Chapter 3: The Question You Didn't Ask
You've lived in Gotham your whole life. You know what to do when the lights go out and there's a fight in the room. You get low and you get behind something solid.
You get behind the register counter, which your grandfather built out of an old oak church pew in 1958, and you crouch there with your back against it and your hands over your head, and you listen.
It doesn't take long. That's the first thing that surprises you.
There's a sound like a heavy book dropped flat, twice, very fast. Somebody yells. There's a crash from the direction of Travel and Maps, and the long, sliding, avalanche noise of a whole shelf of atlases going over. Somebody else says, "Wait, wait—" and doesn't get to finish. The man with the crowbar is swinging it. You can hear it whistle. Then you hear it stop, mid-whistle, with a meaty slap, like it ran into a hand.
There's a pause.
"Crowbar," says the distorted voice, very quietly. "Really. Of all the things."
It's the quiet that scares you. Everything else has been loud and fast and almost bored, but there's something in that one word that sounds like it's coming from much farther down. You hear the crowbar hit the floor. Then you hear something else, which you will think about for a long time afterward, which is the sound of a grown man in a carved mask starting to beg.
"Relax," says the voice. "You're not worth it. Get up."
Feet shuffle. Someone is being pulled upright by the collar.
"Here's what you're going to do. You're going to pick up your friends. You're going to walk them out to whatever car you drove here in, and you're going to drive to Roman, and you're going to give him a message from me. You listening?"
A muffled noise that might be yes.
"This block is mine. This building is mine. The lady who owns it is under my protection, and so is every busted radiator in it. If he sends one more guy with a funny face down Gilmore Street, I stop burning his warehouses and I start burning his collection." A pause. "He'll know which one. Go."
They go. You hear them dragging somebody, and the bell over the door jangles wildly, and car doors slam outside, and tires squeal away up Gilmore toward the river.
Then it's just you behind your grandfather's counter, in the dark, with a whole floor of fallen books, and the slow creak of a leather jacket as someone in the middle of the room turns around.
He doesn't come toward the counter. You notice that. He stays where he is, far enough off to give you room.
"They're gone," he says. "It's okay. You can come out."
You come out.
In the light from the streetlamp, the helmet is blank and red and faceless, the color of a stoplight in the rain. There are two pistols in holsters at his hips and a third thing in his hand that you realize, slowly, is also a gun. He sees you looking. He holsters it.
"Rubber," he says. "Mostly. They'll have a hell of a week."
You don't say anything. You walk past him, through the dark, to the wall by the stockroom door, and flip the breaker that controls the shop lights. They hum and flicker and come on, every last one, and you turn around and look at what's left of Hollis Books.
It's not as bad as it sounded. The atlases are everywhere. Somebody went through the display table of staff picks, and a few of the cheap spinner racks are down, and there's a man's shoe in the middle of the floor, just one, which you will be finding it very hard not to laugh about in roughly two hours. But the shelves are standing. The new bracket in poetry held.
The red helmet watches you look. It's very hard to know what a helmet is thinking. It's harder when it doesn't say anything.
Then he bends down and picks up a book off the floor.
It's a fat hardback of Pride and Prejudice that fell off the staff picks table, the nice clothbound edition with the peacock on the cover. He turns it over in one gloved hand. He walks with it down the main aisle, past Mystery, past Science Fiction, into General Fiction, to the A section at the very end. You keep the A shelf a little cramped because nobody in this neighborhood wants Austen. He doesn't look for the spot. He doesn't hesitate. He slides the book into the gap between Atwood and Auster, which is exactly where it goes, because he's done it before.
Because he's spent three months of Sunday afternoons in this shop, standing up, with his back to the shelves and a view of the door.
"You're dripping on my floor," you say.
The helmet turns.
There's blood running down from the cuff of his left glove. Not much. A slow line of it, from somewhere under the sleeve of the leather jacket, where you'd bet your whole building there's a long shallow cut that's been closed up with black electrical tape. It's pooling, a little, by his boot. Right on the faded spot in the floorboards where your grandmother used to stand to ring people up.
He looks down at it for a long time.
Then he reaches up with both hands, and there's a hiss, a soft mechanical click at the base of his skull, and he lifts the helmet off.
Under it, there's a black domino mask. Under the mask, when he peels it off too, a little slowly, like it's stuck, there's Jason. Sweaty, his hair crushed flat, a fresh bruise coming up purple along the cheekbone below one eye. His eyes are green right now, very green, and very tired, and they're fixed on you like he's standing at the edge of something with a long way down.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"So." He sets the helmet down on the counter, between the register and the cup with the pens. "You're still not going to ask."
"I have a rule."
"I know. Your grandma's card. It's taped inside your cabinet. Second shelf." He winces. "When I fixed your faucet. I didn't snoop. It was right there."
"Of course it was."
