"How would you like to become something more than what you are?"
Now.
Tim and Chase II.
Five weeks.
Jervis Tetch's trial for manslaughter took five weeks. Arrest to verdict. Five weeks. Put another way, it was a new year when he finally received his sentence.
An eternity.
I met Cameron Chase halfway through it all. And we sat in the courtroom observing it. We waited in the dark for a verdict. For a decision.
I have to admit, it wasn't as much of a dog and pony show as I thought it would be. It was better. A system, a razor. Precision itself. I had sat through years of trials involving Bruce's mentally ill criminal buddies and all of them diminishing returns after so long. Their own kind of farce, debasing into wild spectacle over their defendants and their crimes.
But not this.
Chase and I had been watching it all happen. It was precise. Surgical. Flawless.
I was impressed. I imagined Gordon was pleased. If he was tuned in to it all. If he would. If he could.
And I thought of Barbara.
That impossible, beautiful woman who believed in the Batman's mission. To save this city from the evil that infests it. The evil that took the lives of two people who did nothing wrong.
I wondered when it was exactly that I had started thinking like that. Like Bruce.
I sat there on a bench outside the courtroom, down the hall from massive oak doors leading into Chambers, hunched forward, holding a Sundollers vente in both hands between my legs, nursing the coffee and staring not at the cup or the floor, but just beyond it. Staring at nothing.
I remembered the first day I met her. It was days after Bruce and I stopped some scheme of Dent's-at the time, the first of many as I came to learn.
So there they were in the cave. Batman sitting like King Lear in his chair, you know, and there's Alfred standing close to him, and there's Nightwing doing a handstand on the counterbalance. And here's this Batgirl, this woman in a Batman suit except she's got heels and hair flowing out behind the cowl, and she's got this killer smile and she looks at you and you can look back but she's already into you. Looking right through you.
She looks at me and I'm standing there in some lounge pants and a Harvard Crew shirt because that's what you wear when it's two in the morning and you used to be asleep, and she smiles. Batman looks at me. Nightwing flips down and stands normal.
"Hey," I say and scratch my eyes and point at her and say, "who's this?"
"Tell him," Bruce says and pulls off his mask.
Nightwing takes his mask off too and smiles. Those human eyes, happy and sad at the same time. "Did you mean what you said. Batman needs a Robin?"
"Yes."
"Yeah?"
"I meant every word."
He looks at Bruce.
I say, "Is this another test?"
"People have died," Bruce says. "I refuse to accept it happening again."
"I'm not Jason Todd."
He makes a face.
"This world is doomed," Bruce says. "You know this better than most. Plagued by worse than gangsters and killers. The only thing keeping it alive is us."
"All of us," Nightwing says.
Batgirl looks at me. "You know who I am?"
She pulls off her mask.
I say, "Yes, you're. You're."
"My name is Barbara Gordon. We haven't met. I'm a librarian. My father is the Commissioner of Police. But mostly I'm called Batgirl."
I breathe. "It's an honor."
"He told me what you did," she says. "That's a very brave thing, standing up to Two-Face."
I keep my eyes on her. "I know."
Bruce looks away. Thinking a moment, then he stands: "Tim. After Jason died...I have a responsibility. I know you want to help. But this is not a game, it's not for the faint of heart. I have a responsibility. I have-"
I nod. "I know, sir. You don't have to worry."
He says, "So if you're truly serious about this. About being Robin. Helping us bring this city back."
"I am."
He holds out one hand. Flat. The other stuck up like he's swearing the truth.
"And you're sure I can't change your mind?"
I look him in the eyes. "No."
"Hm." Then he takes deep breath and says, "Batman."
I put my hand on top of his. "And Robin."
And. I go to shake his hand. And it becomes a hug instead.
And there I sat outside Chambers, thinking through all of this. Thinking of Barbara. And Bruce. And Gordon. And Dick. And Bruce. And Jason.
And Bruce.
Batman.
Batman forever, I thought out of nowhere. Batman eternal.
Through all of this. All the moments of our lives. Jason Todd. Dent. Joker and Crane and Bane and Ra's and Jean-Paul and No Man's Land and Nigma and Luthor and Joker.
And Bruce.
Ever since I was a kid.
I used to idolise you, Bruce.
Used to.
Where did it all go so awry? When-
I thought of Tetch. Sitting there on display. Knowing that the world was watching him.
Judge Surrillo presiding, Donna Gugina for the Defense, DA Kate Spencer and her ADA Janet Van Dorn for the City of Gotham, County of Kane and State of New Jersey. On the other side of this wall all those moving parts were colliding in infinite majesty over the life of a nobody. A would-be criminal with nothing to show for all his strength, his magnificent brain. Here at the end of his days...what did Jervis Tetch have?
