People dying in the snow.
Everest or something.
Should have been funny. Brains
soft. Taking their clothes off
when the shivering stopped.
Laying there freezing, knowing they were going to die if they didn’t move
but their soft serve brains didn’t care.
Winding up all stiff and blue.
Should be hilarious. Lips
blue. Blue under the eyes.
Heh.
Couldn’t see the funny though. For days, Joker couldn’t
see the funny. For days, he
couldn’t see anything but dead teeth.
People that… were people.
Human beings like him.
They breathed and moved and laughed and ate pizza, they had birthdays
and got annoyed at blonde dimwits who read romance into a cartoon about
alien invasion and filled the fridge with SlimFast.
Now they were dead teeth.
They had breathed and moved and laughed and they didn’t do any of those
things now because he’d killed them.
How many? So many years
it all blurred. All that smiling
death.
He lay there, knowing he was going to die if he didn’t
move but his soft serve brain didn’t care.
It was so… he was so… paralyzed with horror.
So many death smiles. The
part of Joker’s mind that pulled towards madness strained for relief.
People like him—living, breathing people, gasping and twitching until
they were nothing but dead teeth.
Because of him. The
reality like a razor. There
had to be a way to make it stop,
to make it into something else. Make
those people into something else.
Not human beings who ate pizza and had birthdays.
There had to be a way, but the part of his noggin that pulled towards
madness like a bad shopping cart couldn’t find the way.
Day 2... Bodies convulsing, foam oozing from their
mouths in disgusting spurts while the lips stretched into those frozen
smiles. Those awful frozen
smiles. People who watched
football and complained about Campbell.
They were all dead teeth now.
They watched football and took the subway and complained about the
smell—and about Campbell. It
wasn’t even a third or fourth down; it was the first down and he could’ve
had a 1-yard TD but opted to throw a dangerous pass into coverage and was
intercepted. And now they’d
never eat wings again or complain about Campbell’s back-foot throw, the kind
of footwork even a rookie’s been broken of, and they wouldn’t say a word
about it because now they were all...
There had to be a way to make it stop—grinning—there had to.
All of those awful grinning
bodies. Smiling at their
lives being snuffed out as if it was some sick joke, as if they were echoing
the laughter—his laugher—the memories of his own wild laughter, his sadistic
glee while they twitched and convulsed.
There had to be an escape from this torment, but the part of his
brain that pulled towards madness couldn’t find the switch.
Day 3… He might have killed himself if he could move,
but he couldn’t. People who had
birthdays. All those loved ones
wouldn’t be buying cakes anymore.
Probably thought about them though, on their birthdays.
Looked at photos, told stories, remembered the good times.
Once you’re gone, they remember the good times.
Birthdays, graduations, family vacations.
And the anniversary of the day they died, that’d wind up the ol’
memory machine every year. And
any time Joker’s name appeared in the news, that would bring a fresh wave of
memories of their loved one and renewed the hatred towards the clown who
killed them. The clown.
How many must hate him.
Figure two or three on average, for each death smile… Two or three left
behind. If only his brain could
find the latch.
By the end of Day 4, dehydration and hunger brought
salvation. He started
hallucinating. Delusion nibbled
at the edges of reality. And the
part of his mind that pulled towards madness
lunged—lunged like a starved
dragon breaking its chains and obliterating every obstacle in an inferno of
fiery wrath as it raced to freedom, its talons ripping the meat from any
unfortunate thought that didn’t have the good sense to burn.
Selina Wayne.
She suddenly understood why honeymoons were still important in an age
when husbands and wives were used to sleeping together long before the vows.
Because this was… this was… What was this?
She was giddy.
She was lightheaded with a kind of euphoric drunken giddiness, and
trying to function in her normal life as her normal self in this condition
would be a ludicrously doomed exercise.
Much better to putter around the Amalfi Coast or Paris or Hawaii,
worship bodies and indulge themselves until this crazy giddiness passed.
Get a feel for the man-and-wife of it before having to do it in your
normal life. And that was for
people who had a normal life that
didn’t include secret identities, lunatics wanting to kill them, the
intrigue of billion dollar foundations, feuds between multinational
corporations, the occasional interdimensional crisis, and oh yes, wizards.
Much better to have some time settling into themselves before she
woke up to “Today is the first day of the rest of your life as Mrs. Bruce
Wayne.”
Fortunately they fell in love behind masks.
She loved a man in a mask long before she knew his name or saw his
face, so it didn’t spoil things if they were playing house as Tommy and
Colette for these few weeks while “Bruce and Selina” were off honeymooning
in a remote Scottish castle with the kind of privacy only Wayne clout could
obtain. It allowed Batman to
remain in Gotham while they enjoyed a different kind of privacy.
At night she did have to forego Catwoman, but that was no different
than laying low after a heist.
She’d done it a dozen times: a blonde wig, some beach reading, usually a
research project in case the beach read didn’t grab her.
She’d done it a dozen times.
With the crucial difference that this time she wasn’t alone.
Tommy was a thief like herself.
If you turned your head and squinted, you could imagine they were
laying low together after a good heist.
Anyone could honeymoon in Maui or Venice.
