The Bristol Country Club is one of those places that
have institutionalized resistance to change. Naturally, there are some
advancements they have to accept if they want to go on existing in the
modern world, and in order to live with themselves for compromising on the
stuff that matters, they dig in deeper on the stuff that doesn’t. Maybe
they have to hire the Irish and put an unsightly exit sign over the door,
but tennis whites are white, damnit. None of that new-fangled colored trim.
So Eddie and I sat in the lounge beside the tennis
courts without so much as a thread of green on his person to help anyone
identify him. We were playing backgammon to pass the time, and I was
trying to bait his witty wordsmith to come out and play. I was worried that
with no question mark tie clip, no bowler and cane, and no signature green,
it might be difficult for the Smeks to make the connection right away. I
certainly didn’t want to introduce him as Edward “The Riddler” Nigma,
so a little riffing on the terminology of tennis as they came up to the
table would not have been amiss. Unfortunately, the mojo vacuum had reached
his language centers. “To write with a broken pencil is pointless” and “A
will is a dead give-away” were the best he could come up with, and neither
were appropriate to the occasion. We had to trust to luck that Smeks would
recognize him sooner rather than later, and luck wasn’t exactly Eddie’s
lapdog at the moment. Woof.
At least they arrived on time, and as expected, they
came straight up to the table when they saw me dressed to play. I
introduced Eddie and got the excuses out of the way:
“Some mix-up at the pro shop. I was sure Alfred had
reserved us a court for today, but it looks like somebody got the date
wrong. They have us down for next Wednesday.”
It brought the desired effect. Paula insisted I
take her place playing with Marcus against the Ambertons. Her arm had been
bothering her all morning, and she would have given anything
to get out of the game, but she didn’t want to let her husband down. This
way I could get a good game in, and she would be so happy to keep my
friend company…
I refused once, just so Marcus could get in on the act:
It’s always such fun playing mixed doubles with a new partner.
Paula had quite a good backhand, but everyone knew that by now, as well as
her penchant to tucker out after the first set. He said this right in front
of her, but she just smiled. They really were quite a pair, the way they
worked together to maneuver me into playing for them. I finally agreed, as
long as Eddie didn’t mind, and naturally he was more than happy to have a
nice chat with Paula while we played.
After the tennis game broke up, Eddie and Selina had
lunch in the dining room so Paula would have a handy visual aid as she
briefed her husband.
“Just look at him, Marcus. He’s completely infatuated
with her. He couldn’t be more obvious about it if he tried.”
Marcus glanced around for a waiter so he could study
Edward Nigma without being conspicuous. He didn’t see anything he would
describe as “obviously infatuated.” Nigma was looking at Selina
quite a lot, but they were having lunch. Still, he didn’t have the benefit
of talking to the guy for over an hour the way Paula had. Paula
had a good eye for these things.
“He knows he can’t compete with Wayne’s billions,”
Paula narrated while, across the dining room, Eddie was telling Selina about
advancements in robotics. “Not yet, anyway. But he knows that’s the point
of attraction, and I’m convinced he plotting some coup to make a fortune of
his own and win her away.”
Once again, Marcus did his “Look for a waiter”
maneuver, but this time he accidentally made eye contact with one and had to
order a bowl of French onion soup. The exercise did allow him to take a
long, calculated look at Edward Nigma, which he pondered through the next
course. He certainly wasn’t much to look at compared to Wayne. Trophy
women might not care about that if a man was rich enough, but if she already
had an $8 billion GQ cover like Bruce Wayne, she wouldn’t be likely to trade
him in for an eight billion dollar Edward Nigma… or even a nine billion
dollar one. Unless…
“It’s not enough to become rich himself,” he confided,
leaning across the table to share the revelation in a hushed, oniony
whisper. “He has to be planning to ruin Wayne as well.” He sat back,
contemplating the words with an excited glint in his eye. There were
possibilities in that. Very profitable possibilities. “Tell me
everything,” he said emphatically.
“Well, like I said, he’s besotted with Selina.
Seems to have a very high opinion of himself—his intelligence, that is—but I
don’t think it’s ego. He does seem to have the technical expertise to back
it up. He was telling me about some article he’d read about a new ‘robot
skin’ with nerve endings that send signals to a microchip, I couldn’t follow
a word of it. Like talking to that Wozniak character at the Snow Ball last
year.”
