A Mortal Melody of Blood and Memory

By

E Kelly

PART ONE: Losses

Night falls, and I'm alone. Skin, chilled me to the bone.

You turned and you ran; slipped, right from my hands...

Whisper on a scream, doesn't change a thing,

Doesn't bring you back

Blue on black

- Kenny Wayne Shepherd

Chapter 1

The sun was setting over Gotham Harbor and Osman Atiq squinted into its dying rays as he handed a copy of the day’s Times to the middle-aged black man wearing a Teamsters jacket. Osman had run the newsstand at the corner of 25th and Gerwin for fifteen years, which meant he’d heard thousands of working class guys go through this ritual. The man shuffled through the paper quickly, pulling out the sports page and dropping the rest of the paper on the bench behind him.

“Crazy, man! Frigging ref was crazy to make that call. The Knights were ten yards from the end zone!” As his eyes scanned the report on last night’s game, his curses grew more volatile, and more obscene. Osman counted out his change, and the man shoved it into one pocket, stomping away, still reading and muttering death threats to the referee under his breath.

A sharp blast of cold wind came in from over the Harbor and Osman leapt to hold down the stacks of paper on the east side of the booth. He looked up to the darkened sky, a dull gray above the shine of the city lights. It was a hard winter coming; he could smell it in the air. He turned to help an elderly white woman whose quivering fingers were pulling bills from a small purse to pay for the stack of magazines she’d gathered. She was already bundled up as if she expected ice to descend on the city tonight, even though it’d be at least a week before the first snow came.

The remnants of the Teamster’s newspaper caught in the wind and scattered along the sidewalk. The front page swirled up, over the curb, and hit the air currents of the passing cars. It spun down 25th, falling to the asphalt at the intersection with Kavanaugh, where it lay until a pause in the traffic lights cleared the crossroads and the wind skittered it back up into the sidewalk’s pedestrian traffic. In fits and starts, sliding between the many legs, it slipped along before the row of open shops. On the street side most of the stores peddled various arrays of gaudy gold jewelry, clothes and small electronics; there was a liquor store on the corner and a tattoo parlor beside it. From their back doors facing the alley many sold their own selection of pharmaceuticals, gambling numbers and unregistered handguns. The bright shops with their competing sound systems were punctuated here and there by closed stretches – bars, some blank walls with blacked out doors, some with welcoming windows decorated in neon beer signs. A block over on the west side were mid-rent apartment buildings filled with the usual urban mix of families, groups of college roommates and older middle class Gotham survivors. A block over on the east the bars grew seedier as the neighborhood began to disintegrate on its way to the docks.

The newspaper caught on the edge of a corner grocery store before a truck’s passage sent it swirling into the street, where it hit the grill of a limousine moving at a good clip down Lexington. In a few minutes the limo slowed and turned into a circular drive before a tall, tastefully lit hotel, topped with expensive condominiums. The historic building was of warm brown stone, and art deco angels graced the corners of its concrete ledges. The doorman moved quickly to open the limo’s door for the designer-clad couple in the back.

“… not saying I don’t appreciate the theater, honey,” the man said. “It’s the actors that give me a headache. I know you love the opening night parties – they’re why we give so much during charity season – but you can’t expect me to endure hours of pseudo-intellectual sophistry from a man who is famous solely for having a strong chin.”

“I know Douglas is a bit hard to take, Will, but can’t you just avoid him while we’re – “ They disappeared through the revolving gold door.

The doorman knocked on the glass of the limo’s passenger side. It descended and the driver looked over at him.

Tipping his hat back over his close-cropped blonde hair, the doorman asked in a thick Bowery accent, “Which pahty they go to?”

“Some Broadway thing,” the driver, a handsome young man of Korean heritage responded, checking his clipboard for his next reservation. “Up on 3rd Avenue.”

“What theater you take them from?” the doorman wanted to know.

“The Grand.”

The doorman’s eyes lit up, “That’s the show with that little Latin honey from the tv. You see her there? World class tits on that one.”

