Raoul
had manned the coffee cart at the corner of 59th and Madison
since before his daughter was in diapers. He’d seen his share of oddballs.
He didn’t judge. He
didn’t assume everybody who sat on a park bench and talked to themselves
must be a homeless loon without $5 for a cup of coffee.
So he certainly wasn’t going to judge the
well-dressed blonde man who’d sat on a bench near the cart for two hours.
The man didn’t appear to be talking to himself—not exactly—not out loud, anyway. He did
make some strange faces…
This was not Raoul’s concern, of course, not really. If someone wants to sit on a bench and make faces, that was
no concern of his. Except… Raoul stole a sideways glance at the face-making stranger… Except Melanie
would be helping out again over the weekend. And Raoul wasn’t quite so
open-minded about oddballs in the vicinity of his fifteen year old daughter.
A few feet away on that park bench, the
argument raged on.
Azrael maintained that Jean Paul learned
much from Green Arrow’s coaching. He
could now deal with many strong-willed and attractive women without standing
mute or stammering like a fool. That
the Catwoman still had power over him was evidence of her witchcraft.
She had caused Jean Paul to imprint on her in some bizarre way at
that first meeting and the mortal should purge his mind of her influence
through meditation. He
recommended “the devotion to the most glorious St. Dumas by way of the
sword.”
Jean Paul stood firm in his view:
the disastrous combination of The System and the Mantle, otherwise
known as “AzBat,” went up against Catwoman and fell flat on its
ass. Unless they both faced up
to that fact, they would never move passed it.
At no time, Mortal, did either of us
‘fall on our ass.’ On the contrary, we fought well, standing our ground
against a skilled combatant and leaving the field of battle in a time and
manner of our own choosing.
Only
after you insulted her, sputtered like an imbecile, and opened us up to the
ridicule of that nickname she will NEVER let go of.
I
am gifted with the sum knowledge of the Order of St. Dumas. That wisdom,
regrettably, did not include instruction on dealing with women who were not
docile and subservient. Dealing
verbally with The Feline therefore fell to you.
And it was your mind, Mortal, that
contributed to ‘AzBat’ that notion that she came with the mantle: the cowl, the car, the signal, the manor, and the affections
of the cat. You thought they
were a package.
I… I never… NEVER!…
And
it was you who blew that insignificant encounter completely out of proportion by
going on to DREAM about her.
I… NEVER!
Those
dreams were not mine, Mortal. An
Azrael does not have such thoughts.
This
is a cheap attempt to get me to go home without talking to her.
And
it succeeded. She’s just left.
While you railed at me, that doorman called her a taxi.
We’ll
wait.
RE:
Leslie’s return
It was
a memo from Lucius Fox, reminding Bruce that Leslie Thompkins would be returning
to Gotham City and discussing, in pedantic detail, the many possible consequences
for the Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic.
“Dr. Thompkins’s recent post on the AMA advisory council gives her
considerably more clout … bluntly, having her name on the letterhead is worth
more… and, of course, her history as a partner in the late Dr. Wayne’s medical
practice…”
Bruce
gave the daylight version of the Bat-scowl at seeing this detached formula of
words used to describe his father.
The
irritation passed soon enough. Lucius
hadn’t done anything wrong. The
impersonal tone was appropriate to the topic at hand.
The poor man had no way of knowing how personal the subject of Leslie
Thompkins was to Bruce.
She
had, it was true, been his father’s partner.
As such, she was one of the first notified the night of the tragedy. Living in the city, she had reached Crime Alley before Alfred. She got there shortly after the official personnel.
She had hugged him and comforted him while his mother’s body was loaded
onto a stretcher and disappeared into a van.
For a long time, Bruce would despise her for that.
He wasn’t aware that he associated her with the tragedy, not in the beginning.
He wasn’t aware her very presence made him angry.
He only knew he found her unpleasant.
He took her kindness to be a cloying fussiness, as though she wanted to
set herself up to replace his mother.
Alfred
spoke to him about his behavior. He
said it was not enough for a young gentleman to address his elders with respect,
he should also make visitors feel welcome.
To become sullen whenever one particular person came to visit…
That
approach worked until Bruce was sixteen, the age at which the urge to assert one’s
independence provides an instinct for cruelty.
On her
next visit, Bruce told Leslie about his Plan: to train himself, to travel the
world seeking knowledge, to become an instrument of Justice…
She
reacted as expected. She
criticized. She nagged, in fact.
His health. His safety.
“I
already have a mother, Dr. Thompkins,” Bruce cut her off in what would one day
become Batman’s voice, “in case you’ve forgotten.”