I sat there nursing my coffee. Wearing a vacant face. Attentive but not. Present but not. That was the face I wore when I interacted with Chase.
Truth was a little harder.
It was getting old. Coming down here daily to see Tetch cry his eyes out. See Spencer rake him over the coals. See Surrillo up there listening to it all.
I told Chase as much.
"Let me ask you something."
"Okay?"
"Why are you still doing this?"
"What, coffee with you?"
"Robin," she said and took a drink. Lowered the mug and looked attentively at me.
I cracked a smile.
"What?"
"Nothing," I said. "Luthor asked me the same question. Long time ago."
"I know," she said. "I've been briefed on his conversations with you."
I waited. Regarded her with a cool and narrow look. "He likes me," I said. "Doesn't he."
Chase said, "Yes. For some reason."
I looked away. "Did he tell you I didn't answer his condescending question?"
"Yes."
"And I'm not going to answer yours."
Chase looked at me again. Scoffed and said, "okay."
"Why all this interest in me and Bruce?"
"No reason," she lied. "I'm just curious where your heart is."
I rolled my eyes, looked up and down the hallway, the bailiff on guard outside the courtroom staring ahead, betraying nothing. "Agent Chase."
She looked at me. Drank her coffee and said, "Okay, the truth."
"That would be nice."
"What I told you earlier was true."
"Okay?"
"The smart thing to do is for Surrillo nail Tetch on the murder and stick him in Solitary for the rest of his life. But you know how the government works. They just can't help themselves. They'll glamorise his supercriminal past, use the Murdock precedent or something, and he'll end up in gen-pop with a knife in his ass inside three months. It's justice, but only barely. You came down here to bear witness, Tim, witness this. Watch your institutions fail to do their jobs."
I looked at her. "I've been fighting the man since I was twelve. You want to know why I'm here? You want to know why I still do it?"
She smiled. Thin and satisfied.
"Because I honestly believe in it," I said. "Because I want to see him sentenced and in jail forever for this. No escapes, none of this Appeals shit because Gugina gets an insanity plea. He gets his."
She looked at me. The smile was gone.
Then: "Is this what Bruce made you? I'm talking about your life choices and you're burning ants with a spyglass."
"You know how it is," I said. "Arkham. Blackgate. Even the Schreck. People break out. Mistrials happen. Crime goes unpunished. The Joker escapes and where is he now? What's he doing?" I looked at her. "We were hunting him when Barbara died. Did you know that. We were so close, Chase. So close that he was on his last hideout. So close we could taste it. And then this shit happens. So. You tell me where he is. Tell me, Chase, and I'll tell you your system is broken."
She looked at me. Those eyes staring at and through me.
"And you think that if the Mad Hatter goes to jail for killing your friend, if that happens and he stays there forever, then she gets avenged. That one criminal finally gets what he deserves when so many others have fallen through the cracks. You think that if Jervis Tetch goes to jail, your life will finally have meaning and all your time spent with the Batman will finally amount to something. Instead of a bunch of freaks troubling you and again and again until you're all dead. Yes?"
Silence fell upon us.
I looked at my coffee. Not at her. Not in this moment. Not now.
"You were never going to save your father," she said. "You were never going to save Batgirl. Or Superboy. What happened happened. And it made you...like this."
"Jesus," she said. "That's it. Isn't it. All that bluster and intelligence serving a lesser master and look where that got you. Oh, this was meant to be. You so desperately want something better than what you have, but you're such a nice kid that you're afraid to tell him. Because you don't want him to hate you. And because you love him."
I was quiet for a long time. Staring at the floor. What were you going to tell her, Tim?
"One more thing," she said. "After this trial, what happens? You and Bruce go back to normal? You keep being Robin. And you just...sublimate your feelings? Keep silent forever, or until you turn thirty and wonder where it all went wrong? What kind of life is that?"
I waited.
She looked at me and reclined a little in the bench. "This conversation and my presence here has been a test." Then she reached into her coat and pulled out an envelope. Handed it to me.
"There is another way. You want change? You want free of this town and that man, here you go. Open it."
I did. Inside a single sheet of paper stared back, with a stylised eye in a rounded design. Beneath, the DEO masthead in a block flourish.
"What is this?"
"The world that's coming," Chase said. "A seat at the table."
"Jesus, what is-"
"You're the most qualified by far. Luthor and the others believe you have distinctive insight. So. What do you say."