Only they could find a honeymoon getaway as exotic as Thomas Pearl.
One thing she’d learned about Bruce when they were
building the Pearl identity was that he had a connection to his time in
Japan that was unlike other places he’d lived in his years of travel, and
she was embracing that with the enthusiasm of a young wife setting up
housekeeping. There were two
Japanese department stores in Gotham, and she’d visited both while he slept.
Returning, she’d unpacked some beautiful new bowls, carved
chopsticks, and specialty food as if each was a priceless bit of loot after
a heist. Then she refreshed
herself on how to make sencha and woke him with a cup of the standard green
tea “just like I remembered from Tokyo.”
“Good morning, husband,” she purred, which brought a
guttural rumbling when he’d patrolled almost to dawn, but this morning
brought only a low moan since he’d returned before four.
“Get up, sleepy,” she coaxed.
“Drink your tea.”
An eye opened and attempted, all by itself, to convey
the stern unyielding judgment of the Avenging Angel of Justice.
It wasn’t terribly effective without the cape and cowl, the night sky
brightened by an imposing moon behind him, the evidence of a crime in the
fleeing thief’s loot sack, or even his left eye, but it did move the
criminal to set aside the tea and straddle his naked body.
“Let’s try this again,” she said, the purr taking on an
edge of menace as she raked the scar of an ancient cat scratch.
“Good morning, husband.”
“Good morning, my impossibly beautiful wife,” he said,
grabbing, twisting, jutting out his hip and trapping her legs in a ferocious
pin and then spinning them so he was perched on top of her.
“Did you say something about tea?”
“Mhm, I brought you tea,” she said, accepting the pin
as if it’s what she wanted all along, and letting her arms come to rest
around his neck. “Real sencha
from Shiuoka province ‘just like you remembered from Tokyo.’”
“You’re perfect,” he said, and kissed her.
Much of the day was spent in the way that’s typical of
newlyweds, with breaks of Bruce making lunch (the toasted turkey sandwiches
that were his chief culinary achievement—with the modification of the
special French mustard Selina preferred), discussing what she’d be doing if
she was laying low alone and what they might be doing if they really were in
that Scottish castle. There was
speculation if the castle was haunted and if anyone they knew like Hella
might be dropping in. There was
a lightness to it all, even with this talk of the underworld.
Two people who had passed through the storm and won their well-earned
happy ending, giddy with the knowledge that it wasn’t an ending at all but a
beginning sizzling with possibilities…
Which led to more love making, and finally dinner.
This time Selina cooked, one of the delicate noodle
dishes she’d bought the stuff for that morning, while Bruce set the table.
She pointed him to the new chopsticks.
Meant for her place, obviously, was an elegant lacquered pair in
Catwoman purple, with a thin band of flowers near the top.
Leaving him the pair with the carved black handle that looked fit for
a shogun.
He beamed and his cheeks warmed, then he turned and
snuck a glance at her. The cat
burglar from the train station…
Sometimes it was hard to get his head around it: Catwoman was now his wife.
She’d replenished his incense too—the sandalwood he
liked, the brand he favored, of course.
She had an eye for detail that would do Sherlock proud.
There were three new bowls in the room too, each more exquisite than
the last. Two were decorative,
the third was filled with Japanese matcha chocolates—because they’d made
foreign candy Thomas Pearl’s signature to discretely advertise the cities of
his showpiece heists.
After the noodles came traditional red bean mochi for
dessert and matcha (which she’d learned to make that morning while he slept)
from the Uji district in Kyoto, the most famous tea growing region in Japan.
“I don’t deserve you,” he said, looking at her in
wonder.
“Boy, you really liked those chopsticks,” she smiled.
“I know this was all a bit much.
I’m just… giddy. We got
through it. And we’ve put up
with so much of that normal people stuff to get here.
Now as far as everybody but the family knows, we’re out of the
country. It’s finally just you
and me and I guess I just—” she laughed “—I don’t know.”
She took a deep breath, looked into his eyes and declared “I
don’t know, but I know this.
Thomas Pearl is the best gift you could have given me.”
“I thought he was your gift to me,” Bruce teased.
“Tom Coronet
started out that way, but by the time he became Tommy Pearl there was
definitely more in it for me than… Bruce, what’s wrong?”
His eyes had narrowed, and the atmosphere of playful
intimacy seemed to have evaporated from the air.
The muscles around his mouth had slackened, and at first he stared to
the side just past Selina. Then
his eyes flicked to one of the new bowls with a Daruma design.
For just a fraction of a second there was a sense of Batman at a
crime scene where he wasn’t welcome, moving silently around the police who
didn’t want him there and discreetly tagging a piece evidence they didn’t
recognize for what it was. Then
he looked back at Selina and smiled.
“Nothing,” he said. “And you’re right. By the end Pearl was a gift we gave each other.” His eyes were carefree and full of love again as if nothing had happened.
After dinner they’d curl on the sofa with two glasses
of Chateauneuf du Pape, and Bruce would declare this really was the last
night. He’d been taking alcohol
inhibitors since the engagement party and now that the wedding was over, he
really had to resume normal habits.
