Harley Quinn watched the digital timer counting down, second by second…
It was almost time.
30 seconds.
She struck the match. 29…
Touched it to the wick. 28…
Watched the flame dance. 27…
♫ Happy Birthday to me… 22…
♫ Happy Birthday to me… 16…
♫ Happy Birthday, Dear Harleen… 8…
♫ Happy Birthday to me… 2… 1… Midnight.
Harley blew out the candle, wiped a tear, and ate her cupcake.
Twenty-nine. She was twenty-nine years old. And she was behind schedule. She was supposed to have her own talk show by now. Her book, written while a brilliant young doctor at Arkham, would have become a best seller in its first month and now be in its third paperback printing. Then the radio call-in show, a stepping-stone only since her looks made her a natural for television. She should, at this moment, be using her star-studded birthday party upstairs at the Russian Tea Room to announce the release of her second book, timed to catapult her TV talk show into national syndication! And instead, where was she? Alone in her new HA-HARLienda eating a cupcake.
And it was HIS fault.
“This is Harleen from Gotham,” Harley said sadly, although there was nobody but a couple slobbering hyenas to hear. “I’m a long-time listener, first-time caller. I just love your show.
“Why thank you, Caller. What did you want to talk about today?
“Oh Dr. Quinzelle, my life is just gone all off track somehow. I’m supposed to be this brilliant, beautiful superwoman, sittin’ on top-a-the-world and restin’ my footsies on the moon. I’m supposed to be you, Dr. Quinzelle!
“That’s sweet, Caller. What did you say your name was?
“Harleen.
“Harleen, let me ask you a very important question. Have you read my book?
“Oh of course, Dr. Q! I read it cover to cover. Twice!
“That’s great, Harleen—but if you’re going to read it twice, you might want to buy a second copy next time, okay? Just kidding. Anyway, I’d like you to think about Inmate Isley, profiled in Chapter 7: Flowerbeds: A Gardener’s Guide to Personal Inventory. You need to sit yourself down, Charlene.
“Harleen.
“And take a long look at the flowerbed that is your life. Make a list of all the weeds cluttering it up that you don’t want to be there, and yank ’em out by the root!
“But I—
“Then write down all the flowers you do want and get out there and get yourself some seeds.
“But—
“Thank you, Caller. And good luck to you. Next up, we have Debbie from Croton Falls concerned about her husband’s foot fetish. Stay tuned…”
Harley ran a fingernail around the dried wax that had dripped from her birthday candle. She felt exactly as if she had been blown off by a real talk show help-jock spouting a lot of useless platitudes.
Make a list of all the weeds cluttering up her life: Mistah J. It was all his fault. She would have the life she always dreamed of by now if that grinning maniac hadn’t made her fall in love with him.
Make a list of all the flowers you do want in your flowerbed: Mistah J. Her Mistah J. His winsome grin, his merry laugh, his green hair, his purple pinstripe. It was too cruel that he would let something as trivial as that stupid octopus joke come between them.
Sigh.
What could she do? There must be some way to teach him a lesson. Pay him back but good for all her pain and suffering and unfulfilled dreams. And get him back to be her Puddin’ again… “Pay back, get him back,” she sang to a made-up tune. “Pay him back and get him back… Ha-haa, ha-haa…”
Well why not? She was an expert in the field of human psychology, wasn’t she? Even if she did fudge her way through a few classes, it’s not like she didn’t have a piece of paper saying she was a doctor of psychiatry just like the guys who hadn’t slept with the professor to get a grade. Besides which, anything she didn’t know going into Arkham that first time, she certainly knew by the time she broke out for the sixth or seventh time. With the likes of Jonathan Crane and Hugo Strange as her colleagues—well, maybe not Strange, he was pretty much a slimy loony-toon. But anyways, she had certainly seen enough of them, from both sides of the glass, to be ranked as the foremost expert on rogue-psychology in the world. So why not? Why shouldn’t she be able to push her Puddin’s buttons, this way and that like a joystick, until he came running back into her arms!
YES! This was a plan. This was a plan worthy of Dr. Harley Quinn. “Payback and get him back, Ha-haa ha-haaa,” she sang again. She paused and rolled her eyes towards the ceiling, concentrating, as she repeated the song deliberately “Pay… back… and get him… back… Doo-da, doo-da.” The hyenas whimpered. Her made-up tune had morphed from a schoolyard chant into Camptown Ladies. “Ooh-di doo-da-day…”
“Well, shit,” she declared, stomping to the kitchen for another cupcake, “I can’t come up with a brilliant scheme to bring my Puddin’ back to the tune of Camptown Racetrack! That’s NUTS!” She turned on the radio to drive the siren song of the bob-tail nag out of her brain.
♫All day
♫Staring at the ceiling
♫Makin’ friends with shadows on my wall
“Sing it, Brother!” Harley told the radio-voice while she searched for a piece of paper.
♫All night
♫Hearing voices telling me
♫that I should get some sleep
PUDDIN’S WEAK SPOTS, Harley wrote in thick block letters.
♫Because tomorrow might be good for something
“Yeah, it sure will,” Harley muttered darkly, she was starting to like this song. She was gonna play that clown like a puppet on her own personal can of Silly String, and this song would be her anthem.
♫Hold-on
“Holding?” Harley told the radio promptly, her pen poised over her list.
♫Feeling like I’m headed for a break-down
♫and I don’t know why
“Well, maybe it has something to do with letting a grinning clown screw up your life plan and never getting your book deal or your talk show or your guest appearance on Frasier…”
♫Well I’m not crazy
♫I’m just a little unwell
Huh?
♫I know right now you can’t tell
But—
♫—stay a while and maybe then you’ll see
♫A different side of me
“But I gotta be crazy!” Harley wailed, “It’s what brought me and Puddin’ together. It’s what makes us so perfect for each other.”
♫…not crazy
♫I’m just a little impaired…
“I don’t like you anymore,” Harley told the radio.
♫I know, right now you don’t care
Harley stuck her tongue out at the speaker and then returned to her list.
BATMOBILE, she wrote carefully. Puddin’ really did have some kind of fixation on Batman’s car, quite apart from his hatred for the crimefighter. Some kind of Oedipal hostility transference complicated by a displaced manic aggression.
♫But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
♫And how I used to be
Jason Blood unlocked the door to his apartment, slammed his keys and backlog of mail onto the carved table in the entranceway, and glanced up at the painting hung directly above it. Andrea Mantegna’s Descent into Limbo. Limbo from the Latin limbus meaning literally the hem or “border” of a garment. A temporary location on the border of the afterlife for souls not ready, for one reason or another, to proceed to their final location. Not unlike California.
How typically ETRIGAN! Manipulating him into leaving town for no other reason than some scaled-winged-demonic ex-girlfriend was whipping up a little Apocalypse in Gotham, and Etrigan didn’t want to see her.
The worst of it was, Jason had enjoyed San Francisco. And he would have been no more than perturbed to have missed something “big and mystical” in Gotham. But it was the principle of the thing. Etrigan had played with his mind—again! He’d been maneuvered into taking a holiday because the Prince of Hell couldn’t manage his relationships.
Jason sorted through his mail, collecting the pieces he wanted to read, and retired to his favorite chair in the living room. He tried, as he had throughout the flight home, to settle in to the balanced state of ‘resignation’ and ‘pissed at Etrigan’ in which he lived the bulk of his waking life. It was not an easy state to achieve when Etrigan was being so bloody quiet. He detested that demon’s voice more than any sound in the world, but its absence was always a worry.
In a case like this, embarrassment was a likely enough explanation. That his hated adversary could be so disconcerted by an old flame’s return that he would actually miss the chance to be released into the world, that would be shameful enough. But that Blood himself now knew of Etrigan’s predicament…
Embarrassment was the most likely explanation, but with Etrigan you could never know for sure. The son of Belial, Lord of Lies, deception was literally in his blood, or whatever it was that coursed through demon veins. It was probably simple embarrassment keeping Etrigan silent. But you could never be sure.
Batman knew something was wrong the moment he got out of the Batmobile. It had been a satisfactory patrol: stopping a mugger was always gratifying, more so than any other criminal scourge that afflicted his city. A mugger with a gun was doubly gratifying. The scum AND his weapon were off the street and out of circulation; that dwarfed all other accomplishments of the evening. Although, strictly speaking, finding the location of Scarecrow’s new hideout would probably prove more valuable in the long run as far as the war on crime. It was nearly a week since Jonathan Crane had been released from the hospital, and until tonight, Batman had been unable to pinpoint his location. He had been thinking over the log entries since the final tu rn from the public road onto the Wayne property. He only put that mental outline aside as he stepped out of the Batmobile and sensed the disturbance in the cave.
He couldn’t tell offhand if it was something about the bats overhead, if it was what Sensei taught about opening your awareness as you entered a room to sense if it was occupied, or if he was simply that connected to the cave that he knew instinctively if something was amiss. He proceeded cautiously from the Batmobile’s turntable into the main chamber. He eyed the workstations… they didn’t appear to be disturbed. The tray with his untouched sandwich had been removed and the coffee mug washed and replaced… that was routine. Alfred’s presence would not feel this way. Alfred belonged in the cave; this was something that wasn’t as it should be.
There was a sound in the costume vault and Batman raced to the door, silently, swiftly, nerves tensed, senses hyper-alert. Just as he got there, Stephanie stepped out.
“OH!” she gasped. “Oh… Oh, ah… um. Oh.”
“What do you think you’re doing here?” Bruce graveled suspiciously. To Stephanie’s ears, it sounded like Batman challenging the worst of the worst in the back alleys of Gotham. If she had known him better, she would have realized that this wasn’t the crimefighter at all, but merely an adult all-too-familiar with teenage hijinx.
“Wait here,” he ordered and stepped into the vault. “Lenses engage. Infrared.” He noted the heat marks lingering on the last items touched and shook his head wearily. Children. They were so fascinated by the trappings. He often worried about it. It didn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t understand the somber nature of the Mission and all the inherent dangers, but it always struck that nerve.
He returned to Stephanie and removed the cowl, giving her the full benefit of his sternest glare.
“Well?” he asked, when the glare produced no result.
“I… uh…”
“No more of that. What were you doing with Robin’s costume?”
“Iwasgettin—”
“Speak up,” Bruce ordered.
“I was getting a picture taken. One of those Glamour Shots type things. It’s… a present for Tim.”
Bruce stifled any visible reaction, although if he were alone, he would have allowed the minor tickle at the corner of his lip to twitch.
“I see,” he said at last, sounding as stern and disapproving as he could manage without resorting to the Batman voice.
“Sorry, Batman,” Stephanie mumbled, addressing her feet.
“Don’t ever do it again,” he ordered, turning and leaving her alone.
Well this sucks.
It’s not a surprise. You get into a knife fight, you’re going to get cut. You need to know that going in and accept it, not be intimidated by it, use an arm to block a strike like always, even when it means turning into the blade. So now I’ve got a few cuts in the costume, and yeah, the skin underneath. That much isn’t a big deal. They’ll heal and Kittlemeier will make me some new gloves and fix the slashes in the catsuit. In two weeks, it will be like it never happened.
Except for him. He’s going make this into a thing, I just know it.
And it’s none of his damn business! What I do on a prowl is my own affair. It’s hardly the first time I&r squo;ve gotten banged up. It’s just the first time since we’ve been living together. He’s going to see it and he’s going to freak out. I can just sense it.
I don’t even do stuff like that in the usual course. I’m not a crimefighter, I don’t have that “this is my territory and no crime shall be committed here” chip on my shoulder. That’s his kink, not mine.
But there is such a thing as professional pride, and there is such a thing as respect: for the city, for the prime targets, for the… I don’t even know what all. But it’s about respect! You go breaking into Cartier or the Gotham Museum of Art, then you damn well better live up to it. I absolutely can’t stomach these goddamn know-nothing wet-behind-the-ears wannabes sitting around in their grimy little hovels deciding they could take on a target like CARTIER! It’s offensive. It offends every fiber of, every molecule in my… It just fucking pisses me off, okay! There they were, these goddamn punks that know nothing about anything, and they DARED to break into MY PLACE!
That was simply unacceptable and I went down there, whip in hand, to explain it to the ignorant little shits.
Of course, the nature of ignorant little shits is that they’re very attached to their ignorance. You can never explain anything; the only satisfaction to be had is—to use his expression—taking them down. They won’t be desecrating Cartier again with their seedy incompetence any time soon, and I guess there is some satisfaction to be had in that. But not much. The only real gratification I got from the whole thing was the release of punching the one with the knife into next week.
It wasn’t really enough. I begin to see why Bruce has such a stick up his butt so much of the time. It is downright sickening, and the satisfaction of punching some payback out of them doesn’t quite balance this infuriating! goddamn! frustrating! need to… ARGGHH!!!!
And on top of all that, I’ve got these slashes in my costume.
I just don’t need him making a thing of it on top of all the rest.
I really don’t.
Batman finished his log entry, then looked around. Selina usually came padding around by now, not always, but most nights, with a cup of cocoa and a neck rub and encouragements to come to bed…
Since Scarecrow was still at large, he updated the toxicology database with the latest information on adenosine inhibitors and adrenaline activators. This data he transferred to a memory stick no larger than a piece of chewing gum. He retrieved the portable vapor analyzer from the Batmobile and removed a similar stick, replacing it with this new one. You could never be too careful with Crane…
He returned the analyzer to the Batmobile and was about to call it a night when a red light flashed on his workstation: once, twice, and then on the third flash was joined by a soft yet urgent tweet of the JLA Communication Net. The call, Bruce noted, was from Atlantis. Aquaman. He replaced his cowl before opening up the A/V connection.
“Accept,” he ordered, and the system bleated. Then the sea king’s scowling face appeared on the giant monitor. “Evening, Arthur,” Batman said curtly.
“Hello, Bruce. Glad you’re there. Didn’t want to interrupt if you were on patrol.”
“Back an hour ago. What do you need?”
“That’s, eh… tricky to explain. You’re sure you’ve got the time?”
“Art hur.”
“You know the situation with California?”
“You mean Sub Diego?”
Arthur stared at him disgustedly from the screen. His baseline contempt for the surface world’s press always spiked when they treaded into his realm with their catch phrases and buzzwords. Sub Diego was only the latest of their presumptions.
“San Diego, yes. You’re aware of what’s been happening?”
“The survivors of the earthquake last year, genetically tampered with to become water-breathers: living beneath the surface, presumed dead all this time, and unable to ever return home because they can no longer breathe air.”
“Thanks for the statistical analysis, Captain Compassion. You do realize that people’s lives have been ruined by this…”
Bruce tuned out the rant. He could understand the frustration behind it.
“What do you need, Arthur?” he repeated when the rant had spent itself.
Arthur puffed out a belligerent sigh.
“I need to borrow your pet cat burglar.”
♫ I know they’ve all been talkin’ bout me
♫ I can hear them whisper
♫ And it makes me think that there must be something
wrong with me
♫ Out of all the hours thinkin’
♫ Somehow I’ve lost my mind
♫ Well I’m not crazy
♫ I’m just a little unwell…
Harley reconsidered her thoughts on the song, the list of Puddin’s weak spots, and her own life plan.
Maybe it wasn’t that crazy after all. She was in a better position now to write her groundbreaking book on the psychology of Gotham rogues than she would ever be working as a wage slave drone at Arkham. She had been one! She was already famous, so she didn’t even need the book to put her on the map. She was already known—so maybe she hadn’t lost so much time after all. The book would give her credibility in the world, that plus her notoriety as The Clown Prince of Crime’s handpicked Tasseled Princess…
It would work. She would bring enlightenment to the world about the nature of costumed rogues, achieving fame and fortune for herself, and at the same time taking her vengeance on the clown for taking the best years of her life and giving nothing in return. That would teach him! The Great Joker, his reputation stripped away, his darkest, most humiliating secrets revealed to the world. They would all know of his secret love for… the mundane! That dream he has about washing the car on a Sunday afternoon before the game—and not a hot car either, or his steamroller or even his pogo stick—a Subaru Minivan. Just wait ‘til they all find out about that one at the Iceberg!
Ha! Take that Puddin’! Ha, I say HA!
♫ …stay a while and maybe then you’ll see
♫ A different side of me.
?
So I took a shower. Even with fresh knife wounds, it’s the best way to settle myself after a chaotic prowl. I had bound the cuts up fairly well, so there was only a slight sting here and there when the hot water hit.
My sponge was missing. This has become the norm and I’m going to have to get a new one. I would have already but I just hate letting him win this way. The sponge was a beautiful, soft, natural one—from Eddie, part of a gift basket he sent when he was in Key West back in January. Q.E.D. Bruce didn’t like it. It got “accidentally” moved to one of the guest roo ms a few times. I found it on both occasions and brought it back. That was that, for a while. Then Eddie found out the secret and all of a sudden my sponge is gone again. When I found it this time, it was in Nutmeg’s stash under the bed, and it has her tooth marks in it. As often as I return the thing to its little shelf in the shower, it finds its way back to her stash. Yes, a cat will brave the shower, or any water, if the enticement is great enough. I’m not sure how Bruce got her interested, catnip oil most likely, but however he did it, it worked. Sneaky bat.
The sneaky bat was waiting for me, holding out a towel, when I stepped out of the shower. He started to say something, and then his eyes went square.
“What happened there,” he asked, glaring at the cuts on my arms and hip.
“Nothing much. Certainly nothing I couldn’t patch up mys—”
“Have Alfred look them over in the morning,” he graveled—and I’ve got to say, sexy as I find Batman’s voice in most circs, I was less than thrilled with it then. He was going to go all overprotective now and make a thing of it, I just knew it. “Sharks can smell a single drop of blood in the water from ten miles away, so—”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen the movie. Also, I think sixth grade science covered that. Um… sharks?”
Instead of handing me the towel, he moved behind and started drying my back.
“Sharks?” I repeated.
“You might be doing some diving soon.”
entr’acte…
It has been said that earning a degree in psychology is the same as earning a degree in manipulation, and having been manipulated her entire life, Harley had half a thought—as she cleaned up a puddle of hyena piddle—that she might find out why. Damien, or maybe it was Slobberpuss, objected to her delaying their evening walk until she finished Chapter 1—Phylum Asylum. She glanced at her notes for the book, and then at the chalkboard, dominoes and scale-models detailing out her more complicated campaign to win back Puddin’s heart. She really needed a henchman-handyman, and if he didn’t mind a little typing and filing, so much the better. But Ha-Ha Harry said he wasn’t interested. Not after she explained there were no big robberies involved, maybe a break-in at Arkham, just to get her notes in order for chapter 4, but there was no money in it. “It’s for science” was not the way to get henchmen on board. She’d have to find another way. Of course, her esteemed colleague Dr. Jonathan Crane (tentatively Chapter 3: Scarecrow—fear and gender confusion in the post-industrial age) did it for science. Maybe she should consult with him before her next trip to the Iceberg to recruit herself a hench-handyman and hyena walker who could maybe help paint her scale model in his free time.
I didn’t have to dive for the initial meeting as it turned out. Aquaman was like a lot of clients; he liked doing business on his home turf, which was Atlantis. They think it gives them an edge in the negotiations or something. Little do they know; cats are never put off by a little thing like home field advantage. They outrank you wherever you hold the sit down. “A cat can look at a king” is the pertinent bit of catlore, not “Cats don’t like water.” Although I braced for that remark to be repeated every step of the way in this job by folks that thought they were clever. Not one of them would know the truth about Felines and H2O, and I wouldn’t bother to explain. Sea King wanted to meet in his capital city in the middle of the Atlantic, I didn’t mi nd.
Transporter in the Batcave connects to the Watchtower, and from there I could transport down to Atlantis. (There’s no direct connection from the Cave to anywhere but the Tower. Bruce’s orders. You really have to love that man. Meow.) But anyway, it was a simple, two-transport deal. Fast. Easy. Unwet. No need for some Atlantean conscript to come collect me in a shuttle-sub. I did have to wait for a noon-to-midnight window when Martian Manhunter would be on duty. Bruce and Aquaman agreed that “J’onn” was the most discreet and would ask no questions. Before his shift was Diana (“too many questions”), and after that was Plastic Man (“And you want NO part of that”).
