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#1
JAN 11 |
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“Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes”
You are not a home for the hearts of your brothers
And God does not care for your benevolence any more
Than he cares for the lack of it in others.”
-Nick Cave, ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’
I’ve been watching her sleep for close to an hour now.
The light of two dozen candles gutters softly in the breeze from open bay windows; I’m fascinated by the way it plays across her skin, and in her black hair that spills luxuriantly across cream satin pillows. Her lips are slightly parted, with a glimpse of that crooked smile I know so well, one which has mocked me with taunts and promises alike over the years we have known one another. She radiates heat, and a subtle perfume, reminiscent of orchids and cinnamon.
There’s an uncommon gentleness about her like this, an innocence. Tonight has been everything I could have wanted. Everything. So why do I feel so… lost? You’d think, given my reputation as a decadent ladies’ man, that all this would come naturally to me. It doesn’t. And perhaps that is the answer in itself.
Bruce Wayne may have spent countless evenings wining and dining the rich and the beautiful in this old mansion, and need and circumstance may well have led some of those women, half-clothed and breathless, to this very bed. But Bruce Wayne is just a cipher, a character in a play that forever veers between farce and tragedy. He is a mask. And for the true face behind that mask—for me—this is a new experience. Unexpected. Unsettling.
Liberating.
“Has anyone ever told you that you think too much?” she breathes, her voice as soft and dark as twilight. Her eyes flicker open, a deep, luminous green that I’ve always found bewitching.
“How long have you been awake?”
“I wasn’t really sleeping. Just… recovering.” She smiles, then stretches, her lithe body arcing evocatively beneath the sheets beside me. A small sound of contentment escapes from the back of her throat, and she licks her lips with the point of a tiny, pink tongue. “I could get used to this,” she murmurs, fixing me with those wicked eyes.
“Yes,” I say, quietly. “I think I could too.”
I lean forward then, reaching out to place the palm of my hand on the jut of her hip, encased in satin. She breathes more deeply and swells to meet me like a tide. Her eyes shimmer like smoke. My fingertips travel, searching. And then, in the distance…
…I hear the faint but insistent ringing of bells.
“Ignore it,” she demands, seeing me stiffen, my attention suddenly alert. “Let your butler earn his keep.”
“He already does, as you well know.”
“Well then…”
The bells continue to clamour. I grimace. “I have to go.”
Her eyes widen then, ferocious. There’s no smoke without fire.
“It’s the Batphone,” I say. To which she arches a perfect eyebrow.
“The what?”
“If I’m too… preoccupied to notice the Bat Signal, then the police have a direct—”
“You have a Batphone,” she says, slowly. “To go with your Batmobile and your Batcave and your Batarangs?”
“Yes. I also have a Batplane.”
“I see.” She purses her lips. “You know, there’s obsession and then there’s obsession…”
“It’s nothing of the kind,” I snap, sliding out of bed and standing there in the candlelight. She appraises me with that same, amused expression. Specifically the solitary item of clothing I’m wearing.
“Batshorts,” she purrs. “Meiow.”
“Alfred bought them for me. It’s the English sense of humour.”
“I see.”
“I’m going now.”
“Uh-huh.” She smiles, sweetly. “Lunch tomorrow?”
“Love to.”
“Good. I’ll call you on my special Catphone.”
And then she giggles. I scowl. I try to keep scowling even when she slips out from beneath the sheets with a whisper of satin on skin and crawls to the edge of the bed before me, her hair falling down about her shoulders like black rain and her eyes shining. She isn’t wearing Batshorts. Or any other kind of shorts. She brushes her lips against mine, biting with sharp teeth as she does so, and I feel her fingertips trail lightly across my abdomen, tracing the hard ridges of muscle with exquisitely tapered nails. My scowl melts into a kiss.
Eventually I pull myself away, and she curls back upon her pillows with a dark smile and a wink. Selina Kyle, in my bed. After all this time. Wanton, willing… and here I am, taking my leave.
It’s often been suggested that I’m just as insane as any of the criminals and freaks who plague my city. I have to admit, sometimes I wonder about that myself.
I remember reading once, about a man who lived in a small Louisiana town called Johanna, on the north banks of the Mississippi. The man was ninety-seven years of age and had survived not only his wife and his four children but also no less then seven grandchildren. Now he was alone – very much so, considering that he was Johanna’s sole remaining resident.
