The Further Adventures of Batman (28 page)

“A threat?”

“A particular threat—but I don’t think I should say any more about it. If only I could get word to Batman.”

“You have some way of signaling to him, don’t you?”

“Yes, but how can I be sure he’s on the lookout for it?”

“He has a bat’s radar. Anyway, you have no choice but to try.”

“True.” Gordon sighed. “I’ll get on it.” Then he said wearily, “did you have something you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Nothing that can’t wait. You have enough to worry about. Let me get out of your hair. Goodbye.”

“Thanks for being so understanding. Goodbye.”

Wayne had a weather eye out to the night sky and Commissioner Gordon did not signal in vain.

Sitting out on the terrace of his penthouse suite though March made itself felt, Wayne spotted the searchlight beam. It swept the heavens with a bat silhouette. The bat flew due east, then south-southwest. That formed a 7, and meant a rendezvous at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street at seven
P.M.

Wayne checked his watch. He had a half hour to get there.

The beam had switched off at the end of the 7; it switched on again and repeated the figure. It would keep on doing that until seven o’clock, when Gordon would give up if Batman failed to keep the rendezvous.

Wayne leapt inside. “Alfred!”

Alfred was ready, the Batman outfit folded on his arm. He helped Wayne get it on. Alfred had done his best, laundering and steampressing the cowl and the cape, but was still disdainful of the outfit’s shabbiness.

Batman smiled to himself. Clothes did not make the bat.

Commissioner Gordon started as the black figure slid from the shadows. Then he gave a groan of relief. “Batman!”

“It’s about the Riddler?”

“How did you know?”

“Bats have good ears.”

“That’s almost what Wayne said.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. He doesn’t really matter. Nice fellow and all that, but . . .”

“I know the type.” Batman grew brisk. “What’s our old friend the Riddler up to now?”

For answer, Commissioner Gordon drew three pictures from an inner pocket.

Batman unclipped a penlight from his belt and examined the topmost photo. It showed the punctuated message tattooed on the torso of the floater.

“We’ve identified him as a promising young art student,” Gordon said. “Classmates told our homicide detectives that he had been flashing money and dropping hints about having received some mysterious commission. Then he himself suddenly dropped out of sight.”

“Ah! That explains the ‘Art thou?’ and ‘Art not.’ ” Batman’s mouth went grim. “The Riddler, with his twisted logic, took someone whose subject was art—and made him into an object of art!”

Batman turned to the second photo. What it showed was also familiar, but he let Gordon explain it.

“This is a picture of a note Riddler pinned to the famous Rembrandt on Jack King’s yacht.”

Batman nodded. “Here he’s threatening the Wise Men of Gotham.”

Gordon stared at Batman’s shadowy face. “Amazing! It took the best brains of the Department all night and all day to figure that out!”

Batman gave a modest wave of dismissal and concentrated on the third photo.

“That,” Gordon said, “is a copy of Riddler’s latest message.” His voice shook with mixed rage and fear. “I found it on my own desk in my own office at headquarters. How he could penetrate that fortress—”

“Every fortress is penetrable,” Batman said absently. He was busy with the message.

Smoking the beehive is best

For combing out honey.

Burning both house and wasps’ nest

Is stupid but funny.

—
Yours bluely, the Riddler

Gordon was peering at him prayerfully, as one hoping for a miracle. In a hushed voice Gordon asked, “Well, Batman? Do you have any idea what this means?”

“It means trouble,” Batman said. Then, with a smile, he lifted Gordon’s gloom. “Yes, I have a pretty good idea what it means.”

Before Gordon could ask further, Batman took a step back and was one with the shadows.

The Valley Forge Club was the last stronghold of male elitism, an exclusive organization with a policy of admitting none but White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

A meat truck was making a delivery. The driver and his helper were unloading it. Batman waited his chance to shoulder a ham, and bent under it so that it obscured his face and upper body as he walked inside. He jettisoned the ham before he reached the meat locker, leaving it for others to wonder how it had got into the chef’s clothes closet.

Batman flitted unseen through the corridors, looking for sign of the Riddler’s machinations.

