III: catching up
The biographer braced himself for a monster, like everyone he'd seen the pictures, but what he saw that day in Arkham was just a coinless, friendless man.
He seemed shrunken somehow and yet overweight. Some small flame in him had been extinguished, that was what disturbed him most, not the gruesome half-wreckage of his face.
It was Harvey's voice that retrieved for the biographer their older, shared reality. The same wounded tone, always laden with emotion. The way he could make some stick up man seem like the Son of Sam.
"Hello, Vincent," the voice said.
Once friends, close, very close even, in law school, the two ambitious young men eventually drifted to opposing sides of the justice system, friendship turning into rivalry, respect souring into disdain.
The same voice that had once called him a defender of scum, a whore, scum himself. He had keyed three of the biographer's cars, long angry gashes. That famous temper.
Harvey had always been theatrical, the scarred silver dollar originally a courtroom prop for closing statements, signifying the shitty luck of victimhood.
Now tourists bought replicas in little shops.
"I know why you're here," the former district attorney said, half of his face angled into shadow. "I have something to tell you."
But the biographer knew better. Harvey just liked to hear himself talk, always had.
The bandages had come off slowly, one layer at a time. There were many, many disclaimers, talk of swelling, healing, the therapeutic passage of time, there was a note from Harvey's friend the mayor.
At last a nurse gave him a mirror.
His scream was so horrifying doctors on other floors wondered who had died. Harvey bashed his face into his reflection, the glass fracturing into shards. He started sawing at his wrists before an army of orderlies subdued him with 80 ccs of lupenol and a few tons of muscle.
In those early days, before he embraced who he had become, before he became ruled by his own violence, flexing his muscles into Gotham's underworld, a silk cloth covered the scarred side of his face. The silk a small vestige of Harvey, known for his expensive taste, all the suits.
He set up in a dingy abandoned theatre on some outskirt of Gotham. It was just him and Oslo then, a mugger. That was one thing about being a prosecutor, you knew a lot of criminals.
It was a little like a trial, what they did, the casting sessions. He just wanted things to be the way they used to be.
The women, all blondes, were told they were being considered for a role.
Questions arrived via index card from off-stage, Oslo ferrying them back and forth, reading them out loud.
Hobbies?
Interests?
Do you play the violin?
The women were between 5 foot 4 and 5 foot 6, all others turned away.
Do you like California reds?
He was going to find a new Grace one way or another. She might be half as good, but so was he.
I've done ballet since I was little.
No! he growled from off-stage.
What was the rush? The hands of his clock moved by audition, not days. It was a way to go on.
After the interview period, the more promising girls would be asked to recite a single sentence.
You'll be there, won't you?
The next notecard was always the same.
Again.
The auditions went on fruitlessly. Rumors spread in Gotham of a reclusive director, foreign perhaps, mysterious and short-tempered, an artistic genius, they assumed. Brunettes dyed their hair.
Again.
But then one day, there she was. Grace.
Harvey came out of the shadows, banishing Oslo with a word, the actresses sent home without explanation. That Batman was there too, Harvey barely registered, the odd mathematics of it.
Grace.
Harvey Dent trembled.
She whispered things, it was hard to speak. She was sorry she hadn't been there when he'd woken up, she had been in a coma herself. She'd been looking everywhere for him. Everyone had. Where had Harvey gone? The mayor, his friend Bruce, the tabloids, everyone wanted to know. No one more than she.
She asked to see his face, asked him to remove his mask.
He did it, no coin, no nothing. But when it was off, when he let himself be seen, all she could say was sorry. I'm so sorry, she said.
She fled, crying. Two-Face found Oslo, poor Oslo, and blew his brains out.
Batman stood in the audience. Harvey, he kept pleading.
That meddling scoundrel had brought her before she was ready.
There would be no more auditions.
He moved his face fully into the light, the deep stitched grooves worm-like, his skin a sickly, yellowish pallor, and that oversized inhuman eye.
"She's out there still. Vomiting at the thought of me. She wasn't ready."
"But Grace didn't survive the explosion," Vincent said, knowing full well how Harvey reacted when contradicted, wanting only to assuage his pain. "She never woke up. You know that. She loved you."
He pulled up the obituary on his phone.
"You think you can slip doctored evidence by me?" Harvey paused to yell for the guard. "The world is colder than you can understand. Love, it runs out."
When the guard arrived, the biographer stood immediately to go, sensing the Harvey in this creature across from him slip away. But it was not to the biographer that the guard addressed himself. "Six minutes is the best I can do," he told Two-Face, before unlocking his handcuffs. Something passed between their hands.
The biographer began to shake, not in fear but in absolute loneliness, the way both of their worlds had fallen apart, the way it had come to this.
Two-Face flipped his coin.
Something animal took over, something mean.
"You're going to tell me about Grace? You think you know better?"
Even the right side of his face became distorted. Mumbling became incoherent ranting, an opening statement of sorts, about things from years and years before, old cases, some criminals the biographer had sprung, people the biographer had not thought about in a long time.
"How's Kati doing?" Two-Face sneered, closer now, his bulging yellow eye centimeters away from the biographer.
Intended to bring pain, his wife's name brought the biographer joy. Two-Face knew! He knew about what had happened to Kati, to his children, their kidnapping, the strange ransom. I know why you're here. He'd told his story for a reason, he'd provided some clue. Even though the biographer would lose several of his teeth, his jaw cracked, his body riddled with contusions, even though he'd be hospitalized, he almost smiled at this man who was still his friend.
GOTHAM HERALD: City Officials Deny Existence of "Dent Day" Practice
A spokesman for the Gotham District Attorney's office again denied rumors that the city occasionally uses physical force to "persuade" suspects to confess. The practice is named after former District Attorney Harvey Dent, now known as Two-Face, perhaps the greatest trial lawyer the city had ever seen. After mob boss Carmine Falcone's boys rigged up Den't house with dynamite, retiring the District Attorney and ruining half of his face, certain nasty accusations were made, sullying a once spotless reputation. Among them were stories that when Dent would be frustrated, he'd personally go into cells. "Therapy," he was said to have called it.