For all his mental grumbling, Dr. Leland
Bartholomew enjoyed his work. The
rest of society might look on Arkham as a place to shut away the problems it
couldn’t deal with. For him, it
was a chance to reach those the world had written off, to help those most in
need. He became a doctor to be a healer, not a bureaucrat.
Reports on patients were part of the job, he accepted that.
Employee evaluations were another matter.
Whichever ancient Arkham administrator decided that doctors should have a
hand in evaluating the support staff must certainly have had
counter-transference authority issues.
Bartholomew had put off the loathed task for as
long as he could—a bit longer than he could, as it turned out. He’d been picking away at them all week, getting all
the way from Abrami, Erica to Drognowski, Peter.
That left 24 letters to go, but Bartholomew was confident he could finish
up today. A Hugo
Strange-Catman incident in the morning anger management session had eaten up
most of his day, and he’d completed only four evaluations by five o’clock.
It was strictly against policy to take the forms home with him, but
Bartholomew couldn’t stomach the idea of working through the night in his
office. The late hours were a
necessary penance, he had succumbed to avoidance and procrastination, and now he
must accept the consequences. He
would work though the night to get the job done by the deadline, he would work
through the night with no consolation but Chinese takeout.
But he would do it at home, not at Arkham.
He’d long observed that Chinese restaurants
fell into two categories: the good
one and the one that delivers. Ming
Chow, the place that delivered to Arkham, was only one sticky rice grain better
than starving. The Hunan Wok,
where he could stop on the way home for savory ginger and scallion shrimp, that
was worth bending a few regulations.
With his last bite of shrimp, Bartholomew
opened the evaluation for Tibideau, Rachel.
He was happy to have reached the Ts, calculating that there were only 6
letters left in the alphabet and few surnames begin with U, X or Z. The end was
in sight!
Unfortunately, he was at a loss to evaluate
Rachel Tibideau, having only a vague recollection of who she was. He strained for some sort of comment, and failing to come up
with anything he cracked open his fortune cookie.
One look is worth a thousand reports, it
read.
Bartholomew chuckled, picked up his pen, and
wrote hastily, “She works in admissions, she says good morning, and she
didn’t quit when Croc broke her jaw. What
is there to evaluate?”
He nodded, pleased with himself, and went on to
the next form. Willory, Patrick.
“After Joker escaped there was blood on the walls.
After Willory’s shift next day, there wasn’t.
What else is there to evaluate?”
Bartholomew nodded again, doubly pleased, and
placed the dedicated Mr. Willory’s evaluation at the bottom of the stack as
before, looking eagerly at the next form.
Abrami, Erica.
Oh.
It looked like he was done then. Well…
Bartholomew skimmed his earlier comments on Erica Abrami’s performance.
He clicked his pen a few times excitedly and added the notation, “Have
you ever put Jonathan Crane in a straitjacket?
She has! Give her a
raise.”
Tim knocked nervously on the door to the rose
bedroom.
Seconds passed, and he wondered if he hadn’t
knocked a little too softly.
“Cass, are you awake?” he whispered.
More seconds passed before he realized the
whisper was even softer than the knock. He glanced anxiously at Alfred’s door,
wondering if he could risk a louder knock, when the door creaked open and Cassie
stood there, blinking at him. Tim tried his best to remember how to talk.
“Thought you might, uh,” he managed.
“Like I said before, we’ve all been through it, the Scarecrow gas.
I figured sleeping in a strange bed in a big empty house isn’t the best
medicine.”
“Not sleeping,” Cassie said frankly.
“This house can be a little creepy,” Tim
pointed out.
“Room too pink,” Cassie agreed.
Tim laughed, and Cassie looked confused.
It was unusual for anyone to laugh when she spoke.
Then he stopped. It was very
awkward. The hall was dark and quiet.
“Wanna go down for some ice cream?” Tim
suggested finally.
