III.

Cécile sat in the workshop. She revved up the old HP computer. She waited for it to boot. She stared at the outline of her pale, anemic face in the black screen of the computer monitor. Nothing happened. She waited.

Cécile moved uncertainly through the showroom on the floor of PC World. She'd never shopped for a computer before. A businessman, client of her father, had selected and given to them the dinosaur they'd been using until it had died. Just like her father. She shook her head, a crooked smile on her face. She couldn't think like that.

What was RAM and what was ROM again? She stared at price tags, at spec sheets, at the smiling people, who were glad to be inside and away from the winter weather. The store smelled like packing peanuts and hot coffee. "Madame?" She spun around. In front of her in the black polo shirt uniform of PC World was a man. Cécile decided at once that he was young, younger than her. He had dark, short hair, and round, black studs in both ears. His cheap, gold-trimmed name tag said "Luc." "Can I help you at all?"

"I'm looking for a new desktop computer," she said, staring into his eyes, so dark they were almost black. She thought the area below his lower lip was pierced, but there was no earring. "I don't know much about computers . . ."

She realized that not only was she staring at him, he was staring back at her. He was smiling. It had been a long time since a man had smiled at her. She was annoyed, flustered, and reeling from the stab of pleasure she felt all at once. "Is this for a home office?" he asked. He had a pleasant, rich-toned voice, perhaps from Montréal.

"Um, yes," said Cécile. "I need it for internet, primarily. We were on dial up, at home, but now I'm thinking of going to—"

"Dial up? Look who's still living in the Dark Ages." Luc the salesman laughed, and Cécile flushed in embarrassment. "Um, sorry, I didn't mean—"

"Look—just sell me a damn computer, okay?" Cécile sucked in a breath, wishing she was smoking a cigarette.

"My pleasure," said Luc, holding up his hands, as if to fend off a blow or welcome her, she wasn't sure. At the cash register, Cécile noticed how the store had cleared out. The fluorescent lights were leaving her light-headed, and the clock said it was, impossibly, nine o'clock at night. Had she been listening to the Montréal salesman, with his pleasant dark eyes and the plugs of plastic in his ears, all this time? Or was she just going crazy?

The register totalled up the multi-digit purchase, something Cécile never would have been able to afford. Before. "Here, I've got cash." She handed the Canadian dollars crisply to Luc, trying not to be amused by the surprised look on his face.

"You must have just inherited some fortune," he said, with a smile that was meant to be flirtatious.

Cécile felt a chill. That was what the man at the bank had said—was it inherited from her father's estate? What was she doing with a handbag full of American money that she needed exchanged? She'd almost winced and lost her nerve as it had gone into her account. She'd wanted to confess it all. She had loved her father, but she had hated him. She was chained to a life she didn't want to live, but was too frightened to do anything else. She'd been given the money by a criminal clown from down south?

"Sorry," said Luc the computer salesman. He was printing up her receipt. "Did I say something wrong?"

"It's just—" Why was she telling him this? "My father just died."

"Oh." He ran a hand convulsively through his thick black hair. "I'm sorry."

She shrugged. What did she say in response? "Thank you"? "You don't even know me, how can you possibly understand what I feel"? She skewered him with her glance. His black-dyed denim jeans were creased; she expected he'd never worn a pressed suit like her father had made in his life. She wanted to laugh at his helpful, worried little-boy face, the small puncture at the base of his lip, at herself for thinking even for a moment she had correctly read such a person . . .

"Can I help you take the computer to your car?" He had handed her the receipt. She had taken her change, cramming the dollars into the pale peach of her purse. She shook her head. "Bien. Can I help you set it up once you get it home?" She looked up, raising one eyebrow. His smile was effortless, genuine. "I can set you up on Google, I can get the Ethernet cable connected. No strings attached. Heh."

Cécile felt she hadn't smiled properly in years. "No, that's okay." She found a scrap of paper in her purse—a receipt for wine, that her father had bought—and scribbled down her cell phone number. She shook all over. "You can take this, though."

