fic: Chinese Boxes 10/11

[01cheers]

22. Back to the future

“Can I speak to Miss Selina Kyle, please?” The crisp English voice at the other end of the call is fully in line with the 44 phone caller ID, but try as she may, she cannot remember knowing any Englishmen who might have this number, or remember her by that name.

“Speaking,” she says, cagily.

“Hello Selina, Alfred Pennyworth here.” She is both relieved and genuinely happy to hear the name. “Am I interrupting anything?”

“Nothing at all,” she assures him. In fact, there is nothing to interrupt; she is alone upstairs, Bruce is away again, and the maid is busying herself with the downstairs floors. “It’s good to hear you.”

“Lucius Fox gave me your number,” Alfred offers by way of explanation, as if it were needed. “And he told me what happened to you lot.” His voice takes on a stern note. “That’s really not the way to behave, young lady. I hope his abominable self-destructive habits don’t rub off on you.”

She has to laugh at that, even if it risks keeping Alfred cross. “I’m doing my best to resist,” she says.

“Not very successfully, it seems,” Alfred points out, but his voice sounds warmer again. “What’s all that sorry business about your leg being broken in two places?”

Who would have thought that Lucius was such a gossip? “I had to jump a dozen feet down to stop a thug from shooting, or else he’d blow up the room we were in.” She wonders if Alfred knows that part already, but it won’t hurt to assure him that her bone-breaking feat was not entirely self-destructive after all. “And I’m much better now.”

“What’s the damage?” Alfred’s voice turns almost professional.

“Fractured kneecap, fractured ankle, they’ve put screws and the like into both, but they say they’ll take them out of the knee in a few weeks. The ones in the ankle might stay.”

Alfred clicks his tongue in a mixture of sympathy and disapproval. “In my old line of work at the SBS,” he remarks matter-of-factly, “we’d technically refer to the kind of situation you’re currently in as a royal bitch.” She has to laugh. “I can only hope your reckless boyfriend is taking good care of you.”

“He is,” she insists.

“Good.” Alfred takes it in stride, as the least that he would apparently expect of his former charge. “And I know you’re taking care of him, but I also want you to take care of yourself. For his sake, if you won’t be convinced by other reasons. I don’t want to have to worry about you both now.”

“I will, I promise.” She does her best to sound both convinced and convincing. “I have no plans to let either of us get killed anytime soon,” she adds for greater emphasis.

“Better if it’s never,” Alfred counters, and she has to admit that he has a point.

“Can I persuade you to come visit us here?” She knows that Alfred wanted himself and Bruce to keep their distance at least for a while, but she knows that Alfred is really family, and it would be a shame for those two to stay apart for good.

“Thank you, my dear, I’ll think about it. I have to go visit a friend in the French Alps in late September, I might just take a detour. But before then, you must come visit me here. When are you out of the splints and off crutches?”

“Early to mid-August, they say. It may depend but they’ve done a good job realigning the bones.”

“Good to know. Well, whenever you’re ready, just give me a call. I mostly stay at home in Cornwall now, but I also have a nice summer cottage in the Lake District. It’s a walker’s paradise, shame about your leg but we can still go riding.”

“We’ll be happy to come over.” She finds herself looking forward to it already.

“Oh no, I meant you, not him,” Alfred points out. “If that boy tags along he’ll only want to talk about technology and his latest toys and the silly sports he’s now into. I’m nearly eighty now, I don’t want to spend hours talking about surveillance systems and BASE-lining. I’d rather just gossip,” he says in a vaguely conspiratorial tone.

“It’s a deal.” She wonders if Bruce will be sulking about it, but a promise is a promise. “But you must come see us in September, or else he’ll never get over it,” she adds.

“I will. Don’t tell him yet, but I will. And as I said, take care of yourself.”

“Will do. And Alfred?”

“Yes?”

“Please stay in touch.”

“I sure will. And you do the same, young lady. You have my number now.”

***

It is shaping up to be an afternoon of surprises, as an hour after Alfred’s call, she gets another call, a local one this time, from Theo’s wife. They have not met yet, but she has heard enough of Sylvie to know her for a down-to-earth sort of girl who does an excellent job juggling part-time work and two unruly kids and apparently also manages to keep her husband from doing too many crazy things, a skill Selina would like to know more about. Sylvie is asking if she can stop by, and half an hour after the call, she duly does so. Knowing that she is only three or four years younger than her husband, Selina is surprised to see the petite brown-haired woman looking like a twentysomething.