I read it through in an instant. Again and again.
Looked at her and said, "Cameron-"
And then the universe reached out to both of us for one last cruelty.
Her phone beeped.
Chase pulled hers out first. Read it. And looked at me.
"What?"
"The jury is coming back in."
Then.
The Joker and the City.
Often, when It was very dark and the city was quiet. Quieter.
He would walk.
Up and down the Cambridge Road and staring at Wayne Manor distantly, like he didn't know what to do with it. Thinly and narrowly at Archie Goodwin Airport, jealously, longing for escape.
Or he would walk through the city. It's vast and twisting alleys, hell breaking up through the sidewalk and continuing into the sky. He knew the cliches well. Down past City Hall. Through Grant Park. Or through the Diamond District, window shopping at Schonenfeld's and wondering how many licks it would take with like a mannequin arm or something to get to the centre of a guy's skull.
So he would walk. Leaving one of a number of nameless hideouts, safe houses or abandoned homes around the city. Clad in his trademark suit, his very finest, solid purple with a striped green waistcoat and a yellow silk shirt underneath, a silk bowtie pinned neatly on a neck that was barely skin and bones. Or he would slum it. Put on peach-coloured face paint so no one would catch on, put on a pair of ratty jeans and a destroyed Carhartt, some cowboy boots with the heels worn down good and ratty mesh trucker's hat. And find some random woman or random stray to feed to a newspaper vending box and see how it took him to laugh.
A thousand different names. One for each occasion. Any occasion. Given time, and space, and disguise enough-not to mention the opportunities, and in a city like this those were never ending-he could enter himself among any group. Any system.
From the inside out.
These were his streets after all, and none knew them better.
Drug dealers on Burnett Road knew him as Clem Rusty, a thinning specter of a man who pulled up to their street corner every Friday night with a backpack full of cigarette cartons, sandwich bags stuffed with cocaine, marzipan joy-joys, the kind in the silver foil or the hazelnut in the red wrappers, dime bags packed with marijuana, or a syringe or five full of mystery barbiturates, or other times it was gummy worms and candy cigarettes, and when the junkies got pissed about that he'd shoot them dead in the street for not laughing at such a great bit.
In the East End where Selina Kyle's generation had fled after her death and so where the Joker was allowed to reestablish himself, he called himself Jack White and enlisted a small army of child prostitutes and their middle aged masters, holdovers from the days of the Catwoman, to exercise some moral-physical jokes on a bunch of humourless old farts. He made the child hookers sidle up to aldermen, ward bosses, charity heads, the local lieutenant of the Salvation Army-making their hypocrisy hurt. Making a point. Sending a message.
In Otisburg the homeless and indolent knew him as Ivar Loxias, once a great stage magician and now reduced to poverty, scraping out cheap acts for food. He practised street games and hustled fools from their money with fake shell games and rigged two-card-Monte, and when it was all said and done he gave the poor their due of stolen pocket money and kept some for himself, and told the children among them that one day he might need a favor and that he could come calling.
In Old Bristol they knew him as Oberon Sexton. A coffeehouse intellectual raging from his hole at the back of a dilapidated Sundollers in the rough part of town. There he sat at a moldering wooden table sprouting half assed theology: the cheapest, the most discredited pseudoscience to eager hipsters, dope smokers, new libertarians, young communists, urban evangelists, Campus Crusaders for Christ, and the green crowd. They hung on his every word: of the greed of Gotham, of the dictatorship of the police and the tyrant Commissioner Gordon and his little attack dog, the Batman.
He was Bob Gray in Miller Harbor, and it was the there that he took over the drug dens, made the dealers and their middlemen pinky-swear to deliver to their regular haunts and to Arkham and the rest to him, and he just flushed it all down the toilet in front of a group of them. The junkies and dealers stared at him while he was doing it and some got pissed, and he just clicked his tongue and told them, "What can I say, fellas, I'm just high on life!"
This was pretty much true. No schadenfreude, no angst or sturm or drang or other freaky German words. No silliness, except silliness. Life was awesome and it was gonna stay that way if he had his way.
After all, he had to admit, teach a man to give in, to break the rules, to finally admit that life is such a fucking joke that it's not even funny anymore, and to indulge all his stupid tendencies that make him just as savage as the gorillas, yeah, you get a guy to believe that, to really in his balls believe it, and he'll do anything. With such minimal prompting. It was an odd thought for him to have, especially at this point in his life where honestly couldn't remember a time when the playing field seemed to be so wonderfully, fatuously open. The sky wasn't just the limit. There was no sky anymore. Nothing he couldn't do.