The mirror tacked onto the medicine cabinet had a dent in its upper right-hand corner. "Well, when you're in the bedroom of a cheap-ass, what can you realistically expect?" The Joker flicked on the fluorescent bulb. He opened the medicine cabinet and began tossing out bottles of hair spray and face cream, Neutrogena and Noxema and Nair. The Joker gave a quizzical look to the skinny, diminutive man tied up and gagged with duct tape on the grey carpet. "What, all this crap and no Moonbeam foundation?" He tossed a tub of Carmex at the gagged man who didn't react. "No Electric Black mascara and eyeshadow? No Sour Green Apple hair dye?"

The Joker reached into a black camera bag at his feet and pulled out a box of green hair dye with its ingredients in French. "Fortunately, I brought my own!" As he laid out pots of label-less cosmetics on the sink, the figure on the carpet made a feeble murmur. The Joker made a shhh-ing motion at him and then carefully removed his purple gloves. His hands were pale and grimy, his thumb pink and white as he ran the sharp edge of a razor over it. The duct-taped man whimpered and shook in his bonds. "Don't wet the carpet!" the Joker shouted. "This isn't for you."

He looked back in the mirror and ran the blade gently across his naked scars. "You're actually quite privileged. Not many people get to see me like this." He stroked the scars with his tongue. "Lots of people think I'm ashamed of them, that I wear all this to cover them up." He reached down and found a bottle of shaving cream in the midst of the rubble. "There was this girl, this bony French girl. Her father made me this suit, y'know." He rubbed the lather in his hands and smoothed it over his chin. "She wasn't scared of the scarrrrrs. She knew what they were about."

He raised the razor and winked at the reflection of the prisoner on the floor. "This isn't easy, either." He shaved carefully around the puffy lacerations, making a strange sucking noise as he drew them in. "I'm very good at holding a knife steady!" He laughed uproariously. "Ha, ha, ha-ho-hee." He unscrewed the cap of a white tub and smeared white paint on his face. "Did you ever read any Shakespeare? No, didn't think so. He knew all about Death painting itself." He reached into another bottle and daubed his eyes in black. "It's just too bad," he said, "that Cécile had to go and lose her temper." He scraped a tube of red across his cheeks and mashed the bits of paint into the crevices of his scars. "Where the hell am I going to get good makeup remover now?"

Cécile had one eye on the Google home page and one on her cell phone. She hadn't even needed a cell phone until her father's death. They had always used their landline, and living in the world she had since girlhood, the kind of empty fairy-realm, she'd never even considered getting one. But the funeral arrangements, the slow measures she was taking to sell the house, the liquidation of the Blandine business, required catapulting her into the twenty-first century. Luc had been right to laugh.

"Design colleges" she typed into the search engine. Impressed with the number of hits, and a little overwhelmed, she dived into the kitchen for a glass of wine. The house had always been quiet, even when her father had been alive, for obvious reasons. Now she stilled her own panic and fear in the well-steeped silence. The first night without snow in weeks. What was it Luc had told her? She needed to narrow her search parameters. He was young, and handsome, this boy, and he belonged to a world she had left years before. The land of the living. She barked out a short, startled laugh and squeezed the stem of her wine glass.

She didn't want to go to University in Québec. Her English was good enough for Toronto, or New York City. She tried to imagine herself, pale-skinned, lank-haired Cécile Blandine, in sunny southern California. No. Then where? She'd never been out of Canada before. Something the Joker said teased her memory. "Can't keep Gotham waiting," he'd said. She held her breath and typed in "Gotham design colleges." The first hit was the Waterman Institute of Art and Design located in downtown Gotham. She clicked on the link that listed tuition. The computer hummed as she digested her shock. Why was it so low? She heard herself laughing aloud, a sharp, discordant sound. Probably because downtown Gotham was so dangerous.

A/N: Luc began as a character named Iestyn in the first comic I ever wrote/drew. He was Welsh, dark-haired, wore eyeliner and had pierced ears. I thought he was the coolest and was sad when my editor told me I needed to get rid of that storyline. Iestyn lives!

Would the Joker really invoke Shakespeare? Maybe if he's as well-read as in Saviors and Hellion Smiles.