The purpose of Sylvie’s visit is apparently to bring Selina a get-well present from her boss. They saw each other very briefly when she and Bruce stopped by on the way back from Italy to pick up the phones and the keys to the villa, and trade in Theo’s camouflaged-weapon Scénic for the Sesto, but it did not leave much time beyond expressions of dismay and sympathy on his part, interspersed with stern comments about careless company owners endangering their best staff. Sylvie runs off almost at once, having to go back to the two rascals, as she lovingly calls them, waiting in the car to be taken to sports practice classes, though she has promised to come check on her again. Once she is alone, Selina unwraps the golden paper and regards the big, similarly golden box in a mixture of delight and chagrin.

The box is an exquisite collection of Godiva chocolates, 2 ¼ pounds of sinfully good stuff; she can practically smell them through the plastic wrap. She wishes someone would lock them up away from her and hand her one or two at a time over the space of a fortnight, or even a month; knowing herself, left alone with this temptation she will go through the 84 pieces in a week - and with Bruce having banned her from the exercise room so long as she is in splints, good luck to herself not showing the weight gain.

Luckily, the temptation has a distraction attached, in the shape of a get-well card on top of the box under the wrapping that, when opened, reveals an Italian inscription in Theo’s handwriting: Un ottimo lavoro ma ti prego di smetterlo. Brilliant work, please don’t do it again; she might argue that repeat performances may be made necessary by events beyond her control, but understands the sentiment. Also inside the card is a folded page from the Corriere from a few days ago; she has not been keeping an eye on the news, and is now curious and mildly worried to see what the media made of their misadventure.

The front page has a teaser halfway down the right hand side: Anti-terrorist raid in Prato, with a short paragraph below and a note referring to the next page for details. The second page boasts a much more substantial effort, taking up a quarter of the space and accompanied by a picture of a beaming, shorter-haired Gianfranco sitting in a hospital bed photographed in the middle of an official handshake with a high-ranking Carabinieri officer, with a slim blonde girl - looks like the real Chiara - sitting on the other side of the bed. Unlike Bruce, Gianfranco looks better with shorter hair, less pretty and more handsome, she thinks. The feature is titled Daring Carabinieri mission puts an end to a biological weapons factory west of Prato and contains a glowing description of the events. In an unprecedented lightning-fast targeted raid, it goes, the Carabinieri ROS yesterday stormed the premises of a textiles factory in Prato, uncovering a sinister Chinese mafia operation producing a nerve toxin that was smuggled into Syria and also sold to a number of terrorist groups concealed inside rolls of fabric. The company had been effectively taken hostage by the local branch of the Triad, who, as it transpired, had murdered its owner, Giacomo Varese, a respected local businessman, two weeks ago. The raid was made possible thanks to China’s participation in the Interpol effort that helped trace Triad links with terrorists and obtain data on Wu Ming, the Triad boss who ran the Prato facility, which also led to a series of raids and arrests in mainland China, and thanks to the meticulous preparation and daring undercover work by two freelance agents in Italy, who cannot be named for operational reasons. She snorts at the freelance agents part and remembers Bruce complaining about the journalists to her at the hospital, saying how he had to beg the police and others to keep their faces and names out of the media. Good to know it worked. However, the article goes on, Mr Varese’s son Gianfranco, who has inherited the company and now intends to turn it around, and who cooperated in the raid, speaking from his room at Santa Maria Novella hospital where he is recovering from bone fractures, described the pair of intrepid operatives respectively as “half 007, half Superman” and “half Audrey Hepburn, half Mata Hari”. Oh well, she could live with those descriptions; they are more amusing than revealing, after all.

***

“What, tired of boxes?” Bruce asks her when she points to Theo’s gift sitting on the nightstand with a long-suffering sigh. Her willpower lasted for half an hour - and now, another hour and eight chocolate pieces later, she has to revise her rate of uncontrolled consumption of the contents from a week to three days max.

“Actually, this is a kind of box I do like,” she counters. “I just wish he’d got me a smaller one.” She notices his curious look and tries to explain. “There’s a kilo of chocolate in it. Was, before I got started, and at this rate, so long as you won’t let me exercise, I’ll get so heavy I’ll ruin the mattress.”

His expression makes abundantly clear what he thinks of the likelihood of that happening, but he still tries to reassure her. Well, sort of. “We’ll think of something,” he offers with a suggestive wink.