He decided to do it all.
He persuaded Harley to honeypot the Superintendent of City Schools for the fun of it, and it was through the old fatass that he learned PS 120's prize possession and sole earner of state grant money was the championship wrestling team, who's season was short to begin.
He just sat back and giggled like a little girl when he put it all together.
Harley asked him what was so darn funny and he said, as he routinely beat her around with Boo-Boo the rubber chicken, "it's the kiddies all over again, toots!"
She made a face through a bruise and said, "huh?"
"I took their rassafrassa babies once!" He belted out. "Now the little nutknockers are all grown up and I can take them again! Hahaha! Don't you get it, Harley?"
"Yeah!" She lied. "Yer the Pied Piper a-Gotham, puddin!"
He screamed at her to shut up and slapped her in the ribs with Boo-Boo. "It's more than that! It's my next big hit! I haven't released one in years, you know, he'll be expecting a shiny new LP to go triple diamond and make tons of bucks! You watch, Har, I'll get em good."
She spit out some blood and asked him how, and he said, "The same way our wingnut, no-talent, no-humour friend does! He watches! He stalks his bad guys to the dark places and then makes em squeal."
Then he turned from his frenzied thoughts and actually looked at her. Clasped his hands together and cackled, his best Vincent Price.
"These star wrestlers, these lunkheads who so clearly just need a teen movie to show em that the nerds really run the world, they must stay in shape, right? For their phony-baloney friends and some ridiculous sense of belonging, right?"
"Sure, Puddin," she said.
He stuck one authoritative finger in the air and made a stern voice. "Then by Jove that's it, my sweet girl! We'll get these so-called meatheads and bring em around to our way of doing things, eh, Har? Get some new meat in the gang and then go sock old Batsy on the jaw, eh? Eh? Eh? Say eh!"
"Eh!"
"Fabulous!" he squealed and planted a big sloppy kiss right on her bloody lips. The he pressed two spindly hands into her temples and squeezed. His voice went deep and his eyes narrowed, looking at Harley and through her. She chilled in her bones and it excited her.
"Now," he said and it was breathy and greedy and addictive and mad. "Go win me that festival!"
Soon.
Thomas and the Boys.
In addition to running around Arkham as Bruce, which was probably the riskiest part of all this, Elliot had taken to stalking, kidnapping, murdering and then impersonating the guidance counsellor at PS 120, Mark Stevenson. A dowdy retiree of a man, long past his prime. Elliot knew him ancestrally: from years past, running with Crane and knowing the psych-crowd.
He had been at it for some time. Two weeks was an eternity these days, long enough for his latest simulacrum of Bruce's face, the one he'd worn to Arkham and posted bail for Tetch under, to break down. Falling apart at the seams. He was displeased about this, the lack of return on his effort, mostly; coming as it had from seventy four different vagrants, men and boys, that he'd lured to a hovel behind the dilapidated Solomon Wayne in Park Row. Oh well, he supposed. Nothing lasts forever.
So he needed a new one.
It wasn't Stevenson he needed either-the man was fifty-seven, old enough for the elastin in his skin to break down, old enough to have the wrong luster, the wrong feel. He didn't need a retirement home face, he needed Bruce's. That young, vital face. Thirty eight in real life but in all actuality it had the appearance of a twenty one year old. He knew Bruce's skincare routine, however coƶpted it regularly became because of his nightly stupidity. The man kept his body in top shape, including his face, necessarily, and Elliot knew it.
It was the students Elliot needed. Young faces. Young bodies.
In the realm of complicated surgery it was fairly pedestrian. Rather like an organ transplant wherein the greatest risk was infection control. Even after removal the skin would maintain the necessary shape for suitable transfer. Necrosis had never been an issue in younger samples, neither had shrink. Ages twelve to sixteen worked best-before certain hormonal releases began to wreak havoc on the dermis, compounded by salicylic acid masquerading as cleansers.
He needed youth. He kept thinking it.
More particularly he needed a group of wrestlers the real Stevenson had been counselling on the particulars of college entrance. Easy marks. Popular and easily missed. The kind of loss that created vigils and college scholarships and tee shirts in their names. And all the years of their lives would come to nothing at all as he murdered them like dogs. Popular students, apex specimens at the height of their lives.
He smiled. Allowed himself the pleasure of hate. For these boys. For Bruce. For the universe that allows smug men like these to exist and to thrive.
A universe that needed someone like him to restore balance.
