At ten minutes to midnight, on the roof of the main building in the port of Gotham, Batman finally broke radio silence. “Jim,” he said quietly, resisting the urge to touch his earpiece.
“Go ahead, Batman.” Gordon sounded on edge.
“I’ve been here since ten thirty looking for hidden traps, henchmen, or any other nasty surprises,” Batman told him. “So far, nothing.”
“Any sign of her?” Gordon asked.
“Speak of the devil,” Batman replied as a shadow moved out of the surrounding darkness to stand in a circle of dim yellow light in the middle of the pier—a slender young blonde woman wearing a raincoat and carrying a briefcase. “On time, all alone, and looking pretty scared. Going dark.”
Which was a funny way to say he was going radio silent again, Batman thought; he was always dark.
* * *
“You have some information for me?” Batman asked quietly.
Harleen Quinzel jumped and turned around, one hand pressed to her chest. “Oh, my!” she said breathily. “S-sure. It’s all right here, just like I said.” She held up the briefcase.
She really was tiny, Batman thought, just like a gymnast. “Open it,” he told her.
She blinked up at him, momentarily baffled. “Oh! Of course! You’re thinking booby trap, right?” She gave a small nervous laugh as she opened the case and showed him the papers inside. “I don’t blame you, considering.”
Batman took out a couple of papers. They looked like schematics for something but the light was too poor to see them clearly.
“So, is that okay?” she asked, her voice hopeful.
“I want Jim Gordon to take a look at these. If what you say is true, the police will have to mobili—”
“TRAITOR!” roared a familiar voice from somewhere out on the water.
“Oh, no—noooooo!” Harleen Quinzel wailed.
Even in the bad light, Batman could see the Joker standing up in the approaching motorboat. He was holding a machine gun.
“Nobody turns stoolie on me and lives, do you hear? Nobody!” The Joker laughed maniacally and began firing.
“Down!” Batman dived for the weather-beaten wooden planks, pulling Quinzel with him and shielding her with his body. In the back of his mind, he was wondering how the Joker could have gotten so close without his hearing a motor. Still shielding Quinzel, he slipped a batarang out of his utility belt and whipped it toward the Joker. It put a stop to both the laughter and the shooting by taking his head clean off.
Batman leaped to his feet and saw the Joker’s head rolling around in the bottom of the boat as sparks sprayed from his neck. A robot? He was turning toward Harleen Quinzel when he felt a sudden sharp pain in the side of his neck and fell to his knees. Papers flew out of the open briefcase and scattered on the pier around him, magazine pages, takeout menus, flyers.
Fingers dug under the side of his cowl, found his earpiece, and yanked it out. “Sweet dreams, suckah,” she said in her ditz-voice.
* * *
The Brooklyn accent that had followed Batman down into darkness now led him up out of it.
“Lemme see, his arms are double-bound, ditto his legs—”
He tried to say something but could only produce a wordless groan.
“—took off the belt, triple checked all my knots and locks—”
There was something wrong with his head; all his weight seemed to be pressing against the very top of his skull. It was an effort to open his eyes, and when he did, nothing he saw made sense. Light fixtures stuck up from the floor and there was furniture on the ceiling. Barstools dangled around a bar where a tank was filling with water. There were some weird little shadows wiggling around in it. But the tank was hanging upside down from the ceiling—the water shouldn’t have stayed in it.
A familiar, clown-white face floated into view, bells on two floppy points jingling cheerfully, also upside down.
“Harley… Quinn…” Batman groaned.
“Oh, you’re awake!” she squealed. “Finally! Gee, that knockout drug really hit ya hard!” She stood back and gestured. “But you been hanging upside down for a while.” She drank something purple from a bottle. Grape soda? “All that blood rushing to your head’s gonna make you a little logy. Or a lot.” She leaned back and gave him a long up-and-down look. Or a down-and-up look. “Yeah, you won’t get outta this one.”
