The Further Adventures of The Joker (57 page)

Exhibit 4A:

This is a mask of the Joker’s first known murder victim, which the Batman wore beneath his cowl as a safety measure during that period of time when the Joker publicly threatened to reveal his secret identity. When he was momentarily overcome by the ultrasonic fountain pen (Exhibit 4), it was this mask that the Joker revealed beneath the Batman’s cowl. The shock of seeing his long-dead victim caused the Joker to go into a near-catatonic trance, a condition that persisted until hours after the Batman regained consciousness and returned his archenemy to Arkham Asylum.

Exhibit 5:

Remains of exploding baseball, capable of killing everyone within a radius of fifty feet, which the Joker substituted for the normal baseball that the mayor was supposed to throw out on Opening Day.

Exhibit 5A:

This is a chemically treated catcher’s mitt that the Batman, disguised as the catcher for the Gotham Giants, used to muffle the explosion just prior to apprehending the Joker.

Exhibit 6:

This earthen jar holds the contaminant with which the Joker planned to poison Gotham City’s water supply.

Exhibit 6A:

These eyebrows, blue-tinted contact lenses, false nose, and blond wig formed the disguise the Batman used to impersonate the Joker’s henchman while substituting half a gallon of perfectly harmless Vitamin C for the contaminant.

Exhibit 7:

Clipping of hair, purportedly taken from Robin’s head. The Joker, aware that Robin had been called out of town on a case while the Batman was otherwise occupied, used this in an attempt to entrap the Batman by convincing him that Robin was his prisoner.

Exhibit 7A:

Electron microscope with which the Batman analyzed the clipping in Exhibit 7, and proved that the hair came from a dog infested with a certain species of flea that could only come from Olson’s Kennel on the shore of the Gotham River. He relayed this information to the police, who, led by Commissioner James Gordon, broke into the kennel and captured the Joker’s entire gang.

Exhibit 8:

Coffin used by the Joker when he faked his own death to gain access to the North Gotham Mausoleum.

Exhibit 8A:

Sound detector with which the Batman detected the Joker’s heartbeat in the mausoleum where the criminal’s loot from the Gotham Diamond Exchange robbery was hidden.

Exhibit 9:

Juggling balls filled with knockout gas, which the Joker used during his attempt to steal more than $200,000 of gate receipts from the Gotham Circus.

Exhibit 9A:

False clown nose worn over breathing filter by the Batman, who masqueraded as a Gotham Circus clown to apprehend the Joker.

Exhibit 10:

This mounted snake is a rare South African variety whose poison leaves victims with a grotesque smile on their faces. This is not the actual snake used by the Joker, but is a member of the same species. (Courtesy of Gotham Museum of Natural History.)

Exhibit 10A:

“Trump,” the mongoose that Batman borrowed from the Gotham Zoo to dispatch the Joker’s killer snake. (“Trump” is on loan from the Gotham Zoo. Please do not feed him or insert fingers into his cage.)

Exhibit 11:

This is the phony television camera the Joker used when masquerading as a member of the media during an inaugural dinner for the mayor. The small red button on the left fires the handgun that is hidden beneath the lens.

Exhibit 11A:

The lens from the Joker’s false television camera (see Exhibit 11). The Batman, suspecting just such an attack, had Robin sneak into the Joker’s headquarters and replace the original lens with this specially treated lens, which distorts the user’s perceptions and causes him to fire eighteen inches to the left of his target.

Exhibit 12:

Membership card to the exclusive Gotham Millionaires Club, made out to one Joe Ker. With this card, the Joker gained access to Gotham’s richest men and women, whom he planned to hold for ransom.

Exhibit 12A:

Gold-plated honorary membership card to the Gotham Millionaires Club, offered to the Batman by unanimous vote of the membership after the Dark Knight had foiled the Joker’s scheme. He declined membership, and donated the card to the Gotham Museum.

Exhibit 13:

This final exhibit is the cannister of lethal gas with which the Joker planned to kill himself after his most recent capture by the Batman.

