Chapter 1: Neutral Ground
Penguin's penguins are real, which you have always found the most unsettling thing about the Iceberg Lounge.
You can hear them while you wait at the private table on the mezzanine, a soft honking from the habitat behind the bar where the actual birds stand around on fake ice under blue lights, looking like they'd rather be anywhere else. Same, you think. Below you the main floor is doing a decent Thursday: politicians, a city councilman who owes you three favors, two of Two-Face's guys pretending they don't see you. A jazz trio plays something with a lot of brushed snare. Everyone is very carefully not looking up.
You check your watch. He's late. Of course he's late.
"He'll come," says Dez, standing behind your chair with his hands folded in front of him. Five years he's stood behind your chair like that. You've stopped noticing him, the way you stop noticing your own coat. "Hood likes an entrance."
"Hood likes to make people wait so they'll be angry when he gets here and say something stupid."
"Is it working?"
"I'm not angry," you say. "I'm billing him."
Oswald Cobblepot waddles up the mezzanine stairs with his umbrella tapping every step, beaming like a man who's already counted the money. Which he has: neutral ground costs fifty thousand an hour at the Iceberg, payable in advance, split down the middle. You paid your half in cash, in an envelope, on time. You suspect the Red Hood paid his in something less traditional.
"My dear," Oswald says. "You look ravishing. Positively lethal. Is that Valentino?"
"It's a coat, Oswald."
"It's a coat that costs more than a city alderman." His monocle glints. "I do hope you'll both keep things civil. I've just had the carpets done, and the birds get anxious."
"Tell your birds I'm always civil."
"Oh, it's not you I'm worried about," says Oswald, and the doors at the far end of the main floor bang open.
The jazz trio does not stop playing, to their great credit. Everybody else stops everything. Because the man walking in through the front doors of the Iceberg Lounge is wearing a smooth red helmet with no face on it, a brown leather jacket over body armor, and two holstered pistols, and he has a stride like the floor owes him money.
He doesn't take the stairs. He takes them three at a time, which is worse.
Then he's standing across the table from you, and the helmet is turned toward your face, and you can see yourself in it, small and red and composed. You give it your best boardroom smile.
"You're late," you say.
"Traffic." The voice through the helmet is a modulated growl. "Batman was on Fifth. I had to take the long way."
"You could've just driven past him."
"I could've. But then he'd have followed me here and I'd have to listen to him lecture me about the company I keep." The helmet tilts. "No offense."
"Some taken. Sit down, Hood. You're blocking my view of the birds."
He sits. He doesn't take the helmet off right away, which you expected, and he sits with his chair turned slightly sideways so he can see both staircases, which you also expected, because you're sitting the same way.
Oswald pours two glasses of something old and amber and leaves the bottle. Dez stays where he is. Across the table, behind the Red Hood, there's nobody. He came alone. That's either confidence or an insult, and with him you suspect it's both.
"So," you say. "You want my docks."
"I want your docks."
"Every gang in this city has wanted my docks since the day Carmine Falcone's nephew drove into the Sprang River with three bullets in him and no idea who put them there."
"I know who put them there."
"Do you."
"You were his bookkeeper." The helmet doesn't move. "Six years. He trusted you with every number in the family. And when the Roman thing happened and the Falcones started eating each other, you were the only one who knew where all the money was. Funny how none of them made it out of that winter. Funny how you did."
You take a sip of the bourbon. It's very good. Oswald must want something.
"That's a lovely story," you say. "You should write it down. I hear you like books."
That gets you something. A pause half a second too long. The helmet tilts a degree to the left.
"You've done some reading on me," he says.
"You put a man through a window on Park Row last spring for selling bad pills outside a shelter. Then you sat on the curb and read Great Expectations until the cops came. That's not reading on you. That's gossip. Everyone in Gotham knows that story."
"It was Bleak House."
"Was it? I'm sorry. I'm sure that matters a great deal to you."
And then the Red Hood laughs. It comes out of the helmet's speaker as a crackle of static, distorted and ugly and surprised, and he reaches up and hits the release at the side of his jaw. The helmet comes off with a hiss of pressure.
Okay, you think. Okay.