“You already did,” she pretends to be less than happy about it. “And at that rate we’ll not just ruin the mattress, we’ll break the bed frame.” Which is probably not true, but he should not begrudge her a bit of artistic license; what the exercise he has in mind may lack in exertion, it makes up for in intensity. Since he left the couch to share the bed as usual, his nice gesture of holding her so she can get to sleep, more often than not, ends up with both of them getting much less sleep; and if she thought that the condition of her leg would baffle him in the least, she was thinking of the wrong lover. Except that instead of the usual passionate antics, he now drives her crazy by being slow and careful, a ruthless, relentless, shameless tease, mercilessly tender and obscenely good at playing with her body, so much so that she is happy that the village residents are some distance away, or they’d think their Lamborghini-driving neighbour has acquired a wildcat in heat, what with the way it makes her moan. Worse yet, she thought she’d never in her life stoop to saying something as trite as I want you to fuck me senseless, but couldn’t help it on at least one occasion; she would be embarrassed if the consequences had not fully justified the plea. She has been doing her best to reciprocate and he is happy to submit to her caresses, but she cannot wait until she is in good enough shape to have him entirely at her tender mercy for a change... not to mention making the most of his endearing hang-up about sex in public places that also gets him ridiculously turned on.

“We’ll think of more something,” he counters in the meantime, undaunted.

“Have pity on a poor cripple,” she teasingly throws his words from weeks ago back at him.

He doesn’t miss a beat. “You’ve survived.”

Nor does she, naturally. “Barely,” she shoots back, grinning, before adding, “but I’m getting the hang of it.”

***

It turns out that the threat of decimating the chocolate box that evening has been averted thanks to Bruce, who called the San Salvatore restaurant on his way back from the meeting and stopped by later to pick up a takeaway dinner. She cannot imagine how he could have remembered her exact order from two months ago, but somehow he did; and she has to laugh at his apologetic expression when he says that the affogato dessert would have melted en route if he had tried to bring her one.

“No worries,” she reassures him when they are sitting on the terrace having a home-served version of the fateful dinner. “I’m sure I’ll have a chance to eat it again. I’d like to go back there when I can walk. I really liked the food, I loved the view, and all in all I’d like to give it another chance.”

“What was wrong with the first time?” he asks her, perplexed.

Not much, considering the way things turned out. Still...“Too much unresolved sexual tension,” she offers with a dirty look. Plus the fact that he did his best to confuse her with the truth.

“Isn’t that the point of dinner dates?” he shoots back, innocently.

“I prefer the after-dinner dates,” she replies with a meaningful look, taking in his indecently wide grin. Looks like he does, too.

He is only too happy to confirm her guess. “Couldn’t agree more. Still, I should buy it, and I keep forgetting to call the owners.”

“You sure?” Not that she wants to count his money, but still.

“Positive,” he replies, and reinforces his point by enumerating the arguments. “I have no plans to move away from this place, and I hope you don’t mind it here. We need a good place nearby to go for dinner, at least in the eight months of the year the cable railway is open. I know Graziella doesn’t mind cooking, but I don’t feel like regularly bothering her with it, and besides, she normally only comes in twice a week. And I don’t cook and to my knowledge, neither do you.”

“I usually had dinner bought for me by marks,” she says in her questionable defence.

“I never bought you one until Lugano,” he counters.

“You were never a mark,” she argues in turn.

“How about the time you got to my Diebold?” he points out, and if she had any doubts if there was any hint of a grudge, the grin accompanying it is reassurance plenty. Still, she has to make her point.

“That was a mistake.”

“I’m glad you made it.” She wonders if anyone ever could look so happy about having been relieved, albeit temporarily, of a few billion dollars and an expensive necklace. “Which reminds me,“ he continues, getting up to walk inside. When he comes back, he is holding a very familiar black velvet square. “I had to have half a dozen or so of them replaced that were damaged by the solvent,” he explains, opening the box for her to see. To her eye, the beads all look exactly the way they did. “but most of them are the original ones.”

“Is the tracker still in there?” she asks, pointing to the clasp.

“It is. But I can take it out if you want - “

She does not let him finish. “No, I want it there.” In fact, considering what has happened, she wouldn’t have it any other way. “Besides, it’s not as if I were going anywhere now.” She meant it literally, as an allusion to her lame state; they have had to postpone their trips to Japan and Vietnam already... but when she has said it, she realises the double entendre. Oh well, it’s true anyway.

Judging by how pleased he looks to hear it, he only cares about the second meaning. “We could still go to Venice in a couple of weeks,” he suggests.

“Would be a shame to be there on crutches,” she counters, idly playing with the pearls.

“You won’t want to walk around there in any case,” he replies. “Starting from early July, it’s even fuller of tourists than usual. We can go back and walk around next spring, but for now our best bet would be to get a powerboat...”

