After the casino, Hugo Strange did something almost funny.
He took the stolen money, laundered it, separated out a fraction of it, and paid it to Maroni as a partial repayment on the original loan. Clean bills, proper envelope, hand-delivered.
The audacity of it was almost artistic. Unfortunately, Maroni was already dealing with a bloodbath investigation and forty dead bodies, and the payment landed on his desk without context. He didn't connect it to Strange. Not yet.
Then word came that the two men who'd run from the casino had been found.
Maroni straightened his tie, picked up his cane, and walked to the study.
Will had just finished the comic.
The new pages had filled in during the ride over — panels appearing on paper that had been blank an hour ago, the story extending itself as though the narrative were being written in real time. He'd read through them twice, fast, committing what he could.
Batman — invited by Gordon — had examined the casino crime scene. He'd gone down through the bathroom floor, into the storm drains below. Down there he'd found dense clusters of coarse hair and a torn biohazard bag with a lab classification label still partially legible on it. Back in whatever facility he worked from, he'd used those fragments to identify Hugo Strange.
Then Batman had moved to infiltrate Strange's laboratory.
And the pages had gone blank again.
Will stared at the last empty page.
The casino made sense. I was already there — the story needed me present for that node. But the laboratory?
He was still working through the logic when the study door opened.
Maroni walked in the way men walk when they've already decided what they're going to do.
He was dressed well — grey check suit, gold hair lacquered back, the cane swinging loosely at his side. He shrugged off the jacket as he crossed the threshold and tossed it over the desk chair without looking. Then he flipped the cane in his hand, catching it by the lower end.
He hit Oswald across the jaw with it.
The crack was loud and clean and unmistakable — the specific sound of something structural giving way. Oswald went down without a word. On the deep red Persian rug he curled slowly, spitting blood, body working through the pain in small, involuntary contractions.
Maroni stood over him for a moment. Then he looked up.
His eyes found Will and stayed there.
"Well," he said. "Speak."
"We didn't do this." Will kept his voice level. "Whatever happened at the casino — it wasn't us."
"I know that." The contempt was mild, almost bored. "If you two were capable of that kind of work, I'd be the one on the floor." He raised the cane again and brought it down across Oswald's back.
The tip was pointed. It opened a long wound through the jacket fabric and the skin beneath it, deep enough that the edges separated. Oswald's voice came out broken and high, nothing like his normal register.
"What do you actually want to know?" Will said.
"Ideally, you give me a name." Maroni turned the cane over in his hands, examining it with apparent disinterest. "If you don't have one, a satisfactory explanation will also do. I'm reasonable." He swung again — unhurried, precise.
This time Oswald didn't make a sound.
He'd gone still.
"He's not going to last much longer," Will said.
Maroni glanced down at Oswald with the expression of a man checking the time.
"Then I'd move quickly."
Will thought fast. Maroni didn't care about justice. He didn't care about the bodies. What he cared about was the money that had walked out of his casino in the pockets of whoever had done this — and the fact that it had happened on his property, to his people, which was a different kind of problem.
"Three days," Will said. "Give me three days and I'll get your money back."
The cane stopped mid-swing.
Maroni lowered it slowly. His mouth arranged itself into something that technically involved the corners turning upward.
"And why would I believe you're planning to find my money rather than planning to leave Gotham?"
"Because I know who took it." Will pulled the words out in a measured line, committing to them. "Hugo Strange. He borrowed from you, couldn't pay, hit the casino to clear the debt. The things that killed your people — bio-humans, he engineered them himself. That's what the claw marks were. That's what the hair on the floor was."
He said it plainly, the way you say something you know.
Maroni studied him.
"That's a coherent story," he said. "So coherent it makes me curious how you came to know it." His grip shifted down the cane toward the pointed end, slow and deliberate. "The police haven't released those details. My contact at the precinct told me only this morning. So tell me — where did you get this?"
Will bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste copper.
He had no evidence. Every piece of information he had came from a comic book that updated itself when the plot required it. There was no source he could name.
"Penton," he said. "Richie Penton — he mentioned it earlier tonight, while we were on the floor. Said he'd been to collect on Strange's debt earlier this week and there was something wrong with the laboratory. Something in the tanks." He kept his eyes on Maroni's face. "Oswald was standing right there. Ask him when he's conscious."
Maroni was quiet for a moment.
He had, in fact, sent Penton and Carlo to lean on Strange the previous afternoon. That was verifiable. The casino's security footage — grainy, silent — had also captured Oswald and Penton in conversation on the gaming floor. Nothing that confirmed the content. But enough to make the claim plausible.
What tipped it was the thing Strange had said when he'd made his payment that morning. Maroni had turned it over several times since, unsure what to make of it.
Please pass my regards to Mr. Penton. And let him know — he really shouldn't flick cigarette ash into my specimen fluid. Though I suppose he won't have the opportunity to do so again.
Maroni had assumed it was a petty complaint from an eccentric academic.
Five million dollars, he thought. The man just handed me five million dollars. With my own casino's money, laundered and repackaged.
"Get me the case that Strange sent over," he said to the room. "And a UV lamp."
The bills came out under the lamp one by one.
"This one has blood," someone said.
"This one too."
"The whole back half of the stack."
Maroni stood with his hands behind his back and watched the light move over the money. His eyes had gone very narrow.
He remained like that for a long moment after the last bill was checked.
The problem was tactical now. Gotham PD was unreliable under the best circumstances, and this situation had too many outside eyes on it for him to route through the department even if he trusted them. The Romans would have to handle Strange themselves.
But the casino floor had told him something about what Strange had built. Sending men in blind would be expensive. The walls had told him that.
He needed someone expendable enough to absorb the risk and capable enough to be worth the gamble.
His gaze settled on Will.
Will felt it like a temperature change.
He already knew what was coming. The comic had gone blank at the laboratory door — which meant the laboratory was next, which meant Maroni was about to volunteer him for it. He'd been running calculations on how to get Oswald out of this room and out of Gotham since they'd arrived, and those calculations were about to become irrelevant.
"Three days," he said, before Maroni spoke. "I'll find the money. That's all I'm promising."
He had no intention of going near Hugo Strange's laboratory. What he intended was to take Oswald and disappear far enough that Maroni's reach didn't extend, then reassess from there.
Maroni may or may not have understood this. Either way, it didn't matter.
He extended one foot and hooked it under Oswald's jaw, tilting his face up toward Will.
"His life runs on your clock," he said simply. "And don't consider leaving the financial district. I have people everywhere. You won't make it to the bridge."
Will opened his mouth. Then closed it.
Because buried in the threat was something that snagged his attention like a hook in cloth.
"I'm sorry," he said carefully. "What did you call him just now?"
Maroni raised an eyebrow.
"Penguin. It's Oswald's — what was it — Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot's rather distinguished nickname. You didn't know?"
Will looked down at the man bleeding on the Persian rug.
He took a slow breath. The air in the room was thick with tobacco and the particular staleness of old money and older grudges.
Then he closed his eyes for a moment.
He had spent three months sharing a condemned apartment with this person. Eating vending machine food with him. Watching him name a tenement building after the Roman Senate with complete sincerity. Watching him describe Maroni's cane with the reverence other people reserved for religious icons.
Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot.
The Penguin.
Future king of Gotham's underworld.
Currently face-down on a rug, unconscious, with a broken jaw.
Will opened his eyes.
Of course.