Batman fixed his gaze on a spot on the opposite wall while his inner ear tried to decide which way was up. “The Joker,” he managed after a bit. “Where—”
“Not this time, B-man,” Harley Quinn said cheerfully. “No Joker, no gas-bombs, no city in peril—just you, that tank, and me.”
The spot on the wall resolved itself into an upside-down, very distinctive swordfish. He was in Aquacade, Gotham City’s premiere seafood restaurant. Reservations were hard to come by. Unless you didn’t mind hanging from the ceiling after the place was closed.
“I want ya to know I went to a lot of trouble to pull this off,” Harley was saying in her annoying put-on ditz-voice. “Not only did I have to drag your carcass up to this place all by myself, but—” She gestured at the tank. “I had to raid every fish collector and aquarium in town to get enough piranhas for this stunt. And I hate fish! Ick!”
Had she just said piranhas? “Then why bother?” Batman asked.
“To show Mr. J I could pull off one of his gags!” As if she were a Girl Scout going for a merit badge. “It’s called ‘The Death of a Hundred Smiles,’ which has to be the best title for anything, ever. Mr. J gave up on it ’cause he couldn’t get the piranhas to smile.”
Yes, she’d said piranhas, all right, Batman thought. Unless he was dreaming, but that was entirely too much to hope for.
“But then, I had the bright idea of hanging the victim—which is to say, you, Batsie—upside down. That way, it’ll look to you like they’re all smiling! Pretty clever, huh?”
“Brilliant,” Batman said flatly. “Genius.”
Harley Quinn shrugged, laughing at him. “Okay, so you’re less than thrilled. I don’t blame ya. But for what it’s worth, this ain’t poisonal.”
“You mean ‘personal’?” He had to keep her talking, Batman thought.
“That’s what I said: poisonal.” Harley Quinn made a face at him. “Anyway, I actually enjoyed this little romp, ya know? But the time comes when a gal wants more from life. And what this gal wants now is to settle down with her puddin’.” She sighed and Batman could practically see cartoon hearts and Cupids dancing in the air around her head.
“You mean you and the Joker?” Batman said.
“Right-a-rooney!” Harley Quinn sang gleefully.
It was too much. Batman burst out laughing, making his whole body shake and sway over the tank.
“I never heard you laugh before,” Harley said uneasily, raising her voice to make herself heard. “I don’t like it.”
“Cut it out!” she yelled. “Yer givin’ me the creeps!”
After another fifteen seconds or so, Batman let himself wind down. “Harley, you’re such a fool. The Joker doesn’t love anyone or anything except himself.”
“That’s not true!” she snapped.
“Oh, please,” Batman said. “The moment you set foot in Arkham, the Joker had you pegged as hired help.”
“No!” she yelled. “You’re a big fat liar. He told me things about himself—secret things, things he never told anyone else!”
“Like what?” Batman gave a short laugh. “His abusive father or his alcoholic mom? Or was it the runaway orphan routine—that’s a tearjerker, very moving. He’s gets a lot of sympathy with that one.”
“Stop it!” Harley started to cry. “You’re making me confused!”
“I’m trying to remember what he told that one parole officer years ago—oh, yeah. ‘There was only one time I ever saw Dad really happy. He took me to the ice show when I was seven—’”
Tears ran down Harley Quinn’s cheeks, leaving flesh-colored trails in the clown white. “He said it was the circus,” she said in a small voice.
“Circus, ice show, carnival, puppet show—he’s got a million of them, Harley,” Batman said. “And like any other comedian, he tailors the material to his audience—he reads the room and goes with whatever he thinks will work best.”
“No!” Harley screamed at him. “You’re wrong! My puddin’ loves me. He loves me!You’re the problem! Always tryin’ to come between us. We could be happy if it weren’t for you! But now you’re gonna die and we’ll live happily ever after!”
“Oh, sure,” Batman said. “Except he’ll never believe you did it.”