The driver gave him a tired, blank stare. Breeders, he thought, and their obsession with breasts. Without answering (the doorman was gazing off with the look of a kid with an ice cream cone anyway), he put the window back up and pulled out of the driveway. The newspaper kicked off the back wheel as he turned out onto the road. It blew swiftly down this more open street, coming to rest against a bench on the edge of Aparo Park. The ragged man lying on the bench looked down, reached and spread the paper over the others already covering his body. His gaunt hands smoothed it down as he lay back. The headline under his fingers announced, “Preparations for Economic Summit Stall under Security Questions”.

Police Commissioner James Gordon came under fire this morning when it was revealed that convicted murderer Harvey Dent escaped from Arkham Asylum yesterday. Hard questions were asked of the police as to why the news was not released. The escape was baffling, a source inside the police department said, because it appears to be completely inexplicable. No one was harmed. No alarms were tripped. Dent simply disappeared from his cell between routine checks.

Coming in the midst of preparations for the historic economic summit called by the United Nations, the escape has raised serious concerns over security. Nanotel Inc., Samson Corporation and Infinitie Technologies have stated their reluctance to send representatives to Gotham under the circumstances, and have suggested choosing another location for the summit.

“The balance of the summit is delicate,” said Edvard van Mieris, spokesperson for the UN. “Gotham City, the commercial capital of the world, is the natural choice to bring together the heads of the world’s 50 largest multinational corporations to gain their input into the new International Commission of Commerce the UN is creating. But in today’s climate of political and industrial terrorism, tensions over security are running high. To have an infamous serial murderer loose on the streets now is a terrible blow to the stability of the conference.”

Mayor Karen Hillman responded to these criticisms at a press conference early this morning. “No matter where the summit is held, it will be a target. Gotham’s police force is among the best in the world, and Commissioner Gordon’s decision to keep Dent’s escape quiet, while poor judgment, is understandable. Harvey Dent is no ordinary criminal. He was a close personal friend of Jim Gordon’s. He was a colleague of mine. And he did a lot of good for this city once. Gotham does not forget its own. That said, every effort is underway to apprehend Dent and I have confidence the situation will be resolved quickly.”

Governor Jerry Velder added his support, “I have dedicated a significant percentage of the state’s national guard, in cooperation with the Secret Service, to the summit’s security. Our visitors have nothing to fear.” Sources close to the summit organizers within the UN report that participants are hiring additional security despite the Governor’s assur- Cont. p. A12

Where the article’s column ended, a box beneath read:

Entertainment Section D

GOTHAM BY GUNFIRE

Hollywood’s brightest stars light up the city tonight, celebrating the premiere of the epic motion picture, Twenty-Two Days,a tale of crime and politics spanning the first half of the 20th century in Gotham City.

The man under the paper shivered slightly as the temperature continued to drop.

Four miles away klieg lights knifed through the sky, silver sweeping beams leading all eyes in Gotham to the Majestic, the city’s largest luxury hotel and the only one colossal enough to hold the world premiere party for Twenty-Two Days. Paparazzi and celebrity-gawkers lined the red carpet leading through the gigantic gilded atrium to the ballrooms, setting the air ablaze with the incandescence of camera flashes. The lower room housed the thousand or so people associated with the film’s creation: the technical crew, costumers, makeup artists, the marketing and distribution teams. Entry to the party on the upper floor required a second invitation and was the exclusive precinct of megastars, producers, and a few select politicians doing fundraising for their upcoming campaigns, including Governor Velder, as he prepared for a run at the White House.

The Californians thought it quite exciting to be in the city when one of Gotham’s more famous criminals was on the loose. They joked about it, and at least four producers were discussing the Harvey Dent story, as it would be “a guaranteed Oscar winner.” “Handsome, successful, crusading District Attorney driven mad and turned into a crazed murderer. Put Johnny or Brad in it, throw in a love interest – box office gold!” one declared, while his hand made its way down to the buttocks of the young starlet at his side. A discussion quickly ensued over who could legally release the story’s rights, since Dent was certifiably insane.

Theirs was a world made of artifice, faux realities, reimagined histories, and illusion. Above the party, hidden in the ceiling’s shadows, the master of a different sort of illusion watched them. He understood the uses of special effects and the impact of drama, but he also knew how ephemeral these things were in the face of harsh reality. When he looked down, he could see nothing more than vulnerable flesh and fragile bone, possible victims for the madman these careless people thought of as mere amusement, and possible profit.

