This is Alan Shore returning your call [for manorly_wayne]
“Alan.”
Alan’s had a newspaper-a-day habit for as long as he cares to remember; since Bruce’s arrest he’s upped it to two, but neither Globe is quite so informative as the timbre of Denny’s voice. Today he sounds jovial, congratulatory. Alan’s name is transformed into a two-syllable slap on the back.
“I had nothing to do with it,” Alan says.
“Of course not.”
“Denny, I mean it. However he accomplished his escape, I wasn’t involved.”
Silence as Denny reckons the truth of that statement or-it being ten in the morning-finishes breakfast or shoos a hooker out of bed. “Do I need to come down there?”
“And do what?” Denny Crane in Gotham. He’d be leading his own crime syndicate by nightfall. “The weather’s lousy and my client’s missing. The only reason I’m still here…”
“You’ve been there too long. You’ll go native”-Denny pauses, and Alan can imagine his eyes widening, the sudden swerve of his thoughts-“maybe you already have.”
“It’s Gotham City, Denny, not the Congolese jungle.”
Anger exhilarates him. The world constricts, suddenly, narrows like a beam of light caught in a magnifying glass. Alan doesn’t act in haste-when he snaps the phone shut it’s with an air of reflection. He waits five minutes, ten, for it to buzz to life in his hand.
Fifteen minutes later he sets it down on the desk.
Bruce will call back. He’ll have no choice if he expects Alan to participate in this scavenger hunt he’s organized (to find: one safety deposit box in your name, one vacant seat on the Wayne Foundation, one wrongfully incarcerated man with a first name containing three letters). Alan would rather he did so now, in the grips of mild annoyance or whatever passes for strong emotion in the Bruce Wayne repertoire.
(That desk, by the way, it’s a nice one-a nearly wall-length slice of marble hotel staff had adorned, as if it needed adornment, with a vase sprouting fresh lilacs.)
By the thirty-minute mark his anger’s dissipated, given way to embarrassment-at his own loss of control, at the unseemly display of emotion-and worry. Maybe Bruce only had a tiny window during which to place a call. Maybe he’s been apprehended, shot. Alan’s thoughts are forever returning to the stab wound, his subconscious unable to resist the image of Bruce leaking blood as he scurries from city to city.
He pockets the phone, tightens his tie, and goes to see Joe Marek.
The flowers on the desk don’t ever droop or wither; the unseen force that plumps his pillows and smoothes his rumpled comforter must attend to them as well. Wayne Tech’s financials summoned to the screen in front of him, Alan sits thinking about all those discarded flowers mingling with the rest of the hotel’s garbage-room service leftovers, yesterday’s wadded up itineraries.
Research and development. Unusually high numbers, though he’d been primed for that, hadn’t he? Primed to find some sort of irregularity by a person (he thinks of her as a woman, but that’s the byproduct of instinct and a stock photo) who’d intimated a connection to Bruce, scattered a few crumbs of information, and then vanished.
Well, if nothing else, she and Bruce share certain methodological similarities.
R&D. What could numbers like that fund? What couldn’t they fund? Where are the corresponding increases in production, in revenue? What could any of it possibly have to do with Bruce Wayne, he of the pre-, post-, and mid-meeting doze?
He approaches the problem not like a puzzle (find the corners, assemble the border, make sure the pieces interlock, admire the resultant image) or a chess configuration (consider who is vulnerable and where, each piece’s sphere of influence) but a Mad Lib. Bruce Wayne has no alibi for the night of Vesper Fairchild’s murder because he was testing top-secret, ludicrously expensive technology. Bruce Wayne has no alibi for the night of Vesper Fairchild’s murder because he was negotiating with a dealer in high-tech black-market something-or-others. The budget allocations are the result of Bruce’s legal troubles; Wayne Tech will now be researching and developing cutting-edge alibi technology.
He plays that game for a while.
Alan stops by police headquarters that night. Summer hasn’t yet come to Gotham and the city’s still soggy after a late-morning dousing of rain.
“I’m here to surrender myself,” he announces, wiping his feet on a faded mat meant to resemble the department’s seal. If he doesn’t recognize Alan, the man manning the desk recognizes what he is, reads it in the briefcase, the bespoke suit. Alan smiles as if secure in the knowledge that he’s the first to have made such a show of wit.
“Ha,” the deskman says about a minute and a half later. “A door-to-door comedian.”
Alan’s made his way to the elevator, tapped the button once. “I’m an attorney,” he supplies-everyone likes having their suspicions confirmed, officers of the law in particular. “I was promised an interrogation at the hands of one of Gotham’s finest.” The elevator chimes; he steps on board.
The view from atop the building isn’t as spectacular as one might expect: it’s a cloudy night, the moon little more than a wisp of light, the stars all but blotted out.