Bruce was surprisingly cool about the whole thing. By noon, I was changed into costume and he met me down in the cave. I was pretty sure Aquaman hadn’t told him what this job was about. He kept saying he would “let Arthur explain it in his own way”—which had to mean that he didn’t know. He only answered one question I had before I left. It was an important one, but I’d been hesitant to raise the subject at all. Still, it was nagging me. So right before I stepped into the transporter, I asked it:
“He’s not going to be another Clark is he? You know ‘Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match…’”
I would have sworn it would take a lethal-and-then-some dose of SmileX to make Bruce laugh inside the cowl. He never does it. Never. But evidently the thought of ‘Arthur’ playing matchmaker was sufficiently ridiculous, even to the Bat. It was a quick snorting chortle, not something the uninitiated would ever recognize as a laugh, but it was one and it was creepy as hell.
I was very relieved as far as my meeting with Aquaman, the idea of an entire faction in the Justice League campaigning about my love life was a lot more horrifying than Batman chortling.
entr’acte…
Leon knew his job at Glamour Shots wasn’t art. Not high art, not low art, not any kind of art. And he came to Gotham for art. It was the center of the art world; there was nowhere else to go if he wanted to pursue his dream as a world-class photographer. You saw life through a camera lens, looking always to capture one of those moments of pure visual truth… He ran out of money in six weeks, everything cost so much here. Other hopefuls gave up and went home. Leon swore he would never be one of them. He might not be able to support himself with his art, maybe he never would, but he would eat and pay rent however he could and he would keep taking pictures. It took three jobs to make ends meet, and Glamour Shots paid the least of the three. But it was his favorite. He got to take pictures. They weren’t his kind of pictures, but anything that let him look through a camera lens was fine with him.
They weren’t his kind of pictures. There was little variety for one thing: young girls mostly, pretending to be sophisticated and sexy years before they even understood what went on between women and men. And housewives, middle-aged and then some, trying to be young and alluring again. Lies. They were decent portraits, some of them. Leon liked to experiment with the lighting and filters, and the manager didn’t mind as long as he kept on schedule. He had created some truly stunning effects, definitely some pure visual moments, but not one of them could be called truth.
Like this blonde in the Robin outfit. She had the kind of eyes that writers embarrass themselves trying to describe. This is what photography was about: eyes like that and then putting on a mask around them, it was one fucking fantastic visual. It jus t wasn’t true. That girl was no Robin, no way, no how. She was just the best goddamn picture Leon had taken in eight months.
He couldn’t waste it. Every artistic impulse he ever had screamed that a visual like that must not be wasted. He cropped off the stupid Robin stuff and blew up the perfect square of the girl’s masked face into an extreme close-up. It was something. Leon wondered if his manager might consider it for the ads in the store.
Probably not, though, those pictures were part of the décor, they probably came from corporate, professional models and all… Leon looked down at the stunning eyes of the close-up becoming more stunning as the image continued to develop.
A moment captured could be a pure visual moment without being true… “A pure visual moment, whether true or lie,” he heard himself saying as he imagined showing his portfolio to a gallery owner. “I compare moments of pure visual clarity that express truth juxtaposed with those equally vivid that express untruth.”
“Hello, Selina,” the Martian greeted me at the tubes.
“Hi, Ï’ônń,” I winked.
“You’re expected below,” he told me fussing with the dials. “But you’ll have to wait a few minutes for your biorhythms to recover from the first transport before undergoing another.”
I knew Martian Manhunter slightly. He had shuttled me back to Gotham after the Prometheus mess, and I had asked him some questions because, well, why be rude. It’s a longer trip than the transporter; you don’t want to just sit there in silence. So we chatted.
He told me he goes by J’onn on Earth; it’s close to the ubiquitous “John”, easy for English-speakers. That is a little too much coincidence for anybody to swallow, so I asked about his real name. Wasn’t meant to be any kind of great bonding thing, it was small talk. That seemed the way to go after turning the tide against the crazy with a gadget who had flattened the entire Justice League. So I asked about his real name. He brushed it off and we rode in silence for a while, then for no particular reason, he started to explain.
His people are telepaths, so his name wouldn’t be “spoken” so much as zinged into someone’s brain when he met them the way we say “how do you do.” This didn’t strike me as any way to run a polite society; I don’t even like giving out my email.
He got a funny look at that moment that I strongly suspect was a Martian chuckle.
Now when the guy who just introduced himself as a telepath seems to chuckle at your unspoken thought about the e-mail, you can’t help but consider the possibility that he might be peeking into your brain. And if he had, that meant he’d also heard “no way to run a polite society.” I really didn’t want to insult him. First Prometheus slaps him into a state of spastic paralysis and some criminal cat burglar that only snuck into their lunar clubhouse for the Storm Opals has to save him and his whole sorry team, then he gets the fun of shuttling her home because Batman is busy being a jackass, and then on top of all that she’s slamming his culture. No. That is not the feline way. So I told him to zing. It seemed the best way to make a gesture. He said a human tongue wouldn’t be able to pronounce his name, but I asked again. I was a bit curious by then anyway, a name that could only be expressed telepathically, what could it be? After a little more prodding, he agreed.
He sent the name twice into my mind, and the only way I can describe it is that a part of it felt like Paris and the smell of this little bookstall by the Seine when it had been raining. I tried my best at reproducing what I’d “heard”, and he said I have a cute accent. He said it with a very curious look, one that was not—decidedly not—a Martian chuckle.
I winced. Because the Paris flash had caused me to infuse the word with a rather French pronunciation. It seemed right, this thought, this name, was closer to Paris than to anything else in my experience. And the one thing the Parisians do not find remotely charming is any kind of accent. You speak their beautiful language correctly or you should not be speaking it at all. And the one word I’d ever heard of this man’s language had conjured Paris in my brain. If his people were at all like the French, I’d probably pained him more with that ‘cute accent’ than Prometheus had with the gadget.
“Oh, not at all,” he cut me off (and now it was clear he had been eavesdropping on my thoughts).
“Not really,” he said, “I would never intentionally enter another’s mind without their knowledge and consent. It is merely that some thoughts are ‘shouted,’ essentially, at a volume it is difficult not to overhear.” Here he paused for an unambiguous chuckle of the regular human-looking variety before continuing. “If I may say, Catwoman, yours is one of those minds which becomes very excited—and consequently rather loud—when exposed to new ideas.
I stared.
“My expression just then had nothing to do with your accent, which is indeed most charming. It is merely that—I have never heard a human accent speaking my language before. And that was quite intriguing.”
Batman would never have explained a look. At the time, I wouldn’t have thought any hero would. At the time, that’s what surprised me the most about our conversation. Today, the thought that struck me was very different: nobody had ever asked about his name before? All this time on Earth, all his colleagues—his friends—in the League and elsewhere, they never asked? They’re not even human, half of them, one or two at least can probably come closer than Ï’ônń.
“Arthur can,” he told me conversationally. “But Arthur is a telepath. But no, apart from him, the others never brought it up.”
“Was I shouting my thoughts again,” I asked sweetly.
“Screaming them,” he smiled back. “Something has excited the cat’s curiosity. This isn’t your first time in the transporters, surely?”
I shook my head. “First time visiting Atlantis,” I explained. “What can you tell me?”
“That Batman doesn’t like it down there. Which is probably why Arthur invited you. They’ve already sent the All Clear, by the way, a very efficient operation. Arthur told them to be ready at noon Eastern U.S. time, and they sent the Ready at 11:45. But you should wait a few minutes more before the second transport, it’s quite taxing physically.”
So we made small talk again. I like what little I’ve seen of Ï’ônń. He reminds me a bit of Harvey in a way, doesn’t quite fit into the social circles he’s landed in, but making the best of it. He asked, rather perfunctorily, about Bruce and then, with more enthusiasm, about Dick and Barbara. I told him briefly about their “new arrival,” the as yet unnamed cat-formerly-known-as-Flummox. After a few minutes chit-chat, he made the inevitable joke about cats and water (that’s one) and sent me on to Atlantis.
entr’acte…
Harvey Dent believed in Fate. He knew as we ll as anybody that Harley Quinn was insane, just as crazy as the psycho clown she doted on. If she thought Galen MacDoogles now lived in Selina’s old apartment, there could be no greater proof of her lunacy.
But Fate sent him to the Iceberg that night. He had been avoiding his criminal haunts, as the coin dictated, since his release from Arkham. And it was the coin that had finally decreed his exile at an end.
It was Fate herself that threw him and Harley together at that cramped table in the bar because 1) the dining room was crowded with Green Dragons and Yakuza celebrating a joint routing of the Chinatown triads and 2) he had no interest in the discussion at the bar as to whether a picture he had not seen of a masked blonde in the window of a downtown Gallery was wearing a Robin mask. It was Fate that sent him to that table with Harley and Fate that turned their conversation to MacDoogles, the wonderful man with the red hair and the wicked dye streak who shut Poison Ivy down with such snarky style at the Highland Games.
If there was any chance at all that Dent’s hero was still in Gotham, he surely must make an effort to meet the man. So he pulled his hat down and his collar up to shield as much of his face as he could and hailed a cab. When the first pulled up, he sent it away and hailed a second. He gave the address of Selina’s apartment, got in and, at Two-Face’s insistence, flipped the coin to decide if they would pay the fare or shoot the driver with a .22.
“I’ve got to admit, I’m impressed,” I told my host sincerely. “I’ve worked for royalty before, and I’ve had VIP treatment plenty of times, but this is the first time I’ve ever been met at the door by an actual king.”
Aquaman laughed. He’s one of those that puts a lot of energy into a laugh. You get the feeling that he doesn’t do it often, like he saves it up for special occasions.
“No choice, really,” he said at last, “If I didn’t meet you myself, protocol dictates that visitors entering by way of the JLA-transporter be escorted to the throne room by the Prime Consular, which is currently Vulko. And as this is your first visit, Vulko would consider it his duty to give you the full tour, including the complete history of the infinite-bubble motif on the Grand Arch as it is echoed throughout every dome and arced spire in Atlantia. I am proud of my home, Catwoman, and I want visitors to see it as I do, not through the eyes of an architecture sophist.”
He did show me his favorite spots, only briefly pointing out the “Grand Arch” with the infinite bubble motif and focusing instead on a garden of sea willows and a coral tower that was the highest organic point in the city.
“The absolute highest point,” he was quick to add, “is the Palace spire, a half-meter taller than the tower, but the tower has a better view. A 360 degree panorama of the city; it’s a breathtaking sight. And a favorite spot for the artistically inclined to go up and paint the view.”
Of course, he touched on the Travelogue stuff you’d get in any tour: Most of the city is covered by a large clear dome with only a handful of smaller domed outcroppings. A large majority of the population is strictly water-breathing, so a large portion of the city is submerged. There are a handful of “dual-breathers” (both air and water) that live in the city, though most prefer to live underwater. But there are a good number of dual-breathers who live above the surface in the open-air portion of the city. The only exclusive air-breathers in Atlantis are visitors like me. The water level in the city can actually be raised and lowered, though it is rarely done except once a year for the annual Migration Festiva l. During the Festival, the entire dome is filled so that everyone has free access to the entire city and the water-breathers can swim up to the top of the dome to view the migrations and festivities.
The palace, which I had transported into, was the largest structure in the city and home to all the royal consulars, ministers, guardsmen and their families. It was also the only building that could fill and drain its rooms independently of the rest of the city.
“This is especially important in the primary chambers of the palace—the Ministers’ council rooms, the Throne Room, the Great Hall and the royal residence,” he explained. As he showed me first the consular chamber, then the ministers’ chamber, then the Great Hall, it became apparent that a number of these rooms had been drained of their water and pumped full of air for my visit.
“You’ve gone to a great deal of trouble,” I noted. “Why? You could have met me at the Watchtower, or even a Starbucks on the pier.”
“I wanted to see if you would come,” he said. “Cats and water.” (That’s two.) “And of course, it would annoy Bruce.”
I laughed. “Ï’ônń said the same thing. I’m honestly starting to think you people put more thought into tweaking Bruce’s nose than my crowd does.”
“What did you say?”
“You people, the Watchtower crowd, you think more about how Bruce is going to react to something than—”
“No, no. What you called J’onn!” And then he burst out with one of those ‘been-saving-this-up-all-day’ laughs. “‘Ï’ônń.’ I’ll have to remember that.”
“Look, if he’s got me saying something like ‘I lost my bra in the Alexandrian oil lamp,’ I’d just as soon not know.”
“Nothing like that,” Aquaman assured me—except—it’s interesting—he wasn’t Aquaman anymore. He was doing one of those shifts, but not like Bruce going into Bat-mode. Still, it was a shift. Informally, the JLA bunch call him “Arthur”—and the man walking with me now nobody would ever call Arthur. I wondered if he had a King-mode just like the others had a Hero-mode.
I didn’t have to wonder long, because, at that moment, he opened a large set of double doors in front of us and I saw into…
“The Throne Room, this is the heart of Atlantean Government—and where protocol dictates I receive a guest such as you on business such as this.”
He looked at me rather pointedly. I didn’t have to be a telepath to get the vibe that he didn’t want to talk here—it was too cavernous and too stately to have any kind of real conversation—but he didn’t want to say so.
I shrugged. “Let’s not and say we did,” I suggested.
He didn’t say a word, but led me through the throne room and into a much simpler room in the back.
“My private office,” he said—and I noted that his King-mode, like Bruce’s Bat-mode, had a different voice.
entr’acte…
Jason Blood needed no mystical second sight to know the visitor with such scarring over half his face was the one-time Gotham prosecutor turned career-criminal, Harvey Dent. But he would need much more than the surface sensitivity that evolves after a few centuries channeling the magicks to understand why Dent thought he was a Scottish Laird called MacDoogles. It would take a full casting at least to explain that one, perhaps even a cross-temporal seeing. Etrigan o bviously knew, he’d been laughing about it since Dent’s arrival.
Jason was grateful in a way. He didn’t get the joke, but whatever it was, it broke Etrigan’s silence. For that alone, Jason felt he owed Dent some small debt of gratitude. Then there was the dark-brother factor. There was no comparing this troubled man’s multiple personality disorder to Blood’s own fate shackled for eternity to a demon of Hell. It would be folly to even consider such a parallel, and Jason Blood was no fool! But he did know what it was to share every waking breath, every dream and every nightmare, with a dark “other” whose evil one fought, day in and day out and too often unsuccessfully, to contain.
King Orin (a.k.a. Aquaman in royal/business mode, at least that’s how the flunky at the door addressed him) wasted no time getting down to it once we were seated in his private office.
“I expect you read in the newspaper about the situation in California, that a small part of San Diego wound up under water after that last earthquake.”
“The newspapers exaggerated, didn’t they? Like the whole Gotham quake and ‘No Man’s Land’ stuff.”
“Yes and no,” he said with a bitter laugh. “They exaggerated the scale of what’s submerged. But the more sensational details, that there are hundreds of people living down there, genetically altered to become water-breathers if something like that occurred. That is sadly and disgustingly accurate.”
He slid a folder across the table. I knew what it was going to contain. I slid it back, unopened.
“Look,” I explained crisply, although I was quite sure I was wasting my breath. “You can skip over the whole Hero-Hire 101 bit. I’ve done three of these over the years. I know you guys think it’s very important to lay it on thick about all the humanitarian reasons why the job needs done, and click off each and every reason why you feel it’s necessary to bend some laws to make that happen. But here’s the thing: you’re already paying me. It’s a job. You don’t need to sell me on it past that, not as long as the check clears.”
“You’re a very interesting creature,” he said thoughtfully. I thought I detected relief, like maybe he was actually pleased to finally have somebody he didn’t have to convince. Then he slid the folder back. “Oblige me,” he said, gesturing to it. Typical. Heroes are obstinate, mulish, obsessives—in the air, under sea, in caves, planes, trains… “You can skip the first ten. Those are ‘the hero-humanitarian bit.’”
Hm. Obstinate, mulish obsessive—but he can be taught. I opened the folder and skipped through the expected heartbreaking pictures of water-breathing survivors huddled in an underwater mall, convention center, amusement park… Real “give and give generously” stuff… He probably figures I’ll soften and kickback part of the fee. That’s the problem with taking these jobs. Word gets around: Cat’s a soft touch… When I flip past photo #10, I absolutely refuse to give him the satisfaction, not the smallest gasp escapes me—but I must admit, photo #11 was a pretty shocking image.
“That’s baby boy Pfeifer, born two days ago. The first new arrival since they went under…”
It was a baby all right, tiny as they come.
“…Seven pounds, six ounces.” He paused, his face solemn. “An air-breather.” He paused again, letting the full weight of what he had said sink in. “The mutation didn’t take. W e’ve got dozens more pregnant women down there, and we have no idea how many, if any, children of water-breathers will be able to survive the environment they’re born into. We got that one to the surface in time—barely. We can’t count on being able to do it again—and again and again, every blasted time. We need pressurized incubators, infant breathing tubes, the list goes on and on. And time is a factor.”
“And that’s why you want me instead of doing it through more official… ‘legal’ channels?”
This look fluttered across his face—quickly, but long enough for me to recognize it. It’s the same look Bruce gets whenever he hears that one of the rogues has broken out of Arkham. Again.
“The surfacers—the surface government, I should say, the bureaucrats and opportunists—know we need this and we need it ‘yesterday.’ I’ve told them it has to happen, that they have to make it happen, period.”
“Oops.”
“Yes. Oops. I’m a king, Catwoman, not a councilman. I’m used to giving orders.”
“I know. Bruce told me you have zero-tolerance for bullshit and you don’t suffer fools. Personally, I like that in a man. But eh, it doesn’t play too well with politicos.”
“So I’ve learned. It seems that even the lives of those ‘constituents’ they claim to love so much come second to their own power-greed. Honestly, every time I think I have a handle on the surfacer mindset, someone comes along and blows my theories out of the water.” There was a barely contained hostility in his voice, a frustration that I’ve seen before, many times—at the Iceberg. Harvey, Eddie, Jervis, sometimes Pam. Always means the same thing: Thwarted! They had a plan, it would have worked, and then the big bad Bat showed up and ruined the whole thing.
He took a deep breath and started again. “Anyway, now they can hold it all for ransom, drag their feet until the next woman goes into labor, or the next. Long as it takes to show me and everybody else who is really in charge. And if they get that upper hand, then all the funding for research, every dollar and resource meant to make those people’s lives bearable, any pretense of autonomous government they put together, it’s all a joke.”
“I see.”
“I rule Atlantis, and those poor people had the misfortune to become submerged on your Western Coast. The Pacific is simply too far away for me to keep a constant watch over it; the logistics, the travel time back and forth. This simply must be resolved to my satisfaction and quickly, not just for the sake of those babies. If it isn’t, then my every waking minute for years to come will be spent trying to provide for them, to assist them and to get them self-sufficient. And from here on out, every single decision involving those lost souls will be exactly the same—the same bickering, the same in-fighting, the same political bullshit. And I can’t allow that, Catwoman. I don’t have the time or the ability to put up with that shit for that long. Atlantis must come first.”
I smiled at that. I couldn’t help it. My way and My city. Heroes are adorable. Obstinate mulish obsessives, but adorable.
“…Look, I’m bringing you in because you’re the best. You’re the perfect person for the job. You snuck onto the goddamn Watchtower for Poseidon’s sake—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I cut him off. “Look, like I said, Bruce told me you don’t do BS, so let’s cut through all that ‘you’re the best’ crap and get to the bottom line. Makes for a shorter meeti ng.”
“How did a guy like Bruce ever manage to hook up with someone like you,” he murmured, shaking his head. And I noticed something I’d never seen happen with Bruce in Bat-mode: the King Orin façade was cracking a little. A hint of a smile and the ‘officialness’ in the air seemed to diminish just a touch.
“I think that’s fairly common knowledge in your circles,” I whispered with a smirk, “it was doing shit like this that you’re hiring me for. So can we get back to the—”
I stopped because he had scribbled something on a slip of paper and slid it across the table. There was a number written on it with an awful lot of zeroes.
“Cutting through the BS,” he said simply.