Cassie smiled—and felt embarrassed by it,
she had smiled too quickly and too brightly—but she followed Tim downstairs
to the kitchen.
The “Monarch of Menace” had followed Oswald
back to his office, and Harley ordered another Diet Sprite. She knew from experience that she had a long wait
ahead. Ozzy would have to examine
all the goods from the safe deposit heist, and then they’d start on the
negotiations. That could take
forever if you didn’t have Mistah J’s knack for hurrying a meeting along.
So Harley looked around the bar for some way to pass the time, and
lucky-lucky there was Red getting seated in her special booth.
Harley marched over happily while the vines and
shrubbery were still arranging themselves to form that curtain around the booth.
Red liked to keep a little border between her and the rest of the
Iceberg, left open like a tent flap if she was feeling sociable and closed if
she wanted to be left alone.
With an expert eye, Sly noted when Harley
joined Poison Ivy, and he deftly slid her tab from the bar stack and set it next
to the one for Ivy’s booth. It
was a complex system only he understood, but it enabled him to map the
ever-shifting movements and alliances in the Gotham underworld and to read them
at a glance.
Oswald’s office door opened and his boss
waddled out, followed by the new fellow, the Monarch of Menace. Sly watched as Oswald surveyed the room, said something to
Monarch, and the pair of them disappeared again inside the office.
With the response time that rivaled the OraCom Matrix, Sly turned the
Monarch’s tab slightly at a 5-degree angle, the upper left corner pointing
towards Oswald’s office, indicating a client currently in favor in the
Iceberg’s underground operations.
He needed a henchwench.
Edward Nigma reminded himself of the fact for the sixth time as the
self-important little nitwit prattled on with her “ideas” (if that was
really the word to use for this treacle).
With a wench at his side, Riddler could face
Batman knowing that neither he nor the Dark Knight could allude to the secret
under the mask. It was necessary to
get a wench, and of the groupies available on a given night at the Iceberg,
well… beggars can’t be choosers.
This girl calling herself Alaskandra
didn’t seem to know who he actually was.
She knew “Riddler” as the name of a top rogue, but she didn’t seem
to grasp the first thing about who he was or what he did.
Her ideas about him, and indeed all rogues, seemed like their Gotham Post
histories but viewed through a funhouse mirror of faux-intellectual, faux-PC
pretension, kind of like Oprah in a homemade question mark leotard.
As she spoke, Nigma found himself wondering how anyone could function
inside such a mind. She seemed to
have no inkling that she was dumb as a rock.
She seemed, on the contrary, to think she was downright bright!
“So y’see, a trap that’s sprung from a
trap door has a built in pun, and I figured you could use that in your clue,
like if it had, like, an electrified shield underneath, you could warn about a
‘shocking pun’ ahead, get it?”
“Yes, I follow,” Eddie said dully.
It didn’t take long for Nightwing to find a
target for his frustrations. He
began with a petty drug dealer supplying the raves, moved on to the Spiked Skull
gang, and finally finished off the evening with the Chinatown triad selling the
Skulls guns. The activity
left him with an aching fist and the 29th Precinct with an
overcrowded holding cell, but it did little to thin the cloud of anger,
frustration, and failure that congealed around him since the call came in: Batgirl gassed. Robin
wounded.
Bruce would be back tomorrow. He’d entrusted Nightwing with his team, and ‘Wing was
returning only 2/3 of it in operational condition.
Cassie had been gassed.
Tim had been stabbed.
He radioed in to Oracle.
It was getting to be Last Call at the Iceberg. Without any operatives to go and observe in person, he told
her to tap into the traffic cameras and see what she could make out.
Any intel she could collect would be helpful: who was closing the place, who left with whom, which direction they went.
Anything he could show Batman to show they’d carried on, they’d
gotten the job done. Anything to
lessen the…
Cassie. Tim.
