CHAPTER 35
Hearing the riots raging all around him, Batman felt mostly helpless to do anything else. He listened to the song of anarchy and order, one pushing against the other, just the way it had always been. The feed he was getting from police radio signaled the end of most of the riots. Now that the National Guard was here to lend support, it appeared Dreaded Sun, the Molehill Mob, and all other upset citizens suddenly wanted no more hand in chaos and disorder.
A news chopper zipped over in the northeast, and a pair of military choppers hovered about five miles away in the south, but so far none of them appeared to have spotted him and his two captives on the rooftop.
Cobblepot snoozed lightly, and Batman was checking all over his body armor to make sure none of the bullets he’d taken today had truly penetrated. So far, so good. He was confident that without Lucius’s upgrade, he wouldn’t have made it half this far today, not with the sorts of bullets he’d been taking from SWAT, and criminals who had seen upgrades, as well.
Batman spit out another gob of blood, and had just started running through some meditation drills to deal with the pain when the Riddler said, “You probably want to know…why I left you so many clues for you.”
“No,” Batman said, taking out a few muscle relaxant pills from his utility belt. “I only want to know about all your other partners. But I’m sure you’re going to tell me the story behind your riddles, anyway.”
“You say that word derisively: riddles.”
“Games, then. You played games with people’s lives, just to make a point, just so people would know how smart you were.”
The Riddler smiled. “And why not? Riddles have an old and storied history, not of being mere child’s play, but of deciding matters of life and death. Oedipus killed the Sphinx by grasping the answer to its riddle, and Samson outwitted the Philistines with his riddle of the lion and the beehive. Great philosophers such as Plato pointed out that riddles are integral to language, that they say better what cannot be expressed in words, and Aristotle found them important enough to include in his Rhetoric. They’re important to building greater brain functionality. They also point out a terrific flaw in human beings—so many of us want answers given to us, so we go to the Internet to find them because they’re just a click away, while so few of us actually try to figure out the answers ourselves.”
Batman popped the pills into his mouth, and sighed. “Tell yourself whatever you want, it doesn’t change what you did, it doesn’t make it anymore poetic.”
The Riddler went on, as if he hadn’t heard the criticism. “Another flaw that riddles point out is in our woefully inadequate brains and our continuous misunderstandings, as in the Riddle of the Missing Dollar, which cannot be solved because the question itself is flawed, only no listener understands why it’s flawed, not unless they put in the time to understand why. A good riddle is like that, it demands that you ask why it was ever conjured up and asked of you in the first place. Like a good story. It makes one ask oneself, ‘What’s the point of all the effort I put into listening to this story?’ And that is an excellent question, isn’t it? What is the point of all our efforts? Yours? Mine? Riddle me that, Caped Crusader.”
“Why don’t you tell me, since you’re so smart?”
Nygma chuckled. “You still don’t know? Then, I suppose I’ll have to give you the answer, and that’s unfortunate.” He sighed. “You gave the criminals of Gotham City something to truly fear, my friend. After so much pushing, for the first time, they were really, truly pushed back. But they couldn’t flex on you, could they? You were so elusive, and no one knew who you were. They couldn’t get to your family, your friends, and they couldn’t bribe you. You were a wraith, really and truly. You were a Nemesis.
“So, I gave the police of this city the same thing, to see how they responded to such a puzzle. An ever-elusive, powerful, intelligent criminal that they could not get their hands on. Not knowing who he was meant they had no leverage over him. I saw the challenge. I saw a gap, and I filled it first before anyone else could get there. This was, of course, after I had figured out who you were. I sat with that knowledge, knowing your secret, and was confident that I was the only one that knew—or, at least, the only one that knew your secret that you hadn’t told yourself. I sat with this knowledge for over two years, not knowing what to do with it, not sure if I was just going to grow old and die, taking the secret to my grave. I thought about just walking up to Wayne Manor and knocking the door, and just having a discussion with you about it. I also thought about blackmail, too, but that seemed too tame.”
Batman looked up at him, his curiosity piqued for the moment. “Let’s assume, for the moment, that you were right about my identity. How did you come to that conclusion?”
“Well now,” Nygma said, licking his lips. “You ask a fascinating question. Is there time before the police show up?”
“You’re not going anywhere until I have some answers.” Or until I know what you intend to do with my secret, he thought.
