2

Gordon took another sip of his tepid coffee and handed the cup to his subordinate. He pulled open the door, which moved on silent hinges, and Batman stepped inside without saying a word. Gordon followed.

They’d had a conversation earlier by phone, and something in his gut told the Commissioner he should be here when the man in the mask arrived. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on why, but he hadn’t made it this far by ignoring his cop’s intuition.

The reception area was well lit, but the hallways beyond were jumbles of angular gloom. Sitting at the receptionist’s station was a woman with short-cropped blonde hair. There was a sign on her desk.

You don’t have to
be crazy to work
here—but it helps!

She held an unlit cigarette in her hand and gaped as Batman stood over her. Mutely she pointed down one of the halls, where the shadows of prison bars cut obliquely across the walls like glimpses of the internal landscapes of the inmates’ minds. This, Gordon knew, was the maximum-security wing. Batman strode past.

The woman picked up her cigarette lighter, then stopped before sparking it to flame. Smoking was forbidden here, but who enforced such rules at Arkham? The stale scent in the air told a different story. Perhaps the sight of Batman had suggested to her that she address her vices.

If only that worked on everyone, Gordon mused.

Gordon started after the caped man. As he did, he paused momentarily to touch the peak of his water-soaked hat. A courtly gesture to the receptionist out of step with modern times, but there you had it—he was a man with one foot in the past, but understanding time stood still for no one.

He followed the dark form down the corridor, Batman’s footfalls a whisper to the slap of Gordon’s shoes against tile. Periodically halogen lights gleamed overhead, so that their shadows were dark and crisp on the sickly yellow walls. They passed a metal door marked with a name and a number.

Wesker, A.
0770

There was a window cut into the door with three bars. Gordon turned his head slightly to see into the cell and noted Arnold Wesker sitting on his bed. He was doing a crossword puzzle, most likely in the Gotham Gazette, one of the two dailies in town.

Wesker’s was a classic case of dissociative identity disorder. Alone, he was a quiet man of modest means and ambitions—but he had a talent. He was quite adept at throwing his voice in his use of his ventriloquist dummies. Unlike most such acts, however, the little pals sitting on his lap took on personas of their own. Nor were his ambitions the same as other performers, entertaining at kids’ parties or on the stage between the burlesque acts.

Through the forceful personality of the wood-and-wires construct he called Scarface, Wesker planned and pulled off daring heists and murders. He dressed the dummy in ’30s style gangster attire and outfitted it with a working miniature Tommy gun. While there were many social norms Wesker alone was too timid to cross, Scarface had no such limits.

“Bats.”

The word was startling in the silence of the hallway. It came from the once matinee handsome Harvey Dent. They had turned a corner and passed his cell. Dent had formerly been the district attorney of Gotham City, a hard-nosed yet fair prosecutor who was being groomed to run for the mayor’s office. But a tough public official like that made dangerous enemies. During a very public trial the gangster Sal Maroni threw sulfuric acid into Dent’s face, permanently and hideously disfiguring one side of his countenance. The incident drove Dent insane.

After sessions with Dent, Arkham Asylum’s chief psychiatrist Dr. Joan Leland speculated that his personality had been fractured due, in part, to an abusive childhood. At any rate, following the incident “Two-Face” had been born. The Gotham villain would flip an old silver dollar coin, one side scarred, the other pristine, to choose how to carry off a scheme, or even decide the fate of an individual—sometimes permanently.

Again, Batman didn’t break his stride. Dent stood at the door, his hands on the bars of his cell as he watched them pass. Gordon glanced at him, though. So much promise, so much disappointment.

The two drew close to their destination, a cell numbered 0801 and indicating, tellingly, “Name Unknown.” A second uniformed police officer stood there on duty, arms crossed, slumping against the door, a bored look on his doughy face. Badoya, his name tag read. He had an old-fashioned ring of keys fastened to his belt loop. His nose looked as if it had been broken at some time in the past. The cop came alert as the two visitors arrived and unnecessarily saluted his boss, the Commissioner.

“If you would,” Batman said. The cop out front and this man were not the usual guards. If he were to speculate, he’d say both were part of the around the clock duty assigned to the Commissioner, and that Gordon had put them in place for his arrival tonight.

Normally there would be an orderly on duty whose function was to unlock the cell doors. Yet even by Arkham standards the occupant with the chalk-white complexion required extra precautions. For the Joker had plagued Batman and the city for many years with his deadly machinations. The giggling mass murderer was responsible for a body count that hadn’t been—couldn’t be tabulated, but it was monstrously high.

Or it could be that Gordon was more concerned with what the masked man had in mind with this meeting, thus putting his own men in place.

The officer unclipped the key ring, selected the right key and unlocked the thick door. Badoya and Commissioner Gordon waited in the hallway as Batman stepped through. In the shadowy cell he looked for all the world like a giant bat.

*   *   *

The door softly clanged shut behind him.