With the addition of the Bat-Signal, it improves.
Alan’s had a newspaper-a-day habit for as long as he cares to remember; since Bruce’s arrest he’s upped it to two, but neither Globe is quite so informative as the timbre of Denny’s voice. Today he sounds jovial, congratulatory. Alan’s name is transformed into a two-syllable slap on the back.
“I had nothing to do with it,” Alan says.
“Of course not.”
“Denny, I mean it. However he accomplished his escape, I wasn’t involved.”
Silence as Denny reckons the truth of that statement or-it being ten in the morning-finishes breakfast or shoos a hooker out of bed. “Do I need to come down there?”
“And do what?” Denny Crane in Gotham. He’d be leading his own crime syndicate by nightfall. “The weather’s lousy and my client’s missing. The only reason I’m still here…”
“You’ve been there too long. You’ll go native”-Denny pauses, and Alan can imagine his eyes widening, the sudden swerve of his thoughts-“maybe you already have.”
“It’s Gotham City, Denny, not the Congolese jungle.”
Anger exhilarates him. The world constricts, suddenly, narrows like a beam of light caught in a magnifying glass. Alan doesn’t act in haste-when he snaps the phone shut it’s with an air of reflection. He waits five minutes, ten, for it to buzz to life in his hand.
Fifteen minutes later he sets it down on the desk.
Bruce will call back. He’ll have no choice if he expects Alan to participate in this scavenger hunt he’s organized (to find: one safety deposit box in your name, one vacant seat on the Wayne Foundation, one wrongfully incarcerated man with a first name containing three letters). Alan would rather he did so now, in the grips of mild annoyance or whatever passes for strong emotion in the Bruce Wayne repertoire.
(That desk, by the way, it’s a nice one-a nearly wall-length slice of marble hotel staff had adorned, as if it needed adornment, with a vase sprouting fresh lilacs.)
By the thirty-minute mark his anger’s dissipated, given way to embarrassment-at his own loss of control, at the unseemly display of emotion-and worry. Maybe Bruce only had a tiny window during which to place a call. Maybe he’s been apprehended, shot. Alan’s thoughts are forever returning to the stab wound, his subconscious unable to resist the image of Bruce leaking blood as he scurries from city to city.
He pockets the phone, tightens his tie, and goes to see Joe Marek.
The flowers on the desk don’t ever droop or wither; the unseen force that plumps his pillows and smoothes his rumpled comforter must attend to them as well. Wayne Tech’s financials summoned to the screen in front of him, Alan sits thinking about all those discarded flowers mingling with the rest of the hotel’s garbage-room service leftovers, yesterday’s wadded up itineraries.
Research and development. Unusually high numbers, though he’d been primed for that, hadn’t he? Primed to find some sort of irregularity by a person (he thinks of her as a woman, but that’s the byproduct of instinct and a stock photo) who’d intimated a connection to Bruce, scattered a few crumbs of information, and then vanished.
Well, if nothing else, she and Bruce share certain methodological similarities.
R&D. What could numbers like that fund? What couldn’t they fund? Where are the corresponding increases in production, in revenue? What could any of it possibly have to do with Bruce Wayne, he of the pre-, post-, and mid-meeting doze?
He approaches the problem not like a puzzle (find the corners, assemble the border, make sure the pieces interlock, admire the resultant image) or a chess configuration (consider who is vulnerable and where, each piece’s sphere of influence) but a Mad Lib. Bruce Wayne has no alibi for the night of Vesper Fairchild’s murder because he was testing top-secret, ludicrously expensive technology. Bruce Wayne has no alibi for the night of Vesper Fairchild’s murder because he was negotiating with a dealer in high-tech black-market something-or-others. The budget allocations are the result of Bruce’s legal troubles; Wayne Tech will now be researching and developing cutting-edge alibi technology.
He plays that game for a while.
Alan stops by police headquarters that night. Summer hasn’t yet come to Gotham and the city’s still soggy after a late-morning dousing of rain.
“I’m here to surrender myself,” he announces, wiping his feet on a faded mat meant to resemble the department’s seal. If he doesn’t recognize Alan, the man manning the desk recognizes what he is, reads it in the briefcase, the bespoke suit. Alan smiles as if secure in the knowledge that he’s the first to have made such a show of wit.
“Ha,” the deskman says about a minute and a half later. “A door-to-door comedian.”
Alan’s made his way to the elevator, tapped the button once. “I’m an attorney,” he supplies-everyone likes having their suspicions confirmed, officers of the law in particular. “I was promised an interrogation at the hands of one of Gotham’s finest.” The elevator chimes; he steps on board.
The view from atop the building isn’t as spectacular as one might expect: it’s a cloudy night, the moon little more than a wisp of light, the stars all but blotted out.
With the addition of the Bat-Signal, it improves.