She
blanched. Her face went straight past white into a bluish green. She stammered something that was as close to an apology as a
shrew like that was capable of. And
she left.
Alfred was furious. Instead of
backing down or arguing, Bruce told Alfred that he was grateful. He said he would always appreciate the way Alfred raised him
without pretending to be his father. And
he would further appreciate it, Bruce said, “if everybody stopped trying to
foist a surrogate mother on me as well.”
Alfred didn’t back down from that the way Leslie had, not at first.
Not until Bruce implied Alfred’s real motive was a romantic attachment.
That’s what they were up to—Alfred, his stand-in for a father,
Leslie, his surrogate mother, and they were in love!
How sweet! How delightful
that the murder of his parents before his eyes could fuel such tender
passions… He got no further before throwing up.
And
there it remained for three weeks. At
the end of that time, Bruce was making arrangements for his year of travel.
“Got
a passport, Alfred?” he asked casually.
“Indeed,
sir,” the butler answered with the cold formality that had become a norm in
the house.
“Good.
Do you think you’d like to come to Japan and Thailand?
Or would you prefer to stay in England?
I’m going there first, although I haven’t decided on Oxford or
Cambridge. But I could drop you off and
then pick you up again on the way back if you like.”
Alfred
gave the boy an appraising look—this boy who he loved, who had such promise, who had disappointed him so dearly. The
question was clearly an invitation to forgive and forget.
Alfred had hoped for more, of course, he had hoped for an apology.
Yet…
Once the initial anger passed, Alfred realized it might be wrong, dangerous
even, to press the boy before he was ready.
Whatever it was Bruce was feeling—and he doubted Bruce himself could
say what that was—but whatever the feeling, it was so intense, so extreme,
that Bruce had used his parents’ memory as an emotional club.
Indeed, the whole idea of this “mission” was an even greater sign of how
strongly the boy felt. The very
idea of devoting his entire life to avenging their deaths—clearly he still had much
to work through before he could see Leslie’s friendship for what it was.
“May
I inquire, Master Bruce,” Alfred replied in warmer tones than had been heard
in the manor for weeks, “about your quandary regarding the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge.”
“Well,
Cambridge has an actual chair in criminology,” Bruce enthused, “while Oxford
has only a small research institute, but balancing that…”
Hugo
Strange, Victor Frieze, and Tom Blake looked up expectantly when Mad Hatter
returned to the dining room. He’d
been sent into the bar as a scout to learn why the Iceberg Lounge, notorious den
of the Gotham underworld, had been turned into a country music jamboree.
“Nigma”
was the one-word explanation.
“NIGMA?”
Blake bellowed, “We’ve been subjected to four hours of losers with guitars
wailing about their mama, papa, or baby sisters ahurtin’, acryin’, acheatin’, alyin’, agamblin’, adrinkin’, ashootin’,
and adyin’ because of EDWARD
I’m-so-clever NIGMA!”
“It’s
payback for 76 Trombones, isn’t it?” Hugo asked Jervis.
“No,
it’s not that,” Jervis assured him. “It
seems the fair Doris did not feel that crossword puzzles were much of a foundation
for a lasting relationship.”
“And
this Doris is the old lady from the party?” Victor asked.
Tom
Blake, aka Catman, growled like his namesake.
He had been excluded from the Crane Halloween party—as he was from all
Rogue social functions since that unholy she-cat had him blackballed.
“Why
the fuck is he mooning after some grandma?” he hissed.
“You’re
so bitter, Blake,” Hugo observed, “Doris is not really an old woman.
It was a costume affair, she was dressed as—what was it? Old lady
from the books that solves crimes… Miss Marple.”
“Indeed,”
Jervis put in, “‘We only go
around in circles in Wonderland, but we always end up where we started.’
Eddie thought he was getting somewhere, getting her into a costume—any costume.” He grinned.
“But no.”
“It
is a cold thing to have loved and lost,” Victor recited like a philosopher,
“I know what it is to have your heart’s desire ripped from your grasp by the
cold, cruel world.” Mr. Freeze’s moment of empathy was interrupted by a loud
click from the jukebox followed by a louder highnote from Roy Orbison.
It threatened to shatter the icicle chandelier over their heads.
Victor’s voice hardened into pure ice as he went on to say, “And yet,
I took out my pain on the guilty parties. I turned my rage on society. I might make the city INTO an iceberg, but I never subjected
The Iceberg to THIS.”
Oswald
Cobblepot, The Penguin, proprietor of the Iceberg, nursing a broken heart of his
own, overheard this and waddled over.
“You’re all being snobs, wack-kwak, about the music.”