“...and crash it,” she cuts in, sarcastically.

He does his best to look offended. “This is absolutely unfair. In the past two months, you’ve seen me handle two motor boats, two planes, a helicopter, at least four cars, and a bike; and I haven’t crashed any of those, not once. Are you still going to hold a single aircraft crash half a year ago against me, and an intentional one to boot?”

Well, it almost killed you, tesoro. “It’s the quality, not the quantity of crashes that counts.”

He pretends to be exasperated. “OK, we’ll hire a gondola and crawl around like tacky tourists.”

“Think of the upside,” she suggests. “The important thing is that you won’t need to steer it, so we’ll both be free to do… other things.”

“At that rate,” he argues, not unreasonably, “we may not need a boat at all, just a big bed. Compared to gondolas, beds have less of a chance of capsizing.”

She has to admit, the idea has its appeal. “Sounds pretty good to me.”

“It’s settled then. We’ll keep boats to a minimum in Venice, and then we can go back to the Falcon after that. Ever been to Capri?”

“No.”

“That’ll be the first place we go then, when you’re allowed to take off the splints. And then when your leg is healed, about late August or early September I hope, I’ll get my knee cartilage replaced so we can take turns hobbling around. I need to get it done in time for the skiing season.”

“Getting new cartilage doesn’t mean you have to immediately lose it again,” she admonishes him.

“I’m not that bad a skier, actually,” he counters. That’s the trouble, she thinks. “Besides,” he continues, “it’s really time I showed the brat a thing or two.”

Ah, so there is a battle of vanities involved. “Which brat?”

“Max.”

She has no idea who Max is. “Do I know him?”

“Fortunately, not yet, but I suspect it’s a matter of time. Max Reimann, Theo’s precious nephew.”

“The crazy 25-year-old?”

“It runs in the family,” Bruce retorts, making her wonder what exactly he and Theo have been up to in the office these days. “And he’s 26 now.”

“That’s still twelve years younger.”

“Precisely, and the little shit has no respect for experience. He’s been rattling on about the heli-skiing in Zermatt for months. Simply won’t shut up about how he allegedly wiped the floor with everyone else there last winter. It’s time I showed him how it’s really done.”

“You can do it next winter, why hurry now?”

“He’s off to Gotham after that,” Bruce responds sourly. “He was supposed to do a PhD at Oxford on hypersonic propulsion and go work at Reaction Engines while he’s doing it, and stay there afterwards. Now he wants to do it at Gotham University and go to Wayne Enterprises instead. Worst of all, Theo has already talked to Lucius about it, and Lucius loves the idea.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Poaching talent, that’s what’s wrong. Max may be a brat but he is smart, and I’d rather have him working for me - “

“He’ll be working for you in either case,” she reminds him.

“It’s not the same,” Bruce argues. “Wayne is the company my family built that I inherited, this one is a company I picked up when it was really very average, that Theo built with my help and we are now running together. It may be smaller but it’s up to us to keep it growing.”

She can see the point in that. What she cannot see the point in is dashing off heli-skiing right after a knee operation.

“I’m sure Max will be back in Switzerland next winter for holidays and such, and you can upstage him then,” she insists. “Or you can beat him at BASE jumping instead,” she suggests. For some people, that is the safer alternative.

“That would be too easy,” he counters.

Hopeless. “Not enough titanium around your bones yet?” she tries needling him.

“Look who’s talking,” he replies, lightning-fast. Bastard.

“Fine,” she sighs in exhausted defeat. “On one condition.”

“No way,” he snaps. “I’ll go skiing, you’ll be sitting in a hot tub waiting for me.”

Great. He’ll be turning the heads of every girl on the slopes, and she...

“OK, it’s a deal. And I know just the bikini I’ll be wearing in and around that hot tub. We’ll see which of us is more popular...”

The glare is impressive, but the voice resigned. “You win. We go together...”

“...and stick to the red slopes.”

He says nothing but looks miserable. She suspects that it is a lost cause and that come skiing season, he’ll be up there doing the craziest stunts with or without the benefit of the cartilage, but all things considered and despite his recklessness being a pain, it is good to have left the past in the past and to be thinking of the future once more.

__________________________________________

Notes to Ch 22

I meant to mention it before; I made a deliberate choice to stick to Nolan's imagery of the pearl necklace spilling despite the fact that expensive necklaces are in reality knotted between beads to stop precisely that from happening. But since he had it in Batman Begins, it was too tempting to include. Pearls are, indeed, easily damaged by chemicals.