I looked down again at the figure he was proposing to pay, and nodded.
“I need it to be absolutely invisible,” he said. “No sign at all of a ‘theft.’ No sign of anything at all. That’s why I can’t use Atlantean troops or Leaguers, even if they would go along with it. Neither group is exactly what you would call low profile. This has to be perfect. Immediate, silent, and perfect. We just suddenly have all the equipment we needed. And I give them all the credit: so glad you saw it my way, realized the importance of getting this done…”
“i.e. did what you told them to.”
“Exactly. We understand each other, don’t we, Catwoman?”
I met his eyes.
“Well we have a deal, in any case.”
“Good. You know your assignment. We’ve agreed on price. Kelp okay or do you prefer it in salmon?”
Bruce had also mentioned the sense of –grunt– for lack of a better word –grunt– humor. I wrote down a number myself and slid the sheet of paper back.
“It’s a numbered account,” I said, simply to show myself un-awed by the hero that makes a joke. “If the Swiss will take your kelp, that’s fine with me.”
“The Swiss? Damn land-locked, neutrality-addicted fuckers. I’ll work it out with them.”
I took that as a handshake, and that concluded our meeting. He stood, smiling broadly.
“Well, since you’re here, could I interest you in some dinner? Unless, of course, Bruce is expecting you back…“A small, devilish smile crossed his lips. “In which case, I can offer you a spare room for the night.”
entr’acte…
It was a shakier Bruce Wayne that descended the stairs into the Great Hall than had ever appeared there before. What was Alfred thinking insisting he see this visitor now? It made no sense! Alfred had never been exposed to fear toxin personally, of course, but he had nursed Bruce and the others through enough episodes that he must surely realize the hell of the aftereffects. Bruce’s heart still raced unexpectedly, his blood pressure would surge for no reason, his body felt drained and sluggish from the physical trauma—and his mind still reeled from the hallucinations: a theatre marquee reading Cat-Tales, the words slashed with a Z as he looked up at it… Then Catwoman’s picture, the close up, slash- slash-slash- by an invisible rapier… Running to the alley behind and finding Selina cut to pieces… It was too much. He needed a day to pull himself together. He was certain he looked twice as bad as he felt, and yet Alfred expected him to go waltzing into the drawing room to talk to some visiting…
Bruce stopped, blinked, and blinked again. “Hey Bruce,” Harvey Dent smiled, “I hear Selina’s out of town, so I told Jeev es I’d better see you instead. I really need a hand on this one. It’s a two-man job, if you know what I mean.”
Bruce fought with every nerve and muscle on his face to betray no expression that might prove suspicious. He was quite certain that, although he still suffered palpitations, the hallucinations were long past. What he was seeing—although it defied any logical explanation—was real. Harvey Dent’s face was completely whole.
It’s been said that all trial lawyers are would-be actors. Harvey Dent was, in his day, one hell of a prosecutor. He played his voice like a musical instrument, played his looks as well, a hint of charm here, a note of indignation there—all for the noble purpose of convincing a jury but basking in their rapt attention all the same. As he stood in Bruce Wayne’s drawing room displaying his full, unscarred face again, it was clear he had lost none of his dramatic flair in his years as Two-Face.
“Hey Bruce,” he had smiled when Bruce entered. “I hear Selina’s out of town, so I told Jeeves I’d better see you instead. I really need a hand on this one. It’s a two-man job, if you know what I mean.”
As often happens when guarding a secret identity, Batman’s mind instantly sliced the situation into cross-sections to be viewed from different angles:
-Bruce Wayne, the civilian playboy fop and Harvey’s old friend, should be bewildered (no artifice needed there) but excited and pleased.
-The Bruce Wayne that was really Batman knew he’d been exposed to fear toxin the previous night, a chemical containing powerful hallucinogens. He had to consider the possibility that what he was seeing was not real. If it was some new aftereffect from the toxin, he would betray himself by speaking of it to Dent.
-If it was real, on the other hand, it would be preposterous to ignore it.
“You said you came to see Selina?” Bruce asked, stalling for time.
“Sure did,” Dent answered with a devilish smile, “Two reasons. Ha.”
Two reasons. Same old Two-Face, except it was Harvey Dent talking and he’d said it like a joke.
“One: I have a situation on my hands. Harley Quinn, ‘the tassel twit’ as you may or may not have heard some of us refer to her, has lost her last marble. She’s going to get herself a deathsmile or worse if somebody doesn’t talk her out of it. Unfortunately, ‘hem, my own efforts to talk to Harley solo have never ended well. You can’t reason with a woman like that, you know the type. And nothing good comes of trying. So I thought I’d bring in Selina. She’s such a sweetie, not at all homicidal. Only one of that lot I can really bring in on this that will stop short of flat out murder.”
Bruce noted the continued use of “I” and “me.” Each one made the hallucination theory less viable. Auditory hallucinations were common enough in the throes of a fear toxin episode, as common as visual ones, but aftereffects had always been confined to palpitations, night sweats, and similar symptoms. Hallucinations of any kind were not normal this long after exposure. It seemed increasingly more likely that this really was Harvey Dent’s true face, fully restored, that Bruce was looking at.
“What about two?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You said you came to see Selina for two reasons. What’s reason number two?”
“Why, showing off my new face, of course.”
Bruce broke into a belated foppish grin on having, at last, external c onfirmation on what his eyes were seeing. It might be a Two-Face trick, but at least he knew his eyes were meant to be seeing what they were.
“It is… quite a change,” Bruce said honestly.
“Isn’t it though,” Harvey agreed, turning his head from side to side to display his matching profiles. “I can’t wait to shave.”
“How did it happen?” Bruce kept his voice suitably bewildered, but there were a thousand bat-questions coiled behind this simple query waiting to follow up on the answer. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for Bruce’s foppish façade, Harvey was too occupied with other musings to answer the question.
“You know what else I’m looking forward to? The Oak Bar. Remember those days, Bruce: Some pretty blonde in one of those booths by the window. Send over a drink. ‘From the gentleman in the Harvard tie’ or maybe ‘in the Hugo Boss pinstripe.’ Not ‘from the two-faced freak that hopes maybe if you sit on his right side it won’t be too much of a strain to sit and talk to him for ten minutes.’”
Bruce said nothing as the bitterness spiked and then spent itself. If this was a Two-Face trick, he’d outdone himself. The performance was pure art.
“How did it happen, Harvey?” he repeated. Harvey looked again to Bruce as if using the question to pull himself back from painful recollections. “It’s impressive work, certainly,” Bruce prompted. “A local surgeon?”
“Local yes, surgeon no. It was that fellow that’s living in Selina’s old place. Says his name is Blood, Jason Blood. But I have my suspicions that’s an alias. He’s really…” Harvey lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper “…a chap by the name of MacDoogles. But keep that under your hat. It must be a kind of secret identity he goes by. And I think he’s been so helpful to me in order to keep it quiet.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” Bruce promised flatly.
Jason Blood. Jason Blood meant magic. Interspersed with the sick flush Bruce felt whenever that ugly subject was alluded to, he wondered if Blood might have possibly swapped the themes of particular rogues. “Harvey Fullface” might be sitting here next to him, but evidently Harvey thought he’d gotten to be that way by blackmailing Jason Blood about a non-existent secret identity. It was so nonsensical, Bruce couldn’t help wondering if Mad Hatter was running around with his face divided in two.
entr’acte…
I remember this! The plane landed in San Diego an hour ago, but I was still flying. To be working again—what a high. Not some by the numbers entry into the Gotham Museum after hours just to keep my hand in, but a real honest to god paying job! I hadn’t felt like this since half-hour to show time that first night on Cat-Tales. Whewee! MEOW! in fact.
It was two weeks since I acquired my own personal Oracle: Jean Paul Valley, a remarkably decent hacker when he’s not busy being a remarkably annoying vigilante. I had contacted him from the Watchtower between return-transports from Atlantis and set him on finding me a cover. He’d found a perfect one in this conference for some kind of specialty software: Two days, not too large, not too small, and the hotel is fully equipped with laptop plugins and high-speed Internet in all the rooms.
By the time I’m checked in (Bridgett Morse from Pittsburgh, Sr. Programmer, Imaging Systems Ltd.) and get my laptop hooked up , he has a folder waiting for me with a city map, locations where certain shipments are stored, blueprints for one warehouse already. Either he’s actually better at this than Barbara, or he’s trying to impress me. There is also an e-mail with an address, a vintage clothing store, because -and I’m quoting- “geeks dress dowdy.”
I stare at these words. What the hell does he take me for! I’ve been walking around in this body long enough that I know how to attract attention when I want to and avoid it when I don’t. Did he think I was going to go bouncing my lack of complexity all around San Diego in eye-catching Gotham ultrachic? Moron.
Bruce’s stomach lurched as he entered the Batcave and saw the one horror of the previous night that had not been a toxin-induced hallucination. There was a hideous red grin painted on the Batmobile, a neon red Joker-grin on the hood of his car. A grin he would slap off the original’s face in payment when they next met. For now, he merely made a mental note to clean the horror off the hood at the first opportunity. In the meantime, he would use one of the backup cars. Today’s business was too important to be distracted by such petty vandalism.
Anxious as he was to talk to Jason and learn the truth about Harvey Dent’s miraculous “healing”, it had to be postponed. Whatever happened there—and Bruce couldn’t begin to guess what it might be—was unlikely to get Dent or anybody else killed by morning. Harley Quinn’s latest stunt, on the other hand, could prove fatal in too many ways to imagine if he couldn’t put a stop to it. Writing a book about the rogues? What could she be thinking? The only way such an act wouldn’t end in a permanent smile is if one of the others got to her first. It was, as Harvey noted, only a matter of time until someone else found out what she was up to.
She’d beaten the odds once already, Bruce surmised, in that Harvey was working to save her. Harvey had made no allusion to the coin-flip that must have occurred to reach that decision, but he admitted he’d come to Selina as the one rogue he was sure would 1) object to the book as much as anyone but 2) stop short of killing to keep it from being published.
Bruce could concede a certain logic to the thinking as far as it went. But it couldn’t be said to go very far. True, Selina wouldn’t like the book. True, Selina would probably do anything short of killing Quinn to put a stop to it. But what could she do? “Two heads are better than one” seemed to be the extent of Harvey’s actual strategy.
Still, Batman had to at least try to intercede. Harley Quinn was insane, but even the insane have a survival instinct. The rogues were killers, every one of them, Joker, Ivy, Scarecrow, Ventriloquist. The M.O.s varied, but none of them were above taking life. He had to make her see that. He had to find a way.
entr’acte…
I changed into my Bridgett-Morse-from-Pittsburgh street clothes and set off on a walking tour of San Diego. Legwork isn’t glamorous, but it is an indispensable part of any assignment. Blueprints are fine when that is all you have, but there is no substitute for seeing it firsthand if only up to the doors and windows.
There were 4 locations I would have to penetrate:
-the infant breathing tubes were at St. Clara’s, a busy downtown hospital.?-the pressurized incubators had been specially commissioned from a medical supply firm, they were sitting in their warehouse, waiting for the city to authorize delivery.
-a specialize d genome analyzer had been built to work underwater to assist research of both the mutated water-breathers and their children, they were sitting in a distribution hub at the airport
-and finally, there was a FEMA station on the new docks set up for diving departures and the lowering of equipment and supplies down to Sub Diego.
To make this happen as seamlessly and invisibly as Aquaman wanted, I would have to penetrate all four in a single night. Pick-up, pick-up, pick-up and drop-off, gathering everything needed from each location and delivering it to Sub Diego before anyone could see it was gone.
Chiroptera Culpa or “Bat blame” is such a common obsession among the Gotham City Rogues, it certainly warrants further study. As was discussed in Chapter 2, a Type-D rogue can observe any given word, action, expression or even inaction of the Batman and extrapolate scenarios as to its meaning which are outlandish even by the measures of delusional psychosis. When the delusions move, as they frequently do, beyond mere wish-dreams of undeveloped psyches into scenarios where Batman is perceived as the cause of all their failures…
Harley stopped typing momentarily to glare at a dark black spot high on the wall that was surely either the world’s tiniest bat or the world’s largest moth.
…which is really bitchy when Batman really IS the reason everything went wrong!
She typed fiercely. The creep. The big ol’ winged bat-creep. Why’d he have to get into the middle of it that way and wind up snorting all the fear gas himself, huh? Even if it was his car, that trap was sent for Puddin’! Now, after all the trouble she went through to get the stuff from Scarecrow, it was wasted. She was all the way up to Chapter 4 (Mad Hatter: Literary Fetishism as Sublimation of Sex Fear) on her book but had made no headway at all on driving Mistah J back to her. At this rate, she’d be off the bestseller list and in the discount bin before Mistah J even reached Phase 3, Begging!
And that bat-moth on the wall was really starting to piss her off. It was throwing a shadow now, which shouldn’t have been possible just sitting on the wall that way.
“Bozo envy?” a deep voice read over her shoulder, “Quinn, how do you think a homicidal psychotic is going to react when you tell the world ‘it’s about the big shoes’?”
“It’s not the shoes at all,” Harley said in an eerily professional tone, “It’s a pathology that your gags will never be as funny as the the other guy’s, your pratfalls are a pale imitation of Keaton’s, you once did a clever variation of ‘Who’s on First’, but when was the last time you did something really original?”
“Quinn.”
“Oh sure, Joker Fish. But Joker Fish are no Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Ni!!”
“Harley, listen to me.”
“And did anyone ever ask you to sell their burgers?”
“QUINN!” Batman snapped, “He is going to kill you. Do you understand? Any one of them will kill you if you go on with this.”
“You just think that because they try to kill you, Batsy! I know better. I am a trained professional, don’t forget. Batsy? Bats? Where’d he go?”
entr’acte…
You meddled, Keeper Mine,
In things that are not thine.
Each man alone must choose
If his soul he keep or lose…
Enough, Etrigan, Blood thought acidly. You’ve said your piece, about ninety times now. The rhymes are gett ing worse by the minute. I get it. You’re upset about Dent. You had your say; I didn’t listen.
Listen you did not,
So defiantly you sought
To magically erase
The most becoming features of his face.
His demon isn’t like you, Etrigan. It’s only a piece of his own tormented psyche. All that was necessary to make Two-Face disappear was to make Harvey Dent believe he was gone. Those scars were Two-Face to him. Ergo.
You meddled, Keeper Mine,
In things that are not thine.
Repeating yourself now, Etrigan.
Play what games you will with Jekyll and Hyde.
Free Will is, it shan’t be denied.
“Sir,” Alfred began calmly, “You know I defer to your expertise in all the many specialties related to your mission—”
“Except this one,” Bruce noted dryly. They went through this every time he disguised himself as Matches Malone. Alfred’s theatrical roots asserted themselves.
“The moustache, sir, I fear it shall not be as undetectable at close quarters as you would wish. If you would only permit the use of a moustache brush to straighten around the edge—”
“Malone is hired criminal muscle, Alfred, he’s not that well-groomed.”
Alfred sighed.
“And the smell of the spirit gum, sir?”
“Got it covered,” he answered, reaching for an unlabeled bottle of pale green liquid. He opened it, moistened his fingertips, then dabbed it at the corner of his mouth. “A little eau de cigarette butts.” Then he took a clean glass and poured a richly gold liquid from a tall thin bottle with a slanted black label. He took a hearty swig, gargled and spat it into the sink. “Between the smell of cigarettes and scotch, nobody will be able to detect any trace of spirit gum, especially not at the Iceberg.”
“I see, sir,” Alfred murmured disapprovingly. “Might one inquire what is to be accomplished by this masquerade?”
“Harley Quinn,” Bruce hissed, “needs to understand the danger she is in. She needs to realize what those so-called friends of hers are capable of if they find out what she’s doing. She has to realize that without their finding out what she’s doing.”
As he spoke, he took a brownish-black cube and scraped its chalky surface against his hands until the fingertips and nails took on a dirty, unkempt appearance. Then he took a fine make-up brush, moistened the tip in a clear liquid, and applied a long, thin line up the back of his hand, and an oval glob on the side of his thumb. Within seconds, the liquid congealed into a kind of body putty, creating the illusion of a scar and callous.
“Very good, sir. And how precisely is dressing up as some mawkish legbreaker meant to accomplish this?”
In the mirror before him, the corner of Matches Malone’s moustache doused with cigarette-scent made an abrupt twitch-like movement.
“By getting her into trouble for something she isn’t doing.”
entr’acte…
I am so spoiled. A city without Batman is, well, let’s just say the medical supplier’s warehouse was not a challenge. I knew I couldn’t use gas or drugged claws to neutralize the guard because there was to be no trace of any type of break in or robbery—other than that the special pressurized incubators ordered for Sub Diego would suddenly be there. These things are large and clunky. It wouldn’t be like slipp ing a ruby necklace into my pouch. I was going to need time and a handcart. So I came equipped for the hokey-but-effective knockout drops in the coffee. Imagine my surprise to find no coffee brewing in the break room because there is no guard. None. At all. They close the place up at five and that’s it. Can you believe that? I can’t. All they have is this antiquated alarm tape and a couple video cameras—not good ones either, the kind they sell at Radio Shack. I didn’t even have to bother setting up a tape loop to cover what I was doing. I could just avoid them.
It bugged me at first, you know. If they were making it this easy, it must be a trap. I was extra careful looking for some kind of additional surveillance or maybe a guard with super stealth capabilities that didn’t drink coffee… nothing. It was all exactly as it appeared. I guess they just didn’t think they had that much to protect.?I loaded the incubators into one of their vans. Didn’t have to hotwire it, keys were tacked on a pegboard in the empty unlocked break room where no coffee was brewing.??I remember this being more fun.
Batman, like most actors, knew how to immerse himself in the mindset of his character. Matches Malone, like most scum that skirted the edges of the underworld, wasn’t as bright as he thought he was.
Matches had rules, like anybody that survived in that shadow world. Couple Loretti soldiers getting into it in the alley with some loser from the triads. Matches did what any cockroach would do, he kept his eyes in front and walked inside without noticing. His rules prohibited getting drunk amidst the dangerous factions that gathered in places like the Iceberg. The rule was smart; Matches wasn’t. Night like he was having, a man had to have a few. He wouldn’t get drunk or anything like it. Just a couple belts to take the edge off. He stood at the bar, looked Sly up and down like he figured the bartender was queer, and ordered a Tesco and Coke. Sly took it in stride, poured the cheap bourbon into a rocks glass and then filled it with Oswald’s cheaper no-name cola.
“Run a tab,” Matches barked, reaching for the drink.
Sly shook his head in that firm, sad way he always answered that request and moved the drink out of the customer’s reach.
“No can do, sir, not without Mr. Cobblepot’s approval.”
“Screw Cobblepot, I need a drink. New goddamn caped do-good-freaks popping up every time you turn around in this stinking shithole uva city—gotta put up with a freakin GIRL ROBIN now, be a hot little piece too if she wasn’t another goddamn cop in a cape—and you’re telling me I can’t have a drink lessen Mr. Too-good-fur-the-rest-of-youse Cobblepot says so.”
Sly let it wash right over him up until the final words, then he merely answered the question with detached politeness.
“Not at all, sir. You can have any drink you like, you just have to pay for it up front or get Mr. Cobblepot to sign off on a tab.”
Matches cursed under his breath, but reached for his wallet all the same. He had slid it from his back pocket when he felt a large presence standing beside him.
“It’s okay, Sly,” said a voice, “Put it on my tab!”
“Heh. Thanks fur nuthin,” Matches said, turning to regard the speaker and lifting his glass in a grateful toast. He saw not one, but three men standing there, dressed in the colors of King Snake’s Ghost Dragons.
“Mr. Dorrance would like a word,” the one said simply, pointing into the dining room.
Matches s hrugged like a tough guy that figured he could take these three if he wanted, but was willing to go meet their boss anyway. That was how you got work if you were generic un-connected muscle for Gotham crime gangs. You went to listen to whatever “boss” might want a word. So Matches took his drink and walked coolly from the bar into the dining room and to a large corner table in the rear. He looked at an empty chair and then at King Snake, sitting in state across the table, his back to the wall.