The town, it was reported, was prone to hazards such as flooding, frequent plagues of rats and mosquitoes, and a constant exposure to a particularly virulent strain of sulphuric gas that rose from the bayou like a sickly, yellow fog. Not a tourist hotspot, as you might imagine. All of the other inhabitants of this cursed settlement had long since packed their bags and moved on to less hostile localities. But not this old man. A bright-eyed young journalist had approached him one day, hoping to fill a few column inches of a lifestyle magazine with his remarkable story. Why, she had asked the man, did he insist on enduring such hardship? Was he poor? Stricken with senility? What was it about Johanna that held him in such thrall?
The man had evidently been surprised at such questions. This was his home, he had replied, simply. Why would he want to live anywhere else…?
I think of this story from time to time. Sometimes it makes me smile. Sometimes.
Contrary to popular conception, there are areas of Gotham City that glitter with lights and life and laughter, as if the glass and steel has been dipped in faerie dust and Christmas cheer. This is, after all, a municipality of immense wealth, electrified with corporate finance and international renown. I will visit those pockets of vivacity only when necessity demands it, for there I am a moth caught in headlights, small and blind and waiting for the inevitable impact. My preference is for the other Gotham – old Gotham, the lost Gotham, this bottomless well of shadows that lurks like the dark side of a waning moon. I fit here. I move unseen. The air tastes of blood and ashes, and the ancient stone is cursed with tears and sorrow, but this is where I belong.
This is my home, I say, just like the old man from Johanna. Why would I want to live anywhere else?
It’s halfway between midnight and one when I arrive at St. Jude’s church on West Hill, in Gotham’s Lower West Side. The November darkness is awash with flashing neon, the red and blue whorl of sirens on squad cars. The wails have been silenced but the lights dance on. There’s also an ambulance, and a number of unmarked vehicles parked across the breadth of the street. The sidewalks are busy with cops. Enquiring citizens are beginning to cluster on the edges of the crime scene, succumbing to morbid curiosity, as citizens are wont to do. The church steeple towers above it all, a spear of black against the night, with an eerie light seeping through a series of narrow, stained glass windows. The windows burn like torch fires.
I find detectives Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya at the entrance to the church, both shivering in their overcoats. It must be cold out. I hadn’t noticed. Allen is immaculately dressed, as ever, with neon reflecting off the crown of his shaved head and in the lenses of his glasses like emergency flares, and his expression somewhere between boredom and mistrust. He’s dragging on a cigarette as if it’s bestowing life upon him rather than stealing it away, whilst Montoya, dark-haired and pretty and achingly wistful, is staring into a cup of coffee as if there are secrets lurking just below the surface. They’re not talking. They’re waiting. Everyone’s waiting.
For me. Not many of them like it, not least these two, but that’s just the way things have to be.
“What’s the story?” I ask, slipping from the shadows. Allen flinches, burning himself on the stub of his cigarette and cursing beneath his breath. Montoya keeps a firm hold of her coffee. But she stares at me like I’m the nameless, faceless thing that lurks beneath children’s beds at night, terrifying them with whispered promises. Perhaps I am. You never can tell.
“Y’know,” Allen grumbles, “If it was up to me, you’d have to wear one of those cat collars with the bells that jingle-jangled every time you moved, just so you couldn’t be sneaking around so much.”
“Whatever turns you on, detective,” I say.
Montoya stares at me. “Did you just smile?” she asks. “Tell me I didn’t just see a smile.”
Allen snorts. “Yeah, and that cracking you heard, that was Hell freezing over.”
Crispus Allen hasn’t been in Gotham very long. He was transferred from Metropolis, another world entirely. However, it appears that he’s beginning to feel comfortable enough around me to take a few shots. Perhaps he feels that’s one of his duties, now that he’s stepped into the twenty-dollar shoes of Montoya’s previous partner, Harvey Bullock. Or perhaps he thinks I’m Clark.
“Is there a reason you’ve called me out here?”
Montoya smirks. “That’s better. Grim belligerence. Now we know it’s you and not just any freak dressed in a bat costume.”
I miss Jim Gordon. I really do.
“Just get on with it,” I snarl, standing in the direct light of the doorway so that I cast both of them in my shadow. Montoya continues to smile humorlessly into her coffee. Allen seems to think about lighting up another cigarette but changes his mind and decides to suck aggressively on a lollipop instead. Refusing to meet my gaze, he jerks his thumb towards the interior of the church.
“Inside,” he says, gruffly. “The altar, at the back. It’s a double homicide. Looks like it could be your territory.”
“The killer’s left behind an identifier?”
“Something like that.”
I grimace, then enter the church in a sweep of cape and shade. Montoya accompanies me, but not Allen. He doesn’t like me, not because of any particular history between us but because the attitude is expected of him. He’s a decent family man by all accounts, ethically strong and proud, but he has to fit in with the department just like everyone else. Montoya’s feelings towards me are more complex, but it all breaks down the same. The police see the chaos of the city reflected in me and they resent me for it. Every time I become involved in a situation it means that there’s a case they cannot handle on their own. Some of them respect me and what I do all the same, including Montoya, but that respect is grudging at best.