BASE-lining is a recent variation on BASE jumping invented by a bunch of French guys: pictures here. And while I am on the subject of Telegraph slideshows, here is a great, if late, one of Hong Kong bars. It really belongs in Catching Up, but they published it in October after I'd finished posting it. And here is a link to the Godiva Ultimate Collection box that I mention (if you like chocolate and haven't tried Godiva, get yourself a sampler box of truffles, or just a few loose ones… but I am not responsible for its habit-forming properties).

23. Symmetric warfare

“Ma vaffa’n culo.” He sounds very authentically Italian saying it, too. It was an interesting juncture for her to wake up from her next day’s afternoon nap to, and lying on the bed, she tries to strain her ears to hear the rest of the conversation that he is conducting by phone on the terrace.

“They’re nuts,” he continues, in English this time. “I’m not its Chairman but it is my company, for fuck’s sake, do something. Tell them we’re nearly bankrupt, five hundred million in overdue debt, and our production lines are twenty years old and malfunctioning. Tell them I’m a royal pain, completely reckless, and morbidly paranoid. What do you mean, it’s true? I’m not letting an industrial giant buy up my business. I don’t care how much they’re raving about our drones. I don’t care that we use their parts that could be marketed directly. Tell them I’ll give them a good price on the finished items... OK, we’ll sign exclusive long term supply contracts for their main market,” he continues in a more resigned voice, “but we keep existing and new regional ones as direct suppliers. Maybe we’ll draft a framework partnership agreement. And I’ll want some concessions, too. I want to make those chip things under license for the European market, we’ve got spare capacity at our Malaysian plant and could make them there... What?” He sounds genuinely appalled. “No, just no. I’m not going to be within 100 miles of that meeting. No, not even if you offer me the jet to fly there. I’m fucking dead. I have a tombstone. You can give them the terms on our behalf.” He ends the call and staggers into the bedroom to plunk himself down on the couch, still fuming.

“Poor Theo,” Selina offers by way of a greeting. She can only assume that the man is the only likely candidate for discussing the tactics of fighting a takeover threat with.

As it turns out, she is mistaken.

“A, Theo isn’t poor, not with what I’m paying him, and b, it wasn’t him,” he replies gloomily.

Her response is to make big, round eyes at him.

“It was Lucius,” he explains.

“What?” This time it is her turn to be shocked, and this time her eyes get bigger and rounder of their own accord.

He makes a face. “Lucius was telling me that the Wayne Enterprises CFO and Chief Operating Officer had just come to him and presented a business case and a detailed set of proposals for buying up Wainwright Security. Ma vaffa… and guess what line they were using? That’s what Bruce Wayne would have wanted. Citing European synergies and global integration and so on. For fuck’s sake.” He shakes his head in disgust. “And Lucius didn’t immediately shoot it down because he says he wanted to check with me. I suspect he may have liked the idea. He was offering to let me fly the hypersonic to Gotham to discuss it, he knows how much I want to fly that thing and he’s trying to use it as leverage. But if he thinks I’m going to stand by and let my company be bought by… my... other company... What are you laughing at?” he looks up at hearing her snicker. Much as she can sympathise with his conflict of corporate loyalty, she cannot help finding it amusing.

“Sorry,” she says, rather unhelpfully. “You have to admit, not many people have this kind of problem. But what do you mean about not being Chairman?”

“I meant I’m no longer Chairman of Wayne,” he explains. “Wainwright isn’t a public company and as such never had a Board, so rather than being Chairman I am and intend to remain the sole tyrant owner, as Theodore Reimann is forgetting at his peril,” he finishes darkly.

So her guess the other day was right; they did lock horns over something. “What’s the deal between you two now?”

It is his cue to get even more exasperated.

“Im. Fucking. Possible.” He shakes his head again for emphasis. “I knew it would happen. I knew I had to keep quiet about it, or my life would become a living hell. I know you had no choice but to call him and tell him to call Lucius,” he adds quickly, “but crap I wish it had never come to this.”

“What, is he threatening to expose you?” she wonders, unlikely as the scenario seems to her.

“No way, he’s having too much fun not exposing me,” Bruce moans. “But it’s almost worse. You know what the bastard’s doing now? As soon as he found out that I was Wayne in my other life, he immediately figured out the Batman part, just like I thought, and has since then suddenly discovered the phenomenon of the dead Gotham vigilante and has become Batman’s biggest fan. Publicly, mind you. He doesn’t say anything one-on-one except that he now won’t address me other than Bruce in private, says it’s either that or Brandy. But in public he keeps dragging up references to Gotham’s crime-fighting legend in meetings and presentations where he knows I can’t retaliate.”