“You wanted to see me?” Matches stated.
“Indeed. Sit,” King Snake ordered, gesturing to the chair. “Did I hear correctly just now? You tangled with a new Robin this evening?”
Although King Snake was known to be blind, Matches still paused and gave an elaborate performance of a tough guy beaten by a girl and loathe to admit it.
“She tangled with me,” he answered finally.
“I see. Describe this creature.”
“Like any of ‘em, cape, mask, full of ‘emselves.”
“Yes of course, I mean physically.”
“Blonde. Lumpy in front. Good ass.”
“Interesting.”
King Snake seemed to think. Matches drank his drink. Finally, one of the other Ghost Dragons spoke.
“There’s that picture of a girl Robin in that gallery window. Couldn’ta been her, could it?”
“I dunno nuthin about that,” Matches answered.
“Thank you,” King Snake said dismissively. “You’ve been most helpful.”
Matches took the hint and stood to go, then turned back with an afterthought…
“You guys hiring?”
The Ghost Dragons looked to each other and chuckled. King Snake simply shook his head.
entr’acte…
I knew St. Clara’s, the hospital, would be the biggest challenge. They didn’t close up their doors at five o’clock, for one thing. It was crawling with people, 24/7. While they didn’t have a lot of “security” in the sense of alarms, safes and electric eyes, they had surveillance cameras everywhere. And the theft had to be invisible. Tape loops only work with empty rooms. You run the same 30-seconds of the bare hallway or the closed safe door, it’s undetectable. But if Bad Hairpiece walks from the nurses’ station to the candy machine sixteen times, that’s going to be noticed. It’s not one of Bruce’s catvids, but it’s still a conspicuous trail. There’s only one way to pull off a truly invisible theft if you have to leave a video record behind, and that’s to make the removal look totally routine and legitimate. Then it’s just another few minutes’ unremarkable footage that looks exactly like the 8 hours preceding it and the 4 hours that follow.
That’s why I took the van from the warehouse. Bax-Trav didn’t just make medical supplies, they offered “one-stop shopping” to hospitals: everything from suture and clamps for the E.R. to paper towels and cleaning products for the supply closet. Result: Someone wearing a Bax-Trav jumpsuit carrying a few boxes and a clipboard can walk through a hospital without anyone batting an eye. The only part that was even slightly tricky was picking the lock on the storage room quickly enough that it would look like standard key-access on the video. I’m fast with a lock pick, but not that fast… Still, it was doable. Just juggled the boxes a little bit. Woman carrying three stacked boxes can’t slide a key in quit e as cleanly.
Unlike the incubators from the BaxTrav warehouse, the breathing tubes were light and compact.
In addition to the breathing tubes, I took two other items from St. Clara’s: an access badge and a sticker. The badge hung around my neck; the sticker went on a large Styrofoam cooler. With only a day of research, I had only devised three ways into the airport distribution hub where they had the genome analyzer. The quickest was waltzing in with what looked like somebody’s kidney headed for Brussels. Even with tightened security in airport cargo areas, nobody wants to mess with the Styrofoam cooler covered in hospital and FedEx stickers. That covered getting in and getting out. In between, I had to dodge a few patrols—2 airport security, 1 national guard, 1 non-descript that I’d guess was FEMA. I guess it’s a good thing; they’re trying to keep an eye on things. But all I had to do was stop and hide a few times. Put off my schedule, but they didn’t make the hub any more secure. Not from me, anyway. I don’t know what the norm is for bad guys out here. Probably like those small-timers I shut down at Cartier’s… Whatever. Why should I care. I’m good at my job. This one was a job worth doing…
Still. I missed Batman. Without any chance of… Well, any job has its ups and downs and any job is what you make of it, right? This one might have been a bit of a chore, but Aquaman was paying me well. And there were possibilities with that kind of money: improvements to the Catitat, a shopping spree on my own nickel (“Thanks anyway, Bruce, got this one covered”), just let the rest sit in the portfolio for a while. You never know when it’ll come in handy. I mean, a girl has to keep her independence, and Bruce is so bloody rich.
So I decided right there, waiting for patrol #4 to go on his merry way, that this job would finance the Selina Kyle Independence Fund, made possible by a generous grant from The Not-the-Wayne-Foundation and earmarked for whatever & whenever he gets out of line.
So much has changed between us since the last time I did a job like this.
There were things back then that we both knew were impossible. Now they’re so commonplace I don’t even think about them: I wake up next to him every morning with no mask on—he sits across from me at the breakfast table—he calls me Kitten.?The impossible, the absolute impossible, is part of our daily lives now.
Can’t help but wonder what other “impossibilities” might one day…
Well. Anyway. Got a job to finish.
An individual who channels the magickal forces will, after a period of years, begin developing sensitivities that outsiders might call mind-reading, psychic powers, or second sight. As an immortal, Jason Blood had channeled magicks for centuries longer than any normal wizard. His sensitivities were sharp and powerful—but that did not mean he could foresee the future of any person, place or event. He could perceive hidden links in people’s destinies. He could meet a bore on an airplane and know that the man would die in the city they were landing in. He could sense it hovering around the man like lingering perfume of the woman, not his wife, who had kissed him goodbye in the terminal. He could know that it would be a car accident, the driver arguing with her husband about a stuffed swordfish bought at a yard sale while he was out parking the car. She liked it, and she didn’t like the lawn furniture he had wanted, and they’d argue; they’d swerve, the swordfish would go flying off the roof of the car and impal e the bore with the mistress in Seattle that wore too much Giorgio.
Jason could know all that but still have no idea what the future held for Harvey Dent, with or without his face healed.
Etrigan knew. Etrigan knew everything, Jason sometimes thought. But Etrigan lied, and Etrigan was an agent of chaos even when he wasn’t downright evil, and you could never tell when his advice was real, in their common best interests, and when it was, well, Etrigan.
Etrigan had become, in Jason’s own words, what he had in place of a conscience. The demon was a moral compass based on opposition. If Etrigan wanted something, it was most likely an evil to be opposed. If Etrigan didn’t like an idea, Tally Ho! (Although Jason himself rarely said ‘Tally Ho;’ it was undignified.)
And Etrigan had not liked the idea of healing Dent. He railed against it. From the first moment of empathy, the demon could see the thought forming in Jason’s mind, and he was enraged. Cursing and roaring, burning threats into Jason’s own blood that seemed to boil at the obscenity.
Every man’s will.
To choose good or ill.
So much hissing about free will. Jason argued—because that is what you have to do when an EVIL THING is WRONG, you have to stand up and SAY so—that Dent didn’t have free will. He based everything on that coin.
And Etrigan said:
Still will. Thil. Shill.
Stuff and nonsense, Jason thought acidly.
Wrong you were
And wrong you be,
You heedless cur,
Hell’s detainee.
Another comes to hear your case
For sniveling, whining, yawping Face.
The knight of Nox is more like me,
For Anger, Rage and Hate make he.
Trapped within a fleshy box,
Yet raging endless ‘gainst the locks.
Tell him your pity for poor Dent,
How nobly you would circumvent
The Will your God grant every soul.
That Will, the price to keep him whole.
entr’acte…
Robin held his position on the roof of a small apartment building in Chelsea.
“This bites, Bro,” he told his partner.
“I know, kid,” Nightwing answered.
“This bites hard.”
“It’s just for one night.”
Tim glared across the dark of the rooftop with pure hatred.
“Just one night of sitting here looking like Dieter in my basic black turtleneck doing surveillance on the Ha-Hacienda while my girlfriend is running around out there in my costume!
Nightwing shrugged.
“My costume and a Harley Quinn wig,” Tim resumed his rant when it failed to produce any response. “It’s Steph, and she’s in my costume and she’s wearing a wig cut like Harley Quinn’s hair, and she’s out there. Dude, it’s a good thing Bruce is rich, ‘cause I’m gonna need therapy after this.”
“She’s not out there yet. That’s why we’re here.”
“Oh thanks, I feel so much better now. She’s not out there yet. But as soon as Harley goes out somewhere public so she has an alibi and won’t get killed on accounta this, then Steph’s going to be out there. My Stephie, Dick, going running out of that Batmobile like a freakin’ PowerPuff girl in my costume spouting some cutesy banter like ‘I’m Robin and you’re screwed’—Not enough therapy in the world, Bro!”
“Quiet, there goes Harley. Call it in. ”
“I have nothing but hatred in my heart right now.”
Nightwing turned with an Enough!-Do-it glare that was pure Bat. Tim hit the OraCom.
“Oracle. I have nothing but hatred in my heart right now,” he said into the mic.
:: Heh. So I take it HQ is moving? ::
“Nothing but hatred in my heart.”
:: Roger. I’ll notify the Batmobile. Follow her, we want to make sure she’s somewhere public. ::
Jason stood on his terrace overlooking the park. Even without Etrigan’s “prediction,” he sensed Batman was coming. There was a curious temporal echo on this terrace. Batman had come here before, often… Jason chuckled at the thought. It was Selina’s place before he moved in, of course… He half-closed his eyes, seeming to listen, and tuned in the echo like a radio signal… Batman came here often and always by the same path: a batarang to the building next door, which was taller, and then a swooping swing down to the northern side of the terrace by that planter… annoyance there. One of the cats. Feline annoyance. At the planter being disturbed. It was the only clear feeling Jason could perceive associated with those visits. The rest of it was a cyclone of furious conflicting emotion.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be,” Jason quoted into the night.
Etrigan was curiously reticent. Jason would have thought these charged echoes of the bat and cat would warrant a comment. But since Jason walked out on the terrace, the demon had resumed his silence from their immediate return to Gotham.
What was the harpy’s name again? Jason asked, to show he was well aware of the reason for the sudden peace.
Have a care,
You hypocrite.
For I was there
When you said it.
The Paris air,
Would sense foreswear.
All so unfair
?Enough, Blood muttered, growing sicker with each line ending in a rhyme for “Claire.” The threat was unmistakable. Etrigan knew everything about Blood’s own past with women, and if Jason insisted on pressing for what Etrigan did not want to reveal, he was prepared to fight dirty.
Jason thought about going inside. Claire’s picture and perhaps a scotch. But the terrace echoes stiffened, like a breeze, furious conflicting emotion associated with this terrace, and Jason turned to the direction from where he knew Batman was coming. His chuckle creased into a wry, silent smile of both wonder and scorn as the object of his earlier musings swung unaware through the echoes to land on that same spot now, in the present, where there was no cat to object to his cape’s proximity to the planter.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Jason said simply. “I expect you’re here about—
“Two-Face,” Batman growled just as Jason said “—Dent.”
entr’acte…
I finally knew what’s been missing on this job.
Batman, sure. There’s no substitute for that. But besides the cat and flying mouse game, something had been missing. When I slipped into the wetsuit, I knew what it was… Meow. There had been no Meow on this job. I hadn’t been sexy, I hadn’t been daring, and I hadn’t had any fun.
Up until that point, it couldn’t be helped. I’d had little time to plan this job and with two different women down there in Sub Diego due this week—two women that could literally go into labor at any minute—sexy, daring, and fun weren’t exactly priorities.
I’m a professional. A pro does THE JOB; a pro does not compromise the job to show off some skill inappropriate to the situation. Batman doesn’t stop in the middle of a patrol to sing an aria, the President doesn’t stop in the middle of the State of the Union to tap dance, and I don’t screw up a simple but important grab and drop where I’m supposed to be invisible by a) making it harder than it has to be or b) making a big Catwoman-was-here production out of it.
That said, I was positively purring to get out of that Bax-Trav delivery gal jumpsuit and into the sleek tightness of the wetsuit. I was purring even louder at the thought of this final phase, which would require nerve, cunning, and charm. I’d have to be daring, I’d have to be clever, I’d have to be persuasive—in short, I could be a cat.
“You admit you did this,” Batman graveled accusingly. “Jason, what were you thinking? If ending Two-Face was as simple as repairing Harvey Dent’s face, I would have paid for the plastic surgery myself, years ago. Two-Face won’t be—”
“There is no Two-Face, Batman. He doesn’t exist; you must know that. He’s a corner of Harvey’s mind that he’s come to treat as a separate personality, but—”
“You’re going to explain my enemies to me now.”
“If necessary.”
“Great. Quinn writes a book, now you’re hosting a lecture series. I KNOW what Two-Face is, Jason.”
“Batman, do you believe Harvey Dent was a good man prior to the scarring that made him Two-Face?”
“Jason—I know the beginning of one of those logic tree arguments when I hear one. I know you have a nice little sequence of questions planned leading to a neat inescapable conclusion that you were right to do what you did. The world is a better place because you used magic to heal Harvey’s face. It’s all sophistry, Jason. No clever logic-proofs will change what is true and what isn’t. And for all that, I will tell you that, yes, Harvey Dent was once a good man.”
Jason rose and walked to the bar, poured himself a drink, then returned to his chair.
“So how do you explain Two-Face, hm? After the trauma of the scarring, he split himself in two, creating the personality of Two-Face. But where did he get the raw materials for such a vile beast inside a man who was basically a good, decent, educated, hardworking public servant?”
Jason stopped and sipped his drink. Batman waited through the pause, then when Jason didn’t seem inclined to continue, he spoke.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“You know your enemies. I would prefer that you tell me.”
Batman sighed, exasperated.
“Most people assume that Two-Face is Harvey’s dark side: ‘Everybody has a dark side and Harvey just gave his a name’. It’s not that simple. His dark side would simply be all the thoughts and impulses to do wrong that Harvey had suppressed as a law-abiding citizen. That’s not it at all. Two-Face is Harvey’s own idea of his exact opposite. Two-Face is the antithesis of all Harvey believes himself to be. Two-Face actually had a… an identity crisis, for lack of a better word, when he—when they realized that pre-acid Harvey wasn’t as perfectly good as they’d both remembered.”
Jason smiled and made a vague “tada” gesture with his hand.
“There yo u have it. Two-Face is not Harvey’s dark side. He was an invention, nothing more, based on the scarring, and with the scarring gone—with Harvey convinced that he’s gone—he is.”
“And what’s the price?” Batman growled.
“Price?”
“With magic, there’s always a price, Jason.”
Jason winced as Etrigan began roaring with laughter in his mind.
Let me tell him, let me say!
Jason, please, you had your way.
Asclepius you did entreat
That Dent’s whore Fate your magicks cheat.
Restore his face? Restore his WILL!
From THAT you claimed would good distill.
Restore his will and take his coin.
From two-faced Fate is he enjoined.
Tell him, Jason, if you dare:
Not once may Harvey Fullface err.
If e’er Dent flips that coin again
To make a choice or feed a yen,
The deal is off, his scars returned.
Will twice bestowed, won’t be twice spurned.
entr’acte…
Harley was frantic by the time she reached the Ha-Harlienda. She’d run home in a state of mind that an objective psychiatric professional might call blind panic. She triple-locked the door, then ran to the kitchen and burst into tears at the sight of the back door’s single deadbolt. What kind of lock was that anyway! She pushed a chair in front of it, then a table. Then she took another chair and brought it to the front door. Then she went to the closet and took out the shotgun and sat with it on her lap.
This wasn’t funny. Not haha funny and not Puddin’ funny either. Batman was crazy! He must be stark raving Looney Tunes. Harley had heard the Iceberg crowd gassing about that photograph in the window of some art gallery. It was a blonde in a green mask and some of them thought it looked like a Robin mask. Big deal. Didn’t mean there was any female Robin running around Gotham. Only the Post could come up with dumb shit like that, right? There WAS NO BLONDE ROBIN! But now one those nutjobs was saying they’d seen it themselves and it looked like HER? COME ON! That was crazy talk. And then Nightwing leaves some kind of note for her with the doorman! “Ha, ha.” What does that mean? Ha, ha, huh? Did they think this was funny! Was this Bat’s idea of a practical joke? Ha, ha, yeah, right, ha, ha. Didn’t he realize what Puddin’ and Red and all the rest of them would think? What they would do? They’d kill her, that’s what they’d do! They were a bunch of HOMICIDAL LUNATICS!!!
As much as Jason Blood respected Batman, he could never completely get past the fact that Etrigan liked him. Etrigan, the evil one, liked Batman.
He said Batman had a dark demon stirring his bile. The way he would fight and fight, when there was no hope—meaning the way Batman would put his body between Etrigan and his lunch, even though lunch was a worthless drug dealer. He would physically fight Etrigan, if necessary, when it was the time for the demon to retreat, even though it would be like punching solid rock. Batman would fight on endlessly, spurred on by something inside that Etrigan could relate to.
Yes, Etrigan liked Batman, and that was not something Jason found it easy to dismiss. And now Batman and Etrigan agreed—the vigilante and the demon were in full agreement that Jason’s intervention was a blunder.
“Magic is a cheat,” Batman declared. “You can’t ch eat Two-Face, I’ve tried. Replaced the coin with a rigged one. When he figured it out, he went on a crime spree. There had been seven coin flips that weren’t fair, so he did what he wanted the next seven times without flipping. He is obsessed with Fate, obsessed with using chance to make decisions. And you’re telling me he can never do it again or the spell is broken and he reverts to the way he was?”
“Yes. An unforeseen catch. A bit of metaphysic sleight of hand, courtesy of Etrigan. Free Will. Because I argued that Dent had no free will and healing him would restore it, he must make good on that.”
“Does he know?”
“No. I didn’t realize at the time what the conditions would be.”
“But you knew there would be a price.”
“A counterbalance, of course. But Asclepius, the god of healing, isn’t really in the ironic twist business. It’s usually a simple supplication to channel his energies in order to restore whatever is corrupted, the tissues damaged by a wound or illness, into the state they are supposed to be in. It was Etrigan that—”
“It wasn’t Etrigan, Jason. Etrigan couldn’t have done anything unless you opened the door, letting magical forces in that can’t be controlled to—”
“It was Etrigan. The healing spell is to restore what was corrupted into the state it should be in. Etrigan is the one who brought Harvey Dent’s Will into that equation. He maneuvered me into arguing… the tissue on half his face was damaged and is now restored because… Oh hell.” This last was sighed in defeat. “You’re right, Bruce. I… botched it. Road to hell and all that. I felt… compassion for the man.”
“That’s not a bad thing, Jason.”
“Unless you have a millennia old chaos demon clamouring in your head.”
“What’s he saying now?”
“’Wit, an ’t be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those wits, that think they have ? thee, do very oft prove fools’”
“Shakespeare.”
“Yes, I know. Shakespeare wrote entirely too much about fools. All of it in verse. I’ve been hearing it nonstop.”
“Someone has to tell him, Jason.”
“By someone, you mean me.”
“Yes. He won’t be inclined to believe me.”
“Not your place anyway. This is my responsibility. I’ll talk to Fortune’s Fool.”
“That was Romeo.”
“Romeo, Lear, and, I believe, Timon of Athens all used the phrase. But it applies best to Dent, don’t you think?”
“Selina calls him Fate’s bitch,” Batman noted.
Jason paused and then grimaced.
“We really must prevent Selina and Etrigan from ever meeting face to face.”
entr’acte…
The only way to get a large shipment that included heavy, bulky equipment down to Sub Diego was to use the FEMA station set up for the purpose. The station, unlike the Bax-Trav warehouse, was manned 24/7. The difference was that these guys weren’t security guards. They were professionals with a job to do, yes, but they went into this work out of compassion. They could be reasoned with. You can’t exactly talk a museum guard into letting you waltz off with a Degas. But I wasn’t here to take their employ er’s property. I was here to help the same people they were here to help. They just needed a reason to cooperate. Didn’t even have to be a good reason, just a CYA reason.
I had Jean Paul fax them the top two inches of some official-looking letterhead. Then it stopped and he faxed it again. And again. When I showed up, they were trying to figure out if the problem was their fax machine or the sender’s. Pete, the older one, was ready to assume the incomplete fax was the authorization for my delivery to Sub Diego. It wasn’t entirely the way I look in a wetsuit, either.
“About time, that’s all I can say,” he spat, “It’s about time. Those poor people. Ought to be a special hell for politicians.”
Pete’s partner, Harold, was more of a tightass. He scrutinized those bits of letterhead on the fax for a phone number. “If we could just get some kind of confirmation,” he kept muttering.
