by Peter David
He yanked the headband off Stickley, and his former boss’s only means of support was gone. He barely had time to utter a screech before the chair tilted backwards and out, plummeting to the ground far below.
Edward didn’t even bother to hang around to see the landing. By the time Stickley hit, Nygma was already back at his cubicle. He was not, however, engaged in a flurry of activity as one might expect after having just committed his very first murder. Instead he was busy staring intensely at the photos of Bruce Wayne all over the interior of his cubicle. “Question marks, Mr. Wayne? My work raises too many questions?”
With mind-blinding fury, he started ripping the pictures down from the walls. “Two years—3.5762 percent of my estimated life span—toiling for your greater glory and profit. Well, let me ask you some questions, Mr. Smarter Than Thou. Why are you so debonair? Successful? Richer than God. Why should you have it all and not me?”
He looked around at the smashed and shattered remains of what he’d torn down. And then slowly his gaze turned to focus on a surveillance camera up on the wall. It was not being monitored, Edward knew, but it had dutifully recorded everything that had happened.
He reached up for the lens as he muttered, “Yes, you’re right, there are too many questions, Bruce Wayne. Here’s a good one. Why hasn’t anybody put you in your place? And it’s time you came up with some answers. Starting right now.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The images were flying toward him . . . his parents lying in state . . . the leaves . . . the ground giving way beneath him . . . and the object . . . small, leather, clutching tightly to him . . .
And the giant bat (if it was a bat, or something worse, something spit out from Hell) lurching toward him. And it screeched at him in a voice that, for the first time, had discernible words:
You’re a killer, too . . .
Bruce Wayne lunged backwards and, in doing so, woke himself up.
He blinked against the intruding sunlight, which was pouring through the window thanks to Alfred’s having just moved the curtains aside.
“Dreams, sir?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“No time for dreams,” he said, brusquely and falsely. “Status?”
Alfred didn’t even bother to point out that most mortals said something along the lines of “Good morning” rather than “status.” “The Batcomputer has been scanning the Emergency bands all night. No sign of Two-Face. He’s disappeared.”
“He’ll be back. Did you get those file tapes from Arkham Asylum?”
“In the player, sir, and ready.”
Bruce rose from the bed, bare-chested, and Alfred couldn’t help but notice the bruises that decorated his torso. “What a marvelous shade of purple.” He paused a moment and, when Bruce didn’t respond, he spoke again and made no effort to keep the concern out of his voice. “Really, if you insist on trying to get yourself killed each night . . .”
Bruce, not wanting to get into it so early in the morning, walked away from Alfred, toward the TV and video player. He stepped over the ripped, dented, and punctured costume that lay on the floor. It wasn’t that he was slovenly; it was that he had literally forgotten about it. An old costume was an old problem. He was already on to the next one.
Alfred picked up the battered uniform and continued, “. . . would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to at least take better care of your equipment?”
“Then you’d have nothing to complain about.”
“Hardly a worry, sir.”
Bruce turned on the TV and, as he loaded the tape in, said, “Speaking of equipment, I want to get back to work on the prototype.”
Alfred shuddered. “Sir, the last time you tried to run it through a test—the relay overloads and short-circuiting almost . . .”
“I remember what happened last time, Alfred. I was wearing it, remember?”
“I doubt I could ever forget.”
“It was just a test, Alfred,” protested Bruce. “And it wasn’t so bad . . .”
“Once the burns healed,” Alfred sniffed.
“You’re exaggerating. Besides, if I’d been wearing the prototype yesterday, things might have gone very differently.”
“Indeed they might have. For one thing, they might be scraping your incinerated remains off the side of the Second National Bank building.”
“Alfred . . .”
“With a spatula.”
“All right, all right.” He flipped on the TV and started up the videotape. There was the tortured face of Harvey Dent, staring in the camera and sneering at the off-camera doctor who was asking him questions. The date and time on the video track indicated that it was one of the last interviews . . . if not the last . . . before he’d made his break. He was methodically flipping his coin, reaching the same height with each toss.