"It's driving me out of my mind," he says. "Do you know that? Three months. I come up those stairs bleeding all over your building and you just—buy another mop. You leave bandages. You leave books. You leave soup in a thermos with a note that says Don't drink this too fast, it's hot, like I'm going to burn my mouth, like that's the dangerous thing. Nobody's ever not asked me anything. Everybody wants to know. Where I was. What I did. Who I hurt. Why I'm not—" He stops. He rakes a hand back through his hair and leaves blood in it. "Ask me. Please. Just ask me something."
You look at him for a long time. At the bruise, and the white streak, and the gun on his hip, and the blood on your grandmother's floor. At the man who fixed your boiler at two in the morning and argued with Alexandre Dumas in pencil.
"Okay," you say. "One question."
His jaw sets, like he's bracing for a hit.
"Is the name on the lease your real name?"
Whatever he was ready for, it wasn't that. He actually blinks. Then something happens to his face, slowly, from the eyes outward, that takes the tiredness out of it.
"Yeah," he says. "It is. It's maybe the realest thing about me. There were a couple of years where it was on a headstone, so." A breath that's almost a laugh. "Long story."
"That's fine," you say. "You're on a month-to-month. I can wait for it."
You go behind the counter and get the first aid kit out from under the register, the good one, the one you started keeping down here after the first week of blood on the stairs. You put it on the counter. You hold out your hand.
He looks at your hand. He looks at you.
Then he pulls off his left glove, finger by finger, and shrugs out of the leather jacket, and pushes up the sleeve of the dark thermal underneath. There it is, from elbow to wrist: the long gash, reopened, closed with black electrical tape that's come loose at one end.
"Wires don't complain," you say.
"Shut up," he says, and he's smiling. The whole way, for the first time. It changes his entire face. It makes him look his age, which you happen to know from the lease is twenty-five, only a year younger than you, and not some much older man with something heavy behind his eyes.
You peel the tape off as gently as you can. You clean the cut. He sits on your grandmother's stool and lets you, and doesn't flinch, and watches your face the whole time instead of your hands. You lay the butterfly closures one by one, neat as stitches in a hem. When you get to the last one, you realize you've been holding his wrist the whole time, your thumb on the inside of it, where you can feel his pulse going fast and steady and not at all like a man sitting calmly on a stool.
You look up.
He's very close. You don't remember either of you moving. You can see the place at the corner of his mouth where the scar starts. You can smell rain on him, and smoke, and under it, faintly, garlic, from a pan in your kitchen a week ago.
"I picked this building because of the shop," he says, low. "The Vonnegut. I needed somewhere quiet with a back door. I figured I'd last a month and then go."
"And?"
"And your kitchen light's on at two in the morning on the fifteenth." His thumb moves, just once, over the back of your hand. "And you sigh at your receipts. And you leave soup. And I come up those stairs at four in the morning feeling like something somebody scraped off a boot, and there's a light on, and somebody's up, and I don't know. I sleep. I haven't slept like that in eight years."
You don't say anything. You can't. Your throat is doing something.
"So," he says. "That's the answer to the question you didn't ask."
You kiss him.
You lean down from where you're standing over him with the first aid kit still open, and you put your hand along that scarred jaw, and you kiss him, and for one second he goes completely still under it, like the boiler, like all the warmth has stopped.
Then it comes back on all at once. His hand comes up into your hair. He stands up off the stool without breaking the kiss and you have to tip your head back to keep it going, which you do, which you are not about to stop doing for anything. He kisses like he does everything else, steady and serious and with total attention, and you can feel him smiling against your mouth, and somewhere behind you an atlas slides off a pile with a soft thump and neither of you looks.
When he pulls back, it's only an inch. He rests his forehead against yours. He's breathing like he ran up four flights.
"I'm still bleeding on your floor," he says.
"I'll buy another mop."
You renew his lease at one in the morning, sitting on the counter of a wrecked bookshop. It's a single sheet you print off the old laser printer in the stockroom. He reads every line. He signs at the bottom in his blocky capitals, JASON TODD, and next to it, in the space for the term of the lease, where it says 12 months, he crosses out 12 and writes in very small letters: LET'S SEE.
"That's not legally binding," you tell him.
"Neither's Wait and Hope," he says, "and it worked for Ed."
You're upstairs in your kitchen an hour later, making tea he says he doesn't want and is going to drink anyway, and he's sitting at your table with his bandaged arm and his bruised face and his feet up on the other chair like he lives here, when something taps on the window over your sink.
You both look.
There's a man crouched on your fire escape. He's dressed head to toe in black with a stripe of bright blue across the chest, and there's a mask over his eyes, and he's grinning in at you through the glass, perfectly balanced on the railing like it's a sidewalk.
He waves.
"Hey, Little Wing," he calls, muffled through the window. "Alfred says you missed brunch again, so I said I'd swing by and— oh. Oh. Hi! Hello. I'm, uh." His eyes go from you to Jason, to the two mugs, to the bandaged arm, to Jason's feet on your chair. The grin gets enormous. "I'm nobody. I'm a figment. Is this a bad time?"
Jason puts his face in his hands.
"Close the window," he says through his fingers. "Please. I'm begging you. Close the window."