“I’d say it’s sweet, really,” she observes, trying desperately to keep a more or less serious face.

“Wait, it gets worse still,” Bruce assures her grimly. “He’s found out that there are Batman comic books now. I am a comic book hero for fuck’s sake!” Good thing Bruce is too carried away by his indignant speech to notice her chewing the inside of her cheeks. “And he’s framed up a few of them and put them on the wall in his office, like pictures, you’ll see them when you get there, I bet he’ll never take them down now. You can’t begin to imagine the embarrassment of sitting in client meetings opposite that wall, not knowing where to look. And if that wasn’t enough,” he goes on forlornly, “he’s counting down the days until that damn Dark Hero film is released next year, and talks about who’s playing whom, and says that he’s going to see it and so should I. And to top it all,” he concludes with another sigh, “he keeps referring to Batman in Italian. Of the two hundred countries I could have theoretically settled in, I chose the border between the two countries where my former nickname literally translates into L’Uomo Pipistrello.”

She may be famous for keeping a poker face, but it cannot stand up to this kind of test; she picks up a pillow and sits there shamelessly giggling into it, watching him as he rolls his eyes in defeat.

“I think,” she ventures when she can trust herself not to start laughing mid-sentence, “that he’s just thrilled to discover your secret identity.”

“No, it’s more like pissed off that it’s taken him so long,” Bruce corrects her. “He can’t believe I’ve successfully bullshitted him for eight years, and then for four more months in person. The one time he commented on it, he said he’d never thought about it because it would have been too batshit crazy to contemplate.” This seems to try his own restraint enough to get him snickering. “But talking about being thrilled at discovering secret identities, the office should be thrilled to discover his identity tomorrow.”

“Meaning...?” she prompts him, intrigued.

“He left early today for an off-site meeting, and I sent his assistant away and I have the code to the vault where he keeps a spare key to his office. So I made good use of my time replacing the name plate on his office door and all the business cards in his desktop card holder to say T. Florian Reimann instead of Theodore. I’m not the only one with a secret identity hangup, and it’s time I showed him a thing or two about symmetric warfare.”

She recalls their first meeting and Theo looking less than pleased at the mention of his romantic-sounding middle name. “Kids,” she remarks nonchalantly, dissembling her amusement.

“Well, exactly,” he agrees unexpectedly. “It’s like I’ve lived to the age of thirty eight to suddenly discover that I have an older brother who is a real pest. And he obviously considers me his reward for having been the younger kid for forty six years.”

She wants to say something about cutting Theo some slack, especially considering the nearly impossible way he managed to pull all imaginable strings to get the orange notice issued in record time and the ROS to save their skins, when the truth of what Bruce is saying hits her. Between Alfred, Lucius and Theo, Bruce has earned himself a sort of international adoptive family, in lieu of a father, uncle, and older brother; and she, instead of living out her life as a succession of burglaries and prison stints as she imagined, has seemingly found a place and a life among this oddball bunch, next to a formerly scraggly-looking former billionaire recluse she once stole a string of pearls from.

***

The next day he is on the phone as usual, pacing around the terrace, and she is sitting on his “office” couch in the bedroom absent-mindedly shuffling through the papers on the coffee table waiting for him to finish the call so they can have lunch, when an envelope catches her eye. Having been around Theo and the company for weeks by now, she is practically immune to such things, and has nothing to fear under a new identity, but is still slightly unnerved by seeing the globe, sword and scales logo and the Lyon address.

“Take a look at this,” she tells Bruce when he gets in. “The Interpol is writing to you personally now.”

He quirks an eyebrow, unconcerned. “Open it,” he tells her, as he picks up plates to take outside for their upcoming terrace picnic. “Let’s see what they want.”

“Dear Mr Wainwright,” she starts out loud, “we represent the International Criminal Police Organisation, blah blah blah… oh wow.”

“What?” he calls over from the terrace.

“They’re inviting Wainwright Security to complete a prequalification procedure to become a consultant agency, and propose that you write a case study based on our, er, operation for their Global Learning Center and conduct tabletop simulations at their training courses.”

“Nice of them,” he shoots back, unimpressed. “We don’t have time but it’s a nice gesture.”

Who would have thought that she would be jumping to the Interpol’s defence, and to advocate working for them of all things? “I don’t know... I like the idea,” she insists. “It will be good publicity for the company in the right circles.”

“Right now we’ve got all the publicity we need and then some, and more new business than we can sanely handle.” He disappears downstairs to come back with the food and wine in a basket a minute later. “Besides,” he continues, setting out the basket contents on the table outside, “can you imagine if there is someone there from Gotham police who knows me?”

