The
visiting psychiatrist presented all the appropriate paperwork at the entry to
Arkham’s high-security wing. He signed the logbook and was escorted to
the Joker’s special cell. That was all the guard remembered or needed to
remember. He returned to his station and fell into a deep, relaxing sleep
from which he would awake in ten minutes feeling rested and refreshed…
“It’s done,” Hugo Strange reported to the
Joker, “When do I get paid?”
“When I’m satisfied it was done right,
you’ll get what’s coming to you.”
On the whole, Joker avoided killing people he
knew. On the whole, he wasn’t done having fun with them. Murder was for
the nameless extras. But if Hugo was going to insist on being paid, an
exception might have to be made…
It all started with Whose Line is it Anyway:
Joker was bored in his lonely cell. Harley had disappeared during the attack
at Wayne Manor, so he’d asked Riddler to bring his tapes from the Ha-Hacienda.
Good ol’ Riddler was such a pal; he’d brought them all.
When Joker saw that Harley had taped over Whose Line is it Anyway!—taped over the one where Colin Mochrie does the dinosaur walk! - he was ready to
kill her.
But she wasn’t there.
So he watched the tape instead.
She was there.
Giving a party.
The trollop.
But wait… Santa hat, it was the Christmas party. That was ok. Then he saw
it…
”Oooh!” (RIDDLER PINCHED HER!)
“Oieee!”
(HE DID IT AGAIN!)
…And she was giggling. She was playing up to
him! The tramp!
”EEIKF!” HE DID IT AGAIN!
Oh, he would kill that funnyman now,
oh
yes he would.
Then came a deeper voice… “If this JokerCam setup is two-way,
Riddler’s a dead man.”
Too right, you tell’em, Brucie!
“He’s the only one who really understands
me,” Joker told the remote control.
Dr. Hugo Strange was forced to return to his
improvised laboratory without being paid. The Joker. Who the hell
did that ghoulish Pagliacci think he was—Batman’s greatest foe, indeed!
The man’s only claim to great criminal enterprise was a shit-eating grin, an
annoying laugh, and being utterly insane. What kind of nefarious arsenal
was that?
While he, Hugo Strange, had achieved the ultimate criminal epiphany: he
had deduced Batman’s secret identity! And was this achievement
recognized by his peers? It was not.
Just because he didn’t have a wild outfit
and a goofy moniker. Strange was an old and distinguished name.
Hugo
blanched as the thought reminded him of his first meeting with his current
victim:
“Eddie Nigma, get it. E. Nigma—clever that.”
“Very droll.”
“But I don’t use it professionally,
you understand. I still go by Riddler.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“So why stick with a loser handle like
Hugo Strange. I mean, Hugo is okay in a dorky way, but STRANGE, c’mon.”
“It’s an old and distinguished
family name, Mr. Nigma.”
“Go on, old and distinguished,
it means, what? ‘That guy outside town who, when he walks past the farm, makes the pigs nervous.’”
That was the respect he received from his
peers.
Like that Harlequin bitch excluding him from
the Christmas party.
Hugo had been gratified when the great and mighty
Joker came to him. A personal matter, the clown had said…
Joker. An arrested adolescent that went from thinking
“girls have
cooties” to
“riding a Harley.” There was no justice in the world;
there truly was not. But that was neither here nor there. The Joker
had come to him, Dr. Hugo Strange, for help!
He only did so, it turned out, because Hugo was
due to be released from Arkham, not because he appreciated the special talents
only a criminal genius like he could bring to the task…
Still, the task Joker had in mind, driving
Edward Nigma mad, would be a satisfying one. Revenge for that insulting
remark about his name! And later: Revenge on Harley Quinn for
blackballing him! For Hugo was sure she would be the Joker’s next
target.
Oracle sat at her console eying an unlabeled
silver button from the corner of her eye. She slowly brought her hand up
from under the desk, as though sneaking up on it, then depressed it quickly,
held it for four seconds while holding a calm, attentive expression, then let it go
with a flourish. The procedure disconnected the scans of her head
movements and facial expression from the hologram displayed in the Watchtower
conference room. Now the other members of the Public Relations
Subcommittee would see only the calm, attentive expression. She could
safely adjust the volume and tune out Diana’s endless prattle about civilian
opinion.
The talk with her father hadn’t gone well.
That was the only civilian’s opinion she cared about.
“Barbara, that man’s world isn’t safe,”
he insisted. “You’ve had enough pain as it is without taking on more
needlessly. This is nothing but hurt waiting to happen, it’s suffering
and risk and worry that can all be avoided by just turning your back on it.
Shake the dust from your feet and don’t look back.”
“Daddy,” she began softly, “I love him.
Can’t you understand that? I love Dick; I want to marry him. This
is my decision. It’s my life we’re talking about.”
“It’s your life, so I’m supposed to stand
by while you get yourself killed! It’s your life, so I just ignore that
you’re deliberately putting yourself on a path where you’ll encounter that
madman again! No, Barbara, no! I said it then and I’ll say again,
it will be over my dead body that you marry into that, that, that family.”
It stung. There was no denying it stung.
But Barbara convinced herself she was calm enough to continue. And she
began calmly enough…
“Dad, it’s like you want to draw a line as
to how much…” she searched for a word and, in her frustration, lost the
advantage of remaining calm “…how much hurt or pain or…shit…your
daughter will endure in her life, and if no one else will abide by this line,
then fuck’em all to hell!”
“Barbara!”
“Oh, screw this!” She was near tears
now she was so frustrated.
“Barbara Louise, stop this at once,” Jim
Gordon ordered. “I
won’t have you carrying on like this.” He stroked her hair lightly, like she
was a little girl. “Barbara, listen to me,” he continued with a new
intensity, “I will never go back to sitting at your bedside watching you
almost die.”