Marcus’s eyes darted back and forth with ratlike
cunning until a kick from under the table drew his attention. Selina and
Nigma were standing and he had to assume a guileless expression to wave
goodbye. As soon as they were gone, his eyes darkened again to twin bulbs
pulsing with aroused greed.
“So Nigma’s a tech genius… He sees Bruce as a rival.
Bruce runs a tech company…”
“Inherited,” Paula reminded him. “Bruce inherited what
he’s got. He’s not self-made and certainly not the sharpest knife in the
drawer…”
Marcus tuned her out. He didn’t consider Bruce Wayne
stupid in that way. Nothing about the way he ran the business was dumb.
He’d been a wild playboy, sure, and one was apt to say some
less-than-brilliant things with a jeroboam of Tattinger in his system. But
a young man enjoying his fortune, that really wasn’t stupid.
No, where Wayne slipped in Marcus Smek’s view was in
buying into all that noblesse oblige crap. The ones who inherited their
fortunes tended to do that: all the long range planning, technology that
made people’s lives better, partnerships with the city,
partnerships with the employees, as if we were all in this together… Not
just giving it lip service to please the plebs but really believing
there was any way to make a buck in this world besides taking it from
somebody else. That’s where Wayne was stupid, and where the self-made like
Lex Luthor and Marcus Smek… possibly one day this Edward Nigma… would beat
them every time.
“We need to meet him again,” Marcus said
decisively.
“Casual/accidental or invite him for cocktails?” Paula
asked.
Marcus bit his lip and considered… “Both,” he said.
Alfred naturally planned to inform Bruce that one of
his enemies had been in the manor that morning. Edward Nigma might be Miss
Selina’s friend and she may have confirmed all those elements of his story
that were confirmable, but that in no way negated Alfred’s duty. He would
make Bruce aware of that fact as well. There was, in Alfred’s view, no
reason to suspect Nigma’s story was anything other than what he claimed: he
was meeting Selina at the country club, took down faulty directions and got
lost… But then, The Riddler was a sufficiently crafty foe that, if he were
up to something, one would expect his story to check out. He would fashion
his excuse around such facts as would hold up to reasonable scrutiny. It
wasn’t Alfred’s place to be convinced and dismiss the episode on his own
authority. He would lay all the facts before Master Bruce and allow him
decide for himself.
What he could not lay before Master Bruce was a slip of
paper that had fallen from Nigma’s pocket when he produced the slip with his
faulty directions. Alfred hadn’t noticed it and neither had Nigma. Bruce
noticed when he got home, picked it up from the floor of the foyer and
tossed it in the waste basket without a thought. He enjoyed an early dinner
with Selina, went down to the cave, and began changing into costume.
He had all but the cape and cowl in place when he heard the soft cough from
outside the costume vault.
A slow burn ignited behind his eyes as Alfred told him
about Nigma being in the house, but reason was quick to squelch any excesses
of emotion that might impede his thinking. By the time Alfred finished the
story, Bruce remembered the slip of paper and was racing up the stairs to
retrieve it from the wastebasket.
It was a debit card receipt from someplace called The
Club Room. The word was underlined, and on the flip side was a rudimentary
sketch of a closet with several lines scribbled underneath, one after
another, like revisions of a work in progress:
No room for a suit?
There’s always room for a suit.
Always room for a black suit. The last with the word “room”
scratched out. And finally:
Always space for a black suit.
“What the hell?” Bruce breathed. Alfred was just
entering the foyer, having taken the longer route up from the cave. He
started to speak, but Bruce cut him off abruptly. “You said he was
headed for the Bristol Country Club?” he spat.
When Alfred confirmed the location, Bruce began
removing his gauntlet.
“Lay out some evening clothes, Alfred. I won’t be
patrolling until later.”
The night Batman recovered the Hapsburg dagger,
Catwoman was livid. She read Penguin the riot act and swore he would never
fence so much as a gold ingot of her loot again. Today, she would have to
admit that she’d got more fun out of the loss than she would have had with
the cash. She had held it over Oswald’s head for years, graciously allowing
him to deduct her bar tab from the sum he owed. Whenever she wanted
something from him, she would knock a few grand off the total like she was
doing him a favor.