Exhibit 13A:

Laughing-gas cannister substituted for Exhibit 13 by the Batman, which left the Joker laughing all the way to Arkham Asylum, where he currently resides. It is rumored that he is laughing still.

Balloons

Edward Wellen

H
igh above the stippled green that was a forest, a press helicopter intercepted the wind-driven ten-story-tall balloon.

The cameraman in the chopper had a pasty face, scarlet lips fixed in a face-splitting grin, and Astroturf hair. As the chopper closed in, he used a helium tank to inflate a sausage balloon. Then he held up the sausage balloon to show lettering on it that read: SAY “CHEESE.”

In the basket of the ten-story-tall balloon, Roman A. Clay, the billionaire publisher famous for his partying, motorcycling, and ballooning, stepped between the two lovely models who formed his crew, put his arms around their bare midriffs, and smiled for the camcorder poking out of the chopper.

The cameraman snapped a special cube into his fill light and triggered it. Superlight blinded Clay and his crew.

They felt a thump and a jerk, but could see only a dazzle of benday dots. Slowly vision cleared, and revealed that a grappling iron now linked their basket to the chopper.

The cameraman held up another sausage balloon. This one said: JOKER TOWING SERVICE.

Roman A. Clay turned almost as pale as the cameraman. He was at the tender mercy of the notorious, the nefarious, Joker. His first thought was to unhook the grapnel, release the gas in the bag, and drop the balloon into the forest.

But the Joker had traded the camcorder for an Uzi. So Clay made no move toward the grapnel. His hand, however, inched toward his cellular phone.

The Joker saw the tycoon’s hand edge below the bulwark of the basket. The Joker signed to his pilot and the chopper slanted higher to let the Joker look down into the basket.

CRACK! The Joker shot the phone out of Clay’s hand, shattering the phone in the process. Bits of high-impact plastic stung Clay and his crew, drawing screams from all three.

The Joker held up another sausage balloon: NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY.

Clay sagged against the railing. He looked over and down. All below was forest. The Joker had chosen the intercept point well. No one had witnessed the air piracy, no one currently watched the chopper tug the captive free balloon at a good clip off course and
against
the wind. All hope of rescue faded from Clay’s mind. When Clay’s balloon failed to keep its ETA, searchers would hunt for it tens of miles from where it supposedly went down.

Needing comfort himself, he tried to comfort his crew as, under the crazy gaze of that weird face with its implacable fixed grin, the chopper towed the balloon toward the unknown.

Ten hours later, Roman A. Clay’s staff at his Gotham City estate began to worry. And as the hours passed, the wire services started to chatter bulletins. The network anchor people impressively intoned these bulletins. Roman A. Clay’s balloon had vanished without a trace on its way home from a state fair in Kansas.

In his hideout, not all that far from the Clay estate, a jauntily bereted and besmocked Joker sang ad-libbed doggerel as he mixed oil colors on his palette.

“Sweet Turpentine.
For you I pine.
Sweet Turpitude,
O’er you I brood.”

He grinned at the blank canvas. “Ready or not, here I come!” And he attacked it, splashing and daubing away with savage glee and wild intensity, getting more spatters and dribbles on his smock than on the canvas.

“Oh, my darling, oh, my darling,
Oh, my darling Adrenaline.
You jump-start me and keep me going,
that is why my eyes have this shine.”

Sudden inspiration hit him midstroke and his brush dribbled a largesse of red over the chest of his smock unheeded. His face split in two. “I’ll throw that bat a curve!”

From his penthouse patio, Bruce Wayne swept the night horizon with his restless gaze. Northward, the suburbs spread out in a lacy tracery of lights; eastward, the stars melded with the bold carnival lights of Cockaigne Island Amusement Park; westward, the river netted moonlight; southward, the great ocean luminesced.

Beautiful, all of it, but a long siege of idleness left him bored.

A cacophony of car horns and police whistles rose from the street into his consciousness.

He stepped to his telescope.