Selina purred and ran her finger around the edge of his glass,
reminding him of all those times she had tempted him: how he always refused
wanting so desperately to agree. There was quite a backlog of indulgences owed to balance the scales…
After a pleasant hour he left on patrol, and after
kissing him good-bye, she looked at the window where he’d left into the
after dark Gotham that was for now off limits.
It couldn’t be helped.
Selina Kyle was on her honeymoon and too many people knew Selina was
Catwoman. It wasn’t forever,
just these few weeks. She returned to
the sofa, poured another glass of wine and broke out her beach read...
Bradford Dormont’s An
Appreciable Sum wasn’t any better than she remembered and was quickly
cast aside. She’d also picked up
his friend Torrick’s first novel
Impasto and Pentimento, and while the writing was superb, it was a heavy
read and not the kind of thing a woman wants to get into on her honeymoon.
That left “the project.”
She retrieved a purple leather messenger bag from her
luggage and began unpacking its contents: catalogs of the Hope Collection
and the Angerstein Collection, biographies of Lord Byron and William
Buchanan, a photo essay on the Chinese drawing room at Temple Newsam, and
the volume that started it all:
Carlton House Under the Prince Regent.
It was “a daring new history” when she bought it just to have a bag
from the museum gift shop while she was casing the place.
She might have pitched it when she returned to Gotham, but for a
chance remark of Oswald’s.
Oswald Cobblepot, who she would have guessed didn’t know who Byron was,
mentioned all the jokes about birds
he’d put into Don Juan. It
was something she’d just seen referenced, somewhere.
It took the second half of a Grey Goose martini to remember it was on
a book jacket. When she got
home, she found the book in question was the one she picked up trying to
figure out that weight-gait authenticator at the Hockney exhibit, the only
publicly accessible example of the system used in Stefanyk’s private vault.
Carlton House Under the Prince
Regent… The index had cryptic
references to a rare Audubon volume in France, though what that had to do
with anything she couldn’t guess.
She was curious, but she’d only got a day into the research when Len
Stefanyk fired his decorator.
Number 16 on the list of world’s Top 200 art collectors had fired the
decorator for the mansion he’d purchased on Gotham’s Upper East Side and
there was suddenly a much cleaner path opening to his private vault with the
weight authenticator used by Interpol and the Pentagon.
By the time that job was finished, the Justice League had announced a press
event giving 100 reporters a tour of their new Watchtower (aka an
unprecedented opportunity to get to the Storm Opals) and she was packing
again. The Byron research went
into the pending file known as the Hell Mouth closet.
Selina stroked the leather of the messenger bag,
remembering the adventure that followed, and then shook it off and began
paging through Carlton House.
Four hours later, open books lay everywhere and Tommy’s
wall-length monitor was wallpapered with open windows on Thomas Hope, Lucien
Bonaparte, the bankruptcy and suicide of the prince’s art dealer, the Elgin
marbles, the Spanish Gift and a spate of hasty donations to museums in the
early 19th Century.
In the midst of it all, Selina was transfixed, a detective instinct she
hadn’t possessed back then completely enthralled by the mystery: A painting
Ponzi scheme that went all the way to the Prince Regent?
Jewels and artworks appearing out of nowhere in London as soon as the
statute of limitations ran out in France?
Titians and Murillos copied by students at the Royal Academy while
the originals wound up at Carlton House?
And the Audubon that started it all
looted from Napoleon’s brother and
given to the Regent’s mistress?!
And Byron knew.
A keen detective’s eye hiding behind a dilettante fop, he knew
everything. And he hinted.
He taunted them in his
writing, provoking a slew of now famous donations that were—Selina couldn’t
hold back the belly laugh—that were nothing but traffickers in stolen art
dumping the objects of their shady
deals before they could be exposed!
Byron, not smart enough to do his crimefighting without a mask, got
himself exiled and…
There was a creak at the window, followed by light
rapping. Selina looked up and
saw Batman on the fire escape, an unhealthily red blotch where he leaned
against the glass. She hurriedly
went to open it.
“Glad you’re awake,” he groaned, followed immediately
by “Why are you awake?” while Selina helped him inside.
“Catching up on something,” she said, noting the red
smear he’d left on the window.
“Oh boy, you’re going to need a patch up.
Where is it?” Then she
saw the hole just under the left pectoral of his body armor—another halfway
between his right shoulder and neck, and what appeared to be a bite taken
out of the utility belt.
“Scratch that.
What is it?”
“Cassowaries,”
he graveled.
“Come again?”
“Cobblepot got himself a pair of cassowaries.
It’s a six foot bird—with five inch claws.
It’s ridiculously fast; it can kick up to here.”
He indicated his pectoral.
“It’s got this helmet crest on its head that it
rams with, and I think it can
swim.”
“And he has two?!”
Selina asked as he carefully removed the body armor.
“For now he has one and a half.
I think I broke one of their legs.”
“Doesn’t look too bad; I’ll get the kit,” she said.
“At first he was controlling them with adapted Hatter
tech. (I have one of the devices for
further study.) But you know, he
shouldn’t have bothered. Once
I’d knocked the controllers off, they were just as mean.