“Come on, Harvey,” Bruce said urgently. “What’s on those twisted minds of yours? Where are you going to strike next?”
Harvey, of course, didn’t hear him. Instead he was saying to the doctor, “Where would be the ideal place for a man like me, Doc? Ideal means imaginary. But to me, Doc, it’s not imaginary. It’s someplace that I’ll find. I’ll find a land where light is shadow and freaks are kings.”
And then suddenly Harvey shifted his gaze . . . and was looking straight at Bruce Wayne as he said, “You’re a killer too, Bruce.”
Bruce’s head turned quickly to see Alfred’s reaction. But Alfred was merely standing there, calm, passive, holding the costume draped over one arm.
Quickly Bruce rewound the tape, ran it again. And again. Two-Face was saying, “Where light is shadow and freaks are kings.” This time, though, he didn’t turn and look at Bruce. Instead he just sat there, staring at the doctor.
The doctor said from offscreen, “And where would that be, Harvey?”
Dent studied him a moment and then said, “You’re so smart. You figure it out.” Then he leaned back and lapsed into silence and not all the doctor’s probing could prompt another response out of him.
There were other times, other sessions on the tape, but a disconcerted Bruce Wayne decided now was not the time to hear them. Instead he shut off the VCR and brought the TV on line.
The station owner, a man with whom Bruce had had dinner several times and who considered Bruce Wayne to be one of the true treasures of Gotham City, was staring into the camera with the words “EDITORIAL” pasted across the upper right-hand side. “The city should charge Batman with felony landmarks destruction. His vigilantism is a plague on Gotham.”
Bruce moved away from the TV, making a mental note not to pick up the dinner check next time, and stepped into a high-tech workout machine. His pressure on the footpads brought the machine to electronic life. “Good morning, Mr. Wayne. Select difficulty level.”
“Bruce, please,” he corrected, feeling that if he couldn’t be informal with an electronic system of weights and pulleys, who could he let down his hair with? “Maximum resistance.”
He began running through his regimen. Alfred, meantime, had come out of the bathroom, having begun to run Bruce’s bath for him. The butler slowed and glanced appreciatively at the TV screen, and Bruce looked over to see what had caught Alfred’s attention.
It was a file interview with Chase Meridian, as she dissected the mind-set of multiple personalities.
Bruce made an impatient noise. “You know what she said to Batman last night? She practically accused him of being crazy.”
He waited for Alfred to concur loyally that such an assessment was completely out of bounds. Tacky, even. Instead, Alfred considered the matter and then said, “Sir . . . you are a good man. A brave man. But perhaps you are not the most sane man.”
The comment stopped Bruce cold as he turned to look at Alfred. Any number of times, this man who had become like a substitute father to him had made oblique comments about Bruce’s mind-set. Most of them had been cloaked in withering or drily sarcastic terms. But Alfred had never made such a flat, inflectionless . . . and e
ven slightly frightening . . . assessment of his employer’s mental state.
Alfred immediately became aware that perhaps he had crossed the line that he should not have. Trying to angle the conversation into a more social, even jocular, direction, he suggested, “Perhaps the lady is just what the doctor ordered. She seems lovely . . .”
But Bruce wouldn’t be put off. Instead he stared at Alfred as if he were dissecting him with his eyes in hopes of finding some sort of answer to long-standing questions.
“Alfred,” he said slowly, “why did I become Batman?”
You’re asking me? was the first thing to come to Alfred’s mind. But he had the good grace not to say it. Instead he simply repeated what Bruce himself had said on occasion. “To avenge your dear parents. To protect the innocent.”
But Bruce waved off the rationalizations as if they no longer interested him. “To fight crime, of course. But there’s something else . . .”
He looked toward the window, blinking against the autumn sun. The day couldn’t have been more unlike that hideous night. “What was I doing outside the night of my parents’ wake? What sent me running into the storm?”
