VI.

"So what's the story?" In the warehouse hideout, the kid with the silver teeth was leaning over a laptop screen swathed in porn.

"Whaddya mean?" asked the older, sad-faced man picking at his fingernails.

The kid gestured to his mouth. "The face. You know."

"And the general craziness?" asked the older man. "Not our business."

"But you've gotta be curious, Hector."

"Sure I am," said Hector, chewing on a toothpick, then using it to brush back his cuticles. "But curiosity gets you dead."

"What's his plan?" The kid had clicked the window of porn off and closed the laptop, smoothing his sweaty palms along his brand-new jeans.

"Weren't you paying attention earlier?" asked Hector. "Mob banks. First hit of several, like he said."

"Yeah, I know," said the kid, reaching into his jeans pocket for cigarette paper and his tobacco. "But, I mean, after that. How far is he going to take this?"

Hector rubbed his stubbly chin, watched the kid roll a cigarette, carefully nudging the filter into place. "As far as he can. Wouldn't you?"

"But he's gotta have friends to do that," said the kid, neatly licking the cigarette paper and sealing it in its cylindrical shape. "And a guy like him . . ."

Hector nudged the kid in the chest. "What's your plan?"

"Seriously, though," said Hector, "if he catches us in here . . ."

"He won't," said the kid. "Relax, old man."

"Who you callin' old man?" asked Hector, chewing his toothpick until it disintegrated into splits of wood. The kid had the rolled cigarette limply in his lower jaw, but he hadn't lit it. They flicked on the overhead bulb in the Joker's room. There was a bed that looked like it hadn't ever been slept in, neat, crisp, but somehow seamy, off-putting. There were stacks of books and blueprints and magazines.

"Check it out," said the kid, wandering over to a discarded shop window dummy, brown and battered, wearing a replica of the massive purple coat they had learned was part and parcel of the Joker's persona. "Creepy shit," said the kid. Hector moved over to the coat cautiously. It looked old and badly worn out, with cuts and gashes in the material that Hector could, in spite of himself, see had been expensive and well-made once.

"Huh," he said to himself, digging through his pockets for bubble gum. He gently pulled the left lapel away from the dummy and found something pinned against the wood. He warily peered closer. It was a card from a deck, the queen of hearts, stabbed into the breast of the dummy. He shuddered. "Watch out, there might be booby traps."

"Who's this?" asked the kid, picking up anonymous, darkroom developed black and white prints. They had the same face over and over, a woman's face. "I know her."

"Yeah, some goody-two shoes from Metro Court," said Hector disinterestedly, his attention caught by another pile of photographs, shaky and unresolved, with no clear target. Amongst them was a newspaper clipping, possibly an obituary, but it was in French. He squinted at it, employed the Spanish his Puerto Rican abuela had taught him, and failed. Too much effort. He needed coffee, not bubble gum.

"You think he wants to off her? Is that the grand plan?"

"Kid, who can tell?"

"I've got it," said the kid, giggling, the acne on his face flushed red. "Do her, then off her. She's not a bad-looking—"

"Okay, cut it out, Casanova," said Hector. "The mental pictures I'm getting ain't pretty."

The kid shrugged, put down the photos, and moved on. "Ohhh, no way," he said, pulling back a curtain. "Obsessive much?" Hector looked behind the curtain. The white wall behind was covered with scrawls in blue Bic ink, in black stuff that could be makeup, in crayon, and the mirror beside it—covered with swirls of white stuff, maybe shaving cream. Writing, diagrams, patterns, codes, drawn and redrawn. Hector crossed himself involuntarily. In the middle of the wall was a huge red smudge, in the shape of a smile. "Jackpot," giggled the kid. "This is what we came here for! To be one step ahead! That way, if we're next in line to get axed, we'll know and we can run with the cash!"

"I admire the initiative, guys," said the Joker, pulling back the curtain and rounding on them, "but you should have been a bit quieter." The kid wasted no time, scooping his handgun from his jeans pocket. But the Joker was too quick, grabbing him by the hair and jerking his head back. The gun dropped to the floor. There was a sickening crack.

