ROBIN and all related characters, names and indicia are TM & © DC Comics 2004.
Author's Note: I do not own the characters, I do not own the story. This is an ADAPTATION of a comic book series called "The Joker's Wild." It was compiled into a trade paperback comic book titled "Tragedy and Triumph." I have added some dialogue, TONS AND TONS of narration, and a several completely original scenes. But the story, and the characters, do not belong to me, it was written for DC Comics by Chuck Dixon. I am just the novella adapter.
Rated PG
"TRIUMPH OVER TRAGEDY" - Prologue
There are some creatures in this world that decent society would rather not see. Monsters the world tries to ignore. The twisted, the misguided, the sick, the diluded, the dangerous. There's a place for just such outcasts. Arkham Asylum, the house that hate built.
A smoky haze hung stagnant in the air of the crowded little office, an office comprised of mahogany, dim lighting, deep red-brown leather chairs, green banker lamps, and an enviable library of medical and psychiatric books on floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The smoky haze was compliments of a large cigar in the mouth of Assistant Director Jameson, a tall black man whose hair was graying over the ears. Jameson was sitting in a soft high-backed brown leather swivel chair, ankle crossed over knee, managing miraculously not to crinkle his dark gray-green suit in his comfortable position. His chair was pressed up against a little end table, which was sandwiched by a slightly different color and style leather swivel chair. The table in between crippled the chairs from swiveling, but they could do plenty of leaning back and squeaking. Jameson was doing a lot of squeaking.
Attorney Strenstrom could not seem to keep his seat. He had been sitting just a moment ago, but now he was on his feet like a soapbox had grown under him. Strenstrom was a tall, thin man, and his suit hung on him like it would on a hanger. His fists were planted firmly on his hips, curtaining back his suit jacket. The lines pressed into the front of his pants were perfect, right to the tiny crinkle just above the ankle that suggests a perfectly tailored length. His squinty eyes were narrowed beneath his thick, round-rimmed glasses. His pepper-gray hair was beginning to recede ever so slightly on one side.
"Just what is this all about, Mister Strenstrom?" Jameson rocked and squeaked. He was feigning severity. Everyone present knew him to be somewhat sympathetic to Strenstrom's cause. Jameson would be easily won over.
"This is madness, that's what this is about!" Director Malwitz interrupted, shouting from his worn pacing pattern in the narrow strip between the back of his desk and the window. A short but strong-looking man, Malwitz had become used to the necessity of enforcing his own word. His wavy blonde hair and relative youth compared to his present company served to make him seem more indignant. His thin mustache, grown to costume his lack of age, was too blonde to do much good in its present purpose. Malwitz lost his professional front and began cursing and muttering under his breath. "The Joker can have visitors, he says! Absolutely out of the question! Thinks the Joker's some kind of clear thinking person! His mother! Huh! Psycho probably doesn't even have a mother!"
"Mister Malwitz," Strenstrom stretched out the words like a grammar school teacher, "What this is about is The Joker's rights as an American citizen."
Malwitz stopped pacing and stared out the large picture window behind his desk into the darkness and snow. "God, you lawyers are all alike, Strenstrom."
"The man has a right to see his mother on his birthday," Strenstrom answered defensively, and a bit testily.
"Like the man said," Jameson backed the director once more for good measure, "we weren't even aware The Joker had a mother until we received her letter."
Strenstrom didn't have a reply for that. It didn't really need one.
"The Joker is the most dangerous inmate we have in here," Malwitz turned from the window and glared directly into Strenstrom's eyes. "The list of directors who have lost this office simply because of his escapes is legion. Nothing is sacred to him, not his goals, not his cohorts, not even Harley Quinn. And I strongly suspect, not his mother. He will use any tiny thing, any spark of interest or hope someone shows in him, and turn it to his psychotic schemes. And you work with your pet psychiatrists and every liberal do-gooder in the state to offer him another shot at getting out of Arkham."
"It is my opinion," Jameson, who had been biding his time all along and finally the moment was right for his genius revelation, spoke slowly and calmly, "that The Joker can only benefit from this contact with his mother. It's therapeutic for him. The letter we received stated that the woman wants to redress the issues of the abuses to her son as a child."
"That monster never was a child! I'm sick to death of all this psycho- babble crap!" Malwitz took a second to compose himself and measure his breaths. Compromise was necessary here. "He'll get to see his mother. But it will be on my terms."
End of discussion.
"We're running her through the metal detector now, sir," a guard reported to Malwitz.
Malwitz nodded absently. He was too busy concentrating on the strange little old woman who claimed to be The Joker's mother. He had to keep his hands in his pockets to keep from biting on his nails. His nervousness would have been made obvious by such an agitated gesture, and anything like that can set The Joker's evil mind to work. He stared at the woman.
She was tall and ridiculously thin, just like the Joker. She was wearing a purplish pink dress, a matching pillbox hat with a black veil covering her entire face, and large, clunky black shoes with a wide, short heel. She carried a black leather-covered Bible.
"She's clean," someone called. Malwitz didn't look to see who said it. The door from the cell block opened. The Joker was being brought in.
The Joker was no new sight for Malwitz, but seeing the sick, twisted man up close never failed to give him the creeps.
Joker's hair had grown in a bit too much and it hung in long green strands past the point of his stark white nose. He wore that huge, ridiculous grin, and leered out from beneath those tortured eyebrows. His arms were wrapped around him in a tight straight-jacket. His pants were the typical purple with black pin stripes, and his shoes were purple and black saddle shoes, buffed to a bright sheen. Little, the wardens had decided, could be done with a shoe rag and some black polish - so he'd been permitted them.
