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Bruce’s burner phone buzzes in his suit pocket. He checks it discreetly, hoping that his date won’t notice. He needn’t worry; she’s not even looking at him. Salomé’s attention is currently held by the playing of the Michelin-starred restaurant’s live string quartet as she idly twirls her martini glass.
He spares a glance down at the message on his phone screen.
Gordon: Requesting immediate assistance for a confirmed armed robbery and possible hostage situation in the Diamond District on East 4th Street and Grand Avenue at the Jubilee. Shots fired, officer down. Backup is currently en route; ETA: 5 minutes.
Bruce’s thumb quickly taps across the keypad.
B: Message received. I will be en route shortly.
It’s not like the date was going that well anyway.
Bruce looks back up at Salomé and finally catches her gaze. He rubs the back of his neck, his smile sheepish. “I’m really sorry, Salomé, but I need to head out; something came up at work. I can call you a chauffeur, if you’d like.”
It’s an easy excuse—practiced at this point. No one’s ever going to question why the billionaire CEO of a multinational conglomerate had something come up at work. Bruce feels a little bad, but judging by Salomé’s polite yet tired smile, she was looking for an excuse to retire for the evening anyway.
She accepts the offer of the chauffeur graciously and bids him goodnight as he gathers his coat and belongings and hurries out the restaurant’s front entrance, tapping away at the com on his watch.
The chill of the crisp January air hits Bruce as he steps outside, causing him to shiver. He scans the street for his own chauffeur and smiles when he spots a black limousine pulling up to the curb. The driver’s side window rolls down as he approaches, and a familiar voice calls out, “Good evening, Master Wayne.”
Bruce has never been more grateful for Alfred’s patience with him than he has been this past month. Juggling playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne’s schedule with Batman’s nighttime vigilantism wouldn’t be possible without him—especially not with the recent surge in activity among Gotham’s organized crime.
Falcone’s men had been on a tear over the past few weeks, targeting various banks and wealthy businesses throughout the city—his rivals’ or otherwise—in an effort to terrorize Gotham’s citizenry back into compliance. Ever since the appearance of the Batman, there had been an increase in murmurings against the crime boss, a glimmering of hope that he sought to swiftly crush.
Batman had his supporters throughout all the rungs of Gotham’s economic ladder, but it was towards the wealthy citizens—those still unattached to the city’s underbelly corruption—that Falcone concentrated his efforts. While accustomed to a life of leisure and inaction, some of these socialites had grown more outspoken as of late, and they had the power to enact real change in Gotham if they applied their resources strategically—something the crime boss was wise to be afraid of.
It was really no wonder that the Diamond District and Midtown had been hit so hard during the recent crime wave; Falcone would do anything to have these people bury their heads in the sand again, willing the criminal scum to trickle back into the recesses of the city where they belonged—out of sight and out of mind.
It had been an uphill battle—fighting for Gotham. For every criminal Batman managed to put away, it seemed that two more would get out on cashless bail, courtesy of the judges on Falcone’s payroll. Gotham’s newly appointed District Attorney Harvey Dent—a good man, a man Bruce knew well—had been doing everything he could, but it was no easy task—not when half of the GCPD was likely corrupt as well. Privately, Bruce and Lieutenant Gordon had come to suspect that even the commissioner himself couldn’t be trusted.
These are the thoughts racing through Bruce’s mind as he pulls on the cowl and slips out of the limousine and into a back alley. He grapples up to an adjacent rooftop before gliding across the gap to another, charting his course towards the Jubilee. He had been lucky; the restaurant was in the same part of the Diamond District as the one he had taken Salomé to.
Bruce finds the Jubilee surrounded by squad cars. The red-and-blue lights flashing against the building’s reflective exterior give the distinct impression that the colors along its walls are melting into one another. None of the backup appears to have made it inside, and the presence of Crisis Negotiation Team officers all but confirms Gordon’s report from earlier.
Bruce circles around to the back of the restaurant as one of the CNT officers calls out to the hostage-takers with a loudspeaker. He lands on the roof of the building near its skylight window and crouches down to peek inside.
One of the men—likely the leader of the group—yells back to the negotiator, waving his pistol in the air before planting it back against the temple of the sobbing young woman held tight in his grip. Bruce strains to listen, but the man’s voice is too muffled—he doubts the negotiator can hear him either.
Some movement towards the entrance of the restaurant catches Bruce’s eyes, and he listens as a shaky voice calls out, “He says he’s going to kill another one if the cops don’t back off.”