Nowhere did he find anything to back his hunch, though this
had
to be the latterday counterpart of the forge and the wasps’ nest in the legend of the original Gothamites as told to him by Dr. Amicia Sollis.

He reached the head of the fire stairs on what sounds told him was the floor housing the game room and the smoking lounge. He cracked the door open and sneaked a look down the hallway.

A man in blue paced away from him. Batman raised an eyebrow. Had Commissioner Gordon reached the same conclusion—that the Valley Forge Club was the Riddler’s target—and provided protection?

Batman was about to call to the policeman, with the object of joining forces, when—
BONNGGGG!
—an alarm went off in his head.

It had struck Batman that the man in blue was not so much patroling as prowling. Batman, himself prowling, knew the difference.

The next minute he was not so sure. For a pair of members, cocktail glasses and cigars in hand, emerged from a room and the man in blue straightened up and gave them a snappy salute that they casually returned. Batman recognized one of them as environmentalist Glenn Dubois. If these men accepted the policeman’s presence without question . . .

But after they had crossed the hall and vanished into a room that emitted the clicking of billiards, the man in blue once more looked on the prowl. Batman’s gaze hardened.

A man in blue had entry everywhere—even into the Police Commissioner’s inner sanctum.

And the Riddler had signed his challenge
“Yours bluely.”

A shiver passed through Batman. The avenger of evil knew evil when he saw it—though it were clothed in the vestments of good!

But he bided his moment to see what the Riddler meant to do.

The man in blue came to a stop at a point where a shelf jutted from the wall. He looked around, then slid open a small door just above the shelf. Batman realized that this was the opening of a dumbwaiter. The false cop lifted a jerrican down out of the dumbwaiter.

Quickly he uncapped the jerrican and splashed its contents along the hall toward the door of the game room.

Batman caught the odor of gasoline and waited no longer.

Before the Riddler could finish emptying the jerrican and strike a match, Batman had hurled himself from the stairwell, straight at the arsonist.

“Hold it right there, Riddler!”

The Riddler froze. Then his face twisted in a sneer, and he whipped out a knife.

“Steel
this
thunder, Batman!”

SWOOOSSHHHH! The Riddler’s knife slashed Batman’s cape. Batman felt anger on Alfred’s account. Alfred would be really put out.

Batman smiled fiercely. “Close—but no scar!”

Then, launching a savage attack of his own, he kicked the Riddler’s wrist and the knife flew flashing out of his hand. But as he moved to grab the Riddler, he slipped on a gasoline slick. The Riddler took advantage of this and pulled the dumbwaiter box higher so that it cleared the shaft. Then he dived into the opening and escaped down the rope.

Batman had to comfort himself with the knowledge that he had foiled the Riddler’s attempt on this one of the Wise Men of Gotham.

They met at the corner of 11th Avenue and 11th Street at 11
P.M.

“Great work, Batman!” Commissioner Gordon said, but worry and foreboding overlay his pleasure and gratitude. “Do you think you can pull it off again?”

“Another Riddler threat?”

Gordon nodded and produced a photocopy.

Batman—with the Riddler’s knife slash in his cape neatly stitched, though Alfred had bitten off the thread with a most unbutlerish snarl—stepped out of the shadows to examine the latest challenge from the Riddler.

High now chuck the wain

To shade the roof.

Why not the mare, too,

In its behoof?

—Yours coolly, the Riddler

Batman felt a chill sharper than the night’s. The outmoded word wain for wagon had struck home.

Could the Riddler have pierced Batman’s identity, Bruce Wayne, or was it merest and purest coincidence?

“Are you feeling all right, Batman?”

Batman looked at Gordon’s worried face, made ghastly by the streetlight, and forced a smile. “I feel fine.”

He had to put thoughts of his own peril out of his mind. He had to fix his wits on puzzling out the threat to another Wise Man of Gotham.

With a swirl of his cape, he melted into the darkness.

Unaware of affronting Alfred, Wayne let the breakfast crepes grow cold while he rifled through the morning papers. The Riddler appeared to be targeting public figures on the order of environmentalist Glenn Dubois, whose life Batman had saved . . . together with the lives of many innocents who would have perished had the Valley Forge Club burned down. What were the latest doings of such public figures?