Hector pressed himself against the wall. "Díos mio," he said. "You broke his nose."

"Observant," said the Joker, smirking, purple gloves running red with blood as the kid whined in protest. "Have you ever heard of the Marquis de Sade?"

"Yeah, I heard of him," Hector said, balancing on his toes, ready to spring to the kid's defense if he saw an opening.

"When they took away his paper, he got out the old razor blade, and wrote all over his bed sheets in blood. So you see, Hector, a restless, planning mind's got to find somewhere to go." There was another sickening crack as the kid fell limply to the floor.

Hector rubbed his thinning hair, gulping. "Sheee-it. I didn't even know his name. I just called him the kid."

"Ah, reckless youth," said the Joker mockingly. "Now get out."

Cécile made her notes in a plain, lined notebook on one corner of her desk, her sketches in a sketchbook of archival paper she kept balanced on her lap. She found she was smiling, chewing the cap of the pen, following the lecture with ease and eager to get to the sewing machine she'd set up in the apartment. The summer session at the Waterman Institute of Art and Design in downtown Gotham, in her chosen BA in Fashion Design and Development, was surprisingly packed by both those getting degrees and part-timers, interested in a taking a few classes the way the community centers offered culinary classes or conversation-level Italian.

Cécile hadn't set out to make any friends. She expected the classes to be cutthroat, like she found Gotham, with the newspapers constantly screaming headlines of muggings, assassinations, petty crime, the occasional grim torture. But these were ordinary people in the desks beside her. Lien was an exceptionally bright seventeen-year-old whose parents owned a Chinese grocery store on a street between the Narrows and the lower east side, poor people who couldn't afford to send their daughter to Pratt in New York City. Lien was going to design a whole new line of Asian-inspired wedding gowns and sell them out of her parents' store.

Tommy was six-foot-four and every inch the young Black gangster who was constantly held responsible for the degrading crime rates in the city. But Tommy belied all quick assumptions. He took the night shifts as a nursing attendant at Gotham Central Hospital. By day he pursued his part-time BA in Fashion Media to eventually overhaul the medical system's line of scrubs and patient surgery gowns. He described himself as a man with a plan. So someone like Cécile, with a noticeable Québecquois accent and nervous refuge in cigarettes even when her professors repeatedly told her not to smoke indoors, was hardly remarkable. What was remarkable, to her, were the bonds she was taking up within weeks of starting her college degree.

The school had arranged for a sort of off-campus family housing (once Cécile had mentioned Luc) that proved a fairly decent apartment complex. And it was there she took her friends for coffee or, more often, she had free Chinese food at Lien's family's store. Passing by Gotham Central Hospital one night, she'd even bummed a smoke off of Tommy who was standing outside in the rain on his break. For the first time in her life, Cécile had people to talk to. And the constant activity, even if she wasn't the most studious of students, kept her from missing Trois-Rivières. Most of the time.

Picking up her books and her two notebooks, Cécile followed Lien out of the Textiles for Fashion classroom and into the halls of the main building on the Waterman campus. She checked her watch. It was quarter-to-eleven. She had time for a smoke before her next class. She made for the nearest door. "Oy! Blandine!" Cécile turned around. It was Frederika—whom everyone called Fred—and Carly Ann, both headed, Cécile surmised, toward the Student Union Building for lunch. Fred was short with enormous kinks of wild black hair and round, leopard-print glasses. She was as loud and boisterous as her appearance suggested. Carly Ann was a middle-aged middle school teacher with hair the same color as Cécile's—that is, nearly colorless. Only in Gotham, Cécile thought, as she moved to join them.

"You on your way out to kill your lungs?" asked Fred, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. Cécile had eventually come to realize Fred's candor was kindly meant, but she'd been quick to take it in the wrong way.

"Yes," Cécile replied without nuance.

