20 AUGUST 1951 – BELLE REVE PENITENTIARY, AMELIA, LOUISIANA
The guard – O'Toole, or so his badge said – looked at my ID card like I'd pulled it out of a Crackerjack box just that morning. "Flag, Richard Montgomery," he read in the tone of voice you'd use to scare rambunctious six-year-olds. "Captain of the United States Army. Where'd you serve?" he asked.
I ignored the implication that I didn't look old enough to deserve the rank; it's happened before. "South Pacific and the Philippines, mainly. Did an occupation tour in Germany when it was all over. You?"
If I looked too young, O'Toole looked too old. He was still game, though. "Missed this show. France and Belgium in the Big One," calling the 1914–18 war like it was the only one that mattered. "Don't get too many army types here. What can we do for you, captain?" At least the tone of his voice said that he was done with the dick-measuring contest.
"I've been given permission to talk to one of your inmates. Molly Mayne. State business."
"Mayne? Goddamn, you guys must be desperate. Mayne'd scream blue murder if she broke a nail. Sending her here must have been a mistake. I was told she was a stenographer in Gotham, a secretary. This place is for stone-cold killers."
"Maybe someone upstairs realized that they screwed up. Not my business. Not yours, either." I wasn't going to tell him that Mayne was the kind of felon that Belle Reve – built and designated for the kind of science-villains that had begun showing up these last few years – was meant for. "Need to know", and all that.
"Okay. Hey, Anderson?" he asked of one of the female warders, sitting in the adjoining break room. Anderson was a surly-looking block of a woman who could probably have played nose tackle; she grimaced at O'Toole over the mud-brown coffee she was drinking. "Can you bring Mayne to Room Three? I'll bring Captain Flag down there in five minutes."
"You got it, chief." Anderson pushed the chair back and left. I took that as a cue to take a seat myself and wait.
In fairness to O'Toole, Molly Mayne certainly didn't look like the dangerous type. Twenty-seven according to the files, a neatly-built five-three or so, red hair – the Gotham mug-shot showed a Veronica Lake fall over one eye, but it was cropped short now – couldn't be more than a hundred pounds. Hard to believe that she'd been a major embarrassment to the GCPD under the alias of the Harlequin. Easier to believe the suggestions on the file that she'd gone into the crime business as some warped way of getting the Green Lantern to make a move on her. Not her fault that – going from what else we had on that guy – she hadn't a hope in Hell of that.
Mayne sat at the table. Her guard was waiting by the door as I entered and turned to her. "Thank you, Miss Anderson. If you'd wait outside? I'll let you know when we're done."
"The rules say that…"
"Your rules stopped applying when I set foot on these premises. Wait outside, please."
Anderson was too well-trained to give me an argument, but she left. I strolled up to the table, pulled up a chair. "Good morning, Miss Mayne," I said. "My name is Flag. Thank you for seeing me."
"I don't remember being given a choice." Pleasant voice, a little deeper than I'd expected. "And I can't think what you want from me, Mr Flag – if that's really your name."
"It is. And you'd be surprised, perhaps. Even though you've not exactly been walking on the right side of the street, you've been able to impress some important people." I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, held it towards her. "Take one, if you'd like."
"Thank you." She pulled one of the smokes loose, and I lit it for her. The familiarity of the routine seemed to pull some of the tension out of her face.
"Six years ago, you were just a secretary, weren't you, Miss Mayne?" I said. "You were working directly with Alan Scott, then the CEO at Gotham Broadcasting. From there you metamorphosed into a costumed crook, an occasional crime boss, a tech-witch with a hypnotic mandolin. That points to extraordinary resources – your own, or someone else's, that isn't clear right now – and perhaps some natural aptitudes finding a release. Then there was your strange relationship with the Green Lantern. He stopped most of your crime campaigns, but then you did actually help him and his friends in the Justice Society, at least once. Kind of like your heart went out of it."
She glared back at me. "I've never made claims lately to be a good person, Mr Flag. But I don't kill."
"We know. I don't think that we'd be speaking to you, if you had done." We had other people in mind for those tasks, but Mayne didn't have to know that.
"All right. Let's get down to it. Why are you speaking to me? What do you want from me?"
"Things are changing in America, Miss Mayne. You must have read of the hue-and-cry put up a couple of months back. Your old adversary Green Lantern leading the Justice Society into retirement rather than answer to Senator McCarthy and the…"
"Scumbucket," I heard her say under her breath.
"The mystery men of the war years are going away. But the mysteries – and the dangers behind the mysteries – aren't, and we don't expect them to. America has enemies still, anyone with eyes can see that, and they don't wear brightly coloured costumes so we can see who they are."
"That isn't my problem. You say I've still got…" She flexed the fingers of one hand for a moment. "A bit less than five years, before I get back to the real world and it becomes my problem again."
"True, but short-sighted." I leaned forward in the chair. "Molly – if I can call you that – you have done some bad things, but we do not believe that you are a bad person, as you said you were. You have some special talents, and we would like you to put those talents at the service of your country."
"That's what you want. What will you give me for that?"
"If you agree, you can leave here today, but you'll come back to Washington with me. You'll technically still be subject to your existing sentence – a bit under five years – but you'll work through that sentence with us and – if you really want to do so – at the end of that time you can walk away clean and we will forget that the Harlequin ever existed."
"This is the government we're talking about. The government doesn't forget."
"Perhaps. But it can just mislay stuff."
Mayne sighed, forcefully stubbed out the cigarette. "There were reasons why I did what I did. But those reasons don't matter now. I want to forget them. You seem to be saying that you'll ignore them if I do what you want – and no more than you want."
"That's it, more or less."
"Okay. Where do I sign?"
"You don't, yet. I need to sort some stuff out. But I can promise that you'll have seen the last of Louisiana by the time the sun goes down." I put out my hand. "Welcome to Task Force X, Miss Mayne."