This is a vicious bird.
It likes to fight.”
“I’m not Alfred,” she said, returning with the first
aid kit. “I can clean it and use
the skin bonder, but if you need stitches—”
“I don’t. I
would’ve gone straight to the manor if I did.”
“I doubt that.
Telling Alfred you were attacked by a cassowary or telling me?”
“Two,” he reminded her.
“Now one and a half,” she said, pausing before she
dabbed and looking into his eyes.
“Bat-badass.” His lip
twitched, and she added “This is going to sting.”
Death smiles! Of course they were SMILING, they were
DEAD! This reality was the worst
drug trip ever and these bastards lived it 24/7.
He belched.
Now they were free of it.
Of course they were smiling!
Who wouldn’t be?
Chicken helped.
Joker had no idea how he wound up in a Ha-Hacienda without a fridge
full of Harley’s SlimFast, but there was an old bag of Snickers that gave
him enough energy to get out the door.
He belched.
Out the door was a world with chicken—of crossing the
road fame—and popcorn shrimp and a shitload of Mountain Dew.
Just what every clown needs to start feeling like himself again.
He coughed.
Reality was a bitch.
He’d heard the expression but never took it seriously.
Taking anything seriously was a sucker bet, but avoiding the practice
had prevented him from realizing what a wet nosed, butthole-licking, rabid
pitbull bitch this “Reality”
really was. That thing was a
menace! Way worse than Batman
and who knew THAT was even possible?!
It was the worst drug trip ever.
Reality. Seeing things AS
THEY ARE, it’s sick! Like five
or six kidney stones at the time coming out your eyes!
That kind of sick.
His traumatized mind sank into the cocoon of fresh
delusion spinning around it, while that residue of empathy whispered that
there were millions of people out there still living the nightmare.
People like him. The
whole of Gotham, practically.
Trapped there. Trapped.
Trapped, trapped, trapped in rabid, wet nosed, butthole-licking
bitch, seeing everything as it really is.
The poor bastards.
When the patch-up was complete, Selina yawned and Bruce
presented the un-masked version of the head-tilt meant to convey a skeptical
crimefighter’s raised eyebrow.
“Let me guess,” he graveled in a parody of his
museum-rooftop tone, “there isn’t time for a full patrol, so why don’t I
take a painkiller and get a few extra hours rest.”
“You make it sound like I’d be suggesting we clean out
the MoMA and run off to Europe with the Van Goghs,” she laughed.
“You weren’t going to suggest it?”
“The burglary or taking a Tylenol after a six foot bird
pokes a hole in your chest, because I don’t think those are comparable.”
Bruce’s lip twitched.
“I do want to go back out, but not for an abbreviated
patrol,” he said gently. “I
started the investigation on the Times earlier.”
“Ah,” she said.
“How much do you know about what’s been happening since
that headline hit the stands?”
“Let’s just say I’ve embraced the cover story: I’m in a
Scottish castle without Wi-Fi and a sexy new husband that keeps me from even
wondering what might be going on in Gotham since we left.
I remain blissfully unaware that the city’s most prestigious
newspaper said the wedding never happened.”
“I see.
Well, when ‘you and Bruce’ are ready to crack open the bedroom door, I’ll
email Lucius to issue a statement, but the investigation wasn’t something
that could be postponed. If
you’re um—”
“Yes, okay, hit me,” she smirked.
“What did you find? How
did my war with the Post jump species to infect a legit paper like the
Times?”
“Funny you put it that way,” he said with that glint he
had whenever her words betrayed a detective spirit.
“I did check HR first thing.
Occam’s razor. The
simplest explanation is certainly… but no.
Records indicate only two employees from the Gotham Post got work at
the Times in the past year: one in marketing, one works on their app.
No connection to the newsroom, no way for either of them to affect
content.
“The story was filed from Martin’s home computer.
It’s his usual practice.
He doesn’t cover ‘news’; his beat is events with engraved invitations,
planned months in advance. His
editor has a calendar spelling out the parties he’s attending for the next
six weeks. He often gets home
around two or three in the morning, and it’s not the sort of material that
needs fact-checked... I examined
their network, the physical servers and wiring, office terminals, and the
digital files he submitted.
Everything checks out on their end.
The next step is his apartment, and I just have time to get over
there and investigate before dawn.”
“Okay,” Selina breathed.
“With a mission like that, I can hardly give you a hard time.
Just remember if you use the batline…” she pointed to her own breast
to indicate the injury. “Hole
from a six foot bird. Swing
easy.”
“I love you too,” he said, kissing her cheek, then he
restored the cowl and was gone.
There was nothing but laughter in the dining room of a
posh UWS duplex, the laughter of camaraderie enhanced by good wine and the
digestion of a fine meal. Ash
Torrick might be famous for a schlocky TV show, but he entertained like the
Upper West Side intellectual he might have been if he kept writing books
like his early ones.
“What is a 4-syllable synonym for incredible,” Eddie
said, finishing his tiramisu with relish.
“I had a hideout in this neighborhood for a year and half, how did I
not know you could get this delivered?”