Now it was over. With the way Oswald’s luck was going,
he might’ve refused a smaller deal. And Selina didn’t want to be nickeled
and dimed negotiating night by night and table by table. She wanted to make
sure the people on her list could get a table at the Iceberg whenever they
wanted one: Eddie, Hagen, The Smeks, and of course Selina herself. To
obtain that without question, she was prepared to wipe out the entire debt
and pretend the whole botched fence never happened.
She gave Raven a few bills on her way out, figuring
that Eddie and Hagen probably wouldn’t think to and Oswald would simply
forward the instructions without passing along any of the financial
inducements. Then she went off to prowl. The next step was Eddie’s
responsibility. The Inside Man had to tell The Tale…
Matt Hagen was not impressed by the other
shape-shifters he’d met over the years. From what he’d seen, the technical
ability to transform one’s appearance wasn’t worth much without an actor’s
skill shaping the character underneath. He had three new characters to work
on today, and it wasn’t even Christmas.
He started with Ramos, darkening and lightening the
skin as if he were fine-tuning a television. He flattened the nose a
little, widened the eyes, flipped back and forth between black hair and
brown. Finally, when he was happy with the result, he regressed the whole
thing to an 8-year old boy. He examined himself in the mirror, sprouted a
little to appear, perhaps, ten years old… Eleven? No, ten was better… He
added a Pee Wee Football uniform… then a leg cast and crutches… A growth
spurt transformed him to an acne-ridden goth kid at fifteen… He experimented
with a few different piercings and deciding the left ear, right nostril and
upper lip would give the most offense, kept those holes as he advanced again
to a cleancut twenty-three. He tweaked the military haircut, once… twice…
and happy with the result, he advanced again into the thirties… added the
cigarettes, shriveling the upper lip to a dried cracked appearance and
sucking a little color out of the skin. He deepened the five o’clock
shadow… let it sprout into a full day’s growth… two days… three…
then ‘shaved’… He nodded, satisfied, and went to work on Phillip Vries.
The Smeks arrived at the Iceberg Lounge just as Nigma
predicted, almost to the minute. Raven pretended to size them up and gave
them a table that was presumably left free for walk-ins who struck the right
chord. Eddie was seated a few feet away, tucking in to the famous mac n’
cheese. Since he predicted their arrival time so accurately, he could have
timed his own arrival for later, so the Smeks could have appropriated him at
once without having to wait until he finished his dinner. But he figured
since he had a guaranteed table now, he may as well take full advantage.
Gourmet mac and cheese not only anagrammed as “A Cat-Rogue Scheme-Mend,” it
was also, quite honestly, the best thing he’d ever eaten. The leeks, the
truffle, the little sprinkle of panko breadcrumbs… Mmmm…. Panko
breadcrumbs. “Purr” was in there, as was Bank, Bad men, Omen…
“Edward! What a coincidence!”
Eddie produced a surprised smile. His savoring of the
meal of a lifetime would have to wait.
“Phillip Vries, Ph.D,” Barbara said as she
typed.
“Right, search engines, Wikipedia, a bio on
the Hudson U website and a couple academic papers,” Selina said.
“Publish or perish,” Barbara winked. “Subject?”
“Anything to do with copper or silicon, electrons,
microcircuitry.”
“Does it have to make sense?”
“No, lay readers. They won’t have any clue what it’s
saying, as long as it looks academic.”
“Roger. And my payment?”
Catwoman reached into her loot sack and withdrew the
precious items:
“One pint Haagen Dazs White Chocolate Raspberry
Truffle,” she announced as Barbara’s cat Bytes jumped off her lap and
started head-rubbing Catwoman’s boot. “One Chocolate Peanut Butter. They
also had a limited edition flavor: Bananas Foster, so I made an
executive decision and got you that instead of the Java Chip.”
“Pleasure doing business with you, Catwoman.”
Selina looked down at the cat, who was now augmenting
the head-bumps with an insistent purring. She shook her head and headed for
the window, deciding to hold on to the catnip treat she’d brought him. He
was obviously spoiled enough sharing Barbara’s ice cream.
Once again, the Iceberg proved to be too public a place
to have a private conversation, so Eddie led the Smeks back to The Club Room
after dinner. Seated again in the discreet side-parlor under the photo of
Sean Connery, Eddie held his ground through the first half hour of subtle
probing.
