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He sees the patterns. It isn’t hard.
It should be, he thinks, and he knows he could sell this story. If he was really committed – really brave – he could probably make a fortune selling it to the right people. If he was really stupid, he could even sell it to the wrong people.
Because that’s the thing, there’s so much at stake.
He wasn’t born and raised in Gotham but Arthur Stuart has lived here so long now that the City’s wound its filthy, clawing fingers through his very bones, pinning him down and holding him fast. And he’s watched, helplessly, while the City’s fallen further and further into decay.
He’s watched Lou drink himself into a stupor, terrified but struggling to do his job. Holding off mob bosses and corrupt officials and trying to keep the paper afloat. Trying to keep his reporters safe.
He watched while Shirley, working on Weekender articles, grew thin and stressed. Terrified. Crying in bathrooms because she’d gotten involved with the wrong man and she was paying the price.
“But who else is there?” she sniffed, “Except criminals and creeps? In this whole stinking town, there’s no good men left.”
Arthur patted her shoulder awkwardly and said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘I understand’, but he didn’t do anything. Couldn’t do anything. Not if he didn’t want to end up like everybody else who interfered. He doesn’t fail to see the humour of the conversation but he’s hardly going to argue with her. He isn’t a good man either.
Interfering makes people hurt, or it makes people dead. He doesn’t think he could deal with either of those two consequences.
“You could just go home,” Lou said once, sitting in the mess of his trashed office, holding a wet papertowel to his swelling eye.
Arthur didn’t need to say that he was home. Home wasn’t England, where there was nothing left, home was here, in this rotten City.
So he kept his head down and he survived on articles that didn’t rock the boat, that didn’t mean anything, didn’t matter, and in the end he watched better writers and better reporters and better people vanish and die and fall apart.
And then the Batman turned up.
It isn’t hard. Two and two have always made four and Arthur has had practise with Tommy Stone and Brian Slade. More than anyone else at the paper he understands theatrics and deception and masks. And disappointments.
‘Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth’.
He wonders how the police don’t see it. The chin is the same, the mouth; same slope of the cheeks.
It’s almost hysterically funny when the truth comes to him, staring at a grainy shot of the Batman from some kid’s camera phone just hours after he’s submitted a press clipping about Bruce Wayne’s latest philanthropic endeavour. It’s just that it’s also so terrifying that he forgets to laugh.
Bruce Wayne. The Batman. One man, different suits.
Arthur takes the rest of the day off, and he goes home, to sit on his sagging couch in his crummy apartment that freezes in winter and bakes in summer and he stares at the wall while the seconds tick down. He doesn’t think about, doesn’t let himself dwell on it.
And when enough time has passed that the fear and anger have stopped swelling in his throat like bubbles, he stands up slowly and reaches for the only colourful thing he keeps in his flat.
The record cover is faded and beginning to tear at the edges. The record’s too scratched these days to play. It’s old and he wore it out in his youth listening to it. But it still holds the same magic for him that it always did.
Brian Slade is white skin against red velvet, brown hair and cat-like eyes and smug, sensuous, feral grace.
These days Arthur doesn’t wank to the sight of him. Can’t help looking at it and remembering Tommy Stone, hearty and bluff and all-American. Fake tan, fake smile, fake platinum blond hair. New accent and rougher voice. A change of name and everybody thought they were two different people.
Should have been two people – different artistic temperaments. Different personas.
It’s not so hard, Arthur thinks calmly, to become someone else. If you have enough money.
Batman flies, he reads in the papers. In his paper. The Batman flies and crawls up brick walls and he vanishes into the shadows. He knows things no one else can know.
Arthur knows only one important thing and he knows this – Batman is a symbol. A good actor in a costume. Slap a bit of paint on him, stick him in a frame with a few gadgets, it’s still him. Bruce Wayne.
It’s not hard to find out the facts about Bruce Wayne: parents dead, troubled youth, unseen for seven years, declared dead, came back alive, bought back his own company, shagging his way through life. No, that isn’t fair. He also spends money like a drunken pirate. Cars, planes, yachts, parties, rebuilding the mansion he burnt down in a drunken tantrum.
But Arthur can smile with humourless pity at the speculation because it takes a special kind of mind to outthink corporate businessmen. Takes a special kind of stamina to run a company and spend all your nights wining and dining an entire chorus line.
He thinks he could do it, if he really tries. The lies are tissue-paper thin, and like so much else in this town, the only reason no one’s torn them down already is fear. Fear of the Wayne name; fear of the Wayne money. Fear of reprisal.
And wilful ignorance. No point discarding that one. No one tears down the wall because no one wants to know what’s behind it.
Because that’s the thing - people think that knowing means you have to do something with the knowledge.
Arthur thinks that knowledge isn’t power so much as weight. A burden. Ever-present in his brain.
The knowledge pushes into him, dogs his footsteps and darkens the shadows and he knows, without having to define it to himself, that it’s driving him slowly to crisis point.
This, too, is familiar from the Brian Slade case. Only this time there is so much more at stake. Bruce Wayne is not some pop star reinventing himself. He isn’t playing with the art of performance; he’s saving lives. He’s trying to save Gotham.
To tell people will be a good story, but it will mean death. Devastation. Destruction. For more than just one person.
And there is no one safe that Arthur can talk to.
There is no Mandy, who suspects, no Curt Wild, who knows but doesn’t say. There is no pin in a bottle of beer, no memory of lust and love and innocence. Curt Wild is long gone from Gotham, and Brian Slade has vanished to yet another continent, into yet another mask.
This is very much about the present, and the future, and all it is, really, is darkness. And whether Arthur wants to be a good man and do something with the knowledge that weighs him down.
He’s present at the press conference the City calls for the unmasking of the Batman. He’s present when the Joker shoots the Commissioner, and he watches, silently as always, from the sidelines as always, when the lies tangle themselves up into chains and restraints.
When it’s all over, Arthur takes a little walk. He finds himself on a building overlooking the MCU rooftop with its smashed signal. And he sits there and watches until night falls.
He sees Gordon come out, stand by the signal, sees the hovering, and then sees him retreat.
For good reason; it would be stupid for the Batman to visit the MCU. Stupid to take those risks, even as a symbol, because the truth is the man beneath the mask is still flesh and blood, and hurt comes in more fatal forms than just negative press.
He feels the sudden prickle down his spine and starts to turn his head before he realises that he’s caught. If someone’s going to hurt him, they’ll do it. If someone wants to kill him, they’ll do it. Turning around won’t help his case.
He’s not, he thinks acerbically, Bruce Wayne or Batman or any one of those men in that building he’s watching, who act on their knowledge and fight, never mind where it leads them.
The shadows lengthen on the cement beside his foot and he thinks he can make out two pointed ears at the very top, but then it’s gone.
He lets his mouth curve upwards into a mirthless grin.
The patterns really aren’t that hard to see.