"I'll go with you," said Carly Ann. She had the most timid voice; Cécile could never imagine her teaching a room full of screaming thirteen-year-olds. The thought practically grated on her nerves like nails on chalkboard. Fred tsked and pounded the floor with her immense platforms.

"I'll see you two crazies in the box o' doom in, like, ten?" Fred asked.

"Box o' doom" was Fred's shorthand for the SUB. Carly Ann had told Cécile that someone had told her that Fred was Mayor Garcia's illegitimate love-child with a Brazilian hairdresser, but Cécile wasn't particularly interested in gossip. She was just glad to get out into the open air and light her cigarette and Carly Ann's with a lighter she'd borrowed from Luc.

"Another scorcher," said Carly Ann, mopping her brow with a folded Kleenex. Cécile nodded. She missed some of the smells of Trois-Rivières. Downtown Gotham had a good selection of bakeries and delis and diners, most of them open at ungodly hours, but it wasn't the same as the boulangeries in Québec. Lunches were different. The bars were different. Eventually the novelty of English 24/7 wore out on Cécile, and she used Luc's laptop to stream the news from a Québecquois website. The people were different, too. They seemed used to fear. It was like a bad sunburn they were taking weeks to grow out of. But this summer was different. People seemed optimistic.

"I think I saw him last night," said Carly Ann, carefully folding her Kleenex and putting it into her purse.

"Who?"

"Batman," said Carly Ann, with relish.

Cécile hid her smile behind her hand. She liked Carly Ann well enough, even though she felt sorry for her—working nine months out of the year and then going to school during the summer for a design degree that was already three years in the making was not her idea of a good time. But Carly Ann was impressionable. There was some American expression for it, about looking something up in a dictionary, but Cécile couldn't remember what it was.

"Where?" asked Cécile, humoring her.

"Where do you think?" said Carly Ann, her timid voice made rough with the smoke and the bravado.

"You were peering into Mr. Gordon's window? I cannot say I approve," said Cécile with a smile. Carly Ann made a very big point out of the fact she lived in the same apartments as L.D. Jim Gordon, a man of some importance, Cécile gathered. The first time Carly Ann had mentioned Batman, Cécile had confessed ignorance. Until Carly Ann had pulled out a newspaper clipping lauding the caped crusader for the summer's dramatic decrease in violent crime. Cécile recognized the artist's drawing of a man in a bat-shaped silhouette with a cape and heavy boots. Her heart had skipped a few beats as she recalled her package. Wish You Were Here . . . Batman was the stuff of legends—but also, in Gotham, it appeared, a real person.

If Bat-spotting was a sport, Carly Ann would win the gold medal. "I wasn't peering through his window!" she snapped. "I was lookin' out my window."

"Was 'e sitting in a tree?" teased Cécile. "Or climbing up the wall?"

Before Carly Ann could reply, Cécile's cell phone buzzed as she received a text from Luc. She deftly glanced at it then deleted it and looked up at Carly Ann to continue.

Luc was painting his fingernails black. His right ear was swollen as he'd had a third piercing put in it the night before. The apartment building managed one good view that wasn't over the slums in the Narrows, that managed on occasion to give an impression, when squinting, of Montréal. Luc liked it best when it was night and Wayne Tower was lit up, when the cityscape was at its most alive and brilliant. He could sit there in the chair by the window and tune out the dripping faucet in the kitchen and Cécile's constant typing or the scritch-scratch of her pencils on her drawing board.

He hadn't lied. He'd been glad to come to Gotham with Cécile. He would have gone with her anywhere. And he had meant it when he said he was going to get a job since her scholarship, though generous, didn't pay for food. What shit this American food was, anyway. Nowhere to buy a decent loaf of bread. He'd started rolling his own cigarettes. And somehow their shit wine tasted better when he got up at 11 a.m. than it did at midnight.

