulled a knife, then
passing the tray to Tommy who took out one of his own.
Tommy took down his next attacker with three swift gut
punches, while Colette considered the nearest menace with bored contempt.
"This is why no civilized person with a shred of self-respect will have
anything to do with this neighborhood," she said as he came at her with the
bear-hug attack favored by Ubu and the threatening growl favored by dogs.
She dropped to get under his center weight, then pushed
up and against his chest with her left as he moved in, using his own
movement to propel him into her right cross. It was aimed below the
jaw to smash brutally into his throat, and he fell back, choking. She
finished him with a dainty shoe descending onto his chest, holding him down
while she punched his head.
Tommy blocked the guy coming at her with a bottle,
grabbing the arm and delivering a nerve pinch that forced the fingers open,
then hurling the assailant neatly into a table with his right while he
caught the falling bottle in his left. He broke it on the side of the
bar and tossed it to Colette. "Claws," he suggested, as he casually
elbowed a man in the face who was coming at him from behind.
"Thanks," Colette said, smiling at the jagged edge
weapon as Tommy ducked under a wild swing. He came up, holding the guy
at arm's length by the throat, and Colette took him out with a spinning high
kick to his chin…
No one heard the TV’s announcement that ADA Mackey had
been suspended leaving tomorrow’s press conference to be conducted by Erin
Cassidy, and no one saw Detectives Rowanski and Reed lead a handcuffed Gus
Payne through a gauntlet of uniforms into the Gotham South Precinct.
PAGE SIX TV
Your daily dose of gossip straight from
the pages of the Gotham Post! Dissecting the most outrageous,
provocative and entertaining stories from the Post’s iconic gossip feature
PAGE SIX!
RIGHT NOW on PAGE SIX TV – Bestseller Bradford Dormont
took time out from his next novel to appear at a Hamptons bash with this
Taylor Swift lookalike. Also in attendance were Robert Downey Jr,
Jimmy Fallon and Ash Torrick, star of Ash Torrick's Encryption.
THEN – Trendsetter or Tragic – Margot Kidley's Venice
Film Festival look had a lot of people buzzing. It's the first JJ
we've seen on a red carpet since the designer’s supposed "First look at
Selina Kyle's wedding dress" was exposed as a hoax, and critics have been
appropriately catty. Selina Kyle, you remember, was actually
married in Deeor. Not only was JJ’s black lace number a fake, it is
pretty darn close to an Alexander McQueen from his 2008 collection, which
was then used for a wedding dress in a Harry Potter film without giving the
designer credit. Not exactly a criminal rip-off, except for some
self-serving comments JJ made about her wedding look not putting forth the
same tired white dress any man would have given Ms. Kyle. Honey, I'm
pretty sure Alexander McQueen was a man. He won four Designer of the
Year awards more than you'll ever see, and before that he worked at
Givenchy, who was also a man. Shut up, you embarrass yourself.
And Margot looked like she was wearing Post-its.
PLUS – He's supposed to be in rehab, but did Dashiell
Tate escape to reunite with the nanny who started his downward spiral?
Well first, maybe we should stop calling her the nanny since she did that
Playboy spread. So “Did Dashiell Tate escape rehab to reunite with his
Playboy model girlfriend?”
BUT FIRST – Why is Gotham's power couple cutting their
honeymoon short? Turns out—Get this—three satellites on the orbital
ring crashed into each other. Yeah, I wouldn't think that's supposed
to be possible, but somehow… Anyway. As if that's not bad enough, one
of the satellites belonged to DP Media, as in Daily Planet Media, as
in Clark Kent, the best man. So Bruce Wayne is coming home to oversee
a Wayne Tech sale of some new satellites. It's a long process
apparently, takes years to complete, no time to waste getting started.
Not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars, am I right? And get
this: as a special favor to his BFF, Wayne is giving the Daily Planet 500
hours of piggyback time on his private GPS satellite. Heh, Bruce Wayne
has a personal satellite, can you believe it? I mean of course you
can, he's Bruce Wayne. You have a toothbrush, a suit, a phone, a
satellite. Everybody knows that; who doesn’t know that?
Ha-ha! I'm Naomi Sands, Welcome to Gotham Post TV.
I'm here with Page Six Entertainment Anchor Jeremy Kaye. We’ve got
lots to gossip about today so let's not waste any time...
To be continued...