He stood there for a moment, surveying the spartan ten-by-twenty-foot cell. A simple overhead light hung from the ceiling over a metal table that was built into the concrete wall. The Joker sat, most of his features hidden in the gloom beyond the beam from the light. He was playing a game of solitaire. Behind him a bunk bed, also connected to the wall, was unmade.

As Batman grasped the back of the only other chair in the room, he wondered what sort of dreams haunted the man. Did he even sleep that much? Judging from the reports, the answer was no.

Then again, if the masked manhunter got four hours’ sleep in the early morning hours, it was as if he’d taken the day off and slept in. In the Joker’s case, he considered, that unbalanced mind was always too busy working out some fantastic endeavor that would cause mayhem and panic. Batman and Gordon had discussed at length the fact that most of the Joker’s crimes were motivated, not by profit, but by pure effect. Many of them were as insane as their creator.

Once he had used a derivative of his Joker venom to mutate the fish in Gotham Harbor. He and his henchmen turned them pasty white with features like his own; red-lipped stretched death’s-head grins. After an initial panic the fish turned out not to be poisonous as the Joker sought to patent the process, thinking he would get a cut for all of the fish sold in Gotham.

Another time he sought violent revenge on five former members of his gang who in one way or the other had betrayed him. This forced Batman to protect people he’d ordinarily be hunting. Still another time he’d built three-story-high jack-in-the-boxes and positioned them in several locations around Gotham City. When the huge grinning clown heads popped out on giant springs, shards of glass spewed forth from their smiling mouths. Dozens of people had been injured, often blinded when the glass slit their eyes. More than a few had died.

The Joker sometimes called such schemes “gags.”

Big joke.

Yet here he sat, calmly playing a card game, his namesake card prominently displayed. There was an empty card box on the bed marked “Apex Playing Cards.”

The masked man moved the chair over to the table and sat opposite the cell’s occupant. So far, the Clown Prince of Crime hadn’t acknowledged his presence, but that wasn’t uncharacteristic of him. In truth, nothing about him could be called “characteristic.” The one constant with the Ace of Knaves was his unpredictability.

Ranting one moment, then coolly calculating the next. Whatever weird, delusional logic guided him, it was his alone. He allowed no one a glimpse behind the wall of his madness. Numerous attempts had been made to ascertain what was going on inside of his head, in the hope that they might derive a methodology that would help him. Those efforts had failed.

Nevertheless, Batman acknowledged, here he was.

The triangle of light bathed the table and cards in a yellow glow. Their torsos and hands clearly visible, both men remained with their heads and shoulders in shadow. Hints of the light glinted off the Joker’s wildly unkempt green hair and the points of Batman’s cowl. The Joker regarded the two of clubs in his hand, holding it aloft for a beat as if for dramatic effect… then he played it.

Fnap. Card against card.

“Hello,” Batman said evenly. “I came to talk.”

No response.

The Joker played a jack of clubs. Fnap. Water dripped intermittently from the faucet, part of the cell’s built-in metal sink. The drips weren’t regularly spaced, Batman noted. Rather they occurred randomly. A perfect metaphor for the actions of the cell’s inhabitant; a rational man would have given up on this agent of chaos long ago.

“I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me.”

Again, no reaction from his arch-nemesis dressed in an inmate’s drab gray shirt and pants. Where others had their last names on a patch sewn where a breast pocket would have been, for him it was just his cell number.

“About what’s going to happen to us in the end.”

It was warm in the cell, yet the man’s pale skin was perfectly dry. It was an oddity Batman had observed over the years. For instance, he’d encountered the Joker dressed in wool coats when the temperature was in the nineties, and there had been no perspiration on that pasty face of his. Perhaps it was a weird byproduct of whatever it was that had transformed him.

“We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we?”

Fnap.

The Joker played another card, loudly slapping it on a pile of others. Batman gritted his teeth, his broad shoulders sagging imperceptibly. Why try? What could have motivated him to do this? The man had kidnapped children and left them scarred for life, if he didn’t snuff them out for a lark. All without the slightest hint of remorse. Had he been born that way, or had some horrible incident made him what he was now? Was he tormented by the death of a loved one, as young Bruce Wayne had been that momentous night?

Even after all his training, all the good he’d done, he could never shake the slow-motion images, snippets of which replayed themselves each time he put on the uniform of his alter ego. It might happen as well when he was exercising, or watching a news show, simply to see what was going on in the world.

Or just the other day, when the sky was overcast and the rain a day away, cold wind buffeting the windows. He’d been sitting in his maple-paneled study, going over a sheaf of Wayne Enterprises paperwork listening to one of Bach’s sacred cantatas, “Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid.” It was melancholy music to match his melancholy mood.

The tragedy that shaped his life had rippled up from his subconscious as he sat there, working through the events when he and Barbara had raided Maxie Zeus’s lair. Not unlike the Joker, Zeus was his own form of warped self-image, having styled himself on the Greek god of thunder. Entirely unlike the Joker, however, the gangster’s motivations, based on grandeur and greed, were readily understandable.