* * *
“I DON’T MIND telling you that my mother was Russian and my father an American businessman—I was raised mostly in the U.S., but my mother made me memorize Russian and other European language. I was a prodigy, and it turned out I was also good at programming languages. By the time I was fifteen years old, I had an IQ of...well, would you even believe me if I told you? I graduated from Harvard under the name Edward Nashton, though that wasn’t my real name, either. An anomaly when I was born allowed me to grow up without actually having a social security number. See, my mother gave birth to me at our home in a blizzard, and the doctor who came out to deliver me died of pneumonia about two days after I was born—he never chronicled me, never officially recorded the birth, never gave me a social security number. We didn’t understand it all until years later, but that effectively made me a ghost as far as the system was concerned.
“I was homeschooled for the most part, so my social security number wasn’t important for almost anything. By the time we discovered the hiccup some fifteen years later as a family, it at first seemed like something silly that we ought to fix. However, I managed to get my first few jobs here in the states without a social, believe it or not. By the time I went to Harvard, I’d discovered how to make fake IDs, and I attended college without telling my parents that I hadn’t actually fixed the problem with my identity yet.
“In college I studied criminology, physics, and computers. I was valedictorian. It was…simple, for me, you know? Like it must’ve been simple for you. I’ve never really had to try too hard to learn things. I see something once, or read an article, make an observation of someone’s behavioral mannerisms, and woosh, I know it forever, locked away inside me. It’s called hyperthymesia—it’s superior autobiographical memory, and I can recall anything from my past with crystal clarity.
“In my time I was an engineer and architect for the Gotham City Housing Authority, then an architect for the Business District, then a computer security consultant for the NSA. But then, the economy got bad, and even I couldn’t find a decent job—well, I could’ve flipped burgers or worked construction, but who the hell wants to do that? I finally found work at Yolanda Labs.” He now looked at Batman meaningfully.
The Dark Knight paused for a moment, and thought about that. Four years ago, Yolanda Labs had gone out of business after Batman recorded their nightly dumping activities over a two-month period. “You were working for Yolanda when it went under?”
Nygma nodded. “You put me out of work again by hurting Parnes Industries and Yolanda Labs,” he said. “In this down economy, you put me out of a job. A job, my friend. And, let me tell you, that hurts. Especially when you don’t qualify for unemployment benefits for very long, yet somehow penurious morons and crack heads get to stay on welfare their entire lives. Here I am, a man so intelligent and driven I can do anything…but simpletons all around me survive while I’m denied any of the same favors. Welfare, welfare, welfare for all of them, but not the smartest man on the planet. No, sir, nothing for me.” He snorted. “But a rich boy like you wouldn’t understand that dilemma.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Batman said. “How did you come to the conclusion that you knew who I really am?”
The Riddler sighed. “It wasn’t all that hard. Like I said, I have a facility for retaining information. I have an eidetic memory, and I’m also synesthete.” Eidetic memory meant he essentially recalled everything from his life with crystal clarity, and synesthesia was the neurological condition that combined more than one sensory perception to create a memory—common forms were color synesthesia, where numbers and/or letters were perceived as inherently colored, and ordinal linguistic personification, where days of the week and months of the year were perceived to have personalities. It aided with memory considerably.
Such a combination means he probably forgets nothing. Perfect recollection.
“Bruce Wayne disappeared for many, many years,” Nygma went on, “and all at once he shows back up again, a rich, idiotic playboy. And, a few months later, the Batman makes his first appearance. I do admit, it was subtle at first, so subtle that I didn’t put it together immediately. It was over the next couple of years of unemployment, of feeling…well, of feeling my talents being wasted, that I put them to use some other way. I didn’t do much but live off of the money from my severance, and after six months even that dried up. I couldn’t believe that no place would hire someone like me—I came to suspect it was because I was coming away from Yolanda Labs and that scandal, so I was ‘tainted goods’ in a way. Blacklisted.
“I read up on you. How could I not, when you were the one who changed everything for me? I read up on the Joker and the efforts to catch him, about how James Gordon was suspected to have worked with you while he was supposed to be trying to take you down. I started thinking to myself, ‘Who is this person?’ I mean, there was as terrific riddle. Naturally, I initially thought you had to be a kind of specially-trained government operative, an agent that they were denying all knowledge of in a kind of ‘false flag’ operation. But then, I asked myself, why only one operative? I then thought that there might be more than one of you, but that would’ve been awfully strange if the government was producing operatives dressed as bats, wouldn’t it? This led me to believed there had to be more behind the symbology. The bat theme meant something to you.