It is a valid point, but she is still reluctant to let go of the idea. “You could ask Lucius to step in, he was part of it too.”

“He’ll never find the time to do it,” Bruce argues. “Apart from being the Wayne CEO and pestering us with the partnership agreement, he now has his hands full in Italy.”

“Italy?” she echoes, incredulous.

“Yep. He’s diversifying into textiles now,” he adds wryly, and before she gets completely confused trying to make sense of these developments, he explains. “The ROS people couldn’t believe it when I took off my suit jacket and saw that the guards had emptied a couple of clips into my back when they were chasing me. I didn’t even feel much of an impact, but the fuckers ruined my suit,” he adds with a scowl. “Anyway, when the Carabinieri saw that, they were begging me to tell them what the hell it was I was wearing. And then they brought in their bosses, and I put them in touch with Lucius as it’s his Kevlar, really; and when they asked him if they could put in big standing orders to equip themselves and the army and the frontline police with the stuff, he could think of nothing better than talk to Gianfranco. The great irony is, the way the Chinese refurbished the production at Tessuti Varese is ideal for making the colloidal Kevlar we were wearing. Lucius says that all it takes is flushing the old chemicals out of the system, making a couple of minimal tweaks to the equipment settings, adding a silica extraction unit, and putting new raw materials in, it’s virtually the same process, as he said. And the moment Gianfranco heard it he forgot everything about opening a restaurant in California and jumped at the idea and signed a memorandum of understanding with Lucius to become an authorised manufacturer, so Lucius is decamping out there for three weeks with a team from Wayne to oversee the conversion. Apart from the money, Gianfranco now sees it as his chance to redeem his father’s company, making something that will save lives instead of a chemical weapon. I wouldn’t have tagged him for a quixotic romantic earlier, but I suppose I was wrong.”

“Reminds me of someone I know who flew a nuke out of a city,” she comments matter-of-factly. Truth is, Gianfranco may still have no exact idea of who Bruce is and what he did in his previous life, but it does not stop Bruce from being an inspirational role model.

“Maybe Theo can deal with the Interpol request? He used to work there, after all,” she tries again when they are seated on the terrace for lunch, still reluctant for them to turn down the offer.

“Maybe,” he replies reluctantly, pouring the wine. “I’m not sure if I can deal with him right now, now that he’s become a Batman fanboy. Besides,” he continues, less sarcastically, “he’s too busy working on the draft of our framework partnership agreement with Wayne. He spends most of his time with the lawyers, the latest draft is more than a hundred pages and counting, and Lucius has taken responsibility for it on the Wayne side, handling their lawyers upon my request, but is too tied up with the Kevlar deal; they only discuss comments by phone a couple of times a day. And on top of that we now have the Carabinieri also begging us for drone supplies. We just had Gallitelli, their top commander, visiting today with twenty subordinates. I offered the Carabinieri officers a few samples and a VIP tour of the company as a sort of bribe, trying to get them to keep our names and faces out of the press, but I had no idea Gallitelli himself would show up. They were like kids in a toy shop over the drones, want to get them for their overseas operations and bring in the top Defence Ministry brass for a framework contract, which means we’ll need to install another production line, so we have to buy and install the equipment in the next few weeks. That way I may get the Sesto a permanent exemption for driving in Italy, but so much for a quiet summer. I’m trying to get ICQ to pick up the production in the immediate term, but it’s better to have a European assembly plant in the mid-term.”

“What’s ICQ?” she questions.

“Our Brazilian subsidiary. Full name’s Industria e Comercio Quimetal, they make high-end CCTV cameras, mostly for the domestic market, there’s a lot of demand there. What?” he asks, seeing her shocked look.

“I know this small world stuff and all, but this is ridiculous,” she answers incredulously. “I know their business development manager.”

Bruce is not so much incredulous as suspicious. “You know Armando Alves?”

“Alves de Mello, yes, you know him too?”

His response is a muttered oh no.

“He’s the one I stood up in Hong Kong when I flew to meet you over here. We met through a mutual acquaintance at a cocktail reception and sort of bumped into each other a couple of times after that, and then he invited me to dinner saying he wanted to discuss a business proposition. Judging by your reaction, the business part was just a manner of expression.”

Surprisingly, he argues with that... somewhat. “It would have been business. Probably not only business, though.”

“OK, come clean, what do you know about it?” she prompts.