Paula was getting impatient. Marcus was being a bit
too subtle and it was getting them nowhere. Throwing caution to the wind,
she said how nice it was to see Selina back at the club again. She was just
saying to Marcus the other day how they never seemed to run into her
anymore, and Marcus said it was because she’d been flying all over the
country with Bruce for all those town hall meetings he was doing for WE…
It was a very odd thing to say. A suspicious person
might think Paula had a strange fixation on Selina, but she was betting a
man who was in love with her wouldn’t see anything unusual in Paula finding
her as interesting as he did. As she hoped, Nigma did not appear suspicious
and it gave the conversation the necessary turn:
“Interesting to see her getting so involved in Wayne
Enterprises, isn’t it?” Marcus beamed. “Always appealing when a woman has a
good head for business.” This with an affectionate dab at his wife’s hand.
“Though I must say, I doubt Bruce himself understands anything that goes on
in the Tech subsidiary. Just between us, I always thought the man was a bit
of a fool. What a savvy woman like Selina sees in him, I can’t imagine.”
“Oh come now, Marcus, surely you can imagine,” Paula
smiled. “The appeal is as clear as all those zeroes on his bank statement.”
It did the trick. Sensing such sympathetic
listeners—people who clearly appreciated Wayne’s shortcomings as well as his
beloved Selina’s many fine qualities—Edward Nigma unburdened himself. His
passionate attachment to her and his plan to destroy Bruce Wayne and achieve
a WayneTech style empire for himself in the process was very much what
Marcus guessed, although the details, the details were beyond non-Rogue
imaginings:
“You don’t get to be a criminal mastermind without
learning how to build your schemes on a proper foundation,” Eddie explained
proudly. “As you may know, it was microelectronics that made WayneTech the
powerhouse that it is.”
“Microchips,” Paula nodded knowledgably.
“Much smaller than that, dear lady,” Eddie smiled,
assuming a patient professor expression. “The innovation that made Wayne is
actually a microscopic component of the integrated circuits themselves. As
you may know, the integrated circuit or microchip is at the heart of
everything electronic, from computers to cell phones.”
He paused here with a malicious glint in his eye as he
recalled one particular phone that these Smeks had sold him.
“Originally, chips were made from aluminum. It was
more compatible with the rest of the integrated circuit technology. But it
was BIG—molecularly speaking that is. The nature of a circuit, you want the
current to flow. Compared to other materials, aluminum is very resistant to
the flow of electricity. So you need more of it. That means you need more
room for it. By the 1990s, aluminum was the blockage holding back
technology. You just couldn’t make things small enough when it had to hold
all this hulking mass of aluminum circuits.”
“You see, doesn’t he remind you of Woz,” Paula said
brightly.
Marcus ignored her.
“Please go on, Edward.”
“Do you really want to hear this?” Eddie
asked, pretending he had let himself go and was reluctant to bore his new
friends any further—and enjoying the unguarded enthusiasm of their nods for
him to continue.
He stalled and ordered another round of drinks. Once
again, the waitress got his order wrong, but Eddie didn’t mind (even though
whatever she brought him this time contained an inordinate amount of
tequila—blech). He was getting quite enough stimulation from the Smeks’
obvious impatience. He let them dangle a few minutes more before
continuing:
“Well, as I was saying, aluminum circuitry could not
get small enough to run the ever shrinking electronics. Another material
was needed, and everyone knew copper would be ideal. It’s amazingly
conductive. A neutral atom with twenty-nine electrons, and the last one,
number twenty-nine moves easily to the next atom unimpeded. Other
materials, the transfer of electrons has to happen more specifically
by the electrons hopping from one atom to the next, but with copper…
electron twenty-nine is predisposed to move freely. Copper’s lower
resistance would allow for much smaller wires, 1/1000 the size of a human
hair. The resulting chips would run exponentially faster and use
substantially less power. There was just one catch.”
“Figures,” Paula said, while her husband said “Isn’t
there always?”
Eddie smiled at the latter, since he’d worded his
remark as a question.
“Riddle me this: What was the one drawback with
copper? What was the one puzzle that needed to be solved in order to use
it? Answer: If it came into contact with the actual devices, it would
change its properties. So it wouldn’t behave as the integrated circuit was
designed to behave.”