The alienation is not something that especially concerns me, but my earlier thought was genuine. I do miss Jim. Just like I miss Dick, and Jason, and even Tim and Barbara. I think of Selina, and something she said to me quite recently – a comment on the nature of the loner, about how, for a man so determined to live a solitary existence, I go to great lengths to surround myself with other people. Sometimes a hand extended to push someone away becomes the same hand that pulls them in. Waving, not drowning. Drowning, not waving.
I wish Selina was here, now. But she isn’t. And there’s work to be done.
St. Jude’s is a Catholic church rather than Baptist, meaning that the central focus for worship is not a pulpit on a raised dias but rather a sanctuary with an extensive altarpiece depicting the crucifixion of Christ across the breadth of the back wall. The altar is currently lit by what must be close to a hundred candles, reminding me of Selina once more, and the touch of such gentle light upon her skin back at the mansion. There are more candles here than there should be for a standard Mass. The nave is separated from the head of the church by the golden rail that delineates the edge of the sanctuary. A scattering of police officers and forensic investigators populate this area, the latter searching out evidence with a quiet delicacy whilst the cops stand around watching them with a discernible lack of patience. Many of them stare at me as I pass as if I’m some kind of wraith, freshly arisen from the grave. I never get tired of that.
I observe the layout of the church so specifically because that is what I do, and have always done. I observe. It’s the first, basic tenet of detective work. You’d be surprised how many of the officers present would struggle to recall simple details about their surroundings if questioned later. Usually I would consider this inexcusable, but considering the horrific nature of the deaths that have occurred here I can perhaps be more forgiving. Satisfied that I have effectively gauged the situation, I turn my attentions to the murders.
There are two victims, one male and one female. They are both naked save for drapes of red velvet wrapped about the lower torso and groin, like loincloths. The velvet is soaked through with blood, as is most of the altar. I can smell it in the air, foul, mixed with burning wax and incense. The victims have been hung from an arch above the altar in particularly macabre fashion, by numerous lengths of thin wire, wound about the wrists and arms, up to the shoulders. The wire has cut deeply into the skin, and much of the shredded flesh is hanging loose in wet strips. The two of them dangle like puppets, their arms stretched out to their sides in what is, unmistakably, a perverse representation of the crucifixion tableaux – a reredos of gilded wood and ivory - about which they have been arranged. But this is not the worst of it. Not by far.
The man’s chest has been cleaved along the sternum from the throat to the tip with a precise, vertical incision. It would suggest nothing more than a simple wound but for the fact that the woman alongside him has also been branded with a distinct carving upon her upper torso, in the shape of the number ‘2’. One and two. And both of them have been decapitated, their necks culminating in blunt, bloodied stumps. Their severed heads sit beneath their dangling feet, eyes burned away to charred, oily pulp. Gouts of telltale wax are mixed in with the curdled flesh. The woman has short, blonde hair that is soaked with blood. The man’s jaw hangs slack in a silent scream. Each of them displays a scattering of strange puncture wounds across their foreheads.
There is a table before the altar, upon which rests two objects. One is a tall, slender vessel in the shape of a goblet, cast from silver. Beside this is a child’s toy, a rabbit with long, stitched ears. There’s blood all over both. There is no question that this entire scene has been meticulously arranged, a macabre set-piece on a holy stage. Every detail is important, every nuance integral to the killer’s composition. Allen and Montoya were right to summon me.
The acoustics of the church amplify the low murmurings of voices all around me, the hollow clack of heels and the sporadic hiss and burn of camera flash. The temperature is oppressively warm, the air stale. I can feel so many pair of eyes, studying me. Waiting. Again, everyone’s waiting. As if I’m the only one who can deal with this – or, perhaps, thinking I’m responsible for it. What must I look like here, in this bright, sacred place? A shadow, a stain… something black and spindle-clawed, crawled up from the depths with horns and wings. I don’t like churches. They’re another aspect of Gotham where I just don’t belong.
I turn to Montoya, who is regarding me curiously – as is another woman alongside her, a stunning brunette with a young face but wise eyes, the size and color of copper pennies, behind a pair of half-moon spectacles. This other woman smiles, a little shyly. She’s dressed in a white coat and is wearing latex gloves. Forensics. A badge on her lapel reads ‘Melissa’.
“Want to know what we’ve got so far?” Montoya asks, her gaze sharp as she wrests my attention. I nod. She holds up a man’s wallet and a woman’s purse.
