The Further Adventures of The Joker (56 page)

He clenched his fists as he saw the Mayor turn to ask an aide if he had the Key to the City. It was a symbolic silver-plated key of exaggerated size, offered to every important visitor. The aide seemed flustered by the question.

“I thought you wanted it left in the terminal,” he said. “Higgins said you called and told him to leave it at the POA message desk.”

“I didn’t phone Higgins or anybody else this morning!” Hizzoner said indignantly. “Now go get the damned thing right now!”

The aide went trotting off toward the terminal building, and Gordon felt a sudden twinge of alarm.

“Mr. Mayor!” he said.

But the Mayor, deliberately or otherwise, didn’t hear him. He started to walk toward the red carpet being rolled out on the tarmac. Gordon hesitated, not sure if he should run after him, to query this odd detail about a telephone call he had never made. Gordon was hypersensitive to odd details these days. But it was too late. The Mayor, eager to be the first to greet the royal visitor, was already at the ramp, extending his hand toward King Harold and beaming so widely that the sun glittered off his gold front tooth.

Some instinct made Gordon turn and look back toward the terminal. He saw the Mayor’s aide—he suddenly remembered that his name was Philpott—talking to an unusually tall, thin man in an airline uniform whose face was in shadow. The man handed Philpott the key and strode off unhurriedly in the other direction.

The Mayor was already making his welcoming speech into the microphone, in his usual jocular style. Nobody knew if King Harold got the point of his humor, but he kept on smiling just the same. The smile was even more dazzling as Hizzoner took the silver key from Philpott’s hand and presented it to His Majesty with a nondeferential bow.

To Commissioner Gordon, the world seemed to be moving in slow motion. He watched the presentation of the key—and out of the corner of his eye, the tall airline employee strolling casually toward a small helicopter—and he knew exactly what was going to happen next. Like the trailer of a movie, he saw the bursting globe of orange flame, the showering debris of metal and flesh and bone, as the nitroglycerin-filled cylinder detonated with a deafening boom and, for King Harold, Hizzoner, and God knows how many others, the Key to the City became the Key to the Kingdom of God.

But it didn’t happen that way.

As if from outer space itself, there came a whizzing, whining, singing thread of steel. As supple as a cowboy’s riata, as swift as a line cast by an expert fisherman, its barbed end caught the ring at the end of the key and whipped it out of the Mayor’s grasp. Like a hooked salmon, the silver object sailed over a thousand startled faces, and before they saw the fisherman himself, a caped figure straddling the top of a light stanchion, the concealed bomb did what bombs are meant to do. It exploded—but harmlessly, in midair.

Gordon’s heart bounced between throat and chest as he saw Batman drop nimbly to the ground, already reeling in the Batwire that had saved so many lives.

But his mission wasn’t completed. From his vantage point atop the stanchion, Batman had witnessed what the Commissioner himself had seen, the exchange between the tall “airline employee” and the Mayor’s aide. He had recognized that a switch of keys had taken place, and that the man who had casually boarded the small copter was the perpetrator.

The rotor blades were already turning, and they could see the deathly white mask of his face through the cockpit window, fixed as always in a diabolic grin that not even failure could wipe away. Even though his assassination was foiled, the Joker would soon be free to continue his career of malevolent mischief.

Batman didn’t accept defeat so readily. He raced across the tarmac at Olympic speed, but the whirlybird was already beginning its ascent. For a moment, it looked as if Batman had lost him; but then they saw the steel lariat streaking forth once more, like a strand of lightning traveling from earth to sky. They didn’t realize that its grappling hook had caught the tail wheel until they saw Batman lifted into the air, suspended from the copter like a performer in an aerial circus.

It may have been the shouts from below that alerted the pilot to his unwanted passenger. He leaned out and glared at Batman, his green hair blowing wildly in the wind.

It was only too obvious what he decided to do next. He headed the aircraft toward the control tower of Gotham Field. He was going to lose his dangling stowaway by crushing Batman against the tower.

His first pass failed as Batman wrapped his powerful legs about the wire and swayed away from danger. But on the ground below, a horrified Commissioner Gordon knew that the Clown Prince of Crime had gravity on his side. Sooner or later, he would smash his archenemy out of existence. Gordon almost wished he had never sent the message that brought Batman to this encounter.

The second pass against the tower was more successful for the Grinning Ghoul at the controls. Batman managed to avoid its full impact, but his side thudded against the structure with an impact that could be heard on the ground. They groaned for him and then gasped as they saw his grip on the wire loosen. Then they cheered as Batman managed to regain his hold.

The third pass would be the fatal one; that was obvious. It was also obvious that the Joker was enjoying this game. He took his time, circling the tower, dipping the copter lower so that there would be virtually no way for Batman to escape a full collision with the building. There would be only one alternative—to release his hold on the wire, and die an ignominious death on the ground.

There was a terrible, almost eerie silence among the crowd as the copter completed its circle and headed for the structure, and Batman’s death.

Then Gordon realized something.
The Caped Crusader was no longer caped.

The significance of the fact only became apparent when there was a strange, rendering, sputtering sound over their heads. And then Gordon understood. Batman had thrown his cape into the rotor blades, and the blades had found it indigestible. The rotors had slowed and then stopped, and the helicopter was beginning to spin out of control. Now gravity was no longer on the Joker’s side.

It wasn’t on Batman’s side, either. But now that the Joker was no longer in control, Batman could take a desperate chance. He swung on the wire toward the control tower, and let go. When he landed on his feet, there was a roar from the crowd, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the explosion that shook the ground when the copter fell to earth.

A thousand feet raced to the site of the crash, and a thousand eyes saw the broken body of the pilot amid the flames that began to consume it.

