"Bruce…" Barbara Gordon spoke into her headset. "I have something I need for you to investigate. A friend of mine has gone missing. Her name's Ruth Lester. She teaches at Milton Elementary, and I've known her for nearly twenty years. She was a teen volunteer in our library when I was just a child. She introduced me to Harry Potter and Diana Wynne Jones. I'm really worried about her. Dad and the Department are investigating, but you have resources they don't."
"I'll look into it, Oracle," he replied tersely.
"No, Bruce, that's not enough. Not this time. A lot of friends gradually dropped me because I couldn't do all the things we used to do together, but Ruth didn't. The first week I was home from the hospital after being shot, she came over with cupcakes and a Jane Austen movie. While we watched it, she did my toenails in Angel Blush polish. Even though I was paralyzed and nobody but my family and caregivers would see my feet. It meant a lot that somebody remembered I was a girl. We've done something together nearly every week since then. She only knows some basic self-defense moves, nothing that would stop a psychopath."
"…Send me the details. And a picture of her."
One of the oldest stories in the world is the one about the King of the Underworld, who stole away a woman to be his and keep him company down in the darkness. She pines away in the eternal night of Hades, and up top someone is looking for her, someone with enough clout to get her released. However, by the time she's found, it's a little too late.
Some scholars may say it's an allegory about the seasons of great mythological significance, but it's not. It's a teaching story, meant to explain why you can't make all the grain into bread and beer, no matter how hungry and sober you are. You have to save some of each harvest, dig holes in the ground and bury it if you want to have a next harvest. The lesson here is that people remember good stories better than they do cold hard facts, but the bigger picture shows that certain myths have a way of recurring, whether you like it or not.
It's refreshing, in a way, this direct approach, Ruth thought while chewing a bite of lamb chop. No months or years of hearts, flowers, and kisses while he's pretending and acting, only then, 'Ruthie, I—I'm so sorry, but I think I'm gay, and I don't want to be!' Or 'I don't know how to tell you this. I never meant to hurt you, I really thought if we got together I'd get over these feelings...' Or finding out he fantasizes about defiling the beloved cartoon characters of our collective American childhood. Just 'Keep me company, grace my table, share my bed'.
Maybe it was drinking so much more than she was used to, or maybe she was in shock and reality hadn't really hit her yet, or perhaps she was drunk on the first real meal after three days of near-starvation, but… Curiously, I am okay with that. And she was. She didn't find him sexually attractive, but she liked him. He'd gone to some effort to be witty, charming, and generous. He obviously didn't let anything stop him or slow him down, he was direct, honest, cheerful, and oddly enough, charismatic as well.
As for doing the deed itself with him—after several years in which Evan was less and less interested in having sex with her, and in which foreplay to get him there took longer and longer, she had learned to distance herself mentally to a certain extent. She was confident that she could cope—and that he actually wanted to have sex with her was a plus as far as she was concerned.
Besides, as he pointed out, my choices are few and I have nothing else to bargain with besides my body. It occurred to her that she should share her decision out loud. She swallowed the mouthful of food, and said, "I accept your offer. Thank you."
"Good! I'm glad that's settled. It will make the rest of the meal that much more pleasant. More wine?"
"Thank you, yes." She held out her glass. "I…have only been with three men, one of whom I was married to, and one at a time at that. Never with another woman. I knew I was straight by the age of twelve, so why experiment? I have no STIs. That's something you have to ask, these days. As for why I'm talking like this, I'm a little nervous. I never went from meeting someone to agreeing to have sex with them so swiftly before."
"Luckily, wine's been known to help with that," he said, filling her glass, quite unperturbed by her admission. "As for me, I lost track of how many women I've had along time ago. Three figures, easily, 'cause I've been at it forty years, give or take a few months. What's the point of being as rich as I am if you can't get it more or less whenever you like? The best reason for being wealthy, in my book. I never caught anything incurable and haven't got anything right now, so don't let that worry you."
"Have you ever been married?" she asked tentatively.
"Me? No. There've been several assistants of mine who were around a year, two years, before they moved on. If I've a job to be done that requires thinking, judgment, and reliability, I'm always going to have a woman do it, cause in my experience, women are smarter, more sensible, and steadier. With a couple of unhappy exceptions, all of them left me a lot better off than they were when we met. A lot o' them have their own businesses or companies these days, and a few have gone on to marry very well. Like I said, when I'm pleased, I'm prepared to be generous."
She nodded. "A year ago I wouldn't have wouldn't have said this, but I think you have the right idea. I can't recommend marriage. For me it was a bad investment of almost a decade, and I can't even call myself free for another year. I will never get that time back again. Enough about that, though. I think I know why I'm in here."
"Do you, now?" he shifted in his seat. "Why is that?"
"I wrote a blog article about this place. God, I hardly remember exactly what I wrote, it was five days ago now and I haven't slept properly since then—but I do remember I compared it to a concentration camp, pointing out that with the steel mill on site, it even has its own crematorium and that the Joker would no doubt be glad to supply the poisonous gas. I took a semester on the Holocaust, and one of the texts was a book called This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Boroswki. He was a survivor who went on to commit suicide.