Ford offered him seconds which he refused, though Ash
accepted “just a dollop” and told the story of how he discovered the
neighborhood gem that catered the meal.
Then conversation returned to the issue of G-Trends that profiled
Ford’s return to Gotham, which they’d been roasting through dessert.
Eddie was having a wonderful time.
He and Doris may have befriended the writers as a favor to Selina,
keeping them occupied and out of trouble at the wedding, but the two couples
had discovered common interests, shared gripes, and a synchronicity of
spirit that prompted further outings, including this dinner.
They were a curious couple. The Gotham townhouse
belonged to Ash. Ford’s house
was in California and he was staying here while in Gotham, but he obviously
wasn’t a guest. He was the one
offering seconds on dessert, and when they left the table it was Ford who
pressed the button closing the pocket door that separated living and dining
room. And it was Ford who
invited Eddie into the library to see the books on codes and ciphers.
Certainly seemed cozily domestic, but the age gap—Ford must be thirty
years older if he was a day—argued against a romantic tie, as did the fact
that, up until a month ago, Ford lived over 3,000 miles away.
Still, if the writers were a riddle, they weren’t half
as interesting as the treasure trove of riddles they unlocked.
Torrick’s library was a wonderland for a puzzling brain: the cypher
employed by George Washington’s spies, an authentic World War II Enigma box,
an Alberti disk, a Vigenère square, even an ancient goat skin alleged to be
military orders in an original Caesar shift code.
While Edward explored the library, Ash took Doris
upstairs to view his “Gallery of Curiosities” where the intros to his TV
show were filmed.
“Consider the emerald, objects of fascination since
antiquity,” he said, paused before a pedestal as he would introducing that
week’s mystery. Displayed
under a Lucite shield was a beautiful, high relief emerald cameo depicting a
female bust. “The ancient Roman
nobleman Pliny the Elder declared there was ‘no gem in existence more
intense,’” he said in his television voice, “while the queen Cleopatra was
so enthralled by the gem she had her own mines in Egypt, filled with men
whose lives—”
“Were dedicated to finding her jewels,” Doris
interrupted. “Crispin’s auction
house, they have a Collecting Guide on Emeralds.”
“And you have an eidetic memory,” Ash noted quietly,
though he seemed pleased rather than put out at having been caught.
“The show does tend to pull from sources like that without bothering
to rephrase. Salesmen use such
evocative language, and unlike other writers, they don’t really mind if you
bring their words to a larger audience.”
“No, I guess not,” Doris laughed.
“So, since you’ve read the guide, you know few remnants
of Cleopatra’s mines survive, but the two largest—”
“Sikait and Subara.”
“Quite. Can
still be found on different slopes of Mount Smaragdus or…?”
“Emerald Mountain,” Doris grinned.
“You’re not claiming this gem is one of Cleopatra’s?”
“The way the show is structured, I claim very little.
I just present certain information while standing in front of certain
things. For most people, the
thought that this gem came out of Cleopatra’s mine would be the perfect
hook. And a story might follow
about the ancient magic Egyptian priests had mastered, how it was used for
cursing tombs or compelling love.
But you…” He eyed her critically.
“You would be much more interested in the truth.
This jewel was the property of Princess Vera Nikolaievna Lobanov
Rostovsky—”
“You also have an eidetic memory,” Doris noted.
“I need one.
At the age of 16, she married Prince Yakov, younger brother to the
Russian foreign minister. They
were the first Russian aristocrats to take up residence in France on a
more-or-less permanent basis.
Widowed early and left exceedingly rich, she bought jewels.
A lot of jewels.”
Doris laughed.
Then looked at him shrewdly.
“How did you know?
About my penchant for objets
russes?”
He didn’t answer.
Instead he paused for a split second, as if rapid-searching a
database, then changed the subject.
“Of course that’s not to say the stone
couldn’t have been Cleopatra’s before it found its way to some 19th
Century Parisian stone cutter.
That’s the delight of these things…” he moved eagerly to another case with
gold artefacts. “…Precious
objects of a certain age were nearly always
something else, something we can
only guess at. That’s very
convenient for a writer. Take this amphora: the original was
part of a ceremonial set used by a Thracian king in the third or fourth
century B.C., maybe I can spin something out of it, maybe I can’t.
But this copy was made for a Spanish nobleman in the mid or late
fifteenth century, which means it’s almost certainly gold taken from the
Americas. Some magnificent war
shield perhaps, carved in the image of the fiercest Aztec god, looted and
melted down. Such a deity would
be pissed, who’s to say what kind of curse may be hanging over it…”
He can certainly
spin a story, Doris thought—which is how she summed up the tour later
for Eddie.
“I liked him too, once I saw his library,” Eddie
remarked. He went on to some of
the cryptographic wonders, then concluded “Certainly more to Mr. Torrick
than meets the eye. Funny his
books aren’t better. Why does a
mind like that cash out to push conspiracy theories on mouth-breathing
dullards who can barely follow the plot?”
“You just said it: ‘cash out.’