The thug standing behind the hostage at the door nudges him in the back with the barrel of his pistol before whispering something in his ear. The man gulps and says, “You have five minutes.”
The hostage is near enough to the doors to make a break for it, but Bruce doubts these men would hesitate to shoot the messenger—even their own.
He watches as the hostage is dragged back to the center of the restaurant while the man holding him stops to converse with his superior. The leader nods, and the hostage’s struggling becomes more frantic as he’s pulled along towards the restaurant's back rooms.
Bruce counts three hostage-takers—Falcone’s men almost certainly—but only low-level thugs. He would never waste Made Men or even associates on something this risky.
These men are expendable pawns, felons with rap sheets a mile long—desperate enough to accept work that could easily get them killed. Just another move on the chessboard in Falcone's game of terror with the people of Gotham.
Bruce steps away from the skylight and moves to dive off the side of the roof. Breaking through the skylight might be faster, but it would also be more likely to result in mass civilian casualties—the third man is armed with a semi-automatic rifle.
He glides down the restaurant’s back wall and comes to a pair of windows offering him a view inside the manager’s office. Inside the room, his eyes fall upon the first casualty of the night, a police officer lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Bruce narrows his eyes as he breaks the latch on the window and slips inside the office. He steps into a dark corner of the dimly lit room, listening to the sound of approaching footsteps and frantic pleading.
The thug roughly pulls his hostage into the room before throwing him to the ground and planting a boot firmly on his back to prevent him from squirming away. He checks his watch and looks around before lighting a cigarette, all while the man beneath him writhes and sobs.
He hardly has time to let out a gasp as he’s yanked off the hostage and pulled into a chokehold. Bruce drops the man to the ground once he sags in his arms, unconscious, and turns to the wide-eyed hostage still sitting on the ground.
Bruce puts a finger to his lips and motions for him to hide underneath the manager’s desk. The man jerkily nods his head and scrambles to his feet to comply.
Outside the office, on the main floor of the restaurant, the lead hostage-taker furrows his brow as he notes the absence of the expected sound of a gunshot as the five-minute mark rolls by. He cocks his head to the side, motioning for the man with the semi-auto to see what the hold-up is.
The third hostage-taker finds the manager’s office unexpectedly empty. He tightens his clammy grip on his rifle and calls out for his accomplice, but there’s no response. He shifts on his feet for a moment before walking inside the dark room.
The man has hardly taken a step into the office before he’s being bowled over on his side—tackled to the ground and overtaken by a looming black shadow that he will later describe as an enormous bat. He doesn’t let out so much as a squeak.
Bruce slips outside the office room and makes his way into the main dining area, drifting behind the bar counter, unseen.
There’s only one hostage-taker left, but Bruce hesitates to engage him. He’s grown increasingly antsy during the prolonged absence of his accomplices, yelling and cursing at the surrounding restaurant patrons as he jabs the barrel of his pistol against his hostage’s temple again and again.
If he tackles him now, Bruce is liable to get the young woman killed.
Bruce scans the room, taking in the faces of the crowd. Most of them look horrified as they listen to the hostage-taker’s impossible demands. A sense of collective, dawning horror begins to permeate the room as the patrons realize they are in the presence of what amounts to a cornered animal—one with nothing left to lose.
All except for one table, Bruce realizes. Directly behind the raving gunman sits a young couple who don’t appear to share their fellows’ despair. If anything, they look a bit bored.
They appear ordinary enough, but as Bruce watches them, the man of the pair’s eyes suddenly swivel over to meet his own, holding his gaze.
It should be impossible; Bruce is a shadow of a shadow in the darkness behind the bar, but a small smile curls across the man’s lips all the same. His glittering green eyes flit over to the gunman, then back to Bruce, and his smile widens.
The man stands up from his seat, his chair screeching.
He whistles. “Man, it’s a shame they don’t give us any peanuts to throw in this place, because this has to be the worst dinner and a show I’ve ever seen.”
For a single moment, the silence within the restaurant is deafening.
Then the gunman whirls around, turning his back to Bruce. He tosses the young woman aside—allowing her to scramble to safety—and advances on the green-eyed man, snarling, “What was that, you little shit?”
“I mean,” the man says, raising his hands, “that I think I’m speaking for everyone here—including the crickets—when I say that this set is bombing. Now, where’s that curtain hook when you need it?”