“ARE
YOU INSANE,” Tom Blake turned on the birdman with a roar, “Country’s
melody line is monodic, NEVER polyphonic, and is matched with the ‘gospel
harmony’ of stacked thirds!”
Oswald,
Jervis, Hugo and Victor stared.
“The
instrumental accompaniment is crude!” Blake shouted at them.
They
continued to stare.
“Ernest
Tubb and his Texas Troubadours played in the same key of C for 45 years!” he
concluded.
When
this crushing argument was met with even more blank stares, Tom Blake excused
himself.
“That
would be why Catman isn’t invited to the parties,” Oswald observed dryly.
Then he sighed as Roy Orbison concluded and the inevitable opening notes
TEARDROPS segued to George Ducas, “The Most Miserable Man in Country Music.”
Jervis
and Hugo looked at each other and shrugged as Oswald waddled back to the bar.
“What’s
eating him?” Hugo asked, “He could put his foot down; stop the hoedown.”
Jervis
Tetch, aka The Mad Hatter, aka The Gossip Monger, shook his head and again
supplied a one-word explanation: “Roxy.”
Poison
Ivy liked to think of herself as a humanoid plant.
People were nothing but an animal infestation screwing up the wondrous green
balance of the planet.
Under the general heading of “People,”
men were the worst.
Women were at least in tune with the whole Earth Mother rhythm of
Nature’s inscrutable plan. Men strutted around with penises, trying to knock things
over.
And of the animal infestation “People,” subheading “Men,” the most
objectionable specimen was certainly one Harvey Two-Face Dent.
This
was Pamela Isley’s thought, curled in her new lair in a moss-hidden glade in
Riverside Park… hatefully eying a woodpecker pounding its
beak into that poor, defenseless oak. She
spied a climbing vine and caused it to coil itself around the woodpecker…
vicious thing, ruthlessly driving itself into that sweet, vulnerable tree.
It was not to be endured. She
had the vine smash the bird’s head into the tree trunk, then drop the feathered
carcass onto the dirt. Good.
That’ll fix him. Let him
fertilize plant life for a change instead of drilling holes into it.
Harvey
Dent. What did she care if he took
up with Roxy Rocket. They were
through. They’d been through for
a long time. They’d been beyond
through since he viciously murdered Ivan, the best goddamn mutant flytrap
anybody ever bred. So he had a new
girl. It was nothing to her.
It’s not like she ever loved him or anything.
It amused her that he was so smitten. She didn’t have to use her
pheromones to get him to do what she wanted.
And the sex was good. He
wasn’t squeamish about a little roughhousing.
In fact, he gave as good as he got.
But love? No. She had no
feelings for him or for any man or for any of the human pestilence infesting
this otherwise perfectly green realm of vegetation.
“Hiya,
Red, are ya home?” a familiar voice chirped.
Ivy
gave an imperial nod, and the hanging moss at the entranceway parted for Harley
Quinn.
Selina
had no reason to believe she was being followed, but she had the taxi drop her
two blocks shy of the Flick Theatre, otherwise known as Two-Face’s hideout.
He never tired of pointing out the great concrete
Comedy-Tragedy masks that decorated the façade like gargoyles, nor of showing
visitors inside to see the same image—two faces, one laughing, one weeping—in an elaborate mosaic beneath the grand staircase.
Selina was therefore surprised
when Harvey met her at the door and steered her back outside.
He had invited her out to lunch, he said.
She had
assumed that was a figure of speech. Harvey
did not “eat out,” he ordered in. Yet
here he was, ushering her in broad daylight to a quaint Vietnamese restaurant in
the same block. A matronly Asian
woman greeted him at the door as “Mr. TwoDents.”
She called to a boy of about sixteen that looked to be her son, who smiled at
Harvey, picked up two menus and showed them to…
“Your
regular booth, Mr. Harvey,” the boy said, laying out the menus.
“Thank
you, Tuan,” he answered. The
exchange was unremarkable, but the surprising thing to Selina was that the
words were spoken in Two-Face’s gravelly baritone, while Harvey’s side of the
face smiled. It was almost like both
of them liked coming here.
Selina
tried to hide her surprise by scanning the menu, but Harvey knew her too well to
let her get away with it. He
snatched the menu from her hand and ordered appetizers of tom hap nuoc dua.
“Steamed shrimp in coconut milk,” he
explained, “to die for.” Then bao
tu jambon “A beef dish, Jintara’s
specialty. And a
banh bo cake for dessert,” he
added. “We’re celebrating.”
Tuan
nodded, took the menus, and left. Harvey
looked to Selina for a reaction.
“What,”
he joked, “Can’t decide whether to ask?