“You pretty much know it already,” he admits. “He works as global business development manager at Quimetal, where Wainwright Security holds 51% and a local partner holds the remainder. They’ve been looking to expand into Asia, which is another huge market for sophisticated specialised cameras; plus this way they wouldn’t be competing with us in Europe. Armando wanted to use the Wainwright rep office in Hong Kong to basically to do his job for him, but you’ve seen how tiny it is, four people who all have their own things to do, and they mostly deal with tracker technology contracts where Quimetal is mostly cameras. The Brazilian CEO and I both thought that it made more sense for Quimetal to do business development directly, so in the first big management meeting that I joined them for once I could walk around and fly overseas, we both told Armando to get his lazy ass to Asia for a few weeks, get a sense of the situation, and find a couple of smart people who could help set up a rep office and help drum up business. I guess you were one of those smart people he must have thought about.”

“You’re probably right,” she ponders. “Now that I think about it, we did have an interesting conversation about surveillance cameras over a few gin and tonics at one point... so if I’d gone to dinner and heard his offer without thinking about taking out the pearls, I’d have likely stayed there and you and I would have never met again.”

“Quite the opposite,” he says unexpectedly. “We would have met anyway. Maybe a couple of weeks later. Call me a paranoid micromanager,” he explains, seeing her puzzled look, “but I would have asked to look at final candidate CVs. And I’d have probably done a search for online info on the candidates, including photos if the CVs didn’t have them, to see if it wasn’t someone who knew me as Wayne... so that I’d know to avoid them. Which, in your case, is about as ironic as it gets.”

He is paranoid, but in this case, it is reassuring to know. “So you’re saying it was our destiny to meet again?” she offers, half taunting.

Surprisingly, he sounds dead serious when he answers. “Looks like it.”

“Do you believe in destiny?” she asks, not sure if teasing him about it is a good idea.

“Don’t you?” He does not sound completely serious, but certainly more serious than not.

As a practical girl who is usually not that much into philosophy, she just tells him the truth. “Whatever it was, I’m just happy we did meet again, one way or another.”

“Fair enough,” he agrees, picking up the plates to take downstairs now that they’ve finished lunch. “Makes two of us.”

“Listen, I keep thinking about that Interpol offer,” she reminds him when he has come back outside to sit down next to her. “If none of these guys can do it, it sort of leaves the obvious candidate.”

“What, me?” He sounds a bit taken aback.

“No, me,” she corrects him. “I mean, I was there, I saw it all happen, I broke into the safe and whatnot. And unlike you, I’d love to do it.“

Her enthusiasm makes him laugh. “An interesting career aspiration given your previous ones,” he teases.

“Come on, you yourself said that the CleanSlate is guaranteed. My records were all in the States anyway, so after they were erased, there’s been no way to link me to anything outside Gotham.”

“I’m not so much worried about that,” he admits, “as I am about them giving you ideas about a career in crime fighting.”

It is her turn to laugh now. “Look who’s talking.”

“I retired,” he argues.

“As of ten days ago,” she reminds him. And knowing him, there is no telling how permanent this retirement will be.

But he does not give up arguments easily, either. “Don’t you think that half a pound of titanium and two fucked-up knees are enough between the two of us? It’s bad enough that we’ll now be carrying a his-and-hers set of X-ray prints next time we fly somewhere...”

This, from the man who was yesterday defending his right to go heli-skiing; outrageous double-standard treatment. “Get out,” she protests, doing her best to sound indignant.

Surprisingly, instead of protesting back he obeys it as a literal order... except that instead of getting out, he actually gets up to go in from the terrace. “It’s an unfair advantage,” he grumbles. “You are in a position to kick me out simply because I can walk away and you can’t.”

“Maybe it’s an unfair advantage,” she concedes, “but that’s your beloved symmetric warfare for you.” At hearing this, he looks undecided for a second before he gets a wicked look on his face. While she is wondering about his intentions, he comes back carrying a towel, walks over to the hot tub, presses a couple of buttons, and proceeds to slowly and very deliberately unbutton his shirt while he waits for the water to warm up. She watches the proceedings with a mixture of enjoyment and envy. “Not fair,” she remarks finally, when the water has apparently reached the right temperature for him to get into the tub.

“This,” he calls over wickedly, “is symmetric warfare. You can’t beat me at my own game.”

She thinks that she will beat him; the moment her leg is healed, he is paying for this. He just doesn’t know it yet.

________________________________

Notes to Ch 23

Symmetric warfare is a concept used to define "conventional" war between adversaries of more or less equal strength using similar methods, or put crudely, tit for tat.

Special thanks go to klcthebookwormfor graciously sharing her encyclopaedic knowledge of the Batman universe :)

(concluded in part 11)