He might be speaking to the fuming hostage-taker, but his eyes are on Bruce—whose own eyes widen in sudden understanding. He leaps out from behind the bar, tackling the gunman to the ground before he can even raise his pistol.
The green-eyed man bursts into laughter as Bruce clamps a pair of handcuffs around the cursing and thrashing thug’s wrists. Beside him, the woman still seated at their table squeals and claps her hands together, like she’s just seen a particularly good parlor trick.
The man grins. “Nice one, Batman!” He turns, gesturing to the other patrons. “Everyone, a round of applause for our caped crusader!”
At an apparent loss, the rest of the Jubilee’s guests begin clapping alongside the green-eyed man and his wife. Some of them even stand up from their seats.
Underneath his mask, Bruce furrows his brow. Batman has never received a standing ovation before.
The gunman now secure, Bruce stands up and steps away. He takes in the applauding crowd and, after a moment of consideration, offers up a polite wave.
The green-eyed man and his wife both erupt into further laughter—which is nervously echoed by the surrounding patrons. The sound of their laughter trails after Bruce as he slips out the office window and glides off into the night.
Behind him, the police finally burst through the Jubilee’s front doors, filing inside like a wave as they move in to secure the area.
The blue light emitting from the Cave’s monitor screen illuminates Bruce’s face as he types away on his keyboard. He pauses to rub his eyes for a moment, then attempts to blink away his eyestrain. He’ll regret staying up this late in the morning, but he knows that he won’t be able to sleep anyway—not until he knows who the man in the restaurant was.
Bruce is thankful that the Jubilee is reservation-only—this would prove far more difficult otherwise. He scrolls through the restaurant’s list of reservations for that night, matching names with faces from Gotham’s city records. Most of the Jubilee’s clientele are local socialites whose families have belonged to Gotham for decades—with the birth and death certificates to prove it. He finds a few out-of-towners among the list, wealthy entrepreneurs visiting on business—there to be wined and dined by Gotham’s finest—but it's two names in particular that stand out to him.
Jack and Arlene Joliet
Bruce doesn’t think he’s ever seen the surname Joliet before—certainly not in America, at least.
The woman, Arlene, is vaguely familiar to him. He’s able to match her face to a previous driver’s license with her maiden name—and it clicks. Arlene Kerr—Broadway costume artist turned breakout fashion designer with a penchant for pantomime—and daughter of Wall Street stockbroker Oberon Kerr.
The man, this Jack Joliet—Bruce isn’t sure what to make of him. A Broadway triple threat if the show listings and casting agency websites he’s found are to be believed—though Bruce has never heard of him personally. Which is fair; he’s never really been one for musicals.
Bruce is even able to find a partial recording of one of Jack’s performances from the previous year, and yes—the promotional material wasn’t lying—he can sing, dance, and act. Everything with the man’s career appears to be on the up and up—but that’s just it.
There’s nothing else.
No family. No friends or associates prior to his debut on Broadway.
The closest thing Bruce can find is his former talent agent, a man named Elias Leicht, who appears to have helped him land his first role. There is little public information available regarding this Elias Leicht, and Bruce can’t find any record of him taking on clients before or after Jack.
Jack himself appears to have sprung into existence just prior to his debut. The most Bruce can find is a record of a hotel check-in from a couple of years ago, around that time.
Looking into these people has opened more cans of worms than Bruce had ever bargained for, but there was still one question that was gnawing at him—more than all the others.
Both of them appear to have found fame and fortune in New York—why move to Gotham, of all places?
And that’s when he finds the marriage record.
It’s from seven months ago at the Gotham courthouse, and Bruce can’t find any evidence of an accompanying wedding ceremony.
An elopement?
Bruce rubs his eyes again and pushes back from his computer desk, stretching in his chair as he tries and fails to stifle a yawn.
He doesn’t know why he’s being so obsessive; it’s not like these people have actually done anything illegal. His energy is better spent elsewhere—investigating actual criminals.
They were strange, certainly, but it’s not like Gotham’s ever had any scarcity of oddities.
But there was just—something about them. The man in particular, Jack—Bruce didn’t like his eyes. It sounds silly—thinking of it now—but even still, Bruce feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up at just the memory of it.
He knows there’s no use worrying about it now—especially this late at night. He really does need to get some sleep; he was only half-lying to Salomé when he said something had come up at work. He has a meeting with Wayne Enterprises’ board of directors tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock sharp.
Alfred is going to kill him if he sleeps through his alarm again.