“ORACLE, what are your thoughts on this?”
Diana was asking impatiently.
Barbara double-clicked the silver button,
re-establishing the feed from the scanner above her face to the hologram
generator.
“I… think… Diana makes an excellent point. One that needed to be discussed. Maybe she’ll go into a little more
detail for us,” Barbara sputtered. She felt bad for the rest of the
committee who were actually in the room and didn’t have a mute button to hit,
but that guilt was overshadowed by another when she regained her train of
thought.
“Daddy. Daddy-Daddy-Daddy. You
can’t keep bad things from happening to people. You can try, you can
rationalize, I guess, but they still do happen.”
“Barbara, would you please stop talking to
me like I’m an insurance salesman! I am, was, the commissioner of
police. You think I don’t know about the risk you take just living in
this city?”
“Then what are you—”
“A policeman lives and breathes that risk.
Any simple pullover, broken taillight, could be the end. ‘Can I see your
license and registration’-BANG! So there are procedures. You minimize
the risk whenever you can. Before you move to the door, your partner stands
there, at this angle, to observe the passenger seat. You do it that way
because people who are more experienced tell you to. You do it because
your superiors learned the hard way this is what’s best.”
“Daddy…” she broke off then tried slowly,
“…I know all that. But this isn’t pulling over a speeder, it’s
marrying Dick Grayson.”
“I’m your father, Barbara Louise. You
have to trust that I know what’s best. I know what’s safe. You
want to throw out the rulebook and walk into this incredibly dangerous
situation, and I’m saying no. Not while there is breath in my body
to say ‘No, no, no, no, NO.’”
Like many of the Gotham night people, Jervis
Tetch (a.k.a. The Mad Hatter) slept through most of the day and arose around
four or five in the afternoon to begin his day’s work. So even though the
frantic (but strangely rhythmic) knocking that woke him did so at 9 am, he still
went to the door complaining about rude callers pestering him
“in the middle of
the night.”
“You gotta help me Jervis—I have 76
Trombones stuck in my head. …Thundering, thundering louder than
before… You gotta get it out. I’ll pay anything, just make me
forget this damn song.”
While Jervis tried to calculate how “I’ll
pay anything” might translate into a dollar figure, Nigma produced a slip of
paper.
“Look what I just wrote—it was supposed to be a clue for the Crane
Brokerage House!”
Jervis took the slip and read:
76 black crows on the Great White Way
with 110 blown fuses on the sand
He looked up quizzically. Edward Nigma
nodded sadly, and Jervis realized he could name any price he wanted.
“Why do your cats hate me?” Bruce asked in
a strange mixture of his natural speaking voice and Batman’s deepest growl.
“Nutmeg doesn’t hate you,” Selina assured
him, setting down a jug of orange juice and a plate of toast. He pointed.
Nutmeg had appropriated a strip of shredded
fabric that had once been part of Batman’s cape and was hurling it into the
air as though to break its neck. Whiskers watched this performance and
would snarl at the inert form with satisfaction when it landed.
“That’s just play,” Selina laughed,
then took on a husky tone as she added, “I thought we settled that a long time ago.”
Bruce smiled, blushed, then managed an
embarrassed, “Somehow, it’s not the same.”
“It’s after nine,” Selina observed,
changing the subject. “Do you have to call in or something?”
“No, Lucius is used to my coming in at odd
hours, if at all. Still, it’d be nice if those clothes got here.”
“I offered you an outfit to go home in.”
“Look, my reputation can actually benefit
from having Bergdorf’s deliver a sweater and pants to Bruce Wayne at some
woman’s apartment because she destroyed what I was wearing last night.
But it will not survive my going home in a Cat-Tales sweatshirt!”
Selina’s shrug said “Whatever.”
Nutmeg’s crouch said “Soon I shall
pounce on my unsuspecting prey.”
Whisker’s growl said “Die, wretched
strip of blue, die!”
Bruce studied the scene carefully.
“No,
that tone I recognize. That wasn’t play; it was ‘Die, Batman, Die.’ The little gray one said it, just now.”
“Well,” Selina smiled, “It’s possible. Truth be told, Whiskers does have a bit of grudge. But it’s not
personal. That’s his balcony you’re always landing on.”
Bruce looked at Whiskers who looked right back. “Damn right, Buddy,” was the unspoken message. Rather than submit to a
staring contest with one of Catwoman’s cats, Bruce turned and noticed
scribbles in a familiar hand on the back of a magazine:
Clarinets of eve’ry size and trumpeters
who’d improvise
a full octave higher than the score.
Then the words Score, More, Bore, Core, Door,
Floor. This last was underlined. Then “Higher than the door. Higher than the floor.”
“What the hell is this?” Bruce asked.
Selina glanced at it, then chuckled.
“Oh. That’s Eddie.”
Bruce’s eyes went square, focusing hard on
the scribble. A break at last—a clue he wasn’t supposed to have.
His eyes snapped up and met Selina’s, and he heard Batman asking “Do you
know what this means?” before he even considered the ramifications. He
had just asked her to help take down one of her
“friends” among the rogues, a
good friend, one she’d turned to when they had that fight during hell-month.
That kind of request hadn’t gone over well when the friend was Harvey in
genuine agony… Except… so far from shutting down like last time, she gave a
bright smile and answered immediately.
“Of course, it’s 76 Trombones.”
There was a stunned silence as he processed
what just happened. She was helping him. No hassles. No
accusations.
Except she mistook his surprise for confusion
and started to explain.
“76 Trombones? You know…
♫
Seventy six trombones hit the counter
point ♫
while a hundred and ten cornets played the air.
♫ Then I modestly took my place as the one and only bass,
♫ and I oompahed up and down the square…
♫
Man, you gotta get out more.”
To be continued…
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