Gotham did boast some good Goth clubs, he had to admit. This wasn't surprising, he reflected, wadding up a receipt and throwing it at the television, considering the city's name. Considering its unofficial mascot was a man in a Halloween costume. There were so many strange, disguised folk going around the city at any one time, there was no need to even confine Halloween to one day a year. It was happening all the time, all around them. Compared to Trois-Rivières, it was practically Paris itself, minus the catacombs.

In fact, Luc's favorite club was called Arkham, named after the legendary Asylum for the criminally insane. The club was always getting shut down as its ongoing legal battle over the name—which the real Arkham dubbed infringed on its rights—kept being fed through the court system. "No wonder all these crooks are always in and out of jail," Luc said to himself, flipping aimlessly through channels on the TV.

He was counting the hours until Cécile came home. But when she did, he would only count the hours again until she went to sleep and he could go out. He didn't want to see himself as deceived; his pride would hurt too much. He had expected the sporadic sex to unfreeze the ice queen's heart. He never told anyone he loved her. How could he love someone so cold? He was young and good-looking and even, by her own admission, sweet. He could have had anyone in Trois-Rivières. Here in Gotham he was adrift, and every time he tried to grab for his anchor, Cécile swam past him. She was as slippery as an eel, as uncaring.

Even when he'd tried to ask her about the scars, she hadn't reacted in the way he'd planned. She was even more distant. And what worried him most was she seemed happy. Much happier than he'd ever seen her. So there were girls in clubs he was kissing now, girls he pretended were her. She would smell their perfume when he climbed in bed after 4 a.m. and pull the covers away from him. Every morning he would get up with the same resolve to answer the e-mails regarding IT job offers, to leave downtown for the skyscrapers upon which he dreamed, as he would to confront her. To lay his love bare for her feet to tread on. But he knew and dreaded the outcome. So he would sneak a kiss when he could and watch YouTube instead of paying the bills.

He texted her. She was in lecture. He would make an effort to do a real Québecquois lunch. He would buy the table wine and the best French bread he could find and real butter instead of spread and tarte aux pommes for dessert, or maybe Ben and Jerry's. But she didn't reply.

When the woman came limping toward her, Cécile recoiled, as she thought she was hurt. Within seconds she realized the woman, in a smart pant suit and her dark hair piled on top of her head, had broken the high heel of one shoe and was wobbling and balancing her way toward her and Carly Ann. "Excuse me," she said.

"Are you hurt?" asked Carly Ann, rushing to stomp out her cigarette and clutching toward the young woman with the same matronly concern that belied her timidity.

"I'm fine," said the woman. "I'm just—my cell phone battery's died, and—" She stamped her foot with the broken heel. "This city, you know? I can't catch a cab, and I'm late for an important—" She looked up toward Cécile. "Could I borrow your phone, please?"

Without thinking, Cécile handed her phone over. She had a vague feeling of déjà-vu, but the young woman was much too nice-looking for Cécile to ever have encountered her at college or in the supermarket. The woman made sounds of frustration before Cécile grabbed the phone back and muttered, "Sorry, I am from Québec, it's in French."

The woman nodded and took the phone back, punching in her number and looking over her shoulder at Cécile. "Welcome to Gotham, then." The person on the other line picked up. "Harvey!" the woman exclaimed. "Yes, I'm all right, I'm just stuck here on the college campus . . ."

As Cécile let the woman's words fade, she felt uneasily aware, as if she'd just passed a doppelganger. Brows furrowed, she said to Carly Ann, "I know that woman."

"Don't we all?" said Carly Ann, admiringly. "That's Rachel Dawes, the assistant D.A., and that's her—" Carly Ann mouthed the word "boyfriend" without actually saying anything, "the District Attorney right now!" As Cécile recognized the sweet, girlish features and the dark hair, she felt her blood run cold.

A/N: Paul Dini's "Trust" in Death and the City was inspirational for the Joker's obsessive scrawl. Internet research for London design colleges was in order for inventing Waterman Institute of Art and Design (named after the Paris-based pen company if you must know.)