CAT-TALES TTHE NNEW BBLACK CAT-TALES TTHE NNEW BBLACK By Chris Dee Edited by David L. COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY CHRIS DEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BATMAN, CATWOMAN, GOTHAM CITY, ET AL CREATED BY BOB KANE, PROPERTY OF DC ENTERTAINMENT, USED WITHOUT PERMISSION THE NEW BLACK It was a fine spring day. Nannies, governesses, children, and officers all promenaded through the Summer Garden in St Petersburg. The officers discussed their friend Hermann spending all his nights glumly watching play at the gaming tables without ever joining in. “I don’t believe I’m watching this,” Edward Nigma thought, too struck by the mind- bending wrongness of the situation to even word it as a question. What was the crumbiest thing Batman had done to him over the years? There, worded as a question and a question worth asking: What was the very worst thing the Bat had ever done? the lowest of the low? the most diabolical, sadistic and mean? This. Russian opera. The Queen of Spades. Best anagram that he’d come up with since the usher tore his ticket: HE-FOP NEEDS A QUEST. It was an opera by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (KITTY HELP IS VERY CHIC…OAK, he was still working on that one) based on a short story by Aleksandr Pushkin (DARK PLAN HE SINKS U). Hermann appeared and revealed the reason for his gloom: he was in love— passionately but hopelessly, since he was poor and the object of his desire was noble and out of his reach. He rejected his friend’s cheerful suggestion that another woman would do just as well. The official excuse was a business trip, “Bruce Wayne was away on business.” Whether he really had a Wayne Tech deal in London running a few days longer than expected, or if he was tied up (literally, one hoped) in Nepal or Mongolia—or maybe the third moon of Sirius-4, that was anybody’s guess. But whatever the reason, he wasn’t available to use his box at the opera, and Selina didn’t want to go alone. Of course, that didn’t mean Eddie had to go with her. But when she’d called with the invitation, he realized that he missed her. They didn’t get together like they used to. And besides, he’d given her a nasty conk in the head the night of the Gotham Post party. Mind controlled or not, real friends made up for that kind of thing. Despite his lingering anger, Batman calmly removed the buckle and several metal cylinders from his utility belt and placed each in the Watchtower’s trans-spectral decontamination pod with methodical precision. Knowing that each object should be isolated by a four-inch perimeter to avoid any reflective-recontamination, he resigned himself to a second and possibly a third round of treatments. He still had to decontaminate the batcuffs, two batarangs, and his chest emblem. Cat-Tales “The chamber could be twice the size without drawing any more power from the system,” he noted acidly. “I’ll have Wayne Tech send up the appropriate equipment next week.” “Is that really necessary?” Superman noted mildly. “Forty-five minutes instead of fifteen, Clark. Maybe your time isn’t that valuable, but mine is. There are other things I could be doing right now.” “I meant is it necessary to decontaminate at all. It was magic, Bruce.” “No, the Dhumavati Priestess thought it was magic, but it behaved like radiation, it burned like radiation, and that ‘chalice’ looked like some kind of primitive alpha emitter. Yesterday’s ‘magic’ is today’s ‘science.’” “It knocked me back—” “Not every force that affects you is magic, Clark.” “You still think that cat’s eye on the chalice was kryptonite?” “I plan to analyze the fragments,” he grunted. “I’ll let you know.” Superman nodded, then chuckled. “Cat’s eye kryptonite,” he mused. “Boy, that would have made for a fascinating subplot once upon a time. How is Selina, anyway?” Batman stared coldly. “She’s at the opera,” he said flatly. It had to be said, Eddie admitted reluctantly, if you had to go to the opera, this was the way to do it. Selina, absolutely stunning in a strapless evening dress, displaying the creamiest shoulders in existence, was there with him. No man, however platonic a friend, could be completely immune to that ego boost. The back half of the box was a little anteroom with a standing order from the bar. Waynes, it seemed, didn’t wait in line like the hoi polloi at intermission. They had two glasses of champagne delivered to their box before the show and at each act break. Plus, it was a rich crowd. The opening night of the first opera of the season. The best of the best, wearing their