Nightwing made a ferocious fist and punched a
brick chimney. He winced at the new
pain throbbing down his knuckles into the wrist, devouring the older, duller
ache from the evening’s earlier pummeling.
Cassie went in alone against the Scarecrow; she
was gassed and stabbed Tim when he tried to help her.
Would it have played out any differently if he’d let Black Canary
partner them?
It was Gotham.
They were crimefighters. Stuff
was going to happen, they all knew that. But
another pair of eyes, another set of fists, there was no denying that…
No.
No.
No. No.
No. Black Canary could not
be trusted; it was that simple. There
can’t be teamwork without trust; Dick had known that since he was four.
You can’t climb a ladder twenty feet into the darkness above the center
ring, reach out for that trapeze dangling only twelve feet from the top of the
tent, swing from that 1-1/2 inch of steel bar and then leap out into NOTHING
without knowing—knowing, as sure as up is up and down is down, that
those arms will BE THERE to CATCH YOU.
Those you trust that way are family, blood ties
or not; they are family in every way that matters.
His father, his mother, and Bruce. There
was really little difference. You
could leap into nothing and know.
Barbara too, after a time.
Jason wasn’t around long enough to form that bond, but Tim was.
You could leap and know.
And Cassie, Cassie was getting there.
Wally. Roy. Donna. Hell, all of the Titans. It was family. And even if he’d risk his own back with someone like Dinah,
he’d be damned before he’d risk his family’s.
Tim’s or Cassie’s leap entrusted to that woman who came among them
like she was one of them, when all the while she would stand by and let Bruce
fall to the dust…
Just like his father had fallen.
Damn that bitch.
It was getting too late to expect more action.
If he were on his own time, he would have called it a night.
But seeing as he was covering for Batman, he decided on one more pass
through the patrol route. If, as he
expected, there were no more criminal scum to pound out his frustrations, he
might wrap up the evening with a half-hour of Zogger.
Cassie giggled.
“Now it’s all over except the crying,”
she smirked.
“U-oh,” Tim swallowed.
He’d taken her to the “movie room” behind
the armory. The room with the giant
plasma screen wasn’t used much since Dick had grown up, not officially. But he and Dick kept it equipped with the latest Xbox
and PlayStation gear.
Tim figured Phoenix Ninja was the
only chance he’d have to trounce Batgirl in a fair fight, and trounce her he
did for the first 12 minutes of play. There
was no body language to read in his avatar ShadowBird, none of the tells she
reacted to with such deadly speed in a physical battle. Then she noticed how this wrist-twitch or that made his
character move, and since then…
“All over,” she repeated as Tim’s
ShadowBird lay inert on the digital rooftop while the spectacular backdrop of
downtown Ginza reconfigured to proclaim SilentShogee the winner.
“’cept the crying,” she added, looking at
him expectantly.
“Rassafrassin,” Tim muttered.
Cassie smiled.
“Play again or movie?”
“Movie,” Tim declared, looking at the stack
of DVDs.
“Coward,” Cassie teased.
“No,” he insisted, “We’ve got a lot to
get through, that’s all. I
can’t believe you haven’t seen Princess Bride or Blazing Saddles.
These are the fundamentals that everyone must know by heart, Cassie.”
“You fear SilentShogee,” she said. “Beat ShadowBird again given half chance.”
Tim’s eyes locked onto hers.
“You think so,” he challenged with bat-like
ferocity.
“Know so,” she nodded with certainty.
“Care to make it interesting?” he grinned.
She blinked quizzically.
“Interesting?”
“A bet.
If I win, you’ve got to… let’s see… You’ve got to bring me a
slice from Gino’s every night during patrol for a week.”
Cassie’s head tilted slightly, confused.
“You not win.
ShadowBird weak.”
“You so sure, put your money where your mouth
is.”
Cassie’s stare pitchshifted suddenly, the
endearing puzzlement blotted out by a ferocious bat-glare.
“I want Red Bird,” she announced.
“You want my car?” he gulped. “No way!”