“Damn!” Marcus exclaimed, caught up in the excitement
of the story for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. His wife gave him a
puzzled look.
“So the puzzle the tech world faced at this juncture
was this: How to protect the silicon in a microchip from the effects of
copper circuitry? It was WayneTech that solved that riddle.”
Marcus and Paula’s mouths dropped open in unison.
“They developed a microscopic barrier, a barrier
layer that would keep the copper sort of on top of the devices, and so
it wouldn’t be able to get down to the actual device layers.”
Marcus and Paula looked at each other, then back at
Nigma.
“Intel, ATI, Sony, LexCorp, virtually everyone making
viable microchips in the last decade is using the WayneTech process. And if
anything were to… nullify the process, cause the barrier to
dissolve…”
“The copper reacts with the devices and they stop
working—My God, the failure of computers and phones and—the destruction
would massive, cataclysmic.”
“If taken to an extreme,” Nigma said quickly. He
wasn’t a terrorist, he didn’t want power grids to shut down, hospitals
plunged into darkness, or airplanes deprived of ground support midflight.
What kind of sociopathic monster did these people take him for? “All that’s
necessary is for a spate of small product failures, here and there, that
will diminish confidence.”
“Like what happened to Toyota,” Marcus nodded.
“Exactly, except this won’t be just one company’s
products. At first, no one will know what’s gone wrong. Sixty iPods,
laptops and phones that don’t seem to have anything in common all go on the
fritz at once. What the fuck—oh, excuse me.” He glanced apologetically at
Paula, who waved him off with an amused grin. It was rather amusing that a
man casually plotting to bring down a financial empire would think he’d
given offense saying “fuck.”
“So first response, nobody knows what’s happened,”
Marcus said, working it out. “Devices failing from different manufacturers…
Then someone connects the dots. All the different makers used this same
process making the microchips. Wayne’s barrier doesn’t do the job it’s
supposed to… He’d become the worst corporate villain since Halliburton.”
“Halliburton, BP and LexCorp combined,” Eddie said.
“The companies that used his process would be lining up to sue him—and
desperate for a new process they could trust.”
“When there’s nothing actually wrong with the Wayne
process,” Paula said. “You could conceivably change a few words, update the
packaging, and sell it right back to them.”
Eddie smiled, showing more teeth than were
necessary—here, surely, was the mindset that had stuck him with that
worthless second-generation, Japanese-kink-app phone.
“The NigmaSolve Solution,” he said. “The flagship
product of NigmaSolve Inc.”
Marcus smiled too. He didn’t know if Eddie’s scheme
would actually work as far as making his fortune, or if that goal was
achieved, if ‘NigmaSolve Inc.’ would win him Selina as he seemed to assume.
What Marcus did know was that Wayne stock was sure to take a tumble in the
process, and that would make him a fortune regardless.
Blotchy skin, brittle hair and nails, just a touch of
red on the nose without going all W.C. Fields… Now a little bloated, flabby
muscles but without becoming a caricature… That’s what the rest of them did,
bad actors. Went all movie of the week on the horrors of alcoholism and
lost the character in their determination to make a point. Matt liked to
push details like that until it crossed the line, and then dial it back.
Dial it back a little more… and… there! It was just about… PERFECT!
He turned to see his profile in the mirror and dropped
his “alcoholic’s ass” an extra inch. All he had to do now was get used to
the walk that went with it. He took the body for a stroll through the
neighborhood, and found himself near The Club Room. He decided to drop in,
see if Vinnie would admit a dusty academic like Vries. Nigma would be long
gone with the marks, so it would be perfectly safe to show up in the Vries
persona. After all, the guy was a drinker, it only made sense to bend his
elbow a little. Get the feel of drinking in this body, get the feel of the
glass in that hand. What an alcoholic must feel holding a glass like that…
feel when…
Matt/Vries got as far as the fake dogs, but rather than
turn, he kept on walking without slowing his step when he saw tell-tale
movement on a rooftop up the street. It was a cape. It was a scalloped
cape. Matt KNEW that cape, he had MIMICKED that cape. It was Batman’s
cape. What was Batman’s cape doing up the street from The Club Room not
twenty-four hours after he’d brought Selina and Nigma there?
Nigma! That squirrelly weasel Nigma!
To be continued…
|