If you can take one dollar from every stupid person who would rather
believe it’s a secret society pulling strings for one of their own that
separates them from a superstar rather than years of hard work,
determination and raw talent, you’re going to make roughly 12.4 million more
than you would getting $29.95 from literati that want to curl up with a
modern Tom Wolfe before bed.”
“I guess,” Eddie shrugged.
“New riddle then: Why are they so hospitable?
Why do a pair of loaded civilians invite people like us to dinner
and, knowing who we are, knowing what we do, show us their very rare and
valuable possessions that are right up our alley?”
“Obviously, because they know we’ll appreciate them,”
Doris said evenly.
“But they’re not afraid we’ll consider them targets?
They’re not afraid we’ll go back as soon as I’ve popped off a riddle
for Batman, attack them while they sleep and take the goods?”
“We’re not going to do anything like that,” Doris
pointed out.
“I know, but how do
they know?” Eddie said, scrunching
the side of his mouth as if the question was a sour lozenge he couldn’t help
sucking on.
“Because…” Doris said thoughtfully, drawing out the
word as if starting the sentence would cause the answer to appear, taking a
breath to help it along, and then her pupils dilating a bit as the solution
presented itself. “…because
novelists are very perceptive.”
By morning, the dirty laundry of 19th
Century art collections was again relegated to the rainy day file.
Selina spent the night catching up on what the rest of Gotham knew:
The Times had been pilloried.
Within minutes of tweeting the headline, their social media accounts were
bombed with pictures and video of the wedding they claimed never took place,
along with gleeful tweets from opponents of the news desk’s editorial
politics. After several hours, a
retraction was released and the article pulled from the website, hastily
rewritten and reposted with an apology, but by then it was too late to be
distinguished from the hundreds of memes circulating.
“Sorry, Bruce” headlines abounded, consoling him on such improbable
misfortunes as a meteor destroying all life on Earth the night he had
tickets to Hamilton and his new Lamborghini being squashed by the dark lord
Cthulhu. Photoshoppers were not
idle either, incorporating the Joker, Bane, Neil Armstrong, Seabiscuit, Mr.
Miracle, Poison Ivy, the Titanic, Ghengis Khan, Lucille Ball, and 1980 U.S.
Olympic Hockey Team into visuals of important stories the paper got wrong.
The Post, clearly put out that someone scooped them
inventing outrageous libels of their favorite target, came up with their own
version of the wedding not happening.
It involved Bane and PsychoPirate and didn’t make a lot of sense, so
Selina put it aside. It was the
work of the same minds who came up with all the rest of their rubbish with
no actual knowledge of what was really going on, so she went back to the
Times. By the end of the day,
there had been a second apology and the evening edition ran the corrected
story without Martin’s byline.
The next day, the Gotham Observer, the Daily News and the Ledger all had
lengthy articles on the Times calamity, and multiple clickbait sites ran
features on the public reaction and memes.
Caught up on the fallout, Selina went back to the
original article. “Sorry, Bruce,
It Wasn’t Meant to Be” by Martin
Stanwick. She tried to
think… She had no memory of Martin in the receiving line, or at any of the
tables when she and Bruce made their rounds at the reception.
He wasn’t in any of the photos or videos that she could recall.
Did he just not come?
Clark was supposed to be on alert once Martin arrived, but that plan was
made when they thought the Times warned of a serious threat.
He probably relaxed and forgot about it once they made it to the “I
dos;” Selina had done the same.
But if Martin wasn’t there then… then why
wasn’t he there? That was the
next question. Did something
happen to him? Did he just
decide not to come? Could he
have received a message that the wedding was cancelled?
No, if something had happened to him, he’d be missed.
There wouldn’t have been a headline, there would have been an irate
editor whose calls and texts had gone unanswered until he went pounding on
Martin’s door and found him lying at the foot of the stairs or something
equally grisly. And any message
about a cancellation would be confirmed.
Even if it wasn’t the wedding of the decade, Martin Stanwick would
not take a message like that on faith.
He’d call. So what did
that leave? Deciding not to
come? What possible reason—
And then there was all that
detail. Belle Époque
Blanc de Blancs 2004, the Clair de Lune and the Stradivarius, the dress from
Marie Wayne St. John’s portrait, all the details set out as bait.
Even the gifts they’d
exchanged as bride and groom made it into the article.
If Martin never showed, how did it get there?
It was late, but Eddie was a night
owl and he knew she wasn’t in Scotland.
She reached for her phone…
…and hung up ten minutes later, troubled.
Eddie confirmed that Martin was a no-show, but added that Ford
Dormont appropriated his seat for the ceremony and every blue blood in the
room had their own take on what it meant.
He had written two pieces on Bruce and Selina already, and throughout
the reception, guests that Eddie presumed to be Agents of the Cat had come
to the table and discharged their duties: bringing Ford those tidbits meant
for Martin.
Ford again.
Ford who she told about the dress the night Bruce met Anna at Mise en
Abyme.
It was exactly the sort of place
Martin frequented, and the kind of place filled with his eyes and ears.
If he’d seen the meeting or heard about it and misinterpreted… After
Ford’s energetic defense of her in Mayfair, it wouldn’t be hard to
misinterpret. After he called
out that stupid woman at the Post as ‘a creature of Bludhaven outlet malls,’
it wouldn’t be an outrageous jump to think Selina had switched confidants.