Two thousand nine hundred and twenty-two days. Eight years. Tonight was his anniversary. One thousand five hundred and seventy-four people had died by crime in Gotham since that first night. He’d broken twelve bones (not counting stress fractures), and it could be said that his face was having a long-term intimate relationship with Gotham’s asphalt. Two-Face, once Harvey Dent, his former ally, was free for the third time since he’d had his mind ripped apart. Below him was a collection of innocent and not-so-innocent people, any one of whom could find themselves on the wrong side of the coin if he didn’t take Harvey quickly.

His eyes moved restlessly over the glamour in the room. To fit the theme of the movie, the entire place was decked out in vintage décor, a kind of amalgam of the Roaring Twenties, the Gangster Thirties and Wartime Gotham. Satin draped the walls, giant palms punctuated the crowd, an enormous rotating stage was set into the wall at the far side of the room and on it a cheery, bouncy trio of Andrews Sisters look-alikes harmonized chirpily over the loudspeakers.

":… he was the top man at his craft, but then his number came up and he was gone for the draft…:"

There were a hundred vulnerabilities in this room, two dozen entry points, and nothing guarding them but security staff overly dazzled by the fame and beauty of the people they were supposed to be protecting. There were police outside of course, but Jim’s men were already stretched thin by the summit preparations, and had been forced to rely on for-hire private security to cover this.

He clicked on his comm for the fourth time in the last half hour, “Report.”

Over the receiver in his ear, Robin and Batgirl responded from the bigger party below, “All’s quiet on the western front,” came Dick’s voice.

“Still normal my way,” Barbara added.

He gritted his teeth against the tension he heard in their words; he didn’t like being separated from them in this situation. “Let me know the second you see anyone who might attract Harvey’s attention.” Anyone, that is, besides the two of you, his mind whispered, like a taunt. Half the reason he was sure Two-Face would choose this site was because he knew that Harvey knew that he would anticipate it – and thus be waiting to meet him should he attack here. Since the last time, things had become much more intensely personal between the two of them. His fist clenched reflexively. How did you get out, Harvey? Two-Face might be sickly brilliant enough to argue a sane man into stabbing himself in the neck, but he couldn’t walk through walls. His mind ran once more down the list of everyone who’d come in contact with Two-Face in the last year, but it remained as helpful as a DMV employee on a break. There was no one who could have pulled off this escape.

The girls on stage quick-stepped in a tight little pattern around the microphone and posed. ":…He was the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B!:"

The stage rotated a quarter turn, hiding away the perky singers and bringing on a full swing band. The dark-skinned band leader flashed the crowd a smile as radiant as his white suit and raised his hands. With a flourish the drummers started a new song and a coiling beat rolled out with hot horns blaring above it. The dance floor below filled quickly to the sound of the fast-paced thirties jazz.

The summit had to happen, he thought. Robber barons had taken over the world while distracting everyone with glittering entertainments and all the amusing gadgets they could buy. Owning Wayne Enterprises left him with few illusions about the ruthless competition going on around the world between titans so big no one country’s government could hope to control them. The largest corporations now had as many nationalities in their bloodlines as an East End streetwalker; and they exercised even less discretion over who they screwed. This commission was a vital first step in creating international law to at last make them beholden to some code of conduct, but the corporate heads were being forced into these negotiations by public advocacy groups – not one of them was coming willingly, and they were all coming with contingencies of industrial spies, cutthroat lawyers and personal security forces on a hair trigger. And this on top of the flashpoint Gotham had been for terrorist activity since the Attack six years ago. Two-Face’s escape could not be worse timing.

He examined faces through a small pair of binoculars. Harvey never chose only a single victim. Which two might interest him? Which two could be pitted against each other in his twisted game of chance? A number of couples moved off the floor as the band segued into a slower tune. The band leader’s smooth bass voice filled the room and the lights shifted to dramatic pools on the shadowed dance floor, creating a mood of romance to accompany the song.