“He will so!” Harley Quinn squeaked with outrage. “I’m gettin’ it on video!” She pointed at the video-camera set up on a tripod a few feet away.
“It’s easy to fake a video these days—even a baby could do it,” said Batman. “Think, Harley. How will the Joker know you really killed me? There won’t be any hard evidence—the only things these fish’ll leave are some scraps of cloth and a few bone shards. Those could have come from anything. Well, okay, you do have my belt—but that’s not the same as my body. Sorry, but you’ll never prove you killed me—not to him.”
“We’ll just see about that!” Harley Quinn told him and pulled out a cell phone. “I’ll show you.”
* * *
Nothing on his desk looked good to him, and it was making the Joker question himself in a profound way. What if this were more than a creative dry spell—what if he’d really lost it?
Since his escape from Arkham, he should have been wreaking high-powered, big-league havoc on Gotham City, the kind that made all good citizens quake in their shoes and hide under their beds, freaking out over what might happen next. But he couldn’t come up with a single new earth-shaking idea. And when he looked to his old ideas for inspiration, he saw nothing of his comic genius. It all looked lame and boring, clichéd. There was nothing that hadn’t already been done. None of it was funny, it was all just crap that was too silly, too “Riddler”—that hack—or just plain unworthy of him.
How could this be? He used to dream up comic gems with every other breath. Being on the lam had never interfered with his creative process and this wasn’t the first time he’d escaped—
Only he hadn’t, he realized suddenly. He hadn’t escaped from Arkham; Harley Quinn had broken him out. No wonder things were all wrong—she’d taken his mojo! He was supposed to call the shots but she’d turned him into her second banana.
Harley Quinn definitely had to go.
The phone rang, shattering his focus. He hated cell phones with a passion but Harley insisted they have them—another example of how she was calling the shots! He’d get rid of her and the phone, too. Just as soon as he found wherever it was hiding under the papers on his desk. When he finally got his hands on it, he was surprised to see what appeared on the screen.
HARLEY
Why would she call him when she was here? Or she was supposed to be—
“Harley, where the heck are you?” he asked impatiently.
Seconds later he was running for the car. He had a vague memory of Harley saying they couldn’t use that car anymore because the cops had a BOLO on it. But she didn’t tell him what to do anymore.
He could just imagine what the rest of the criminal world would say if this got out, the Joker thought as he roared through the empty nighttime streets. The Penguin: There goes the Joker—you know, the guy whose girlfriend killed Batman! And Two-Face: I never thought he was that funny to begin with. Worst of all, the Riddler would rub it in every time they met: Well, hello, uh—what’s your name again? Oh, right—Mr. Harley Quinn!
That hack.
* * *
“Now you’ll see, Mr. Smarty-Bat,” Harley said gleefully. “When I told Mr. J what I was doing, he was so thrilled, he couldn’t even speak! He’s on his way over right now to watch me feed you to the fish. And then—” She gave a long, happy sigh as her mind filled with joyful images of their happy-ever-after: wedding, explosions, children, holidays, more explosions, and then their golden years, when they would still be madly in love.
“HAAAAAAARRRRRRRLLLLLLEEEEEEEY!”
She jumped up from where she’d been sitting in front of the piranha tank on the bar and ran toward the Joker with open arms. “Puddin’! You’re just in time to see—”
Everything disappeared in a blast of blinding pain, as if a flash-bang had hit her in the face. It hurt so much she was barely aware of hitting the floor.
After a moment, she sat up, holding the side of her face, which was now throbbing. Had Batman gotten loose and hit her? No, he was still hanging over the fish tank.
“Hello, Batman,” the Joker said conversationally.
“Evening,” said Batman, as if he weren’t about to die the Death of a Hundred Smiles.
“’Scuse me,” the Joker told him. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“Take your time. No hurry,” Batman replied. “I’ll wait here.”