It showed him gridlock all around the base of the Tempo Triangle Building, the world-renowned landmark at the throbbing heart of Gotham City. Traffic had stopped. Pedestrians crowded in from all sides, jamming Tempo Triangle. Everyone gaped at the building-girdling array of lights that spelled out the moving headlines.

Wayne sharpened his focus.

THE JOKER HOLDS ROMAN A. CLAY AND CREW FOR RANSOM. DEMANDS ONE BILLION DOLLARS. IN TOTO. THE JOKER CHALLENGES BATMAN TO RESCUE CLAY BEFORE AUGUST 1 DEADLINE. ON THE DOT.

The Joker! Wayne’s blood quickened, fizzing like champagne. Didn’t give him much time. August first was only a week away. Didn’t give him much time. But the more pressure the better. Made him push the envelope of his abilities. This was the challenge Batman had unconsciously been waiting for and he felt alive and purposeful and in command.

Wayne sprang to his direct-line speakerphone. Almost as though Commissioner Gordon had been awaiting the call, the commissioner answered on the first ring.

“C.G. here.”

“B.M. calling. I assume your people are trying to track down the person responsible for flashing the Tempo Triangle Building message about Roman A. Clay.”

“ ‘Trying’ is the operative word. The news bulletins and the ads are fed into a computer that switches the pixels on and off to make the message seem to move from right to left. The Joker has managed somehow to access the computer and impose
his
messages.”

“I see.”

“Er . . .”

“Yes?”

“You’re taking up the gauntlet?”

“I just now said ‘yes.’ ”

A deep sigh. “That’s a relief. I’m in constant touch with Clay’s staff. They’re preparing to convert his assets to cash—just in case. Bad business, this. Could send the stock market into a tailspin.”

Wayne listened but kept watching. New words crept around the Tempo Triangle Building.

CAN YOU LICK YOUR OZ IN A CAT AMOUNT, PARD? SEE YOU THERE.

“Talk to you later, C.G.,” Wayne said absently, and punched off without looking away from the message that was slipping around out of sight.

He waited for more, but the Joker, too, seemed to have punched off. The display resumed its normal town-crying of the world’s calamities.

Wayne replayed in his mind what seemed to him the key message.

CAN YOU LICK YOUR OZ IN A CAT AMOUNT, PARD?

He knew the set phrase to be:
lick one’s weight in wildcats.

Oz.
was the abbreviation for
ounces.
He turned to the unabridged dictionary.
Ounce
also meant the mountain panther
(catamount!)
or snow leopard
(pard!).

But the Joker had written it
OZ,
without the period, as in the Land of Oz. And TOTO (pointing to Dorothy’s dog) and DOT (pointing to Dorothy) both confirmed that interpretation.

Yet, how could the Joker be waiting to confront him in the Land of Oz when there was no such place? Oz existed only in fantasy!

Wayne sat down with pencil and paper. He set his mind in neutral and began doodling, letting the pencil tune into his subconscious.

OZ.

The Wizard of Oz
by Lyman Frank Baum.

Baum-tree.

Can’t see the forest for the trees.

Then, with OZ as his starting point, he found himself working both ways from it, upward and downward, in alphabetical order:

LW
MX
NY
OZ
PA
QB
RC

He stopped and focused on:

OZ
PA

Had Baum’s Pa been the basis for the Wizard of Oz?

He shook his head. He was getting sidetracked. He widened his focus:

NY
OZ
PA

Sensing with rising excitement that he was on the right track, he reached for the atlas. He turned to the maps of the several states and studied the New York-Pennsylvania boundary. He found lots of trees and a Cat.

With a tight smile, he pressed the redial key on the direct-line speakerphone.

“C.G. here.”

“B.M. again. I think you can tell the searchers to narrow the search to Cattaraugus County, right on the New York-Pennsylvania border, where New York’s Alleghany State Park adjoins Pennsylvania’s Alleghany Reservoir.”

“How—?”

“Please just do it. I’ll explain some other time.” Click.