"That book made a profound impact on me, because unlike Schindler's List and so many other popular representations of that time, it doesn't make the Holocaust out to be an ennobling triumph of the human spirit over prejudice and persecution. It was ugly, and the people who survived, especially those who survived the camps, were not the good, the meek and the innocent. One of the worst things the Nazis did to those in the camps was manipulate them into tormenting each other.
"There was more to it than that, but I finished it off by saying that in the end I wouldn't be surprised if the city wound up carpet bombing the area—did I say something wrong?" His face had suddenly gone blank, then twisted up in a spasm of rage.
"That maggoty shite-spewing weasel!" he exploded, "Screw knocking his teeth down his throat, it's going to be a dull skinning knife and gasoline for him…No, luv, I'm not mad at you. You just made everything come into focus. So, you posted this when, Thursday night?"
"More like very early Friday morning. At lunchtime, I looked to see if anyone had commented on it, and I couldn't bring the post up. At the time, I just thought there was something wrong with the site, but when I got home there were Tyger guards waiting for me in the dark."
"First they made what you wrote disappear, and then they did the same to you," he frowned. "Why did you write that bit about carpet bombing at the end?"
"That was the most horrific conclusion I could think of, that's all," she shrugged, which spread a smile on his face and sparked a gleam in his eye.
"Do that again," he requested.
"I'll do one better," she replied, grateful for the change in topic, and unbuttoned the first button of the pajama top before she shrugged again.
It was not long before they finished the meal and retired to the bedroom.
Afterward, when Ruth was fast asleep, Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot turned the bedside light on to its dimmest setting, reached for a cigar, and lit it. No fear of waking her: between the whisky, the meal, the wine, what they had done together, and that this was her first real night's sleep following her arrest, she was not about to wake easily or quickly.
He already felt tremendously fond of her. He could not readily remember a time when it was sweeter or hotter than it was with her, and this was only the start. What sort of witless wanker is that husband she's divorcing?
Collecting a few garments and putting on his slippers, he padded back into his office, where he searched again for that blog post of hers. Once something was up on the internet, it never really went away. You just had to dig deeper. Certain media entities took snapshots of how pages looked at a particular time and stored them, preserving content that way. Nothing—Strange is going to a lot of trouble to erase this one. Still, he knew someone who was apt to be better at finding than the professor was at hiding. He sent a message to the Riddler about finding the post, and while he was thinking of it, began one to his lawyer inquiring what might be done to speed up that divorce.
Halfway through he thought better of it and deleted it. Best not to do anything to draw Strange's attention. Let him think he succeeded. To that end, he used the PA system and called for the three lads who had brought him his early Christmas present to come to his office. While waiting for them to arrive, he got down a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and went to the safe, where he got out seventy thousand in ten thousand dollar bundles.
"Well done, lads," he congratulated them when they were all lined up in front of his desk, looking for all the world like dogs who've heard the treat box rattle. "I like my Christmas prezzie a lot, indeed I do. I also like that you planned and saw it through on your own. I know you worked together, but whose idea was it?"
He gave three bundles to the idea man, two each to the others, and accepted their thanks graciously. "You've caught my eye now, and no mistake. What I want to know is, can you also be discreet? Yes, you found me a woman, that you can cop to, but the details like her name, what she does for a living, anything unusual about her—all those escape you from here on in. What happened after you brought her here? You don't know. There's nothing wrong at all, quite the reverse, and I want things to stay that way. Get me?" The last two words he roared, to show he meant it.
"Yessir,"
"Good. Here, a token of my esteem, to drink the lady's health." He pushed the whisky toward them. "Now clear out. I plan to play with my new toy some more before morning."
They left; he returned to his computer. Riddler had come through. There was a copy of that blog. The Penguin read it through twice.
He knew Strange had some ulterior motive in giving him all the weapons, all the military-grade gear, all the supplies he asked for. He knew there was some bigger game the wanker was playing, and all his suspicions, all the loose ends had coalesced when Ruth said 'carpet bombed.' Something else to thank her for, in the morning. Strange was playing them all against each other.
This called for a meeting under the white flag. Two-Face, certainly. Riddler, yes, he was useful as a neutral as far as the gangs were concerned. Black Mask, if he'd recovered enough. Hatter and Scarecrow? Perhaps not. Nobody wanted to be seeing sounds, hearing smells, tasting colors and coping with whatever nasties their subconscious brewed up. Catwoman and Poison Ivy? Why not? They would raise the tone of the assembly if nothing else. Killer Croc? No. He had his shark Tiny for garbage disposal and explosives if he needed something demolished, and Croc was good for little else. Freeze—the best way to ensure you had his attention was to get hold of Nora Fries' corpsicle. Find out where she was, and the rest was just details.
That left only one. The Clown. If only he'd hurry up and die…
A/N: Well. Whew. I allude to the myth of Persephone in the first part, but I bet more than ninety percent of you knew that already. Many thanks to Swordstitcher, Miss Singing in the Rain, Tevinter, and my guest reviewer. Also to those who favorited or added to their Alerts.