Alfred shrugged. From a distance of many years, he was able to look back at himself, running around like a madman and shouting Bruce’s name into the storm. At the time that very question had flamed in Alfred’s mind. Where could the boy have gone? What could have driven him out? Why the bloody hell wasn’t I watching him?
“I don’t know,” Alfred admitted. He thought of Bruce’s parents for the first time in . . . oh . . . a day or two. “Such a tragic loss. Rain fell like tears that night.”
He wasn’t sure if Bruce had entirely heard him. Instead he was running that night through his mind, trying to reconstruct events. “I remember racing through the fields. Falling into the cave,” and he started ticking off the moments on his fingers, “the bat chasing me . . . those fangs . . . that breath.” Then he paused. “But there was something else. Something I was running from. I just can’t remember.”
The phone rang, and to Bruce it seemed as loud as a cannon barrage. He started slightly as Alfred picked up the phone.
“Wayne Manor.” He listened for a moment, and then turned to Bruce and said, “It’s Commissioner Gordon, sir. There’s been an accident at Wayne Enterprises.”
Suddenly the exercise machine shut down automatically. The device had been monitoring his breathing and respiration, and apparently hadn’t liked what it found. “Routine terminated. Recommend rest. You need a vacation . . . Bruce.”
Bruce and Alfred looked at each other. Clearly it was shaping up to be one of those days.
Edward Nygma leaned against the outside of his cubicle, sobbing profusely onto the shoulder of the head of personnel. She was patting him awkwardly, not quite sure what to make of this display of grief.
“Why? Oh, why?” he moaned inconsolably. “I can’t believe it. Two years. Working in the same office. Shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek . . .” Then he stopped crying for just long enough to clarify, “We’re talking face, by the way.” Then he went right back into his histrionics. “. . . and then this.”
“This,” as it happened, was a note (with a few tear stains on it) that Nygma was thrusting into the confused woman’s hands. “I found it in my cubicle. You’ll find handwriting and sentence structure match his exactly . . .” he added in a perfectly rational voice before breaking down once more. “I couldn’t possibly continue here. The memories. I’ll get my things.”
He ducked quickly into his cubicle, where he’d already boxed up his invention. The woman in personnel used the opportunity to slip away, which was fine by Edward. He, likewise, was going to be using the opportunity to slip away.
He heard voices. One of them was Bruce Wayne’s. Another was older, gruff. Sounded extremely . . . coplike. There were a few other knickknacks still scattered around Edward’s cubicle, but nothing important and certainly nothing he couldn’t live without. He took one final glance around, as if to imprint on his mind a final image of what he was leaving behind. That way he could carry it with him mentally as he progressed toward a greater and far more glorious future—a future that would not be realized by being detained for more questioning. He knew he was at a delicate stage right now. He wasn’t absolutely sure that he could contain the buzzing in his brain. He wanted to crow his achievements, boast about his prowess. Perhaps even chatter about Stickley’s gloriously ludicrous expression as his chair had toppled backwards to oblivion.
That would not be good.
Instead, he took the opportunity to bolt out a side door, so that by the time Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon walked past, he was barreling down the steps of the emergency stairway. If covering one’s involvement in a homicide couldn’t be considered an emergency, then what could?
Wayne and Gordon stood in front of the security console, studying the tape from the previous night. Stickley was clearly visible writing a note which they could safely assume was the suicide note that had been turned in to the head of personnel. Upon finishing, Stickley laid the note down carefully. Then he took a chair, gripped it firmly, and . . . using it as a battering ram . . . charged toward the large window at the end of the corridor. He smashed through it, clutching the chair, and vanished from sight.
“That all jibes,” said Gordon. “What we found on the ground . . . well, there wasn’t really enough to tell much of anything. Both your man and the chair, shattered to . . .” He paused. “Sorry, Bruce. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Bruce nodded in acknowledgment.