“So then, who were you? The Batman obviously has incredible resources. So, naturally I asked myself, who else has the kind of access to such resources? Someone rich and powerful, that’s who. The Batman only comes out at night, so what powerful man is typically only seen in the daytime, or at least mostly? Other technicalities cropped up here and there, and I had a list I played with in my apartment.
“It was somewhere during this time that I was contacted by the vory v zakone. As I told you, my mother was Russian. My uncle, it turns out, is a member of that group, or a vor as we are called. He’d heard about the unique set of circumstances surrounding my official identity, or my lack thereof in the U.S., and realized it would be very easy for me to slip into another identity since my fingerprints weren’t on file and, more so, I could technically become a no one on the greater global security grid. I’d never even gotten a driver’s license, even though I could drive, since I almost always took taxi cabs and the subway. Having worked as a consultant and never an employee, I almost never handed over personal information. In this day and age, I was as close as one can get to being a ghost.
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“My uncle introduced me to the prospect of working again, although it was work I wasn’t used to at the time. But I was desperate. You made me desperate. Desperate for work, desperate for money, for food. My mother and father had both died some years before and the inheritance was running out, and so was time. What choice did I have?
“So, I learned to be a vor. I went to Russia and gained a few false IDs that placed that as my homeland, and the vor bosses helped set up fake IDs and passports that showed I was a natural-born U.S. citizen. In a matter of a year, I had earned more than two million dollars working for the vory v zakone, and I was officially inducted into their number in record time for a beginner such as myself. I worked out various scams, most of them involving computers, and before long I was given a crew of my own to command, and we took some pretty serious scores, my friend.”
The Riddler talked on and on, and Batman marveled at his narcissism. He was infatuated with his own accomplishments, with himself. Perhaps because so few had shown genuine interest in him before. He craves recognition. Batman remained silent, and let the man talk.
“Then, one night while I was working on a job in Moscow, I got up in the middle of the night to get a snack. I was just walking around the apartment working on a problem for the job, thinking about how we were going to infiltrate a safe that had an advanced time-lock defense, when all of a sudden, it came to me: motivation. It was a question I hadn’t asked myself concerning who might be the Batman. The question was, ‘Who would be motivated to be the Batman?’ I admit, since I’m such a coldly logical thinker, an understanding of human emotion frequently escapes me, so I hadn’t been looking for what sort of powerful man might be motivated to do what you do.
“In a matter of thirty seconds, while thinking about a completely different problem, I had the epiphany. It’s a truth so self-evident that I cannot believe more people haven’t stumbled upon the truth themselves. There’s a riddle for us both: ‘Why do people not figure you out?’
“Truth be told, this knowledge excited me, as all newfound knowledge and insight should. That night…it marked a change in me. I had talents that, because of you, had been going to waste until my uncle showed up with his lucrative offer. Still, even with my uncle’s work panning out, I had felt like something was missing. I knew that I was capable of more, and your example inspired me.
“You had put your talents to work, and so I guess that’s what focused me, in some measure, to do the same with my talents. It also forced me to put my talents in perspective. I am, more than likely, the most imaginative, intelligent, and creative human being on the planet Earth,” he said, as though it was an absolute and undisputed fact. “Once a person realizes that they’re that intelligent—and all others are trapped in these simple concepts of liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, existentialism, or whatever—then how does one continue to play the game? If I’m of superior intelligence, then aren’t other human beings to me just as ants are to human beings? For those such as you and I, aren’t we free to treat them as cocks in a cockfight, or pitbulls in a dogfight? That seemed to be the conclusion you came to, and I heartily agree with you.”
“I don’t play people as puppets,” Batman interjected.
“You don’t?” the Riddler said. “Hmph, then I wonder what all your criminal informants are? And I wonder why you chose to play the part of a giant bat? Perhaps, to invoke fear in them?” Nygma smiled. “It’s all right, my friend. You and I are just more intelligent than the rest of the herd. That’s actually what inspired my new purpose—idiots rule the world. They do. Idiots elect idiots. Idiots don’t know they’re idiots, or else they wouldn’t be idiots. They find their quaint, aw-shucks way of living as a virtue. And that same, antiquated notion of wisdom—religion, home remedies, chi—they see these things in potential leaders and vote for them. Idiots electing idiots.”