You'd seen grainy photos. Nobody has good photos of the Red Hood without the helmet, because the people who take them tend to lose their cameras and sometimes their hands. The photos had not prepared you. He's young, younger than you by a year or two, with black hair that falls over his forehead and a streak of white running back from the front of it like somebody painted him in a hurry. There's a red domino mask across his eyes, and through the eyeholes his eyes are a blue that keeps going green in the light from the penguin tank. His jaw has a bruise on it, a day old, yellowing at the edges. His mouth looks like it's used to being punched and used to talking its way into being punched again.
He sets the helmet on the table beside his glass. He picks up the bourbon. He doesn't drink it; he just holds it, looking at you over the rim.
"Let me tell you a different story," he says, in his real voice. It's lower than the helmet's, a little rough, Gotham all the way down. "Three weeks ago, somebody started moving a new product through your piers. Synthetic, cut with something nasty, the kind of thing that turns a person's lungs to wet paper. It's been showing up in my Alley. I've buried two people over it this month, and I don't like burying people. So I followed it back. And it all comes in through Pier Eight." He sets the glass down. "Your pier."
You go still.
You keep your face where it is. You've had a lot of practice. But you're aware of Dez behind you, the shift of his weight from one foot to the other, and you're aware of your own pulse in your throat.
"I don't move poison," you say.
"Yeah? Then who does?"
"I don't move poison," you repeat, slower, "and I don't move people, and I don't let anybody on my waterfront do either. Ask anyone. I've had men's hands broken for less."
"I did ask anyone. That's why I'm here talking instead of shooting."
"You're here talking because the last man who tried to shoot his way onto my docks is a very nice piece of the foundation on the new aquarium."
He grins. It's a terrible grin. It's lopsided and wolfish and too pleased with itself, and it is aimed directly at you, and somewhere south of your sternum something lights up that you would very much like to turn off.
"See," he says, leaning back, "I'd heard you were scary. Nobody said you were funny."
"I'm not funny. I'm billing you for this."
"Put it on my tab."
"You don't have a tab."
"I've got one now." He tips his chair back on two legs, perfectly balanced, which you're fairly sure is meant to annoy you. It works. "Here's my offer, Harbormaster. You hand me Pier Eight and Pier Nine and the warehouse district from Moench to the bridge. I clean house. Whoever's running the poison through there, I find them, and I make sure everyone in this city knows what happens to people who move it. You keep the card rooms and the rest of the waterfront and your nice coat."
"And in return?"
"In return I don't come take the rest."
It's very quiet at the table. Below you the jazz trio has moved on to something slow. Two-Face's men have left. The councilman is pretending to read a menu.
You put down your glass. You lean forward, elbows on the table, close enough that you can smell him: gun oil and leather and a little bit of rain, and under that, absurdly, cheap soap.
"Here's my counteroffer," you say. "You get out of my lounge."
"It's Oswald's lounge."
"You get out of Oswald's lounge, and you go back to your little Alley, and you let me find out who's using my pier, and when I find them I'll handle them. Myself. My way. And if you ever threaten me across a table again, Hood, I swear to God I'll make you sorry."
He's quiet for a second. His eyes behind the mask move over your face slowly, deliberately, the way you'd read a contract you were planning to break.
"Yeah?" he says. Soft. "How sorry?"
"On your knees sorry," you say, before you can think better of it.
Something goes across his face then. It's fast, and it's not anger. His chair comes down onto four legs with a quiet click. He leans in until there's maybe a foot of white tablecloth between you, and his voice goes so low the jazz nearly swallows it.
"Careful, sweetheart," says the Red Hood. "You keep talking like that, I'm going to start thinking you mean it."
Your mouth is dry. You don't look away. You'd rather die than look away.
"I always mean it," you say.
His gaze drops to your mouth. Stays there. Comes back up, and it's very green now, and you watch him take a breath to say something.
He never says it. Because behind you, very quietly, Dez says, "Boss," in a tone you've never heard from him before, and the Red Hood's eyes snap past your shoulder to the far staircase and go wide.
You don't see the gun. You only see Jason Todd come over the table at you like he's been fired out of a cannon, scattering bourbon and crystal and a fifty-thousand-dollar hour, and you feel his arm lock around your waist and his whole weight take you down to the carpet as the first shot shatters the penguin tank behind you.