“See, you know ShadowBird weak. Shadowbird lose. I
get car.”
“If you win,” Tim said firmly, “IF, ‘cause
you don’t have the sure thing you think you do, but if you win, I’ll
bring you an ice cream sundae during your patrol each night for two weeks. See, you get two weeks if you win, and I only get one.
I’m giving you odds, that’s how we know who’s really the favorite
here.”
Cassie nodded her agreement, and Tim punched
the reset, restarting the game.
“All over ‘cept the pain, Shadowbird”
Cassie snickered.
“Not this time, SilentShogee,” Tim
answered.
Nigma signaled furtively at the waitress.
He really didn’t think he could get through another minute with this
“Quizzix” woman without a stiff drink.
She was “a go-getter,” the type you saw on those Apprentice shows,
thought she could mastermind a Riddler crime better than Nigma himself:
“As you can see by this graph I’ve made up plotting successful
robberies against robberies stopped by Batman, you could raise your success
ratio significantly, save time and fit in more robberies per month just by
leaving out the clues.”
Nigma looked pleadingly at the waitress,
pointing to his empty glass, while Quizzix went on to suggest, if he absolutely
had to leave a clue, it should have nothing to do with his intended crime.
Rather, he should send Batman uptown instead of down, to the east side
instead of the west…
“Another Glenundrum,” Eddie told the
waitress wretchedly.
“In fact, if you’re going to send clues, you
could go all the way and send them pointing to other rogues crimes, like that
Joker-guy.”
The waitress looked at Eddie pityingly.
“Just bring the bottle,” he suggested.
“You have a problem there,” Oswald advised
the Monarch, nodding shrewdly towards Poison Ivy’s booth, where Harley sat
chatting happily with her friend.
He ushered Monarch back into his office and
closed the door. “Two problems,
perhaps. Whether the Joker has any
actual feelings for Ms. Quinn is, of course, a subject of some debate.
I don’t really think a jealous outburst is likely on that score.
But he will not like anyone else calling himself a ‘king’ among the
rogues.”
“I’m not worried,” the Monarch announced
calmly.
“Kwak,” Oswald answered, as if this
unruffled confidence came as no surprise. “And
Miss Isley,” he went on probingly, “She has been known to be
jealous… possessive, territorial, and dangerously hostile to Bat and Rogue
alike.” He paused and smiled
fiendishly. “And yet you’re not worried there either,” he noted.
“No,” the Monarch answered.
“Might one ask why,” Oswald replied.
The Monarch smiled.
“I rather think you’ve guessed, Ozzy old
boy.”
Oswald chewed his cigarette holder
thoughtfully.
“Because SmileX and pheromones don’t have
much effect when you’ve got no lungs or nostrils,” he said at last.
In response, the Monarch’s body swelled,
drooped, and settled into Clayface’s unaltered form.
“You
really will have a problem there,” Oswald noted gravely.
“She hasn’t forgotten the potpourri incident.”
“I know.
Why do you think I came back in disguise?
I know I’m still blacklisted, but damnit, Oswald, I don’t care
anymore. I’m sick of Star City
and Keystone and Metropolis. I
wanted to come home, and so I did. It’s
not like she can do anything to me.
Short of firing me into pottery, it’s not like any of you can do
anything to me.”
“True enough,” Oswald conceded. “But then, why the Monarch?”
“It matches Harley,” Clayface explained.
“King and court jester. Be
a crime to change that look of hers, don’t you think?”
“Quite,” Oswald quacked.
“I like her, Ozzy,” he said simply.
“I don’t have many pleasures left, since this.” He gestured,
his hands and fingers becoming more solid and defined, then melting back into a
viscous goo. “I’ve no blood
pumping, no nerve endings. Touch, taste, and smell are all a memory.
All I have left is looking. She’s
pretty. God, the pleasure I can
still get from looking at a pretty woman.”