“So now, you’re someone just out to save society from itself?”
“Is that so crazy?”
Batman sighed. “You killed people to make it happen.”
“Do I need to remind you how much innocent blood was shed to build this country?” the Riddler chuckled. “Get off it. You’re trying to provoke change, and you’re doing it in the sneakiest way imaginable, so why can’t the rest of us?” Batman didn’t answer him, because answering someone such as “Edward Nygma” would only incite him on further rants. “Idiots will only elect idiots,” he said. “It’s just the way it is. The only way to help anyone is to wrest control back from all the idiots, and then you start setting things right. The great battle you’re fighting—good versus evil—it does not exist. The world is divvied up different. There are the intelligent and the unintelligent. That’s it.
“Back to my point, though. I must admit I was a little distracted from my goal since you’d also caused me a lot of hardship in my past, and I wasn’t too keen to just let that go. And, like I said before, blackmail seemed too tame.” The Riddler shrugged. “You gave us all a riddle to solve—‘Who is Batman?’—and so I gave you an unsolvable riddle. There was no Mulcoyisy Stewart-Paulson, but you chased him down anyway. You chased the wrong person. You chased a non-person. I gave you a riddle similar to the one of the Missing Dollar, completely unsolvable because the question itself—‘Who is Nate?’—was flawed. I’ve always enjoyed riddles, and I was always good at them.
“This illusory personality also put me in a good position for Carmine Falcone’s people in the streets, who were still doing his work, but needed more capital to continue Falcone’s businesses. I made a deal with Falcone’s lawyer to send him a message—give his people the command to obey me, and me alone, and I would operate through couriers to give him the money he needed to carry on his businesses, and, hopefully, get him out of prison. With that done, and what with all of my other earnings I’d accumulated, I had virtually unlimited resources at my command.”
“So,” Batman said, “you were making all of this money and decided to stop, and to bring harm to others, killing them, just to get to me? You needed me out of your way to start fixing society’s ails?” His anger was mounting. “You killed Margot Tralley and her little girl, Jessica. You killed a little girl, Nygma! Just to make a point to me? Just to attract my attention? When you could’ve used your talents to get more money or gold than you could ever use in a lifetime?”
The Riddler smiled and said, “I have something greater than any gold, my friend.”
Batman winced when he touched his ribs, then looked at Nygma. “And what is that?”
“What is yours, yet your friends use it more than you do?” he riddled.
Batman considered the enigma, and figured it out. My name. “You may know my name,” he said. “And you may know how complex engineering is done, and you may know how to hack an entire city’s power grid, and you may have an eidetic memory, and you may know how to manipulate a nuclear plant. But you comprehend very little about the lives of good and decent people. You’ve preyed on the innocent to make some kind of point that has no bearing on anything except in your own mind.”
“Oooooh, I think you’d be surprised just how much I comprehend about ‘good and decent’ people,” he said. “As with the Riddle of the Missing Dollar, though, I think there is something misleading in that statement, too. I’m sure you call ‘good and decent’ people those average folks out there, yes?” Nygma said, nodding towards the sounds of anarchy. “So that means the rest of us—you, me, Commissioner Gordon, Oswald Cobblepot, the Joker, his new pet Harley Quin—we’re the diseased ones. Is that how you see us all? Because, I have to tell you, there’s all sorts of holes in that logic.
“Krishnamurti, one of the recognized great thinkers, once said, ‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’ That just means that being one of the crowd isn’t so good when the crowd is mentally ill. You would have us be one of those Average Joes out there, the ones you call good and decent, only they’re the ones that are rioting and tearing this city apart, the ones that birthed you, me, the Joker, all of us. Who is the diseased now?”
Batman started to say something, but he could hardly get a word in edgewise. The Riddler just kept talking, he was so proud of himself.
“The Joker stumbled onto this thinking, I believe, only he didn’t know what to do with it. Does that make him a modern-day Krishnamurti? Only time will tell. Some see you, me, Cobblepot and the Joker as an inoperable cancer on Gotham City’s body. Perhaps we’re just not willing to be ‘well adjusted’ to their non-functioning society.” He snorted. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of the Joker’s work—far too chaotic of an expressionist, without any artistic focus, but I suppose that’s his point. Crude as he is, he may be the van Gogh to your Rembrandt and my da Vinci. But I digress.”