I focused my efforts on Pete. I asked if he knew anyone down there. He did, a buddy from High School. I invented a cousin. We bonded. And then we both looked at Harold.
“If it’s legit, they’ll resend the fax,” he insisted. Then he looked at Pete—and then at me, and then at Pete again. “Meantime, I guess it would be okay if you got the stuff loaded.”
Jason found Harvey Dent exactly where Batman said he would be, in a downtown theatre called The Flick with huge stone comedy-tragedy masks hung on its façade like gargoyles.
This is going to be harder than I thought, he considered.
‘An ordinary fool that has no more brain
Than a stone’—What a sorry refrain,
Now that Face is alone.
Jason tuned out the rest and entered the theatre. He found Dent in the lobby, atop a stepladder, dismantling some kind of laser.
“Why Mr. Blood,” Harvey called happily, like the codename was the best joke he’d heard in weeks. “What an unexpected surprise.”
“I told you, Harvey, you can call me Jason.”
Harvey winked theatrically.
“Jason it is. I’m just removing some pesky old ‘perimeter defenses’ that I won’t be needing any more. This really is a fine old building, isn’t it; wasted as a criminal hideout. I wonder if I should develop it myself or sell it. What do you think?”
Jason thought Dent’s obvious joy in his new circumstances was the lowest blow yet. This was going to be like kicking a puppy in the stomach and then telling it there was no Santa Claus.
“Harvey, I—I have some news. Some very bad news. You might want to prepare yourself—for some very bad news.”
Harvey climbed down from the ladder and looked Blood in the eye.
“There’s a catch,” he said coldly.
“Yes. How did you—”
Harvey gave a wry, bitter laugh. “Free lunch.”
Etrigan began laughing hysterically. The former district attorney continued, oblivious to the demon’s presence…
“I was offered a bribe once from a guy like you. From the Odessa mob. None too subtle. Heh. No such thing as a free lunch. So here it comes, right, the shakedown, and maybe a threat or two. I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with, Jason. Harvey Dent is nobody’s fool. And nobody double-crosses Two-Face.”
“Two-Face is gone, Harvey. He’ll stay gone, as long as—”
“As long as what, as long as I toe the line and do what you say, right?”
“No, nothing like that. This isn’t what you think, Harvey. It’s not a betrayal or a shakedown or a threat. It is merely a, a condition—”
“Same thing.”
“NO! Because it was a condition I was not aware of when I did this thing for you. I was—in error. I did not foresee a consequence of calling on the magicks in the precise way I did in your particular case. The fact is, Harvey, that you can remain this way for as long as you choose, with your face fully healed, totally free of Two-Face and his influence. You must simply… abide… by a, a bargain of sorts with the universe.”
“A bargain I never agreed to,” Harvey said, arching a brow. “I was a lawyer, Jason, I understand contracts. I understand small print. I know that I can’t be held to a bargain that I was never a party to.”
“You received the benefits of the healing spell, Harvey, your face is whole again. You are bound to the conditions…”
The eyes danced wildly. Harvey Dent’s brilliant legal mind, at last unfettered by Two-Face, attacked the problem as it was set before him. He attacked it from every conceivable angle, looking for the loophole, the ambiguity, the… missed comma, something, there must be something. After a half-hour’s probing, he admitted defeat.
“So we’re stuck with it,” he said finally. Jason noted the ‘we’ and tensed. Harvey continued, “Yes, we’re stuck. You made a bad deal, Jase. Don’t blame yourself, it happens. Get ‘em next time, right? In the meantime, well, I’ll just have to live with it, won’t I. So what is this condition anyway?”
“You can never use your coin again to make a decision.”
Harvey laughed.
“Is that all? Why would I! With no more Two-Face, why would I need to—Haha! Oh Jason, Jesus, you really had me going there! THAT’s all it’s going to take to keep from turning back to half a pumpkin! Come on! I am going to buy you lunch! There’s this great Vietnamese place down the street.”
entr’acte…
Pete helped me load the incubators onto this sea-winch they had to lower big shipments down to Sub Diego. The rest of the stuff was compact enough to ride with me in one of the submersibles. They used these to shuttle Press, VIPs and relief workers back and forth. Even Pete wasn’t going to let me take one out for a joy ride without some kind of authorization—but now that the gear was loaded, I was past needing their full cooperation.
Pete apologized again for Harold, who continued poring over the partial faxes, looking for somebody to call for confirmation. I sent Pete out to the van to look for my cel phone. I was sure I had a number in the address book, I said. As soon as he was gone, I went to talk to Harold.
“Pete says you’re not usually this pissy,” I told him sweetly. And his cheeks started to pink. “He says you just didn’t want to help us with the heavy lifting.” The pink started to redden. “Bad back? My brother’s got one from weight lifting.”
He reacted as expected. Painted as a discourteous wimp by his treacherous partner Pete, and then offered a manly out by the bouncy gal in the wet suit, Harold latched onto the excuse that made him neither pissy nor wimpy. He had a bad back. He stretched and turned and showed me where it pulled if he lifted too much weight. When he sat back down:
“Hey, where’s my faxes?”
“Now, Harold,” I explained, slipping the neatly folded paper into place and zipping up my suit, “You’re a smart guy. You know what’s going on here. I’m taking the sub. And without that fax, there is no evidence to support your story. It would be so much better for you and Petey to pretend this never happened. I’ll have them refill the gas and air tanks down below, so no one will even know it’s been used… except you, of course. It’ll be our secret. Tell Petey I’ll be back in two hours.”
I winked, blew a kiss, and, just for fun, got myself back to the submersible by way of a simple backwards somersault. A minute later, I was on my way down to Sub Diego.
“I want you to punch me in the mouth,” Jason said directly.
Harvey set down his menu and looked curiously across the table at his guest.
“Try the steamed shrimp, they’re our—my favorite.”
“I really think you should punch me in the mouth instead of buying me lunch, Harvey.”
“Tom hap nuoc dua, ‘steamed in coconut milk’, how can you turn that down?”
“I would feel more secure that you understood how difficult this will be if you’d only—”
“Jason, please. You’re like this junior associate we had at the DA’s one year, Mick Darcy, he accidentally stapled an internal memo into some documents sent to Defense Council. I had to go in next day knowing they were going to get half my evidence tossed out.”
“What did you do?” Jason asked.
“Offered a plea. Simple assault, dropped the gun charge. Less than the scum deserved, but what can you do? Know what happened to Mick Darcy?”
“You bought him lunch?”
Harvey laughed.
“I set him to researching repeat offenders after an assault-plea. He thought he was fired. He was so charged up to get a ‘working penance’ instead, he wound up creating this whole spreadsheet, statistical analysis of career paths after plea bargains for various offences… Made Law Review… Darcy—even had my job for a while—after.”
Harvey’s face darkened.
“The Bao Tu Jambon is also very good.”
entr’acte…
Had to happen. There just had to be a snag sooner or later, and 190 feet below sea level, the snag wasn’t going to be dangerously sexy crimefighter in a cape.
I was headed for the Hotel del Coronado, formerly a luxurious waterfront hotel, now the entrance to Sub Diego. I was trying to work out just how that final chat with Harold had shifted on me. It was meant to be checkmate, grabbing the fax, leaving the pair of them without any option but to shut up and play along. But somehow, once I started talking, I wound up reassuring Harold that he wouldn’t be culpable if he cooperated. That wasn’t a challenge. It wasn’t a dare. It was—hell, I don’t know what it was! But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t feline. It’s not like I was afraid of returning to a FEMA warehouse full of cops, after all. Risks go with the territory, it’s why these jobs pay so well—and it’s half the fun. What could they possibly throw at me that I couldn’t handle? ?So why did I pat Harold’s head instead of tweaking his nose?
Maybe these FEMA guys weren’t quite as puffed up as cops or crimefighters, but still, obnoxious authority figures, when you got ‘em on the mat… it was checkmate and I just… Anyway, I was trying to work it out the whole way down. I was just nearing the Hotel del Coronado, just sighted the cupola, when I saw another submersible rising from behind it—the markings of a TV Network on its nose.
Shit. How do I hide a two ton submersible in the middle of the damn ocean?
Harvey Dent was a Harvard man. It was an aspect of his personality even Two-Face couldn’t supercede. Every year on the eve of the Harvard-Yale game, he bet on his alma mater. His only concession after the acid was to give 2-to-1 odds.
He still had his Harvard tie—somewhere—if he could find it. He hadn’t worn it in years, because he refused to cut it in half. The Armanis, the Hermes, the Pradas and the Brooks Brothers he had turned over to Kittlemeier to be sliced down the center and stitched onto dingy burlap or loud polyester for the Two-Face half. But his Harvard tie he refused to sacrifice. He knew he had kept it safe, somewhere, but having searched under all his Two-Face ties, his sock drawer, his underwear drawer, and his armoire, he was forced to admit defeat. He’d had two… too many hideouts over the years.
And too many of those two-puns…
Anyway, in one move or another, he had obviously lost his tie.
A call to the student bookstore set that right. The nice girl he spoke to, Gail, was not impervious to the charms of Harvey “the Apollo” Dent. She appreciated that he wanted his new tie immediately. She said it happened all the time, alumni on a business trip, needed to replace the tie for an important presentation. She said she would FedEx it; he’d have it by ten o’clock tomorrow. Harvey squelched the impulse to ask about sending it second-day air.
Habit. Old habit. It would take a while, certainly, to lose those old habits.
But by 10 a.m. tomorrow, he would have a new tie.
In the meantime, he would have to do some other shopping. If he wanted to rebuild his old life, he would have to start by rebuilding his wardrobe. Every garment he owned was split down the center, that was no way to appear in polite society…
entr’acte…
Heroes are infuriating. I wasn’t overjoyed when I saw another submersible rising from behind Sub Diego, but I would have managed something. It might have involved semi-nudity and a certain degree of Spring Break “girls gone wild” behavior, but it would have neutralized the situation. Because let’s face it, when a reporter tells his buddies that this hot chick in a mini-sub came on to him thirty fathoms down, their response is fairly predictable.
But no. Because heroes can’t ever let it be. They can’t trust that you know what you’re doing; they have to watch out for you. They have to call ahead to make sure a school of fish is ready to run blocker. Just as soon as I sighted the submerged Hotel del Coronado, there they were, several hundred thin silvery-greenish fish surrounding me like a squirmy iridescent honor guard. They blocked any view the other sub could have of me, and once it had disappeared, they stayed with me, escorting me down to the cupola.
Infuriating. The hero, not the fish.
Nothing about this job had felt right up until now. Since my plane landed in California, nothing about this job felt like it used to. Now, finally, bottom of the goddamn Pacific Ocean an d I was back in familiar territory: Pissed at a hero. Pissed off at that familiar mix of annoyance and gratitude. I just hate heroes interfering, watching over my shoulder, and HELPING when they are not needed—but the fish were handy.
Ryan did not get to be the top-selling salesman at Feldman’s without being able to pigeonhole customers. He had worked at the exclusive men’s clothiers for only two years, but he had evolved, in only two months, an eye for the way people browsed. He could tell by the way a man walked in the door: a sure gait—here to buy… a poseur—putting on airs but way out of his price range… a quickrich—can afford to buy but won’t. Never been in a place like this before. He’ll look around, get intimidated, then scurry across the river to some outlet mall in Bludhaven…
The man in the tan trench coat was a puzzle. He fit none of Ryan’s prescribed categories. He walked through the door like a regular, but then, almost immediately, the assurance vanished and he was looking around like a newbie. Then he started browsing like he might know quality merchandise. Ryan was puzzled and started analyzing his clothes. You couldn’t tell much from a trench coat unless it was from the very top or the very bottom. This was neither, and it hid too much of the shirt and trousers beneath for Ryan to appraise. In desperation, Ryan looked to the shoes… They didn’t match. They didn’t match?! One black shoe and one brown one? The guy had to be a nut! Lunatics shopping at Feldman’s must surely be one of the biblical signs of Armageddon.
Of course, you did hear about crazy billionaires.
Just in case this guy was some Howard Hughes, Ryan decided to wait on him.
“Welcome to Feldman’s,” he began, “What can I show you today, sir?”
“Anything that’s not double-breasted,” Harvey Dent answered with a bright smile.
Thirty minutes later, Ryan was returning from his third trip to the fitting rooms. He had followed the mystery customer through the store, taking shirts, jackets, trousers, braces, and even ties back to the fitting room as the odd fellow selected them. He seemed to know what was what in terms of quality, although his sense of style seemed behind the times—at least to Ryan. But Feldman’s had plenty of stodgy clients. Ryan didn’t like to judge unless they were somebody else’s commission.
It was only once the customer walked back to the fitting room himself and removed his overcoat that Ryan saw the guy was dressed from head to toe in clothing divided down the center. In the zeal of calculating his commission, Ryan had forgotten the mismatched shoes. He was struck now with the sight of… split down the center…
Even in the rarified air of Feldman’s, Ryan knew a thing or two about Gotham. He read the newspaper, at least. And this guy was…
“You’re— you’re not—” he stammered.
“No, we’re not. I’m not,” Harvey answered. “Let’s start with the Polo, shall we?”
Ryan scrutinized the man’s face. It certainly wasn’t split down the center.
“The dress shirt?” the non-two-faced customer prompted. “The Ralph Lauren, if you wouldn’t mind handing it over.”
Ryan rapidly recalculated the commission he would earn on the sale (assuming the customer paid for it instead of flipping a coin, killing them all, and waltzing out the door with some $4600 worth of sartorial elegance).
He handed over the shirt.
< p>“Can I find you some shoes?” he offered. He was risking his life for this sale, after all.
entr’acte…
Alfred entered the Batcave med-facility as he did every Tuesday morning to check the inventory of bandages, disinfectant, and other basic supplies. He expected the room to be empty, as it always was at this time of day.
“Good heavens, Master Tim, you gave me quite a start,” he announced.
Tim looked up from the bloody puncture he was dabbing above his kneecap.
“It’s weird how you have to say that, Alfred. Other people you can just tell, y’know. But when you get surprised, no sign of it. It’s kinda cool how you do that.”
“Master Timothy, your attempt to divert attention from the gaping hole in your leg is duly noted. Now if you would permit me to have a look at the injury.”
“It’s nothing, Alfred,” Tim murmured, although he hopped up on the table to let Alfred get a better look at the leg. “I was just blowing off some steam. Bruce and Dick got some wicked settings on Zogger.”
Alfred inspected the wound, then Tim’s face, then turned with a look of sour disapproval to find a fresh gauze. He saturated the pad with disinfectant, inserted it into a pair of tiny forceps, and began probing the wound. Tim winced.
“My apologies for the unavoidable discomfort, young sir,” Alfred said blandly, “You might find conversation a welcome distraction.”
Tim agreed and began chattering.
“Did you know they’ve got settings on that thing labeled François and Jean Paul and Eddie? Ow! Man that smarts. I remembered Dick saying that Zogger did double-duty around here in the old days, eeesh, how it was a training program, yeah, but that sometimes Bruce used it to Ow-OwOw-ouch relieve the tension when Catwoman got him all hyped…”
Tim paused in case Alfred wanted to say anything. He didn’t. So Tim continued.
“Anyway. I haven’t really had any problems like that so far. With girlfriends, I mean. Lucky me, right. But with this whole mess with Steph running around in my costume, I figured I’d try it out.”
“And did you find the experience rewarding, Master Timothy?”
“No.”
“Hm, perhaps there is hope for you yet. Master Timothy, one doesn’t wish to be inquisitive into a young gentleman’s private affairs—”
“But—” Tim interrupted. It was absurd. Alfred was poking the gauze around his kneecap. When a guy is digging around where your tibia meets your femur, he gets to ask whatever he wants.
“But one is rather curious. I had the impression that you and Miss Stephanie were no longer seeing each other in a romantic context.”
Tim bit his lip guiltily.
“We weren’t really, after I started seeing Cecily just before Christmas. And it was really nice at first. Cecily didn’t have anything to do with any of this life. She was just a girl. It was so… easy.”
Alfred set the dreaded forceps aside and began bandaging the wound.
“But the thing was, even after ‘Tim and Steph’ broke up, Robin and Spoiler still worked together. When that whole thing happened with Johnny Warlock, it made me see that somebody from the outside is never going to understand the stuff we deal with. I thought I had killed him, Alfred. And I had a date with Cecily that night. I kept it. We went to some movie. I don’t remember a thing abo ut it. All I remember is sitting there in the dark for two hours thinking how there was no way I could tell her. Even if I could tell her, y’know, if I told her I was Robin, there was still no way I could tell her. There’s no way you can make somebody understand: ‘this guy is an enemy, a powerful one. He absorbs energy and expels it. And he expelled too much, weakening his body to where I thought I had decapitated him with a single kick.’”
“And Miss Stephanie was able to understand?”
“No. No, I went to see her that night after I said goodnight to Cecily. She was totally clueless, but—see Alfred, that was it—it was the way she didn’t understand. She thought I’d lost my nerve. I learned to fight from Bruce and Lady Shiva. If I back off a fight, it’s not because I don’t think I can win. It’s because I learned something else from Bruce. I learned strategy… Anyway. We got into it pretty good that night. There was so much she didn’t get about me. But we could talk about it. We wound up knowing each other a lot better because we could talk about it. I can never do that with someone like Cecily, Alfred. Never. I can never… open up about the stuff that makes me me. It limits the pool, girlwise; y’know what I mean?”
Even though he would never practice law again, Harvey knew only one way to try on a suit. He assumed various poses in front of the mirror as if summing up for the jury—pacing here, pointing there, leaning on the rail, strolling back to the council table—and scrutinized his reflection at every turn. When he was satisfied, he told Ryan to call in Old Man Feldman to chalk the alterations.
Harvey was delighted to see Feldman again. His face lit up when the dear little man pulled back the curtain, his trademark wire-rim glasses and suit vest, a tape measure around his neck just like Kittlemeier.
“Alec!” he called happily.
His delight was not mutual.
“Mr. Dent,” Alec Feldman declared coldly on seeing whom he had been called to measure. “I regret that we are unable to do business with you. Your account here at Feldman’s is closed.”
“So reopen it. Alec, come on now, it’s me. It’s Harvey.”
“I regret, Mr. Dent, that that will not be possible. We here at Feldman’s—”
“Alec, what are you saying? You still sell clothes, don’t you?” He pointed to the heaps of suits and shirts he was trying on.
“Our customers, Mr. Dent, are esteemed members of the community, more than a few of whom you have robbed over the years. We at Feldman’s cannot in good conscience—”
“We here at Feldman’s is YOU, Alec. I know a little something about referring to yourself in the plural. You want to watch that, it has a way of sticking.”
Alec Feldman regarded Harvey haughtily, turned and left the dressing room. From outside the curtain, Harvey heard hushed agitated voices, followed by an outburst from the salesman:
“But why? He was Two-Face, so now he’s supposed to walk down the street naked!?”
“You tell him, Ryan!” Harvey called from inside the fitting room.
“We must draw the line somewhere, Ryan,” he heard Feldman retort.
“We again,” Harvey muttered to himself. “That is so affected.”
entr’acte…
No one likes admitting they’ve made a mistake, but ever yone does make them. Every being on the mortal plane could err. Every being, every being, be it made of flesh, energy, or spirit; winged, scaled, or feathered, every being within the strictures of space-time was fully capable of screwing one up! The only gray area was whether the being was so stupendously powerful that nobody witnessing the screw up would say so. There really was no difference, Jason Blood reflected, between European courtiers all running around with the bottom of their vests unbuttoned because portly Edward VII couldn’t fasten his, and the Lightning Beasts of Altaire flying in a perfect arrowhead formation right into the cliffs of Kaldar when the leader caught the wake from Etrigan’s fireball. Every being in the universe made mistakes, but a prerogative of the truly powerful was that the rest of them wouldn’t notice.
If one wasn’t that lucky, if despite being an extremely powerful wizard one did have to have one’s mishaps pointed out, there couldn’t be a more maddening creature in the universe to do the pointing than Batman. There really couldn’t. He was worse than Etrigan, and that was saying a great deal.