Want to borrow the coin?”
She
laughed. Here sat the only man on
earth, Bruce included, who could actually get away with daring Selina without
bringing on the wrath of the cat.
“Okay,
what is this?” she asked, as if humoring an Arkham inmate.
“It’s
a nice family-owned Vietnamese restaurant,” Harvey answered with a double
deadpan, “why else would we have told them to bring us steamed shrimp and bao
tu jambon.”
“I
mean,” Selina giggled, answering an elder brother’s teasing, “why is it
that none of them…” she trailed off, at a loss for how to phrase it. “Okay, they obviously all know you.”
“Yes,
we eat here often,” Harvey smirked, enjoying the situation immensely.
He resolved to do nothing to satisfy her confusion, or make it easier to
ask the point-blank question.
Selina
found a formula of words.
“And they don’t mind serving an obvious member of the Gotham underworld?”
Harvey
paused, admiring Selina’s strategy. Then
he thought of a response.
“They
may not realize we are a criminal.”
There,
the conversation paused as a young girl came up to the table.
Harvey explained this was Tuan-le, Tuan’s older sister.
Tuan was not old enough to serve alcohol.
Harvey ordered “the usual;” Selina, a glass of the house white.
Tuan-le
left, and Harvey at last offered an explanation:
“In the village where this family came from, hideous facial scarring isn’t
that uncommon. Landmines, you
see.”
“Of
course, Dr. Thompkins’s greatest contribution to the clinic will continue to be
administrative,” Lucius’s memo droned on, “as her staunchest supporters
admit the lady, while a skilled physician, has the bedside manner of a drill
sergeant.”
Bruce’s
lip twitched.
It was
almost a year into Batman’s mission that Bruce reevaluated his treatment of
Leslie Thompkins. It was nearing
the anniversary of his parents’ deaths, and he’d called Alice Ishler,
Lucius’s predecessor, into his office. He
said as of this morning, there was no budget on the Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic.
Whatever it took to get the doors open by January 21st,
that’s what he would pay.
Money,
Alice told him, would solve everything except the staff shortage.
“The
sad fact is, Mr. Wayne, Park Row is not a nice neighborhood anymore.
Physicians aren’t exactly lining up to work down the street from a place
openly referred to as ‘Crime Alley.’”
“Double
the salary,” Bruce ordered, “Triple it, if necessary.”
Alice
bit her lip trying to decide if this job was worth keeping:
“I’m
not at all sure we’d want the applicants we got that way.
Mr. Wayne, the best prospect so far you vetoed.
Leslie Thompkins-”
“Has
the bedside manner of an auto mechanic,” Bruce interrupted. “Forgive me if I think an outreach clinic serving the
disadvantaged should be manned by a compassionate healer, like my father was,
and not an embittered harpy with a toxic personality.”
Bruce
winced at the memory of his words. Alice
Ishler was the first Wayne employee to quit during Hell-Month.
She would not be the last.
Harley
Quinn, the Joker’s quirky, kooky lunatic girlfriend, entered the Iceberg
Lounge looking less quirky and kooky than anyone had ever seen her. She strode to the bar like a gunfighter in an old movie.
She eyed the jukebox playing I FALL TO PIECES with a look of pure menace,
pulled a gun from her belt, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.
A PWATOIIINNGG sounded as the pistol shot a small suction cup onto the
jukebox. Attached by a thin spring
was a rubber ball painted with a Joker smile.
Harley smiled back at it for a split second, then pressed a red button on
the gun barrel. The ball exploded,
blowing a spectacular hole in the jukebox.
“HEY!”
Edward Nigma screamed before the smoke had even cleared.
Harley
turned to him with a slow burn of psychotic menace.
Never had she seemed so much like a woman the Joker would have for a
girlfriend. Eddie gulped.
“Nice shot,” he offered, and then returned his attention to his
napkin of anagrams.
Hugo
Strange and Jervis Tetch joined Harley at the bar.
“Calloo Callay,” Jervis began, “My dear, on behalf of the dining room, I thank
you.” He bowed formally.
Hugo
was less dramatic, but more practical in his expression of gratitude: “Sly, whatever the lady wishes, is on me.”
“Straight
scotch,” Harley croaked with none of her usual whimsy.
When she’d downed the shot and ordered another, she turned to Hugo.
“Dr. Strange, if you observed a patient killing woodpeckers for
‘brutally ramming its vicious beak into the sweet, vulnerable trees,’ what
would be your diagnosis?”
Hugo
blinked. Then he answered carefully,
“Without knowing any
of the particulars…”
“Oh
for chrissake, Hugo, you know the particulars: ‘The sweet vulnerable trees!’