Maybe that was what had brought him here.

After the Zeus mission, he’d felt somehow off-balance—though he would never admit it. Not to Batgirl, not to Nightwing. It was as if he’d begun to question his perceptions, that the arena in which he operated had shifted. He’d been thrown off, and he knew he had to regain his balance.

His dealings with the likes of Clayface, Poison Ivy, even relatively inconsequential criminals like the Zodiac Master all boiled down to one core objective—to eradicate their kind once and for all. To restore order, at least enough that the normal denizens of the city could go about their lives without worrying that homicidal vines might suddenly erupt through the floor, or a pint-sized wooden puppet might open fire in a public space.

Such a mission demanded absolute focus.

Yet Barbara didn’t seem thrown off balance. As Batgirl she approached this burden of the never-ending mission in cavalier fashion, and still got the job done. Who was he to impose his single-minded brand of morality on a colleague? Dick, too, was more likely to accompany action with a sarcastic remark. And like Batgirl, when the situation demanded it he remained focused and disciplined. He was proud too that Dick Grayson had segued from his role as Robin to become Nightwing, leader of the Teen Titans.

*   *   *

Focus, Batman reminded himself. Focus on the task at hand.

“Perhaps you’ll kill me,” he said, his voice offering no hint of his internal conflict. “Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later.” He paused, but still there was no response. “I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.”

The Joker played another card. Thudding his gloved fists on the table, Batman again gritted his teeth, fighting the frustration roiling within him.

“Are you listening to me?” he demanded. “It’s life and death that I’m discussing here. Maybe my death…”

The Joker flipped over another card. Batman’s hand shot out and he gripped the Joker by the wrist. He wasn’t going to be dismissed.

“Maybe yours.” He withdrew his gloved grip, pointing an accusing finger at his opposite. That got a reaction. The Joker glared at him from the shadows, holding his hand upright next to his face, gripping it with the other as if offended that Batman had dared to touch him.

“I don’t fully understand why ours should be such a fatal relationship,” the cowled man continued, “but I don’t want your murder on my…

“…hands…”

Batman stared at his palms. Stark against the dark blue of his glove, streaks of white greasepaint stood out.

That’s not possible. The Joker’s white did not come off.

The defiant gleam left the Joker’s eyes.

Batman lunged across the table in one smooth motion. The Joker didn’t flinch. He just sat there, seeming almost… unplugged. His eyes went wide.

Fear.

Batman put his hand to the Joker’s face.

“Don’t,” the person who wasn’t the Joker said, his monotone voice almost too soft to hear. The voice was wrong. The Joker had a particular lilt to his speech patterns. There was no mistaking it. That voice echoed in his nightmares.

“Don’t you touch me!” the man hissed between clenched teeth. “You’re not allowed to…” The white came away on Batman’s fingertips, leaving streaks of flesh exposed beneath them.

“… touch me.”

He pulled the gray-garbed inmate into the cone of light. Stark terror reflected in the man’s expression as Batman stared at him with unbridled fury. Cunning, ruthlessness, twisted mirth, those attributes he’d seen in the Joker’s eyes. Not confusion. Never. This was an imposter—but it meant his long-time adversary was gone. Gripping the man by the front of his shirt, pulling him close until they were nose-to-nose, he uttered a growl.

“Where is he?”

“Aaaaaa! Oh, God, no…” the man pleaded.

“Do you realize?” Batman said, his baritone voice echoing through the tightly confined space. “Do you realize what you’ve set free?” Guttural, almost too low to hear clearly, he repeated, “Where is he?”

“Get him offa me!” the pretender screamed. Then came unintelligible gurgles from his throat. He became stony and frozen, near catatonic.

*   *   *

“Dear God, he’s gone berserk,” Gordon said, hearing the screams from his position outside the cell. He was surprised at how matter-of-fact he sounded. An acknowledgment that deep down he always knew the man who donned the garb of a walking bat didn’t have both feet planted solidly in the sane world. “Open that door, man,” he commanded Badoya.

His hand shaking slightly, looking as if that was the last thing he wanted to do, the officer got the key in the lock and turned. Belying a man of his years, Gordon felt a burst of adrenaline and easily slammed the door open. In the cell the bat loomed over its helpless prey.

“Okay, that’s enough!” Gordon barked. “You know the laws regarding mistreatment of inmates as well as I do! If you harm one hair on his head—” He peered at the man the Dark Knight held, and choked off the rest of the words. Oh, God… not again. The wall-to-wall media saturation would itself be maddening.

Batman straightened and turned toward the two as if they were interlopers on his private keep of the depraved. In his upraised hand he held a green wig.

“Commissioner,” he said to the shocked top cop, “if you’re concerned about it, it’s yours. Take care of it.” His mouth a tight thin line below the cowl, he tossed the wig aside and returned his attention to the pretend Clown of Chaos.

“Now, you whimpering little smear of slime, I’m going to ask you politely just one more time…” He paused to let the words sink in.

“Where is he?”