":You came to me from out of nowhere…:"

As the minutes crawled over him, the contradiction was almost painful, this celebration going on oblivious to death breathing in the shadows. Little Red Riding Hood chatting innocently with the clever, hungry wolf. What big teeth you have…

":And if you should go back to your nowhere, leaving me with a memory...:"

Doubt gnawed at the edges of his thought. The title, the story, the potential for attention – maybe it triggered Two-Face. Maybe he would choose his victims here. Maybe not. Batman’s mind ran down biographical information on face after face. So many options. The Porn Lord and the Producer of Inspirational Movies? The waitress and the supermodel? The two actors who played the brothers at odds in the movie? Or one of them and the actress who played their double lover? Too many possibilities and nothing to go on from the escape. He had to make his best guess, knowing Two-Face’s mind as he did. And he knew that mind – from before it had been destroyed, and after.

They had been more, and less, than friends, he and Harvey. During his first two years, they had been comrades in arms, the DA and the vigilante, taking on the crime syndicates that held Gotham in a stranglehold, with deadly determination to fight fire with fire. The mob used violence, fear and political manipulation; between the two of them they turned those same weapons back on the criminals. Even Jim didn’t understand the way Harvey had. Jim had never been damaged as Harvey had been, as he himself had been. Though he and Harvey had never discussed their private tragedies, there was a recognition in their shared hatred of injustice. Harvey gave himself to justice utterly, believed in it utterly right up to the moment his mind was ripped in two.

The city had exploded with mob violence after Maroni’s successful attack on the district attorney. Harvey, once beautiful, powerful, a rising star being courted for the Governor’s race, adored by women – found himself alone, forgotten as he recovered, horribly scarred, career finished, lovers gone, his carefully crafted life blown to dust by a single moment, one brutal twist of fate. The madness drove Harvey to a string of crimes, some which ended in riches being bestowed on the unsuspecting, others ending in hideous murders, which fate the chosen received determined by the flip of a coin. He wore a mask to hide his damaged face, so it had taken weeks for Batman to track down the strange criminal. He would never forget that night.

Harvey stood, masked, over his still bleeding victim as Batman landed. He didn’t want to damage Harvey further, and his compassion led him right into the insane man’s gun sights.

“You killed an innocent man, Harvey,” was he a fool to have tried to talk reason to him?

“Harvey Dent had one face. I am Two-Face.” The voice was a brutal parody of his friend’s persuasive tone.

“Harvey,” Batman repeated, stepping closer to him, knowing that if he fired at this range, no armor would stop the bullet. “You had no right to play judge, jury and executioner.”

“The little girl they found, raped and mutilated on the playground at 14th. She had no rights. Charlie Wales just bought a yacht with inherited money from his grandfather’s oil fortune – he had no right.” Harvey’s words were feverish and he touched the mask covering his face, then pointed at the mask facing him, “Somewhere under there is a man who knows right and wrong are just a game we play. That is why the coin should decide. Chance is more just than anything we can devise.” He stalked closer, the gun raised, a foot from Batman’s face. Harvey had always pushed at him, never content to just accept what the masked man wanted to tell him. His investigative mind always wanted to uncover the vigilante’s secrets. Then, it had been a somewhat friendly intellectual game. Now, Two-Face had all of Harvey’s powerful deduction and strategic brilliance at his disposal, “What’s happened to me is not just a tragedy, it is also a triumph. How can you know who you truly are until you’ve walked through the fire and been burned down to your core? Our wounds reveal us. Our losses define us. You know that much, don’t you, Bats? Finally I can be everything, not just half a man. That’s how you live. Truncated.”

Bruce only shook his head slowly, inching closer, closer, waiting for the moment when he could make a move for the gun.

“Don’t deny it,” Two-Face went on, his voice clear, persuasive, and brutal all at once. “You know you can never win. Everything you give will fall into the abyss of Gotham in the end.”

“You’re right, Harvey,” he said quietly. “You’re right about everything.”

“Then why?” the other man begged, his demeanor faltering, cracking, and his voice began to rise. “Why try to stop me? I am bringing true justice to Gotham. Harming. Healing. Random. I’m giving it what it deserves, not you. So why, when you can’t change anything, only lose and lose again - WHY?”

“Because I don’t care,” he had replied swiftly, without thought. “Yes, I will lose. Yes, Gotham will take from me everything I have ever loved. But I still will not stop!”