In another few days he would complete his good work. Ignatius and DeSales he already had, safely bound and in various states of decomposition in the hovel. Next he would take Schlatter, he was already halfway there, while Quinn got the Jordans and Graham.
From the best among them, probably DeSales and the Jordans, he would make a new face. Abuse the rest, and then he would give Quinn what was left. For her sadistic lover to make his obscene statement with.
By then the time would be right. And the Batman would be unable to stop him.
Uncharacteristically, Elliot found himself awash in the the unfamiliar, and joyful for the feeling. This was a job for his mentor, Crane, but the man had been off the map for years, gone to who knew where. Yet Elliot felt a thrill in this new arena. Scientific joy. He was no therapist but then, he did not have to be.
He needed only to endear himself to Schlatter. To create a situation whereby the boy would let down his defenses so Elliot could get close, could trust him. And then.
Ruin.
Schlatter and Jordans and Ignatius and DeSales and Graham. Not to mention the Jordan twins, scions of a state senator. Guilty wasps living guilty lives. paradoxically disdaining their upper class decadence and their parents' money through the magic of social media and their glittering social circles. Luxuriating in self-centred tragedies they called lives, and none more so than Schlatter.
There was also empiricism to think about. Science. Discovery. The growing sense that each harvest and transplant had to be better than the one before it. How could it not be.
He was a surgeon after all. Improvement was as necessary to his craft as was breathing.
More so.
The sudden kidnapping of a gaggle of young promising athletes, certainly the only things carrying Gotham's public education system into national attention, created the perfect opportunity to make himself known.
If Bruce wasn't already onto him. If the man hadn't already figured it all out.
If he ever could. If he ever would.
There he sat in Stevenson's office wearing Stevenson's face, pretending to be the old man himself, a notepad in one hand, listening to Schlatter's sad privileged life.
Elliot might have had sympathy for the kid at some point. If the boy's disdain for his own money wasn't so hideous. Money was money after all, and to have some irrational guilt over possessing it was an irrelevant thought. Sadness of earnings is the sentiment, he thought, of the newly wealthy, lottery winners who fall backwards into money and the examined life, and find themselves quickly bereft of both. Old money, he thought, the coffers for instance of the ancient Elliot family, was a castle, a Norman fortress against the world and all its little commonness. New money was a house trailer falling off its blocks. A high-school shithead, he thought, whose parents got rich without trying and squandered the station that befits wealth with their ill-gotten pride.
Elliot knew the idiom. He was the idiom. Nevertheless, he pressed his advantage.
"We are not that," he said to Schlatter. "We were made better."
"What do you mean?"
"This school has existed in its current form while the community around it grew more and more affluent with each generation. We live in the shadow of an economic boom that allowed your family to live the life you have. Your father and his consultancy, your mother and her company car-you and your shiny new Lexus, Dustin-why do you despise these things so much?"
"Why do you sound like Doctor Doom," he asked.
Elliot smiled. Stevenson's face shifted. "Okay, then, let's be informal."
"Okay."
"May I ask you a personal question."
"Just tell me," Schlatter said.
"I studied for years alongside a now-discredited psychotherapist named Jonathan Crane. You know the name?"
He made a face. "No, should I?"
Elliot smiled and said, "No, nevermind. This all reminds me of a conversation you and I had before about med school. I happen to know some top notch graduate programmes at Hopkins and Philadelphia. Would an internship or something like it be something to stoke your interest?"
Schlatter said, "I dunno, I guess. I mean, I kind of wanted more. You know?"
"More than your parents? Your family, your life?"
"Sure."
"What about the athletic road, a wrestling scholarship. I heard Lock Haven was after you."
Schlatter smiled. "Yeah they are. But like, is that like all there is? Jump from accomplishment to accomplishment until you die?"
Elliot looked around. "...Yes."
Schlatter looked away. "Huh."
Then a long pause came. Schlatter shifted around in his seat. Elliot winced through Stevenson's failing face
"What are you thinking about, Dustin?"
Schlatter was silent. Holding his hands in front of his face and staring off. "I want more. I want my life to have meaning. In a few years none of this will mean anything. These trophies. My friends. I mean. In ten years am I gonna be the same person?"
"No."
"Then why am I doing this?"
Elliot was silent. He tried not to move: Stevenson's face was already losing it.
"You fear death," Elliot said. "Or obsolescence. They can be the same thing sometimes."
And Schlatter was quiet. He looked at the floor. "Yeah."
Elliot cracked a smile. "I believe I can help you, Dustin."
The boy looked up. Elliot leaned in and smiled.
"How would you like to become something more than what you are?"
Continued...