Etrigan. Jason really didn’t feel up to another eighty stanzas of the demon’s latest epic: Ode to a Horse’s Ass, so he returned to the terrace, where the aura of Etrigan’s old girlfriend still lingered over the park, bringing a blessed silence.
Jason looked out on the park with satisfaction. While he remained out here, Etrigan would be quiet—and he himself could bask in those other lingering echoes like another man might enjoy a sunset. Batman really was insufferable when he was right about your being wrong. The rebuke of the mortal man stung more than that of the chaos demon. A mortal, confined to a single fleeting lifetime—it was such a limited perspective—what did they know even of their own hearts—these echoes of his early visits to Selina, what did that say of Bruce Wayne’s ability to see the truth about anything. Such ragingly conflicted emotions when… Of course. Selina!
Batman was truly the most insufferable being in the universe when he was right about your being wrong. And nobody knew that better than Selina. It had been too long since they commiserated, not since that awful little bistro in New Orleans when she brought him the Scrolls of Delataire. He always enjoyed their talks, but he sensed that she got more out of them than he did. She seemed to have few friends among those ‘rogues’ and few chances to really tell stories of her adventures. He had listened, and now she could reciprocate. Yes, that was just what he needed: A sympathetic ear about an insufferable bat, and a tale or two from an entertaining cat. It even rhymed. Take that, Etrigan.
Harvey Dent was a Harvard man. It was an aspect of his personality even Two-Face couldn’t cancel out. He had never let his membership lapse at the Harvard Club, and his colleagues there—broader minded than Alec Feldman—had never removed his name from the rolls.
He sat now at the bar in a crisp, new, Asprey blazer over a polo shirt and trousers (pricey, but one color per garment was worth it), and fidgeted with the swizzle stick. He looked down at his fingers with alarm—it was the same way he had fidgeted with his credit card before buying the blazer. It was the same way he used to fidget with the coin.
Feldman. Turning on him like that. After all the years, all the pinstripe, all the pima cotton button downs… It’s not like he was going to go off and commit some Two-Face crime IN one of Feldman’s suits!
Well. There were plenty of other places to buy clothes in Gotham. And that sales chap, Ryan, was nice enough to refer him. Geoff at Asprey, Philip at Barney’s, Stan at Polo, they were all very helpful… Harvey fidgeted again with the swizzle stick. It was with Geoff at Asprey where Harvey had hit that second snag.
Asprey blazer, $1700.
In his wild bachelor days, they used to call him Apollo.
Polo shirt, $250.
You don’t get likened to a Greek god shopping at Target.
Trousers, $250.
Harvey could well afford it. He had been operating as Two-Face for the past mumble years, after all. Crime on that level does, in fact, pay. It pays very nicely indeed.
Getting your life back from Darth Duality… Priceless.
It was standing there at the Asprey checkout, with his gold card poised in his fingers, that Harvey seemed to have experienced a momentary ethical dilemma: Was it quite right to be living off all that ill-gotten gain which was… from a certain point of view… well… ill gotten?
It was only a second. He played with the credit card for only a second, the way Joker sometimes fidgeted with a playing card, running his finger down the sides, top to bottom, then pulling to let it fall ninety degrees onto its side, lifting it back up, then doing it again… But anyway, he bought the stuff. It wasn’t a moral crisis or anything. He had a choice to make and he made it.
Choice. There really wasn’t any choice: there were piles of clothes to buy so he could get on with his life, and the only way to do it other than stealing the stuff was to pay for it. And what he had to pay with was the wealth amassed in his old life. Case closed. A minor ethical dilemma, and he’d made the call.
And now he was just chewing on it.
That was understandable.
It was an ethical decision, the first one he’s made in quite a long time.
And he’d done it. He’d done fine.
It was quite a treat actually, considering both sides of the question himself with no coarse Two-Face in his head making the whole thing so unseemly.
So he weighed both sides himself and made the decision himself.
People did it every day.
He made one, just like that, no big deal.
Not like he needed a coin flip to make a call like that.
There was actually a 50-50 chance that if he had flipped a coin, it would have said the same thing he decided anyway.
It would be interesting to see if it did… But that would probably be cheating…
Harvey caught himself still playing with the swizzle stick. He set it down on the bar decisively and glared at it. Then he picked it up and snapped it in two, and set both halves back down on the bar.
He looked at them critically, picked up the larger one and snapped it in half as well. He gave the three pieces a satisfied nod, symbolically thumbing his nose at all things “two.” Then he gathered all three in his empty glass, waved it to the bartender and ordered another drink.
entr’acte…
You meet a different caliber of person on rooftops than anywhere else in the world—even if that rooftop is under water.
Her name was Lorena, a water-breather, one of the mutated survivors of the quake that had deposited the Hotel del Coronado, a naval base, and approximately 10 square miles of San Diego onto the ocean floor. She met me on the hotel cupola, considered the entrance to Sub Diego by its residents, and led me to the naval base. The base, or what was once the naval base, was now the home to the research and relief operations. They had two p ressurized rooms there, and I waited in one while the sub was unloaded and refueled. I was surprised when Lorena joined me there.
“I didn’t think you could breathe air,” I told her.
“I can’t. Not for more than a few minutes at a time…” There was an undercurrent in her voice that I recognized. Bitterness. Quite a lot. I’d heard it before, from Harvey when he got to talking about his old life before Two-Face: a job he was good at, Gilda, trying for a baby. “…But Aquaman said it was important that I greet you personally and talk to you while you were here.”
“Bruce!” Harvey beamed, surprised but not suspicious when his old friend appeared in the Oak Bar, and waved him over to his booth. “Selina out of town, right? I should have expected you’d show up, you old dog. Just like old times, eh?”
It was like old times at first.
“Nice blazer, Harv,” the playboy man-about-town noticed immediately, “Asprey?”
Harvey nodded. “Linen and silk blend.”
“Thought I saw it in the window,” Bruce remarked, sitting. Without his ordering, a waiter automatically brought his usual.
“Still drinking the single malts, I see,” Harvey said, pointing to the elaborate set up of scotch in a special tasting glass, a second rocks glass, empty, and a pitcher of Scottish spring water.
But instead of the usual performance of a shallow fop reveling in the Oak Bar’s pretensions, Bruce casually poured water into the second glass, took a whiff of the whiskey and moistened his lips. “I don’t pretend to be a connoisseur,” he said simply. “I suppose I’m just used to it.”
“Well I’m a connoisseur,” Harvey insisted, taking a large swallow of his own drink, “and I must admit, I’ve missed them. It’s like coming home.”
Harvey looked at his glass lovingly. Bruce raised an eyebrow. “No more double malts?”
“There is no such thing as a ‘double malt,’ Bruce. It’s either one single make of scotch, a single malt, or else it’s a blend. More than one is a blend, plain and simple. Nothing sacred about the number two. Use two kinds of whiskey and pretending it’s something special. ‘Double malt’ indeed. Pure affectation.”
Batman overruled Bruce’s urge to take a healthy drink from his own glass. He had to stay sharp, observing the new Harvey Dent, but if the observations continued as they had begun, Bruce felt he was going to need something stiffer than spring water to get him through.
entr’acte…
Lorena said the resort, the Hotel del Coronado and its convention hall, was their population center. They had the same needs as they had above: food, shelter, clothing. Except they needed ways to chemically cure food, since conventional cooking was impossible. Their shelter was to protect them from predators more than the elements, and the surviving structures from above were never built for that purpose. And as for clothing, they needed fabric that could better withstand the salt. She said Atlantis had sent some, short-term, and the Wayne Foundation was working on some way they could make their own.
My eyes may have flickered at the unexpected name, but Lorena didn’t notice. She had other problems—had to step outside for a breath of fresh not-air. I started to wonder why Aquaman was so insistent that she speak to me, if he still had hopes I would kickback my fee for the relief efforts or… …He couldn’t possibly want leverage with Bruce; that wasn’t even worth considering… the Foundation was already onboard anyway from the sounds of it, and anybody who knew the truth about us would know that—
Lorena returned. And very soon I realized the real reason Aquaman had her talk to me. It wasn’t for me at all. It was for her.
“If we can just get over this initial hump,” she was saying, “with the basic necessities, then we can set up a school. And then some kind of industry. There are all kinds of resources down here, if we can just get to a place where we can trade with the surface for what we need instead of living on charity…”
He was grooming her. He wanted them self-sufficient, so he was grooming this woman to lead. She had “greeted me at the door” in a way, meeting me at the Cupola just as Aquaman had at the transporters in Atlantis. And she was giving me an overview of their culture just as he had on “the tour.”
I thought about that as I climbed back into the sub and decided not to be quite as annoyed with my fishy escort back to the surface. Heroes are still infuriating. But sometimes, I don’t know, they’re kind of cute, too.
Randolph’s was a comfortable, clubby lounge in the lobby of a venerable midtown hotel. It had one particular feature that made it Bruce Wayne’s preferred spot for a quiet drink with friends or business associates: it had enormous windows looking out on the midtown streets, making it easy for him to watch the city and, if it were lighted, to spot the Bat Signal.
No signal was lit but, sitting with Harvey Dent as their boys’ night on the town continued, Bruce looked out at the traffic all the same.
Harvey looked more and more at Bruce. He was starting to wonder just how accidental their accidental meeting really was. He was feeling… scrutinized. It wasn’t exactly “stuck in an interrogation room at the 22nd precinct while a room full of police idiots stare at you from behind the ‘mirror’ that fools no one” scrutiny… And it wasn’t exactly “sitting in the Iceberg after a particularly nasty rumor about you and Ivy involving the mayor’s garden shrubbery” scrutiny. It was just an occasional clutch in the pit of his stomach in the middle of saying something perfectly normal…
“Knights got a good team this year.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I caught the end of the Meteors game last night. Tough break losing in overtime that way.”
“At least it was a game. I haven’t enjoyed sports much since…” he gestured to the side of his face. “The Twins couldn’t win a championship with a gun to their heads.”
…And then that strange little clutch in his stomach.
He had a sudden flash of the social captains of Gotham’s High Society, the very people he used to call friends, all getting together in secret to decide whether ol’ Harv should be let back into the “inner circle” and electing Bruce to run the reconnaissance. Perhaps this whole boys’ night was Bruce’s way of testing him to see if he would still fit in after what Gladys Ashton-Larraby would call “that unfortunate Twofers affair” if he passed and “Dent? No I don’t recall ever meeting a Harvey Dent” if he did not.
“Still got that skybox, Bruce?”
“No, I never used it after Dick went off to college. Finally, I just signed it over to the Foundation. Lucius uses it to court donors.”
Harvey dismissed the idea that Bruce was shilling for a cunning cabal of Gotham’s elite. The idiots debated if it was politically correct to serve goose livers at a cirrhosis fundraiser. They couldn’t agree whether that hideous excuse for a dress Gladys wore to the McIntyre opening was tan or taupe. It wasn’t exactly the Ra’s al Ghul level of guile. It wasn’t even the KGBeast level of guile.
It was just… maybe it was just Bruce. He was different, less foppish, more human. Talking about his new yacht.
“So I went with the Gatta, the smaller one. It’s better suited to the rivers around Gotham anyway. Perfect for picnics and short weekend jaunts. Besides, who do I need to impress.”
It was still Bruce and it was hard not to like the guy, but it was hard to believe this was the same wildman who once bet that, in the course of six months, he could score more with Harvey’s dates than Harvey could with Bruce’s.
The mystery had teased him all night. It was only now that it solidified as a definite question (What happened to the playboy?) that the answer presented itself: Selina.
Man.
What a woman like that could do for a guy.
Gilda was like that. In less than a year, she had transformed him from “the Dentmeister” into “loving husband”. And he was happy about it! He remembered looking at Bruce around that time, seeing him still alleycatting all over town every night, and wondering if his old friend would ever grow up.
Of course, then came the acid… and Two-Face had made short work of the Dents’ marriage.
“You okay there, Harv?”
Harvey started.
“You were twiddling with that olive like a coin.”
Harvey looked down at his fingers dully, then up at Bruce.
“We should get something to eat,” his friend was saying. “Pierre, could we get a couple club sandwiches over here.”
Harvey looked piercingly at Bruce, thinking back to that old contest they had… Scoring with the other guy’s date… What a difference a woman like Selina could make… The way Two-Face used to think about her. Geez, what a pig. She was a beautiful, sexy woman, sure, but there are things a guy just isn’t supposed to notice about the woman he thinks of as a kid sister.
The sandwiches came, and a fresh round of drinks.
“You were a million miles away there, Harv,” Bruce said glibly. “What on earth were you thinking about?”
“You’ll sock me,” Harvey said honestly.
“Heh, come on Harv, really. Penny for your thought.”
“Women.”
“Ha. You haven’t changed.”
Harvey thought about that…
“Oh that it were true,” he said sadly, then his eyes danced and he looked up mischievously. “Her skin is not alabaster, by the way. It’s green… Not that I settled for what I could get because I was a freak. It made sense at the time. We had known each other, you know, before.”
“When she tried to kill you,” Bruce said dryly.
“It made sense at the time,” Harvey repeated. “Of course, if I had it to do over again today… Doubt I’ll ever think of the phrase ‘clingy like vines’ the same way again.”
He chuckled and, after a moment’s pause, so did Bruce.
That earlier thought about the date-swapping returned. Once upon a time, there had been stories about Bruce Wayne and Pois on Ivy—but those stories existed about her and every rich man in Gotham, anyone with wealth or influence she had wanted to exploit.
“Like I said once,” Harvey declared with a worldly air, “not girlfriend material. A wild night—or two. But not what a man wants to come home to.”
Bruce raised an eyebrow, unable to disagree, and took a discreet sip of his drink.
“Same with Roxy,” Harvey added, and Bruce’s scotch took a detour at the top of his esophagus. He coughed sharply. “You okay there, Buddy? Yes, those Iceberg women. Not a high cuddleability factor.”
With the aid of a napkin and several sips of water, Bruce had regained the use of his windpipe.
“Oh, not Selina, of course,” Harvey corrected quickly. “I’m sure she’s amazingly cuddleable. I mean… we mean… oh shit. Um… Did you hear the one about the octopus and the bagpipes?”
I was on my way home. Home-home-home-home-home. Meow! It was Economy as far as Pittsburgh (as Bridgett Morse, Sr. Programmer, Imaging Systems Ltd. who Jean Paul seemed to feel wouldn’t spring for at least Business class on a 4½ hour flight—cheap bastards). Then salvation. I slipped into the first class lounge for the Gotham shuttle, shed my dowdy Bridget Morse duds, and boarded my flight home as me. It wasn’t Wayne One, but I had legroom, a glass of champagne, and peace of mind that an insurance salesman from Allentown wouldn’t occupy the seat next to me.
I thumbed through the in-flight magazine and nearly purred at the delicious photos of Gotham, my Gotham, after dark. More than a few of the cityscapes were shot from above. It wasn’t quite the rooftop perspective, but it was close. Close enough for a homesick kitty missing the old rooftop thrills.
Despite the hitch-free delivery, it wasn’t a very satisfying job. Despite the money… Despite Lorena’s gratitude on behalf of the Sub Diegans… Despite a moment’s familiar annoyance with a meddling hero… The whole thing just wasn’t… complete.
I knew why, of course. I’d be a fool not to see why.
Him.
I missed him.
A few days apart shopping in Paris or because a JLA mission dragged on, that was one thing. But stealing again, stealing again without any Bat lurking in the shadows to challenge me? It was… flat.
I sipped my champagne and ran a fingertip across that delicious photo of the glittering Gotham cityscape just as I would over the emblem on his chestplate. Gotham Night, as seen from above. Would he be out there by now, I wondered? Probably not, it was still a touch early. But suited up, most likely. In the cave, the At-Large list open, mapping out his route for the night. And next to his workstation, beside his right elbow, a tray-size rectangle kept totally clear. Alfred would come by and set the tray down—a cup of bisque he won’t drink, a sandwich he won’t eat…
I felt such a pang. This was wrong. It was all wrong. I should have been reveling in this: I just finished one hell of a big score. It was a flawless job. It wasn’t an easy job, but I had pulled it off flawlessly, perfectly… purrfectly even. And best of all, it was for one of them, one of the self-righteous heroes, one of his JLA-cronies, and they had to come to me. And I pulled it off as only I can, and I was extremely well paid for my trouble.
And now instead of stroking my fur as I deserved, I was sitting there thinking about him.
Well.
Ok.
That’s how it is now. We were never just a criminal and a crimefighter doing what came naturally. Once upon a time we could deny that, now we can’t. So. What to do about it?
A cat, I reminded myself, always knows how to make her own fun. If things were… like they used to be, he would be sitting exactly where he is right now, at the workstation, with Alfred bringing a dinner he wouldn’t eat. My name would be on that At-Large list, and he might make an extra pass through Museum Row or the Diamond District or—
I had an idea. I paged backwards through the in-flight magazine looking for a blurb that had caught my eye. There it was, on page 8: “Kiton, the Neapolitan upscale clothier bought the neoclassical six-story Banco di Napoli building, gutted it, and rebuilt the interior with glass, steel, and Murano chandeliers…”
I buzzed the stewardess for another glass of champagne.
Game on, Dark Knight. Catwoman is coming home.
entr’acte…
Harley knew she was lucky. If Stan from the video rental place hadn’t remembered seeing her that night, if he wasn’t willing to come along to the Iceberg to tell them all how she was renting Addicted to Love, Sleepless in Seattle, and Joe Versus the Volcano when that blonde Robin was running around bashing the remnants of the old Black Mask gang, she would have no alibi. They would have turned on her like a pack of rabid dogs if they thought she’d gone over to the other side, the crazed freaks.
It was a shame how Stan thought her asking him out to the Iceberg was a date. It was really a shame how he had such a glass jaw and how he hit the end table so hard when she socked him. But you can’t let a guy go inviting himself to your Meg Ryan film festival, and then put his arm around you when the little kid is booking his flight to go meet Annie on top of the Empire State Building like in An Affair to Remember, even if he did save your life by giving you an alibi so the Iceberg crazies don’t think you’ve gone Bat.
You just can’t.
Harley sighed at her half-finished manuscript and her copious notes for Chapters 9 through 11: Edward Nigma—Passive-Aggressive Intellectual Narcissism as Compensation for Perceived or Actual Physical Deficiencies, Roxy Rocket—the Penis Envy/Thrill Fetish connection and Bane—Debunking the Machismo Archtypes.
You just can’t. You just can’t go public once you’ve crawled inside the Rogue Community and been accepted as one of them. They wouldn’t see her bringing enlightenment to the world about their dear quirky foibles; they would only see her calling Riddler a balding egotist with a little dick.
She’d have to find some other way to get published.
Last call at the Iceberg. Batman usually staffed this one out. Unless there was some particular rogue he was tracking, he let Batgirl, Robin, or Spoiler swing through at this time of night to note who was closing the place, who headed off in what direction and with whom. But a few times each month he would look in himself, especially if patrol was uneventful, as tonight’s had been: One drug dealer, a couple college kids vandalizing the ICX Pharmaceuticals office to protest animal testing, and in a rather ironic counterpoint, a mishap at Scarecrow’s hideout where the scorpions he kept for his sick fear experiments somehow escaped from their tank. It was hardly a banner night for crimefighting, so Batman had taken up his favorite vantage point above the Iceberg to observe the night’s departures.
He was there fore pleased more than not when the Batsignal was lit. He wasn’t a ghoul; he certainly hoped he wasn’t about to hear of some violent atrocity. But he was a crimefighter, and he was invigorated by the prospect of criminal prey.
As was his habit, Batman stopped first on a roof near police headquarters to observe those waiting to meet him. It began as a simple precaution in the days before his alliance with the police was secure and he was never certain what kind of reception to expect. The years that followed had seen some extraordinary reception committees: Interim Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners, FBI Observers, Catwoman a couple of times! Two-Face in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Bundles of Joker’s belongings when Harley moved him out of the Hacienda after the big breakup. There was no lack of variety in the welcomes that had been waiting for him when that signal was lit… but this was the first time he detected nothing at all waiting on that roof.