Two-Face screamed, a wordless, rending screech of pain, grabbing his head as if it were splitting in two. His clutching fingers ripped away the mask, and he launched himself at Batman, seizing him, shoving the ruin of his pulpy face upward. “See me?” he screamed. “What do you see?” His hands seemed to weaken, sliding down as he sobbed, “What… do you see…”

Batman wrapped his arms around him, holding him up. One hand clenched on the back of Harvey’s neck, finding acupressure points, forcing his muscles to lock. He lowered Harvey, whimpering, to the ground. Just before he plunged the needle with the sedative into his arm, he said to his friend, gazing fully into his face, “It’s like looking in a mirror, Harvey.”

The stage below moved again as the song ended, bringing into view a small ensemble of strings and a piano, fronted by a shapely silhouette backlit in blue. The mournful, rising notes of a sad torch song floated up to him as a spotlight came up to display a leggy beauty, poured into a sultry gown the color of midnight, slit up to her hip with a sculpted bodice flattering the curve of her breasts. Her face was half-hidden behind a slick wave of golden hair that left only her blood-red lips visible. Her breathy alto shivered through the room.

":Almost blue… Almost doing things we… used to do…:"

A mirror. He learned then from the psychiatrists what Harvey had endured at his father’s hands, the nightly ritual, the coin toss. No beating if heads, the thick leather belt across his small body if tails. The trick coin – tails on both sides. Why play such a cruel game? But there was no answer except that the world was duplicitous. It offered bliss only to snatch it away, laughing that you had believed its vicious joke. He understood Harvey’s torment to hear him say he would never quit, even in the face of futility. He chose to pursue his pointless quest, and somehow that tortured Harvey who could no longer choose anything for himself. That was why, last time he’d escaped… Bruce pushed the thought away. He would not be able to function if he began to dwell on what had happened before. Two-Face had cut too deep, and the scars still showed in the voices of his protégés, reminding him of the precarious sanity of risking their young lives night after night.

":Flirting with this disaster became me…:"

His eyes snapped to the stage as a glint of silver streaked under the spotlight. But it was only the singer’s flat, tight bracelet shining as she cradled the blocky, old style microphone, crooning sadly into it.

What made him take such risks with them? The question shone starkly with Two-Face loose. He was a man who loved fiercely, completely, wrapping his soul around his loyalty and his protectiveness of the chosen few, and yet he could not stop himself from giving them what they needed, the chance to fight the good fight, even as it terrified him with the specter of their possible harm. Beyond the damage to them, there was every possibility he could not survive their loss, for he had had too many of his precious loves ripped from him, vicious scars that never quite healed.

":It named me as the fool who only aimed to be…:"

He stared at the singer as she leaned into the microphone, disturbed by something in her voice. As she swayed slightly to the music, he saw her leg slip through the slit in her dress momentarily. Her seductive effect was strangely ruined and enhanced all at once by a long, thin, comet-shaped trail marring her thigh. A scar… it had been an ugly wound once, where a bullet had torn through her flesh.

His breath stopped. His eyes moved to her face, hidden behind the sculpted wave of her hair. And then her head tipped, the blonde veil slipping back over her shoulder.

He looked into the face of a dead woman as her voice echoed up around him.

":It’s almost touching… It will almost do…:"

A vault he had kept buried deep inside himself blew open, shards of hot metal flying with a force that, unprepared as he was, left him bloodied. As the song rose to its heartbreak end, he was sucked back in time by the sound...

":Almost me…:" of her voice, speaking seductive, spiky lies and armored, tender truths to him...

":Almost you…:" of her breath against his ear in the darkness of his bed...

":Almost… blue…:"

…of the silence of the Manor when she disappeared as if she had never even been there at all.

The final note stretched and she bowed her head as chilled piano notes drifted away. She did not see, he did not see until an instant too late, the coin spinning up into the spotlight, flipped from the red hand emerging out of the shadows behind her. The large silver circle turned over and over, glinting bright, then dull, bright, dull. Two-Face pressed an ugly .45 Glock to the singer’s temple. Screams shattered the air. The coin slapped down solidly into that red hand. Around the edges of the room men stood, lifting compact machine guns.

The ruined voice rasped out, “Nobody move.”

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B lyrics by Don Raye and Hughie Prince

Out of Nowhere lyrics by John Green and Edward Heyman

Almost Blue lyrics by Elvis Costello