Get off it.”
“Very
well,” Hugo conceded this hypothetical patient could be no one other than
Poison Ivy, “I would say there is a markedly Freudian subtext to her
actions.”
“I
concur,” Dr. Quinn said, motioning to Sly to refill her glass, “but would
you say it to her face?”
“Er,
no, I fear that, coming from me, that would only provoke an even more, er,
Freudian response.”
“Well
put,” Harley said, downing another shot.
Edward
Nigma chuckled as he eavesdropped on the conversation. Finally, he crumpled the napkin and turned to Harley with a
grin.
“Riddle
me this, Harlequin. What would the
Green Queen do to her best friend if you told her she carried a torch for her
ex?”
Harley
mumbled something unintelligible.
“What
was that?” Eddie pressed.
“Shoot
me. Stuff me. Mount me,” Harley shot back.
“Come
on, Harley,” Hugo prodded, “You did not go home and keep this to yourself. You came here, you made a scene, you told this much. Clearly, you want the story
to be known. So finish it.”
“Yes,
yes. Tell, tell,” Jervis chanted,
“For the tale is in the telling and the tattling is the tale, so to tell the
tale completely, you must tettle-tattle- ”
“OH,
FOR PITY SAKE,” Harley exploded, “She set the poison oak after me, okay?
I’ve got poison oak under my tassels!”
With
the arrival of the banh bo cake, Harvey Dent was ready to reveal the cause
for celebration.
“We’ve
got the monkey off our back,” he grinned in a curious mix of Harvey’s voice
and Two-Face’s. “Or to be more
accurate, we’ve got the FLYTRAP off our back.
Night of the Halloween party. Remember
when we decided to stay.”
“Because
Roxy just arrived,” Selina prompted with feline amusement.
“Because
Roxy had just arrived,” Harvey didn’t deny it.
“Well, one thing led to another. She’s
a fun girl. Remember fun?
We had damn near forgot. A
fun girl—not at all adverse to ‘thrills’ as she calls it, heh, heh,
feisty little minx, but without all the hostility.
Oh Selina, it’s great. It’s
like a weight has been lifted from our shoulders.
No more of the angry, angsty, love/hate, are-we-or-aren’t-we, want-ache,
slap-spank, kiss-cuff, lust-smack, who needs that shit.”
A cold
slap of grapey wetness hit his face before he could say more.
“CRAZED
BITCH!” Two-Face bellowed, while Harvey tasted the moist film on his lips and
said “Jadot Chardonnay,
‘93.”
Then he
produced the apologetic grin that always won over the women jurors.
“That
came out wrong,” he admitted.
“Make
it come out right,” she warned.
“We’re
happy,” Harvey said simply. “With
Pam, it was so damn confused. Don’t
tell us you don’t know what we’re saying.
Don’t tell us you didn’t feel exactly the same way when you traded in
‘Mean and Moody’ for playboy Bruce.”
The
Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic had opened on January 21st as planned.
It opened to the extent that Bruce cut the ribbon.
It had only a skeleton staff, on loan from Gotham General in exchange for
four new operating rooms, a burn unit, and a heliport “made possible with a
generous grant from the Wayne Foundation.”
Bruce
walked from the ribbon cutting to the alley…
and there she was,
Leslie Thompkins. Bruce felt a surge of
anger at the intrusion. Did she mean to insert herself into his private
moments of remembrance?
Almost immediately he realized his monstrous arrogance. She
wasn’t here for him. He didn’t
even plan to come until tonight,
after dark,
in costume.
He’d decided that was best. Bruce
would visit the gravesite; the alley was Batman’s domain.
He’d only come now, like this, because he was nearby for the ribbon
cutting. Leslie was there for herself. She
was there because—God, what
a fool he had been—she was there because she’d
loved them too. At least, one of
them.
Bruce
left her alone with her thoughts, but that night, he gave Alfred the belated
apology.
“What
I said, all those years ago, about you and Leslie.
Alfred, I’m sorry, it was inexcusable.
And unforgivable.”
“I
accept your apology, Master Bruce,” Alfred said formally. “You can make
amends, sir, by extending your expression of regret to Dr. Thompkins as well.”
“I
will, Alfred, I’ve already made an appointment for her to come see me tomorrow, at the clinic; I’m going to ask her to run it.
I understand now that… I mean…
Alfred,
why didn’t you tell me? About how
she felt?”
“I
did not think it seemly, sir. Dr. Thompkins and I were nothing more than friends, it is true, but it did not seem
quite chivalrous to say so.”
“I
see.”
To
be continued…
|