Batman stood up to test his legs and twist his upper body. The aches and pains were less now, the pills were fast-acting. “Let me ask you something else,” he said. “Why did Cobblepot give an accurate physical description of you to Gordon? If you and he were such close business partners, then why would he describe you so perfectly, when it would only help us catch you?”
“Because I told him to,” the Riddler said simply.
Batman had to ask, “Why?”
“Why, indeed,” he said. Was it another riddle, something Batman was supposed to figure out?
“Let me ask you this,” Batman said. “If you were only after theft and revenge against me—”
“It was never theft or revenge. Don’t misquote me. I was out to steal a city, sure, but for a good cause. And as for the ‘revenge’ game between you and I, it was just that, merely a game, nothing more. A bit of recompense was just the bonus.”
“Fine, then. If you were so adamant about playing a game against you and me, then why put the lives of millions of innocent people at stake by attacking ANGS?”
“If the stakes weren’t high enough, you might never have taken me seriously.”
Batman nodded. “You are diseased.”
The Riddler considered something, and then shrugged. “And what if I am diseased? Is it really so terrible? Perhaps I’m a necessity to the system. I might be the instigator of change, destined to be interpreted and reinterpreted forever, just as Che Guevara has been, all of us victims of future storytellers and their whims—depending on who writes about whom, I may become the hero and you the villain.” He shrugged again. “Or, I may only be the glitch in the system that alerts you that your firewalls aren’t adequate. Just here to show you where the gaps in your thinking are.”
“This is mindless rationalizing.”
“Is it? Maybe it’s rationalizing because it’s rational.” He smiled. “The idiots swarm and riot right now, even as we speak. Yet, if the intelligence of the people was adequate, there would’ve been no way I could’ve ever penetrated ANGS, or GL&P for that matter. The idiots swarm when you take their toys away, when you take their TVs or electricity or cell phones. If they knew anything about preplanning and preparation, as you and I do, then this wouldn’t have been a problem for any of them. But none of them stock water or have adequate backup power systems. None of them knew about the zero-day exploits I utilized in ANGS’s system. None of them sharpened their minds enough to decipher any of my riddles, or to uncover your true identity. They’re clueless. Completely clueless. Always falling back on the smart people to save them, the ones who did preplan, the ones who do understand science. Now look at them,” he said. “They’re not worthy of your efforts, or mine.”
Batman shook his head. “You’re contradicting yourself. You said you did all of this to help, and now they’re not worthy of help?”
“I never said I was trying to help them,” said Nygma. “I said that I was trying to steal the city and fix a problem. But, maybe I have anyway. Just as the irritant in the mollusk’s throat doesn’t mean to create a pearl, the irritant is necessary to do so.”
“You think your existence will eventually create a ‘pearl’ in Gotham’s future?” Batman asked. The Riddler only shrugged again, and looked over at Cobblepot, who snored loudly in his sleep before settling down and going quiet again. Batman said, “Before I get to my real questions, those concerning your real name and connections in the city, I guess I might as well get this last thing out of the way.” He started to ask his question, but the Riddler cut him off.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody your secret.”
For a moment, Batman didn’t believe him. “And why not?”
The Riddler smiled, and spoke another riddle. “When one does not know what it is, then it is something; but when one knows what it is, then it is nothing. What is it?”
Batman said nothing. This was an old riddle, and the answer, of course, was a riddle. “So as long as no one else knows who I am, and you do, then you hold all the power.”
The Riddler’s smile grew wider. “This has been most invigorating, Caped Crusader,” he said. “I look forward to doing it again sometime.”
“You’ll never see the light of day again,” he said, “or speak to anyone worth speaking to.”
“Oh, no? Haven’t you heard? I’m declaring insanity. I hear that goes over well with a recommendation from the staff at Arkham Asylum.” Nygma chuckled. “And while I’m inside, you can work on the last riddle.”
That struck him as strange. “What riddle?” Batman asked guardedly.
“You mean, you don’t know?” He tsked, and shook his head. “Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you aren’t such a smart fellow, after all, Bruce.”