But Martin wasn’t crazy.
If he did think Selina was rewarding Ford by using him as her
mouthpiece in Martin’s place, this would be an insane overreaction.
Making an enemy Selina and endangering his job, any sentient adult
would see the consequences…
Her head was swimming.
It was too late to be wandering the unfathomable depths of stupid
people. She stumbled to bed just
as Bruce got home and they slept.
When they stirred, sex came first, then changing the dressing on his
cassowary wound, and then tea.
Only then did they compare notes.
“I went in prepared to tranq Stanwick and inspect the
apartment before questioning him,” Bruce began in a tone Selina recognized:
semi-conversational but still organizing his thoughts, the way he talked
before he’d written up the log.
He wouldn’t welcome interruptions.
“I wanted to search his computer first, so I’d know immediately if he
was lying. It turned out I had
the place to myself. There was
no sign of him. The computer
checked out. The article was
written on it and transmitted from it.
And by ‘written’ I mean completely: file created, worked on for 38
minutes, four saves, two revisions.
It was also deleted, but in the usual way: dragged to the trash can;
trash emptied. Easy restore.
I got 93% of the fragments on the first run without going into the
physical hard drive.”
“So we’re not looking at a sophisticated hacker,”
Selina said, risking the glare for interrupting, but earning only a grunt.
“Transmitting is another story.
His login at the Times requires two-step authentication: an app on
his phone generates a new six digit code every thirty seconds.
If someone broke into his apartment the way I did and wrote on his
computer, there is no way they could log in and send it to be published
without having that phone.”
“Well how hard is that?
You were prepared to tranq him,” Selina said, a thief seeing the
obvious key to the lock and forgetting this was the second interruption in a
span of twenty seconds. “When
you put him out, just get the phone from the nightstand.”
Bruce glowered.
“That’s exactly what was done,” he declared in Batman’s
reserved-for-criminal-disapproval gravel.
“Oracle found Martin at Gotham General Hospital.
He checked himself in around one o’clock Sunday afternoon having
slept through the entire day of the wedding.
He assumed some kind of narcoleptic fit, while the hospital—given
what was happening with his column on social media—assumed it was a suicide
attempt. That he had second
thoughts and won’t admit it. The
tox screen showed trace elements, something that breaks down when it’s been
metabolized, but there was
something.”
“Okay, wait a minute,” Selina said, then paused for a
sip of tea. “Somebody.
Went to Martin’s apartment and drugged him.
Came to the wedding and mined the guests for every
fuck-you-Gotham-Post detail that I slaved over.
Went back to Martin’s,
wrote the article saying none of it happened and sent it in to the Times.
And then they waited ‘til morning, bought a newspaper, stole a
Tardis, and brought it to our front door to wreck my
morning-of-the-wedding?”
“All but the last.
It’s an assumption that the paper was left by the same person who
manufactured the headline. But
everything before bringing the newspaper to the manor, that is a logical
supposition supported by the evidence.”
“You’re very detached,” Selina noted.
“It’s a lot of trouble for someone to go through just because they
hate me.”
Bruce’s lip twitched.
“Consider the time and energy the people who hate
me put into it. And
you’re assuming a motive. We
don’t know any of the whys yet.
We’re just starting to map out the what.”
“Well, talking to Martin is next,” Selina grimaced.
“I wish I could put on my fur and do it myself, but I am in
Scotland.”
“Batman will get over there tonight between patrols,”
Bruce said, stroking the back of her hand.
“I know it’s hard. But as
far as the world’s concerned, we’re on a honeymoon worthy of
Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Wayne and it’s a small price to pay for that,
isn’t it? When we get back…God,
when we get back, Mrs. Wayne.” He looked at her in wonder, still trying to
get his head around those final words.
He leaned in and lips touched, tongues swirled and teased and then
parted. He continued as if
nothing had happened. “Batman will get over there tonight,” he repeated like
a crimefighter who never lost focus on the task at hand.
Psychotic Breakfast, HAHAHAHAHAAAA!
That’s what Gotham needed!
How they all got hooked on the stuff was a question for another day.
The monsters responsible WOULD be hunted down eventually.
Probably Batsy could do it. He’d like that; he’d be good at it.
Punching them very hard over and over.
Let them take two tablets of their precious sanity and see if it
takes down the swelling, HAHAHAHAHAAA!
See if it makes the bleeding stop, HAHAHA! Too funny.
Yeah, Batsy will finally be good for something.
When we get there.
But first things first: SAVE GOTHAM!
Before the pushers of the odious horror called Reality could be
hunted down and dealt with, he had to wipe out sanity on a massive scale and
lead them all to the switch. A
psychotic breakfast for all of Gotham, that’s what the doctor ordered! HAHAHAHAHAAAA!
The interview with Martin turned up little worth
discussing the next day at breakfast.
He’d stayed in Friday night to be well-rested for the big day.