best. While Riddler hadn’t left any clues for tonight’s event, there was nothing to stop him making plans for the future… These people in the boxes didn’t buy a ticket for a single show. They’d be in these same seats for the next opening, and the next, and the next, season after season and decade after decade. They’d leave their subscriptions to their kids, right along with the jewels they wore. It made a good link for a crime spree, an unseen link connecting a seemingly random series of victims. Any given opera would yield a thousand possibilities for clues… Of course, while the victims would seem random to the police, to Batman (a.k.a. Bruce Wayne—lifetime season box holder for the Gotham Metropolitan Opera) the connection between the victims would be easier to spot. Would it be too easy? That was the first question mark to address. And since old Hermann was still moaning, melodically and in Russian, about his doomed love life, Riddler turned his attention to the audience. Wayne had the best box, of course, the shit. Some ancestor probably built the damn opera house. Another night, Bruce Wayne himself would be sitting where Eddie was, Selina beside him, the lucky bastard, and then any guests they invited to join them—the box could accommodate up to three more couples… While a duel with Bruce Wayne would be a 2 The New Black pleasure, taking on Selina that way was unthinkable. So much for Box #1. Nigma lifted his opera glasses and tuned his attention to the next… He started. In the next box over, a similar pair of opera glasses were trained on him. It was that Richard Flay character. There were others in the box with him, but all Eddie saw was Flay. They seemed to run into each other whenever he ventured into one of these society shindigs, and given the interest Flay always showed in him, breaking into the guy’s house in the middle of the night did not seem like a good idea. “Edward, how divine! You’ve finally come to see my art collection!” No. And kidnapping would be even worse. Flay could have very different ideas about what constituted a suitable ransom and might be all too willing to pay it. (He didn’t even want to think about what the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ might lead to.) Nigma moved his gaze beyond Flay’s box into the next… Again he started. Again, opera glasses were pointed at him—along with a bejeweled finger. Eddie recognized the woman doing the pointing; she was hard to forget. Claudia something-or-other Muffington. She’d gone to the Gotham Post party, she’d gone as Poison Ivy, she’d met Harvey Dent, and apparently he wasn’t holding the leafy bustier against her because he was sitting right there next to her. In fact, Harvey was pointing too, now, pointing straight at Eddie (or possibly at Selina, at the very least at their box) and whispering something into Claudia’s large ruby earring that made her smile. Hm. ..:: Where are you? ::.. the harsh no-nonsense Oracle voice demanded on the com. Nightwing glanced around the laboratory. He didn’t see any kind of shielding that would interfere with the OraCom’s tracking capabilities. He saw cages, rabbits, foxes, and monkeys.. They did medical research. There were no radiation chambers or lead housing, nothing that would mess with the OraCom. And even if there had been, having seen him go into the building and not come out, it didn’t exactly require Holmesian deductive skills to figure out he was still in there. “Stand by,” Nightwing said brusquely, and then returned his attention to the night staff, a combination guard/caretaker who was still shaken from the break in. ‘Wing had begun by treating the man like a fellow professional, a security guard who had interrupted some radical student group breaking in to Free The Animals! and had simply done his job. But first impressions were deceiving: The “security guard” didn’t consider himself any such thing. He was the guy who came in at night and kept an eye on the animals. The idea of people breaking into the lab never occurred to him. It’s not like they did the kind of research anyone would object to. Twelve years, they never had a bit of trouble. That brought Nightwing’s attention back to the “radical students” who, it turned out, were no such thing. They were burglars, plain and simple. Trying to steal the monkeys, not free them. And for money, not a cause. Probably $10,000 a pop. ‘Wing did his best to calm the caretaker, understandably shaken by his first contact with real criminality, but who had confronted it very bravely and protected the animals in his care.