"Well, Strenstrom," Malwitz sighed as the Joker was seated at the empty wooden table, "you got what you wanted. The Joker is to be reunited with his mother."
Strenstrom smiled.
"I only hope you'll take full responsibility for what happens as a result of this little experiment," Malwitz added, snarling at the lawyer.
"And what could possibly happen?" Strenstrom spoke to him out of the corner of his mouth, as if they were watching a ballgame, and couldn't turn their faces from the spectacle. "You've got an army of guards in and around this room, which is sealed tight anyway. I think that's quite enough to control a straight-jacketed man and an octogenarian."
"I pray to God you're right, Strenstrom," Malwitz could not turn his face away, either, "I just pray to God you're right."
"Mother..." The Joker's high tenor voice, dripping with a slight British accent (purely for effect), seethed through his teeth.
"Son," the croaking old voice, almost lower in pitch than her son's, barely managed to utter the words, "I wanted to bring you something to comfort you in these troubled times."
"What is it, Mother?" the Joker seemed sarcastic when calling the woman mother. Malwitz wondered offhand if that was because he harboured so much hatred for the woman.
"The Good Book, son," the woman passed the Bible to The Joker.
Suddenly, Malwitz had a sinking. "Did you examine the Bible?" he hissed over his shoulder to one of the guards.
"Huh?"
"The BIBLE!!!" Malwitz shouted, not certain in retrospect if he had cried a reiteration or a warning. Green gas began to seep from the book, then rapidly pour out, flooding the room and downing two of the guards. Malwitz didn't know if it was knock out gas or if it was lethal. At this point, it didn't make much difference. The Joker would cause plenty of deaths to make up for any lives salvaged today if he escaped. The Joker had a gas mask on, and the Bible lay on the table, open. It was not a book at all, but a box in which a gas mask could be stored.
"Idiots..." Malwitz choked, tears coursing down his cheeks. He charged towards the door and shoved it open, breathing clear air. The moment he thought he could see again, he was bowled over by the woman who had claimed to be The Joker's mother. And quickly behind her was the Joker himself, who stepped on Malwitz's neck, holding him down till he could make good his escape. Malwitz leapt to his feet in time to see the Joker, sans straight-jacket, running free. And Malwitz had opened the door for him!
"Get him!" Malwitz croaked, though he wasn't sure who would be conscious or alive to hear him.
A heavyset, middle-aged guard appeared from the green smog of the room, holding a handkerchief over his mouth with one hand and bearing The Joker's empty straight-jacket in the other. "He got free!" the guard's muffled voice emanated from under the handkerchief.
"There he goes!" cried a young guard, standing at the ready with his rifle cocked. "I got him!" the guard took aim. His hands were shaking as he sited The Joker. None of the guards could see very clearly yet, the gas was still affecting their eyes. The young guard was a newbie at Arkham, and had never shot anyone in his entire life. He was about to take a life. And he was about to save countless innocent lives. He pulled the trigger. And heard the echoes and ricochets of a shot that had hit no one at all. He missed!
"Don't sweat it, Murphy," another guard stood at the ready behind the young guard who had flubbed the shot, "I got him covered! Get down!"
The older guard shoved Murphy to his hands and knees in the snow. Suddenly, shots exploded just over Murphy's head. The young man clamped his hands over his ears and saw shells fall onto the thin layer of snow near him, melting all the snow around them. About 300 feet away, he saw a tall, thin man in purple pin-striped pants go down.
Malwitz was already running towards the fallen man. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a guard tackle the old woman. Her pillbox hat fell off, revealing short black hair and stubble. A man! It was a man! How could they have been so stupid? The man in the dress gave the guard a nice uppercut to the jaw and escaped.
But Malwitz did not let the cross-dressing accomplice hold his attention for long. There, on the ground, blood soaking a thin V-necked undershirt, was Strenstrom. Strenstrom, half dressed in the Joker's clothing, was dead. Whether Strenstrom had willingly traded places with the Joker or was forced into it would have to be determined by forensics - if it could be determined at all.
"D-Did I...Did I get him, sir?" the guard who had helped Murphy approached slowly with Murphy trailing timidly behind.
"Good lord, man..." Malwitz stared as one of the guards turned Strenstrom over. His eyes were mercifully closed, but his jaw hung open. Yes, dressed in the purple suit, he would have been a dead ringer for The Joker. Now he was just dead. To The Joker, nothing is sacred. Not even the lawyer who gave him his freedom.
After long moments, the guard who had inadvertently shot Strenstrom brought himself to speak. "Should we lock down, sir?"
"What's the use, now?" Malwitz half-whispered. "He's long gone. He's a problem for the police, now."
"You guy I am to be waiting for?" the cabby asked with a thick foreign accent. He stood outside his cab, shivering. He had been waiting for a bit too long in the cold, but someone had paid him quite well to wait here.
"I'm the guy everybody is waiting for!" The Joker spread his arms wide, sporting Strenstrom's tailored suit.
"Sure, sure," the cabby blew him off, hurrying into the driver's seat of his heated taxi. He just hoped this weirdo didn't have to go far. "Got suitcase in here for you. Somebody give with fare."
The Joker folded his tall frame into the back seat. Next to him lay the suitcase. "Somebody" was Strenstrom. Good ol' Strenstrom. Laid down his life for The Joker. It was either risk his life, or lose his career, reputation, and ex-wife. Some choice.
"Where you go?" the cabby asked, settling into his seat and pulling the car into gear.
"Take me where the lights are bright!" The Joker slid down in the seat, crossing ankle over knee and lacing his fingers behind his head. "Take me to Gotham!"