Oswald continued to chew thoughtfully on his
cigarette holder.
“You should still settle matters with Miss
Isley before Joker finds out about the ‘Monarch.’
They may not be able to harm you, but they can still do plenty of damage
to my bar, especially if they’re both of the same mind to do you grievous bodily
harm at the same time, if you see my point. You will, of course, be charged for any breakages at the
usual rate.”
Clayface laughed heartily.
“It is good to be back in Gotham,” he
declared, reshaping himself into the Monarch’s imposing form.
“Good indeed, to be back in the realm of Gotham.”
Nigma returned to his hideout alone.
On the cocktail napkin in his pocket, he had the phone numbers of three
groupies, written in silly neon green ink and positioned with girlish whimsy
around the Iceberg Lounge logo. He
set it on the desk, neatly pressing out all the wrinkles.
He found a glass and filled it to the brim with the remaining scotch. He raised it high, toasting Alaskandra, Quizzix, and Cluedith
in all their dimwitted glory. He
took out a book of matches, also bearing the Iceberg logo, and with the grim
severity of a high priest enacting a holy rite, he methodically struck a match
against the side of the box, touched the flame to the napkin and watched the
names burn.
Then he drank the scotch in a series of urgent
gulps.
Bruce had Selina.
You could say what you wanted about Batman, but he wasn’t a stupid man.
He was the only mind in Gotham on par with Riddler’s own.
And he’d found himself a smart woman, a woman who could challenge him,
a woman who could keep up, a woman who…
How he missed Doris.
Dr. Bartholomew looked at his final notation on
Johnson, Marion and wondered if perhaps he was taking the benevolent flippancy a
little far. While it was certainly
true that no one could do a better impersonation of Hugo Strange eating
spaghetti, it wasn’t really the sort of thing Arkham should be encouraging in
its staff.
The Chinese food was fine, Bartholomew
reflected as he searched for the whiteout, but the gin was probably a mistake.
Azrael perched on top of the train station
while rain began pelting the net of unconscious thugs he’d left suspended from
a fire escape. The rain began as a
mere trickle, but his ears did detect a rumble of distant thunder.
If the police did not arrive soon to collect this criminal refuse, he
would have to cut them down. The
fire escape was metal. If the storm
worsened, it would not do to leave living men, even criminals, tied to a
lightning rod.
While he waited, Azrael eased open the door to
his mortal psyche. Within that
door, Jean Paul Valley glared at him with a murderous fury never before directed
at an angel by a human spirit.
Boundries, Az, that’s all I’m saying,
was his sole remark.
Azrael said nothing.
After several minutes of strained silence, the
police van arrived and Azrael resumed his patrol.
You said Azraels do not participate in the
human experience. Back when my
father died and you emerged from my psyche, you said an Azrael is an angel, a
creature of spirit, and takes no part in the host’s mortal life. You said—
I merely—
You said an Azrael is a creature of spirit.
You said in the old days before the Order of St. Dumas could cook up the
next generation in a test tube, you said the host fathered a child in the usual
way and the Azrael persona just shut off and let him go to it in private.
I merely peeked.
YOU DON’T GET TO PEEK WHEN I’M HAVING
SEX, AZ! You’re supposed to go
take a nap or recite swordfighting stats or something, I DON’T CARE as long as
you’re NOT IN MY HEAD!
It was that ‘Sex and the City’
program, my curiosity was very keen.
…
Ms. Bertinelli seemed very energetic.
I hate you, Azrael.
I hate you and I will find a way to hurt you.
There is no need to be vindictive,
Mortal. My indiscretion did no
harm.
YOU KINDA WRECKED THE MOOD, AZ.
I did not hear the lady complain.
I’m going to find a way to hurt you, Az.
I’m not taking this lying down.
…
…
Have you noticed, Mortal, that Ms. Bertinelli bears a certain resemblance to Charlotte the Virtuous?
I hate you.
To be continued…
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