“Tentative identification only, considering the mutilation of the faces, but we suspect this is Louis and Marie Christanval. Husband and wife, a local address. We’re currently interviewing a Father William Harker, a priest who says he was attacked and seemingly knocked unconscious no more than an hour ago. If he’s telling the truth, that makes this a pretty fresh crime scene, as the blood and condition of the bodies would attest.”
“You think the priest might be lying?”
“Everyone lies,” Montoya says, flatly.
“The pattern of the blood spatters, and the amount, indicates that the eyes were burned out and the heads removed whilst the victims were still alive – and suspended, as you now see them – with the chest wounds inflicted post-mortem. The autopsy will obviously confirm that.”
This is Melissa who speaks, her voice tentative. She flushes a little as she glances up at me, as if searching for approval. Very young, I decide. But not afraid of me. It’s a strange feeling, and a rare one. Her information is redundant, as I’ve already concocted a rough sequence of events in my mind, but I don’t say this. Contrary to popular perception, I’m not entirely without sensitivity.
“How about the wounds on the foreheads?” I ask.
“Undetermined as yet,” Melissa says. “They look shallow, superficial. Possibly just evidence of a random infliction of injury, torture.”
“Nothing about this is random,” I murmur. “Have either of you looked in the ciborium?”
Montoya shakes her head. Melissa appears confused, her eyes wide and bright in the candlelight.
“The chalice,” I explain, pointing at the object on the table before the altar. “It contains the Blessed Sacrament.”
She blinks, still none the wiser. Not the religious type, evidently.
“You should do it,” I urge her, gently. “It ruffles feathers when I tamper with evidence during investigations.”
Melissa smiles, a little unsure, but willing. Her eyes shine. She moves across to the table, her hands shaking slightly. I’m making her nervous.
Montoya smirks at me. “Pretty, isn’t she?” she whispers, coyly.
“I hadn’t noticed,” I murmur. “Had you?”
Montoya is momentarily shocked, then snorts. Touché. That makes us even for the freak comment.
Melissa reaches out and removes the lid of the ciborium, a dome crested with a cross. She glances inside, then over towards me. “There’s something in here,” she says. The neck of the receptacle is narrow, and she can barely fit her gloved hand inside. I see her grimace, but she isn’t skittish or hesitant – even when she removes her hand again, and her fingers are covered with blood. She’s holding what appears to be a test tube. She carefully wipes away some of the blood, then brings it across to me.
“Christ,” Montoya mutters, her eyes narrowed. “What’s that in there? Bugs?”
I don’t reply. I’m staring at the contents of the tube, my mental gears beginning to grind. Montoya is correct, but all she can see is the reality before her own eyes. I look beyond that, instinctively. Outside I asked Allen about identifiers, a catch-all term for anything left behind at the scene of a crime by the perpetrator. But I wasn’t referring to fingerprints or DNA – I was talking about this. I’ve always told myself that criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot, and that’s true for the most part. However, there’s another side to the felonious mind, a fiendish intelligence often drenched with insanity. Gotham has more than its fair share of these wretched individuals – greedy and savage killers with scant regard for morality – and many of them feel the need to indulge their own insatiable egos by leaving obscure clues in their wake like a trail of breadcrumbs. Serial murderers the world over engage in this practice to taunt the authorities. In Gotham it is perhaps a little different.
Here, a number of them do it specifically to attract my attention. And tonight – as always – it’s worked.
“Insects,” I say, quietly. “More specifically, a horsefly, a dragonfly… and a butterfly.”
Montoya says nothing. Melissa looks up at me, wide-eyed.
“Is that significant?”
“Yes. As is the decapitation.” I look down at the table, my fists slowly clenching in rage. A child’s toy. Lost, abandoned. And its owner…?
“Montoya,” I breathe. “Have you checked out the address you’ve found?”
“We have. There’s no-one home.”
“A child. A daughter. If she isn’t there… then she was here.”
“A kid?” Montoya is suddenly alert. “We haven’t found another body, but - ”
“He would have taken her.”
Montoya stares at me. “He?”
He. A horsefly, a dragonfly and a butterfly. Decapitation. I don’t know what the puncture wounds in the foreheads of the victims represents, but I already have enough clues to proceed.
I know who did this. Murder isn’t something I would have associated with him, but my enemies are nothing if not progressive. He’s left this message for me – and it’s up to me to stop him.
“Give me an hour,” I say to Montoya, my voice harsh and low like the rumble of an encroaching storm. “I’m the only person who can save this girl’s life tonight…”
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To Be Continued...
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