He read a few articles he described as “chit chat fodder” which he
remembered quite clearly. There
was one on golf and antiquing in Palm Beach, a wine auction in Napa and a
few related anecdotes: French President Macron’s drop-in at the wine
pavilion at the Paris Ag show and the old Queen Mother’s penchant for
smuggling champagne into the hospital to make her stays more comfortable.
Also “Bread is back,” artisanal bakers have fought and won the
easiest revanchist battle in history, reminding us all why we fell in love
with bread in the first place...
Selina couldn’t suppress the chuckle.
“That’s so Martin,” she said, while Bruce contemplated his fork with
the stoic disapproval of a crimefighter waiting out a criminal informant’s
mirth. “Can you imagine if you
weren’t you, if Batman went into
the interrogation without any Bruce Wayne experience of Martin’s peculiar…
way of seeing things?”
He grunted and continued: Primed with small talk to
cover any momentary awkwardness (except perhaps with anti-gluten
extremists), Martin turned out the light and went to bed.
He awoke late Sunday morning with the kind of hangover that’s more
lethargy than headache. Took a
cab to the ER imagining some sort of late-onset narcolepsy, and concern for
his health pushing out any other thoughts.
He didn’t realize the significance of the day he’d lost until hours
later. Hadn’t looked at his
phone until he was settled in his room.
Blood pressure hit 206 over 93 when he found out about the article
and the fallout on social media.
“So he knows nothing more than we do,” Selina remarked.
“Neither does his phone.
GPS says it never left the apartment until he did, and the only
fingerprint other than his is a nurse who handled it after the blood
pressure spike.”
“Now I feel bad,” Selina said.
“We have to do something for him when we get back.
A big gesture, no hard feelings kind of thing.”
“I’ll leave that to you,” Bruce said, and then “Oh I
like the sound of that. The most
annoying part of managing Bruce Wayne’s social life is now
my wife’s responsibility.”
“World’s Greatest Detective, I’ve been doing that for
two years,” Selina said with an eye roll.
“Two years, four months, and eleven days,” he grinned.
“The Newcombs’ party at the River Club.
That’s when Alfred and Lucius appointed you ‘Designated Wayne
Wrangler,’ that was the phrase, wasn’t it?”
“You did notice?”
“Of course,” he graveled.
Then…
“So Martin is a dead end.”
He grunted.
The Grand Concourse in Gotham Central Station has seen
its share of flash mobs, from Bruno Mars to Queen, a Hawaiian soccer team’s
hula to a ballet school’s hip hop dance off.
One was to raise awareness of MetroCards for low-income Gothamites,
one to mark the anniversary of an Israeli military action in 1976 and five
to set the stage for marriage proposals, but most were just for fun.
And most tempted only a fraction of passersby.
Every mob managed some kind of audience thanks to the tourists, but
only the most daring—like the arrest of Princess Leia on the Lexington
Avenue Express that culminated in her being marched into the Concourse by an
escort of storm troopers for a confrontation with Darth Vader—scored the
rapt attention of everyone present.
It wasn’t that shocking to real Gothamites when the
famous clock over the information booth reached 2:28 exactly and 200 people
around the Concourse froze in place: A young man tying his shoe, a woman on
her phone, a couple holding hands as they walked, the girl putting on lip
balm…
Gothamites are not nearly as hostile to strangers as
outsiders like to believe. “How
long’s this been going on?” a businessman asked a father of two.
“I just walked in, has it been going on for a while?”
“No, this guy just dropped the papers a couple minutes
ago. Less than that, maybe a
minute,” came the answer while his son yelped “It’s like EVERYBODY,” and his
sister rolled her eyes and said “Obviously
not everybody.”
…a pair of tourists consulting a map, frozen.
A woman eating yogurt, frozen.
A couple with coffee cups, a guy with a bottle of water, the man
who’d dropped papers and another with a magazine whose path he blocked,
watching him pick them up…
Many commuters only slowed as they walked around the
living tableaus, looking curiously but not stopping.
Others would study a frozen subject, a few would daringly touch an
arm. Several pulled out phones
and recorded video. “Some kind
of protest,” one onlooker guessed.
“Or an acting class,” said another.
After four minutes a staffer rode in on a maintenance
vehicle and came to a stop at the first cluster.
“They're blocking my cart,” he said into his radio, “There's like
hundreds of people frozen everywhere.”
The exaggerated Brooklyn accent almost went unnoticed, but the guy
who guessed it was an acting class broke into a smile, rolled his head and
turned away. “This is wild.
They're not moving.
I can't move my cart; I need some
help...” the worker continued, but at the next instant as if on cue, all 200
started moving again as if nothing had happened.
“Eh, never mind. They're
moving,” he reported, and his vehicle moved on as well.
There had been fourteen tweets in total, none of which
sparked any interest. It was
nothing but an odd story for the people who’d been there.
Life went on.
Except for the man on the 7 Express platform below who
the conductor had seen as a blur falling into the path of the R62A subway
car just as he was completing the spiel about transfers on the upper level
and of limited uptown service on the 4, 5, and 6 lines. The blur that had been a man wasn’t much more than a splotch on the
front of the train, on the rails, across the yellow line at the edge of the
platform and the graffiti’d letters beyond: CHARAH.
To be continued...