“In any event, this looks pretty cut-and-dried. Definitely suicide. Thanks for the help, Bruce. We’ll be in touch.”
Bruce shook hands briskly, and then turned away from Gordon.
He walked through the electronics division, stopping to whisper a few words to shaken employees, telling them to take a couple of days if they so desired, with pay of course.
He paused momentarily at Edward Nygma’s cubicle, thinking about the intensity he’d seen in the man’s eyes the other day. Nygma’s ideas might have been a bit odd, but that sort of passion—if properly channeled—could accomplish miracles. That was something Bruce Wayne certainly knew better than anyone else. Perhaps after this fiasco was the time to take Nygma aside under less-pressured circumstances. Start again . . .
But the cubicle was almost empty. Nygma’s personal items, and that odd-looking device of his, were gone.
Bruce stared at the vacant cubicle for a time. And then he headed to his office.
Moments later Margaret was following him in, scribbling notes furiously. “Make sure Stickley’s family is taken care of. Full benefits.”
“He wasn’t on our corporate life insurance policy.”
“He is now,” said Bruce, and repeated, “Full benefits.”
She nodded. There was no point in arguing, and besides, she had no intention of trying to act the heavy in this instance. Taking the opportunity to attend to unfinished business, she flipped to a different page in her notebooks and said, “Gossip Gerty and the society columnists have called a record thirty-two times. I think if they don’t know soon who you plan to take to the charity circus, the world is surely going to end.”
Bruce was about to answer when he noticed something on his desk. It was an envelope. “What’s this?”
She was genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone.”
He flipped it over and scrutinized it. “No postmark. No stamp.” He pulled it open and read off, “ ‘If you look at the numbers upon my face, you won’t find 13 anyplace.’ ”
Margaret wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting inside the envelope, but it certainly hadn’t been that. “Say what?”
He turned the paper over, but there was no signature. He looked back at the message. “It’s a riddle. Numbers upon my face. One through twelve. No thirteen . . .” He shrugged at the obviousness of it. “A clock.”
She scratched her head. “Who would send you
riddles?”
He turned to her and said, “Maggie, that’s the riddle.”
The run-down tenement building was notable only for its unique decoration. It had once been directly across the street from an outfit called Criss Cross Cleaners, and consequently, a large ad for the dry cleaners consisting of an immense crossword puzzle adorned the exterior. The wall painting was the only reminder that the cleaner had ever been in business there. The paint was peeling and, to make matters worse, graffiti artists had filled in a few of the empty “puzzle spots” with letters that spelled out obscenities.
All of this was irrelevant to at least one of the building’s tenants, a man who had never viewed the place as anything other than a brief rest stop on his determined drive along the superhighway to success.
The problem was that the tenant had always assumed that Bruce Wayne would present him with the opportunity needed to get that final, extra mile. But it was patently clear to Edward Nygma that Bruce Wayne was too self-absorbed, self-important, and self . . . well . . . self-ish, to give a damn about Edward Nygma and his plans.
Indeed, as he worked in his cluttered apartment, putting the finishing touch on his second riddle, he had finally begun to grasp just what had happened. Years ago, when he had looked into the eyes of young Bruce Wayne, he’d seen a peer. But when the adult Bruce Wayne had come face-to-face with Edward Nygma, Wayne had seen only a rival. That was it, of course. It was painfully, even agonizingly, obvious.
“Guess what, Bruce Wayne,” he muttered. “Now I’m the guy with all the answers.”
He turned and looked lovingly at his modified brain scan equipment.
The box.
It sparkled and sputtered slightly, running self-tests and diagnostics. It was almost ready. Almost ready.
He rose and went to the window, resting a hand gently on the Box’s gleaming surface. He looked out over the ugliness of his neighborhood, toward the gleaming spires of the uptown sections of Gotham. And beyond that, up in the hills . . . the residence where Bruce Wayne sat on high, like great Zeus, looking down at the puny mortals and rendering judgments. This person shall be raised up, this other one cast down.