He advanced cautiously. He searched carefully around and under the signal, assuring himself no one was lying in wait. Finally he went to the control panel to switch it off. The panel was kept locked, the police obviously didn’t want just anybody able to switch the thing on, but it was an easy lock to pick. Harley had done it. In the past. Harley had picked this lock in the past, but tonight’s unauthorized access was clearly not her handiwork. A quick examination of the mechanism and Batman’s lip gave a reflexive twitch. The lock didn’t appear to be picked at all. It had been, obviously, for the signal was lit. But it wasn’t picked by any conventional means. And that could only mean one thing. There were less than a dozen people worldwide that could pull this off and one of them was…
She was home.
entr’acte…
There was a siren, far in the distance, twenty, twenty-five blocks probably, traveling west. The quiet warble made the tense silence in the Redbird all the more present.
They had worked well together, Robin and Spoiler. At first, it had looked like a simple mugging waiting to happen. The scum waited in an alley that wasn’t as sinister as it appeared. He watched as the big theatre let out—it was an old musical, a blockbuster in its day, but after eight years, it was nothing but an overpriced tourist trap. The doors opened, the audience poured out, the scum watched. They were all tourists. Easy pickings. About 60 crossed the alley and clustered at the door to Sardi’s, the famous Broadway bistro, while another 40 or so filed into a tiny gift shop of theatre souvenirs… And all the while the scum watched, choosing his target. Tourists. Easy pickings. That’s what Robin and Spoiler thought… until he spotted the taser… and the knife. This was no ordinary mugger.
They had worked well together. A left hook to the body, a straight right to the jaw. A sweep kick. A chop. Put away the unused Batarang.
The distant siren wailed farther away. They had worked well together. Now it was back to tense silence.
The amused twitch with which Batman first opened the Batsignal control panel gave way to a fierce scowl. He had spotted a small bit of torn paper wadded between the controls, extracted it with tweezers, and he stood now staring down at a fragment of a 1,000 lira note. What the hell was she doing?
Lighting the signal, appropriating his signal as her own personal “Honey, I’m home” message, that he was prepared to accept as typical, maddening brazen felinity—in short, pure Selina . But this, this whatever it was—clue, he would have to call it—what the hell was that supposed to mean? Was she leaving an Eddie Trail? That wasn’t her M.O. (when she had an M.O., which she didn’t anymore). Or maybe…
His lip twitched again.
Yes, actually it was her M.O.
To. The. Letter.
Playing with him. Playing with his head. Playing like he was her yarn toy.
To some he was a fable, to some a nightmare, to some a detective, a freak, a hero, or a demon. But to Catwoman, he had always been, well… hers.
The annoyed scowl gave way to a curious expression. He had missed her, this part of her, and the chase.
A lira note, Italian currency… He shook his head in a wondering burst of amusement that would have produced a chuckle if he was not in costume.
“Italian currency. The Banco di Napoli building, now Kiton. Cute, Kitten. Very cute.”
I was practically salivating. It was a clothiers, not a bank anymore. They had gutted the building, but you could still tell where the vault had been. I made myself comfortable there—it seemed a fitting spot—and waited.
I did notice that they had some lovely knits. Made a mental note to come back tomorrow as Selina.
I had already decided to do some shopping, after all, back in California. This was a lucrative job. It was only natural to have a little spree with the proceeds.
Okay, maybe it was slightly odd to be noticing the merchandise and planning what to try on when I came back while I was waiting for Batman, but when you think about it, really, it’s not that strange. I was there, the clothes were there, Batman wasn’t there yet, I had time to kill… I know it’s not the kind of thing I would have done in the old days, but in the old days the loot wasn’t mine to spend until I had gotten away clean from Batman. And that wasn’t the case now, so why not at least notice the knits that were sitting ten feet away?
He would be there soon enough and I’d have my scrap and scratch. Just like old times. Reowrl. This was going to be fun.
There she was. Criminal prey. Brazen. Feline. Dangerous.
A creature of the night, just as he was. A predator, just as he was. A formidable foe.
Alluring to be sure, beautiful and graceful—as is a tiger. He must steel himself against all that. She is merely prey. She would have no effect on him this time. He would accost her as he would any criminal. That’s far enough, Catwoman!
He really had missed this. Missed her. Look at her. The way that suit wrapped around her curves. Hold it right there, Catwoman!
From this distance, she would unfurl the whip for effect, but she wouldn’t use it. It would be a flurry of kicks, most likely, then a grab-toss and run. Not this time, Catwoman.
And she’d run to that window. That’s where the whip would come in. She’d snare that beam, and then swing up and out. He would be ready. Enough, Catwoman! This ends tonight.
That’s far enough!
Hold it right there!
Not this time!
This ends tonight.
“Here, Kitty-kitty.”
I have NEVER given him the satisfaction of surprising me. Never. It’s a rule.
Catwoman’s Rule #12: never react with surprise when he makes an appearance, no matter h ow sudden or unexpected.
He snuck in, I didn’t hear him, and he caught me by surprise. That much I could handle fine. I have a hundred times before.
What I was not prepared to handle was “Here, Kitty-kitty.”
So I spun around, hissed, unfurled the whip and cracked it on the floor a few times to get his attention.
Except, it came out more like a warm smile and a fingertip wave and a “Meow, come over here and say that, Stud.”
Time for a daring show of bravado, firing a line and swinging down to challenge his quarry in a close face-to-face confrontation.
Instead, Batman reached down with his arm to steady himself and vaulted into the main showroom like a hiker climbing down off a fence. He walked up to her almost casually, as casually as he ever moved in the costume.
He stared.
She stared.
It was one of those moments, daring him. He couldn’t and she knew that and she taunted him with her sexuality. She knew he wanted her and she knew he could never act on it and she stood there so defiantly provocative, so amused by his predicament, so…
So…
Wait a minute.
Like HELL he couldn’t.
…
Whew.
Um.
Wow.
Headrush.
Never let it be said that Batman is a complacent kisser.
…
It occurred to me that we’d sort of bypassed the preliminaries: banter, fight, chase, more banter.
Whoooaheadrush. Um…
It occurred to me… and um… was going to do something about that except… couldn’t feel my legs.
“Welcome home, Kitten.”
Headrush still—God, I love that voice—I mumbled something.
“You were missed. I’m glad you’re back. A lot has happened.”
I managed a deep, feral purr. My arms were already around his neck. Not really sure when that happened…
Another kiss—kept my head better that time.
And he carried me up to the roof.
entr’acte…
Harley found “Googling” her name to be an interesting experience. There were 31,000 websites referencing her.
She wanted insights into how people saw her in order to find a good hook for her new book idea. She found that there was a shop in Bludhaven offering Harley Quinn Harleys: a custom paint job for any motorcycle, featuring “genuine Harley Quinn red” with black detailing.
There was something called Harley Quinn Kryptonite, which was really just some new kind of reddish sandstone marbled with black lava they found in Hawaii. Some geologist named it for her. Ha, ha, that was cute.
Then there was a funny one from some feminist newsletter: “Oh yes, I’ll name my daughter after the psychologist who fell in love with one of her patients and developed a psychosis of her own such that she’s codependent on a homicidal sociopath who treats her like shit. Wake up, ladies! Harley Quinn is not a role model! She’s an enabler!”
Well how do you like that. What does a dried up prune like that know about true love anyways? How can one without a soul understand the emptiness that yearns for a soul mate??? She just doesn’t know Puddin’.
Harley went back to the search page and clicked another link. Sooner or later, she would find the people who really understood what she was about.
Gotham. This is why it was home. This is why the job for Aquaman had been such a bore.
The encounter in Kiton had not played out as planned. Nobody was complaining. He had brought me up to the roof, and the nostalgic confrontation of Bat and Cat continued to be… other than expected. The subtext was changed forever. I could stretch up to him, teasing, letting my lips hover nearly in contact with his until he grunted against them… like a thousand rooftops before, a thousand tempting promises… But we both knew the temptation I offered wasn’t as empty as we once thought, and his grunt now held more than disapproving disappointment. It included a hint of satisfaction and returned desire.
Our bodies were more attuned to each other, too. There had always been physical tension and sometimes a certain beautiful clumsiness. Now, there was casual familiarity. An extra moment’s touch needn’t be stolen pressing my back to his chest inside a pin… not when merely lowering my hip let his palm slide to his favorite spot across my abs.
So the Bat-Cat reunion didn’t play out as planned.
That wasn’t the last surprise Gotham had to offer. Tinkerbelle was next. We were cuddled together on the Banco di Napoli roof. I was playing with his gauntlet while his ungloved hand stroked up my thigh, when this glowing golf ball floated up to me and started talking in Jason Blood’s voice:
~Selina, I hope this Orbis Vox Vocis finds you well.~
The ball flashed brighter on each syllable, and Batman grunted at it—the old grunt, disapproving disappointment.
~I would like to invite you for a little chat, like old times. Your terrace after midnight, if convenient. I hope to see you then.~
I laughed as the Tinkerbelle golf ball spun faster, brighter, and smaller after delivering its message, until it finally just twinkled into nothing in a little burst of fairy dust.
“The nerve,” Batman graveled.
“That’s why I love Gotham,” I said happily. “Always something new. Even the unexpected manages to outdo itself.”
Batman glowered.
“Oh, come on,” I teased him. “You did something very similar to get a message to me during No Man’s Land, remember? That little summons you had Oracle hide inside that emerald?”
“That was different.”
“It sure was. Jason’s invitation was far more polite.”
“And magic.”
“Ah, that again. Well, that’s what Jason does, m’love. Oracle does nanite-generated holograms, you do the gruff ‘n grunty shtick, and Jason Blood—”
“Magically healed Harvey’s face without reading the fine print.”
I stared.
“I told you a lot has been happening while you were away.”
entr’acte…
Another siren warbled, punctuating the silence in the Redbird… Who did she think she was any way? A Robin, that was a laugh. Tim knew he was no Batman, but he was certainly the best detective in THIS car… And Steph was questioning his call—Steph was. Tim didn’t care if she only wore the costume for one night, if she had EVER been Robin in ANY sense of the word, she would have known piping up that way when you don’t know what you’re talking about is verboten. He was no Batman—he wouldn’t sentence anybody to 30 hours of Zogger for daring to question him—But he couldn’t help reliving that moment in the alley. It felt wrong. Every instinct as they watched tha t scum felt wrong. He got out the scope for a closer look—and then when he saw the taser and the knife, he moved in immediately. Once they had him, Robin bagged the knife—and found the guy had a roll of duct tape too. It was just duct tape, but it seemed to confirm everything that made him sick watching the guy.
And then Spoiler went off at him: He could only hope the police would match the knife to something or else they only had him on a few misdemeanors. They should have waited, she said, to catch him red handed. She said that! She dared to put on a Robin costume when… “That way we’d have something solid,” she had said. ?”He was going to KILL SOMEONE. You DON’T take that chance, PERIOD. You don’t give him that chance, PERIOD.” Robin was aware when he’d said it, it was with Batman’s inflection. How dare she not know that. She wore the Robin costume and she doesn’t even know that you DO NOT take that chance and you DO NOT question the call of the team leader…
They didn’t work well together. Working together was more than a well-timed sweep kick. It was more than not needing the Batarang.
Catwoman couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Harvey is back? Completely? No more Two-Face?”
“Like you said: in Gotham, even the unexpected manages to outdo itself.”
“It’s not like when your scars were healed, I hope. It will kill him. Bruce, it will kill him. To have Two-Face gone and then suddenly come back—”
“I know. Selina, I know. It’s not like that, not exactly. It turns out that Harvey’s healing can be reversed, but only if he reneges on some kind of bargain with the universe that Jason inadvertently made on his behalf. Harvey can’t use his coin again to make a decision. Not ever.”
“Ouch,” she winced. “That’s not going to go over well.”
“I know. He’s putting on a good face right now, but—”
“This is funny to you?”
“Either that or he doesn’t realize… What? No, nothing about this is remotely funny. Why would you think—”
“‘Putting on a good face,’” she quoted back to him.
“Oh.” He sighed. “Figure of speech. I did that with him too. I said ‘Penny for your thought.’”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“A penny is a coin.”
“Ho boy. This is going to be hard, isn’t it, dealing with him now?”
“It is hard. It’s hard not to get sucked in. He’s so damn happy.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“It won’t last. When the bubble pops—”
“You don’t know that. Harvey is no fool. If he knows what’s at stake, he’s not going to just—”
“See, I told you. It’s hard not to get sucked into it. You’re halfway there right now and you haven’t even see him yet.”
“Why are you being such a jackass about this? Is it just the magic thing or—”
“Because ‘too good to be true’ isn’t.”
There was silence for a moment. When Selina spoke, it was with a gentler tone.
“It doesn’t cost anything to hope.”
Jason could sense when his Orbis Vox Vocis located Selina and delivered its message. He had brought a decanter of brandy out onto the terrace and placed it on a small wrought iron table nestled between two comfortable garden chairs. He poured his own drink and cupped the snifter, letting his hand warm the contents to release the rich bouquet. He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. Then his eyes popped open.
Someone was coming but… not Selina. He couldn’t quite sense who… Batman’s temporal echo was interfering again… then there was a whoosh—not an echo at all—and Batman had landed precisely where he had before.
“Selina sends her regrets,” he graveled. “She went to see Harvey.”
“Ah.”
“She’s been out of town.”
“Ah. I see.”
“This was her first chance to—”
“I understand. You’ve told her then. Tell me, does she share your view that my magickal intervention on poor Dent’s behalf constitutes a foolish lapse of the highest magnitude?”
“She said it will kill him to have Two-Face gone and then come back,” Batman said frankly. Jason turned his head swiftly to the side—not as if hurt or ashamed, but more like he was reacting to an expected and deserved physical slap. Without knowing why, Batman added in a milder tone: “Then she said ‘it costs nothing to hope.’”
“Help yourself to a brandy,” Jason offered, waving to the decanter.
When Batman didn’t budge, Jason gave a wry smile, poured the second brandy and held it out. Neither man spoke. Neither moved. After a long minute, accepting the only solution to the impasse, Batman took the glass from Jason’s hand and sat in the empty chair.
“’Costs nothing to hope,’” Jason repeated. “Dear Selina. A superior woman. A word of advice, Bruce: Don’t let your cynicism drain that out of her.”
Batman let it pass. He had bristled when Jason used his name and would have bristled more at the presumption that followed—had he not seen Jason’s face and followed his eyes inside… Through the glass doors, a small photograph sat on the desk, a pale, pretty woman with the shingled hair fashionable in the 1930s, wearing a monocle… Jason sipped his drink. Batman merely looked at the untouched glass in his own hand. The gloomy moment made a striking and depressing counterpoint to Bruce Wayne’s ‘Boy’s night out’ with Harvey Dent… Harvey who was so ridiculously optimistic about his future.
As if he heard the thought, Jason turned to Batman grimly.
“This isn’t the old argument about magick, is it? We’ve had that talk before. I know you’re a scientist, and you won’t trust what you can’t reproduce under control conditions and quantify and diagram and make natty charts that show why four is the atomic number of Beryllium. But you haven’t even stopped to acknowledge that, regardless of what might happen tomorrow, Gotham is one criminal light today—YOU are one enemy light today—because of what I did. You haven’t given the most fleeting acknowledgement to the fact that today you have your friend back. I know you detest magick, Bruce, but this is something else.”
“Maybe,” Batman admitted.
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“I thought you would tell me it was none of my business and leave in a huff.”
Etrigan considered Batman a brother demon trapped in a cage of flesh and bone. The glare Jason now received made it hard to discount that theory.
“It is none of your business, Jason. But you’re right, there is something… more… bothering me about this. And if I don’t get into it with you, here and now, it might be with Selina later… and I’d rather not risk that.”
“Is it such a risk to talk to Selina?”
“About this, it might be.”
“Do tell, what’s it about?”
“Happy endings,” Batman growled with contempt.
Jason responded with a noise that sounded very like a bat-grunt.
Atlantis has got nothing on Gotham for the splendidly weird. Neither does Sub Diego.
Every lair, regardless of what it had been before, needs a comfortable living space. Maybe that’s a challenge in other cities; I don’t know how Flash villains go about it. But in Gotham, there is an entire subculture of artists, actors, and students foregoing crappy apartments and installing themselves into raw industrial spaces they can get on the cheap. The ingenuity with which they’ll equip old warehouses, factories, or meat lockers with the basic conveniences is equaled only by the speed at which they’ll do the same for you if you wave a little cash under their nose.
Shortly after he acquired the Flick Theatre for his hideout, Two-Face had these kids set up his kitchen in what had been the general manager’s office. That’s where I was now: in the former general manager’s office of the Flick Theatre, sitting at Two-Face’s two-tone kitchen table, across from Harvey Dent sporting a fully healed face, eating cold fried chicken.
Atlantis has nothing on this.
The first wave of awed disbelief had hit before I’d even seen him. I hadn’t called ahead; it was Harvey, I just drop in. I went straight to his alarm, punched in the PIN: 22222 222 22, and waited. No low hum. The red indicator didn’t flash to yellow and then to green. The system wasn’t deactivating. He’d changed his PIN.
It was unbelievable. It was… real, suddenly. Harvey had changed his PIN.
It can take me forty minutes to crack a Phoenix 9000 and I really didn’t want to take the time, so I snipped a non-critical wire, setting up a short between the keypad and the main alarm cabinet. The system was still operating, so it wouldn’t sound the alarm, it would just light the internal controls, letting Harvey know there was a glitch with the keypad. I backed into the shadows and waited.
I didn’t wait long. I heard a door open and Harvey running up the stairs, muttering. When he got closer, the second wave of disbelief hit. He wasn’t muttering; he was singing.
♫ One thing I know… and I’ve always known…♫
♫ I am my own best friend. ♫
This was unbelievable.
♫ Baby’s alive… but baby’s alone… ♫
♫ and baby’s his own best friend. ♫
Catman made a joke about that song once. It was at the Iceberg. He just found out about one of Harley’s karaoke outings, one to which he had not been invited. He asked if Two-Face had sung this song. Harvey calmly flipped his coin, stood up, walked up to Blake… like a mailman delivering the mail, completely relaxed and casual… picked him up, walked behind the bar, and stuffed him into the little shelf where they keep the rocks glasses. Oswald double charged him for the damage, which he seemed to think was a better joke than Blake’s.
By now, Harvey had reached the keypad only a few feet in fr ont of me. I could only see the back of his head, but I could hear the sing-a-long clearer than ever.
♫ And trusting to luck… it’s only for fools… ♫
♫ Playing a game…where I make the rules… ♫
I was just—stunned.
♫ And rule number ONE, from here till the end is ♫
♫ I am my own best friend. ♫
It’s like: you wake up one day and your cats talk to you.
When I first hid in this spot in the shadows behind the keypad, I had planned to pounce out at him—I didn’t now, I was just too fucking stunned. He liked that last part so much, about trusting to luck, that he was singing it again—then he trailed off when he found the cut wire. Most people can’t tell a claw-snip from any other kind of cut, not at a glance. Harvey is one of the few that can. Either that or he just guessed it was me. However he knew, he was holding the snipped wire and murmuring about what the cat dragged in.
I took that as my cue and was about to step out of the shadows and meow, when he turned around to look for me. He was looking too high, towards the surrounding rooftops. It gave me a startling view of his face—and wave of disbelief #3.
“Why Miss Perkins, you’re beautiful,” I purred—startling him so badly that he stumbled back against the keypad.
“Sweet mother of—You startled me, Kitty Cat! Shouldn’t sneak up like that.”
I just shook my head while this ridiculous grin spread all over my face.
“Harvey! Harvey, it’s just—look at you,” I bubbled. It was disgracefully unfeline, but I threw my arms around him and gave him a hug. He cleared his throat, we came inside, and now we were eating chicken.
He had poured me a diet soda. 3 ice cubes. It was unreal.
“So this rotund little tailor chucks me out of his store like I was asking for a handout, and then the poor salesman comes chasing me down the street ‘cause I left my handkerchief in the fitting room. Except I hadn’t, he just wanted to give me a referral. Get a bit of the lost commission back, probably. And here I am.”