It was the ultimate punchline for the Joker.

Death.

Commissioner Gordon wasn’t sure how long he had slept. He had fallen across his bed, fully-clothed, when there was still daylight in his window. Now there was darkness, and a strange glow in the room. Then he realized that Batman was there, silhouetted against the moon, waiting silently for the Commissioner to wake from his much-needed sleep.

“Batman!” he said. “I was hoping I could see you—”

“I knew you would have questions,” Batman said.

“What I really have is gratitude. The whole city is grateful for what you did today!”

“I’m not here for my medal,” the Caped Crusader said somberly. “There were too many lives lost while I was away.”

“You can’t be everywhere at once. And God knows it took us long enough to realize what was going on. But how did
you
find out? You had no briefing at all!”

“I did have a briefing—from my new supercomputer. While I was away, it recorded every crime committed in Gotham City, and searched them for relational factors. The computer reached its own conclusion, Commissioner, just as you did. That someone was playing a deadly prank involving a deck of cards.”

“Then it must have also guessed the prankster,” Gordon said. “It could only have been one man.”

“Yes,” Batman said. “That was only too obvious—except for one factor. The Joker’s motive.”

“We’ll never know it now. He’s taken the answer to his grave. But at least that Grinning Devil is in Hell where he belongs, and that’s far more important.”

“I believe I know the motive,” Batman said quietly.

“You
do?
You mean your computer—”

“No,” Batman said wryly. “That’s one thing about computers—they don’t think as deviously as Man. I realized the truth only when I applied an old legal question to every crime involved.
Who benefits?”

“But—nobody really benefited. The crimes were senseless!”

“It was senseless to kill thirty-six musicians. It was senseless to kill four men named Jack, four ‘queens’ and four ‘aces.’ It was senseless to kill three self-styled ‘kings.’ But if King Harold of Lumidia had died, wouldn’t his death have benefited one person?
His successor?”

The Commissioner’s jaw went slack.

“I don’t understand, Batman! Why would the Joker care who ran that little country?”

“The Joker didn’t care,” Batman said grimly. “But King Harold’s would-be successor cared. He especially cared about making sure that nobody—absolutely nobody—would guess that he had anything to do with the assassination of his ‘beloved’ monarch . . .”

The blood rushed out of the Commissioner’s head.

“Good Lord! Are you suggesting that all these crimes were meant to cover up
one
crime?”

“That’s what I’m suggesting, Commissioner.”

“And that it
wasn’t
the Joker behind it? That the Joker was just being framed by this—would-be King?”

“His name is Herbert,” Batman said. “He’s Harold’s cousin, his only living relative. Or rather, his deceased relative. Because it was Herbert’s remains that were cremated in that helicopter crash this morning.”

“Batman, are you sure?”

“Herbert had been in this country for the past four years, earning himself a graduate degree in political science and playing on the college’s basketball team. He was also a skilled mechanic, an amateur pilot, and a crack marksman. He was six-feet-five, very clever, very ambitious, and completely ruthless.”

“But how did you know? What made you guess the truth?”

“Once the idea occurred to me, it was simple enough to track Herbert’s movements from the day of the first murders. He could be placed at the scene of almost every crime. But there was also something else . . .”

“I know what it was,” Commissioner Gordon said. “Something that even that supercomputer of yours doesn’t have. It was your incredible intuition!”

“No,” Batman smiled darkly. “It was something that occurred to me about Herbert’s master plan. He was eliminating the entire deck of playing cards. But he forgot that every deck has
two
Jokers.”

Museum Piece

Mike Resnick

CATALOG

Special JOKER Exhibition in the Batman Hall of the Gotham Museum

(Catalog Notes by Richard Grayson, Esq.)

Exhibit 1:

Lethal 10,000-volt “joy buzzer” with which the notorious Clown Prince of Crime dispatched five different people, including two members of his own gang.

Exhibit 1A:

Rubber gauntlets and thick-soled rubber boots created especially for the Batman by Reuben Kittlemeier (deceased). By allowing the Joker to think him unprepared and helpless, the Batman was able to get close enough to arrest him while the electric charge passed harmlessly through the safely grounded crime fighter.

Exhibit 2:

This was a two-headed coin (note that both heads are defaced) that the Joker had manufactured during the brief period of time that he allied himself with Two-Face, another criminal kingpin. Two-Face was known to always flip a coin when deciding between mercy and brutality, or even committing a crime versus obeying the law, and the Joker managed to plant this coin on Two-Face’s person so that he would always elect to follow in the Joker’s criminal footsteps.

Exhibit 2A:

This coin seems identical to the coin in Exhibit 2, but there is one vital difference: this coin, created by the Batman, is weighted so that, when flipped in the air, it will always land on its edge. The coin, which the Batman managed to substitute for the Joker’s coin, so unnerved Two-Face that he turned upon his former ally, and during the confusion the police, under the leadership of Commissioner James Gordon, were able to capture both villains.

Exhibit 3:

This is the automatic pilot mechanism from the
Pagliacci,
a blimp that the Joker loaded with a deadly gas and aimed at the Thomas Wayne Memorial Stadium during the fourth quarter of the Gotham Bowl on New Year’s Day.

Exhibit 3A:

This is a child’s bow and hunting arrow with which the Batman improvised his last-second response to the Joker’s threat. The blimp, struck in midair, dispersed its gas over the sea, and not a single member of the crowd of 75,000 was harmed.

Exhibit 4:

This normal-appearing fountain pen actually releases an ultrasonic blast that temporarily paralyzes its victim, and was used on the Batman when the Joker disguised himself as an autograph seeker.