I couldn’t get used to it. “I”, “Me”, “My”—It was a little like those first weeks after Batman took off the mask. I had to recalibrate my brain. The man inside the Bat had a name… This wasn’t that different in terms of a shock, it takes a while to process. Harvey had one face, and he said “I”… He also kept looking at my legs, which was a little out of the ordinary.
“So what will you do with yourself now? When you’re done shopping, I mean,” I added with a wink.
“I haven’t decided. I thought maybe develop this place. It’s a fine old building—You do something new with your hair?”
“No, but I’m a bit windblown,” I told him. “I was on the coast for a few days, oceanfront.”
“Being close to the water suits you. Who knew?”
“You win the prize,” I laughed. “First person not to say ‘Cats and Water.’”
“What do I win?” he asked.
I got up and gave him a kiss on the cheek—the side that used to be scarred. It just seemed like the thing to do.
He blushed. Then he got this puzzled look, his brow crinkled up into the deepest furrows I have ever seen, and then… he flipped out. He told me to leave—actually he told me to get out. Then he told m e to get the hell out. Then he said he was sorry, he had to get up early, he had an early meeting in the morning—no, of course he didn’t have a meeting, he meant he was casing a target—no, that wasn’t it—he had a headache. Yes that was it. And then he asked if I’d heard the one where this guy goes into a bar with an octopus.
At last. At last Harley Quinn had found the people who truly understood her.
“When he acts like he’s ignoring her or blowing her off, it shows how hard he’s fighting the attraction now…”
“See she stands up to him, that’s why they are so perfect together. Okay sure, he treats her bad, but the more horrible he is and that she loves him even so, that is real romance, true love…”
“Only she can bring out the good in him. It shows what a woman she is…”
“They’re both clowns, don’t you see! It’s all about the laughter!”
“I don’t see why we have to hear so much about that crime stuff. That doesn’t matter, it’s just how they met. I want to hear more about what they do together. Enough about the dumb crime stuff. More Joquinn! More Joquinn! More Joquinn!”
It took Harley a little while to figure out that “Joquinn” was her and Mistah J. There was another group calling them “Harleker” and there was some kind of feud going on between the two groups. Harleker sounded better, this group maintained, more like “Benifer” (which didn’t make much sense to Harley because Ben Afflick and Jennifer Lopez broke up, whereas she and Mistah J were forever). The other group said it was wrong not to put Joker’s name first since he was the man.
“Why isn’t there any more speculation about a Joker-Harley wedding, huh? Not since that one lousy Post article, where it didn’t even go through. Boo! They should get married! He loves her. That’s what they’re supposed to do! I don’t understand how there can be all this stuff about them where they don’t get married!”
Now these were her people! A whole message board, and not one of them got all mean and nasty about Mistah J’s quirky little habits with the SmileX or the crowbars or the timebombs or the hatchets. She had finally found a group that really understood her. They understood Puddin’. They understood EVERYTHING!
“Things are changing, Jason. She’s changing. ‘Evolving,’ Alfred says. She’s gotten so comfortable in our life together, it’s starting to look like… maybe one day she could expect…”
Jason chuckled.
“Fewer women are obsessed with that fairy tale than we like to think, Bruce. Selina’s not the type.”
“Everybody is the type, Jason. Everybody down deep would like to believe they could… somehow… live happily ever after.”
“Everybody meaning you, yourself.”
Batman glared. “It costs nothing to hope, she said. We both know better, Jason. It costs everything. It’s… beyond foolish. It’s emotional suicide… Russian roulette, at the very least.”
Etrigan perked up at the analogy, but Jason ignored him.
“Bruce… A part of you wants to believe you and Selina can have the fairy tale.”
“No.”
“And then, because of me, A ‘Happily Ever After’ walks through your front door and says ‘Oh, Selina’s out of town, I guess I’ll talk to you instead.’ Is that it? And a part of you wants to believe—that it’s real, that Harvey will make it, the happy ending is possible.”
“No.”
“No? Despite the ten-thousand sound, logical, scientific reasons you and Catwoman could never get as far as you already have? That little possibility of more doesn’t twinkle approximately four atoms high, deep and wide, like a molecule of Beryllium somewhere in the back of your brain? Where this ‘Psycho-bat’ throws his cape over it and whistles.”
Batman reflexively made a fist, crushing his glass to bits.
Jason looked at the brandy-soaked glove full of glass splinters and arched an eyebrow.
“It was that or throw it against the railing,” Batman announced flatly.
“I’m sorry, Bruce. I apologize for inserting Hope into your field of vision where you are unable to ignore it.”
“You above all people should understand, Jason. You that keeps glancing at that picture inside, the woman with the monocle. Tell me that was a happily ever after courtesy of your fairy tale hocus pocus.”
“You shouldn’t be so dismissive of Fairy Tales, Bruce. Before that Disney fellow came along with his singing dwarves and dancing mice, you would have liked them. The magicks in those stories are seldom a good thing. They’re the curse that traps the prince as a frog, puts the kingdom to sleep for a hundred years, or lures the children into the witch’s clutches. The hero earns his happy ending by bearing all the undeserved burdens with patience and courage, overcoming the obstacles however many they are and however unfair… Does any of this sound familiar?”
“Thank you for the brandy,” Batman said with harsh finality. He stood to go. “Sorry about the glass.”
“Besides which, Harvey Dent’s fate is hardly a ‘happily ever after.’ He can never fall back on that old crutch he was so dependent on, no matter how stressful his life becomes… almost like an alcoholic… day in, day out, for the rest of his… doesn’t sound like a happy ending, does it? Not unless he works for it.”
Batman had removed the grapnel launcher from his belt and aimed it at the usual gargoyle.
“Give Selina my regards,” Jason said pointedly. “You will be seeing her at home, won’t you?”
Batman grunted like it was a guilty admission.
“Tell her, I send my warmest hope… for her happiness.”
I unfurled the whip—it’s really the only way to get their attention when one of the Arkham crowd starts to flip out.
“Harvey, I never thought I’d have to say this to your half, but if you don’t get a hold of yourself, I’ll set you on fire.”
It worked. Always does. He focused. He put both of his hands flat on the table. Seemed to look at the left one for a minute. Then at last, he looked up at me and spoke.
“I’m sorry, Selina. I seem to have been momentarily possessed by an idiot. All better now.”
“Harvey, you started to throw me out, and then you started to tell the octopus joke. That goes a little beyond Friday night at the Iceberg crazy. That was at very least—”
“A panic attack. You got any loose change, a quarter, dime, penny, anything? I won’t flip it, I just want to look at it.”
“Harvey. Calm the hell down or I’m going to hit y ou with that chicken leg. Tell me what happened just now.”
“NO! No-no. Oh no. No way.”
“Harvey.”
“…”
“Harvey.”
“…I thought he was coming back.”
“Okay, Harvey, if that happens again, asking to look at my loose change is probably not such a hot idea.”
“Yeah. Could you not use that word again?”
“What word, loose—”
“No. Um… ‘hot.’ Also ‘leg.’ In fact, probably not a good idea to talk about any of the chicken parts… You might want to put the whip away too. And ah, if you could maybe, oh I don’t know, put on a bulky sweater or something. I got some extra large sweatshirts around here, if you don’t mind joining the Galen MacDoogles fan club.”
“Harvey? Earth to Harvey. Look at me, focus and start making sense.”
“Selina,” he wailed. “You’re… hot.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Really, really hot stuff. I mean—damn, woman, look at you. And you gotta wrap it in tight leather, that’s just—low.”
I am my own best friend was nothing compared to this.
“Harvey, are you coming on to me?” I asked.
“NO!” he yelped and pushed his chair backwards—adding an ungodly wood-on-linoleum screech to the verbal blithering—and at the same time he hopped up and back. “No. No no no. No. I do not—He—He does—did. I do not have those thoughts about you, Selina. No way. Never. Little sister. Never even noticed—although how when you wrap it all in purple leather—You go out like that! You… shouldn’t. Men get ideas. You have no idea what—I mean, Two-Face alone would—but I didn’t listen. Whatever thoughts he might have had, I did not listen. Because a guy doesn’t. Y’see.”
I nodded.
I did see.
“Leonard Berlander all over again,” I whispered.
Once upon a time, when Harvey was D.A., he had prosecuted a low-level thug named Leonard Berlander. It turned out the guy was framed, but by the time Harvey found out, he had other things on his mind—namely his political future. He let the guy rot. And after a few years in and out of the clink, Leonard Berlander finally committed suicide. By that time, Harvey was Two-Face. He’d come to think of his Harvey persona as a pinnacle of all things noble and good. The fallout, remembering that Harvey Dent had flaws like everyone else, nearly destroyed him.
“Selina, I do not have ideas like that about you.”
“S’okay, Big Brother,” I winked. “Half the Iceberg does—”
“I know, and they know that I’ll flatten them if they so much as—”
“I know that. And actually, Harvey, that ticks me off, because if my honor needs defending, I have claws of my own to take care of it. But Harvey, listen to yourself. Whatever you do or don’t notice about what I wrap in the purple leather, you come down on the side of flattening anybody at the Iceberg that gets out of line.”
“I… we… well…”
“You come down on the side of defending your little sister, yes?”
His fingers twitched. It wasn’t an encouraging sign. But then he said…
“Yeah. I did&helli p; Without flipping for it… This time.”
It was late when Batman left Jason Blood’s, but not so late that he couldn’t make a few stops on the way home. A crack den on East 119th yielded a satisfying haul of scum and the poison they peddled—and a lead on a downtown rave… The rave was winding down when Batman got there, only one dealer—smalltime—and “a lover not a fighter” according to his T-shirt (a claim borne out by his attempt to deter Batman’s attack by brandishing a cigarette lighter, screaming “Stay back or I’ll burn you good, freak!” and then running in such a blind panic that he slammed fullspeed into the doorframe). It didn’t matter from a crimefighting perspective: it was filth removed from his city, filth that never should have been allowed to ooze into Gotham in the first place, now gone where it couldn’t poison more innocents. From a crimefighting perspective, that was all that mattered. But the guy was no fighter and Batman’s fists still ached to punch something. He rousted the usual sleaze at Pete’s “Sports Bar”—Sports Bar denoting the addition of an extra television at a rancid waterfront dive where the worst criminal scum congregated… That led him to the warehouse where the last of the False Face Society were in hiding… By the time the Batmobile pulled into the cave, the 3rd, 18th, and 29th precincts were still processing the paperwork because of Jason Blood’s lecture on fairy tales…
Of course, half of them would be back on the streets in a week or a month. More poison would ooze into town to replace what Batman had confiscated; more scum would surface to sell it to innocents… Today, it was better. Tomorrow, there would be more work to do.
Damn Jason Blood.
This was supposed to take his mind off that whole ridiculous… There is no happily ever after. It never ends. None of it. “You haven’t even stopped to acknowledge that, regardless of what might happen tomorrow, Gotham is one criminal light today”
And tomorrow, if Harvey snapped back, he would be 10 times worse!
Batman had to think about tomorrow. He had to be realistic about tomorrow.
“You are one enemy light today…today you have your friend back.”
Just like today there were a few guns, a few drugs, and a few scumbags off the street. None of that negated the fact that tomorrow it could all be worse, that it probably would all be worse. “It costs nothing to hope,” Selina had said. Of all the temptations she’d thrown at him over the years, that was the most insidious. Costs nothing to hope…
Tim came limping out of the costume vault just as Batman approached it.
“Oh hi,” the boy nodded glumly.
It was a curious contrast to when he ran into Stephanie a few nights before. Tim had that same vaguely disturbed posture. With Stephanie, Bruce identified it at once as guilt. Tim’s was harder to assess.
“Rough night?” he hazarded.
“Was okay,” Tim hedged, “Caught a killer; it’s in the log. Hope the case sticks. If not, least the cops will keep a watch on him.”
Batman grunted. He glanced momentarily towards the workstation, intending to read Robin’s report first thing.
“Steph and I split,” Tim added matter-of-factly. “Wasn’t working. Wasn’t going to. Why waste the time when it’s just going to end in more crap. So I’ll be patrolling alone again when you don’t need me to… Bruce?”
Batman had removed the cowl and was scrutinizing Tim’s words and expression with an intensity the boy found unnerving.
“How do you know it ‘wasn’t going to work,’” he asked pointedly.
“I’d like to be the one to tell Oracle if you don’t mind—that I’ll be patrolling alone from now on, I mean.”
“Fine. You tell Oracle that Robin will be patrolling alone, and somewhere in there you’ll presumably work in telling Barbara that Tim and Stephanie are no longer a couple. But what I asked is: why you are so certain it wasn’t going to work.”
“’Cause I know, okay, Bruce. I’m a realist, like you taught me. The thing with Cecily showed me we can never have relationships with women that aren’t in our world, and that just leaves—”
“This isn’t just because of the episode with the Robin costume, I hope.”
“No. It’s really not, Bruce. Because if it wasn’t the costume, it’d be something else and whatever it is, Steph and I just don’t have the juice for it. Y’know what I mean?”
“You’re just being realistic?” Bruce repeated with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah. I don’t expect happily ever after—”
“What!” Bruce exclaimed, shocked by the use of those words for a second time this evening.
“—I know there’s gonna be speedbumps with anybody. That’s reality. And me and Stephanie don’t have any real connection to get us over those. That’s reality too. We both wear costumes and fight crime—That just isn’t enough, Bruce. Not in the real world. Not for me. So I ended it. Only fair thing to do. Stupid to just let her go on in some fairy tale fantasy world thinking we’re going to say ‘I Do’ and ride off into the sunset together.”
Coming soon from Princess Press: A Harley Quinn Romance. ?Theirs was a love forged in the fires of adversity, a troubled man with a mysterious past, a beautiful doctor who swore never to love again (Thanks to Professor Schnieder and his fricken C+, Thanks for nothing, Jerk). United by fate, they would stand alone against a Dark Terror from beneath the city.
Bruce sat at his workstation in the Batcave, staring openmouthed at the computer screen. He was still reeling from Tim’s news—not to mention Tim’s bitterness—and then he found this.
Theirs was a love that would stand the test of time, it was… A Time to Laugh
He had installed the keylogger on to Harley Quinn’s computer when he first penetrated the Hacienda. It transmitted her keystrokes to an OraCom relay whenever she opened a word processing program, allowing him to monitor her progress on her book. He had just confirmed that she had abandoned the project and was about to log the success of Operation Wakeup Call, when this new document appeared.
No one else could see him as she did. No one could see past his horrific unusual appearance or violent rages quirks. Only she could appreciate…
It was pathetic, but at least it was unlikely to get her gassed, shot, hung, or dismembered. That should mean Case Closed for Batman. Yet still Bruce sat there, perversely fascinated by the words on the screen.
“I love you, Harley, and you love me, HAHAHA. With the evil Bat Dark Terror lurking beneath the city that could part us at any time, we should get married at once. We’ll regret every moment we didn’t spend together if we don’t take this chance.”
Bruce felt snakes of nausea slithering in his gut. She was so totally removed from reality—in such striking contrast to Tim, who seemed to be drowning in it. Bruce was shocked to realize that both extremes seemed wrong to him. Harley was obviously insane. When your idea of “Love” means you overlook abuse and mass murder, that’s insane. But there was something not quite right about Tim’s view either.
He wondered if Selina was home.
Rather than checking the security cameras, Bruce powered down the workstation and headed up to the manor himself. As he left the study, he passed the telephone stand as he always did on his way into the Great Hall, he walked right past a small oil painting hung just above it. He had taken only two steps when his mind processed the image and he turned slowly to study it. It was a scene from Greek mythology by an unknown Russian master. He examined it for a minute, then he continued upstairs.
“It costs nothing to hope,” he graveled when he entered the bedroom.
Selina was stretched luxuriously across the bed. She looked up at him with a miffed pout.
“Hey Beautiful, glad you’re home,” she offered as an alternative greeting, “How is Harvey? How did it go with Aquaman? Nice grope on the rooftop. Is that a new negligee? Why thanks, Handsome. I’m glad to be home. The visit with Harvey was really strange. Aquaman was a hoot. The rooftop was fun, and yes, this is a new nightie, thanks for noticing.”
Bruce grunted. “You said ‘it costs nothing to hope’ before. Do you know how wrong that is? Today, Gotham is one criminal light. Today, Two-Face is gone and I have my friend Harvey back. There are a few guns, drugs and scumbags off the street. And tomorrow it could all be worse.”
“But it might not be,” Selina said simply.
“I know…”
That was the crux of it, wasn’t it: could be, might be, probably would be. No certainties. You couldn’t know for sure. And that was supposed to be a good thing. You could hope. It MIGHT be worse tomorrow, but it might not.
“You know that painting downstairs, right above the telephone?” he asked.
“Of course. It’s Pandora’s Box. The plaque is wrong by the way. The artist is French, not Russian. I think what you’ve got there is actually an unknown work of Jacques Louis David.”
“Yeah, not the point. Pandora’s box. All the evils released into the world—Murder, Crime, Hate, Disease, Poverty and Depravity, Pain and Death—and Hope. The gods included Hope in that box, with all that evil… is it a mercy, to make it bearable—or is it the unkindest cut of all? The darkness is always with us now and always will be and this little four atoms of twinkling hope is saying, somehow, it will all turn out okay?”
Selina raised an eyebrow, not suspiciously as Jason Blood had done, but with a gentle curiosity.
“You know, there was a time I could read your moods pretty well,” she ventured carefully, rising from the bed and sauntering up to him with the old rooftop sway. “They usually didn’t match up with what your mouth was saying, and that was fine. Because we both knew what grunt-Stop right there, grunt-Not so fast, grunt-Those don’t belong to you really meant.”
She offered a naughty grin, which he glared at.
“Your point?”
She shrugged, and her posture changed entirely from seductive Cat to befuddled Selina.
“My point is that I don’t know h ow to translate grunt-These are the benefits of a classical education.”
“There is no Happily Ever After, Selina. The job will never be done. All the crime—,” his voice caught, hating the admission to come “—can never be stopped. But I go out there every night anyway.” His voice had taken on a dead monotone that would have been frightening if not for the warmth glowing in his eyes. “Two-Face is gone and Harvey is back, for now. And you make me happy.”
“I like the sound of that last part—but I’m still confused.”
“So am I. Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow, I want you to give me a complete rundown on what happened with Sub Diego.”
Spoiler left Batgirl on the steepled roof of St. Maria Faustina’s. None of them took her seriously. Not Batman—that whole thing with the Robin costume, it was practically a joke. Using her to send some kind of ‘message’ to Harley Quinn, what a crock. What a waste of all she could offer if she really was made Robin. And Oracle—Oracle didn’t have any faith in her at all. It was ridiculous the way they thought they had to tell her exactly when to come out of the Batmobile and exactly who to go after. Like she couldn’t handle just anybody that she decided to go for. It was insulting. And Tim—Tim that was so threatened by her pitiful 15-minutes in his role that he had to act like such a big man during their joint patrol, like he knew so much more than her and had such good instincts. He had to call all the shots and then just because she opened her mouth, he dumps her. Limp dick little prick. She’d show him. She’d show him just how wrong he was about that mugger and just how wrong he was about her. She was as good as any of them, and not one of them appreciated her. Even Cassie. Cassie that knew nothing but busting chops when she came to them. She had shown Cassie the ropes, and instead of being grateful and helping her in return, all she got was criticism. “Body is saying ‘I wonder what’s happening on Gilmore girls tonight’ Is not scary! Try again.” What kind of help was that? She asks Cassie to make her a better fighter and all her friend does is pick at everything she does wrong. Well she’d show her, she’d show them all. There was nothing wrong with her battle stance, and there was nothing wrong with her instincts. She was every bit as good a detective as Robin and as good a fighter as Batgirl and she could pick her own opponents without any help from Oracle or Batman.
She’d show them all.
The cops weren’t going to be able to hold that mugger for long if they couldn’t match his knife to forensic evidence from some existing crime—and they couldn’t match it to anything if they didn’t have it. Now that it had “disappeared” from the evidence locker (she was as good as Catwoman, too), they would have to release him. She’d be ready to follow him right out of the precinct parking lot—and then she’d show Mr. Super-Crimefighter the way that scumball should have been busted in the first place.
©2004, Chris Dee