A Comedy of Errors

It was March 15th, and Joker was feeling whiny and tired when the cab left him and Dr. Crane off on Granville Avenue & 37th Street, in the part of Gotham known variously as Diamond Heights, The Bubble or just simply, the West End. Dr. Crane, who was known to the Joker as Jonathan, hadn’t even opened his eyes during the cab ride into the Bubble. He had only responded to two sounds that morning; that of a coffee maker and the Joker’s petulant whining, if only to tell him to take it like a man and shut up.

As far as the Joker was concerned, this would have been a lovely day to stay at home and be unconscious.

The condo that the two were headed for was a huge champagne and cream coloured building that took up the whole block of the corner. In addition to the extortionately wealthy and octogenarians, the condo also offered four floors of commercial space rented by various professionals. Below that were offices and the basement, shared by a subway stop. Below that were two more sub-basements and two levels of subway tracks. The block was a world unto itself.

There was no door man securing the large glass entrance. Jonathan glanced at a small note in his hand and pressed a button before a snobbish woman who gave Joker the hairy eyeball could speak to them. A heavy accent greeted the two men.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Antonov, we’re here,” Jonathan replied with his own hint of displeasure.

“Oh, okay,” the Bulgarian said. “Giff me moment.”

It was a lovely day, brisk, but not too cold. There were a lot of people on Granville Avenue, which was kind of a prep school-secretary-hipster-scene whore-rich bitch main street. West Gotham used to have that honor, but it became too commercial. All matter of humanity drifted past the two men on the drafted sidewalk, old people, young people, Asians, Hispanics, black people and a tranny with pink hair. Even the drifters seemed benign.

The two men were snapped out of their reverie by the clacking of heeled boots and the squeak of a heavy door. Dr. Crane put on his brave face to greet the Bulgarian. Joker wished he had a blunt object; that, which he would use it on, himself or the Bulgarian, was still undecided.

“Ms. Antonov, you certainly will remember my friend here, won’t you?” Crane asked. Tatiana the Bulgarian contemplated the Joker, who on this rarest of occasions, went makeless, but that fleshy pink spot right below his left eye and the scars of a Chelsea Grin across his face left little doubt in her mind who else it could be.

Joker gave Tatiana a caustic grin and a controlled yet pronounced, “hai”.

He really wished he had gone for the spray.

Tatiana gave Joker a smart smirk. Dr. Crane, who was now informing her of how his name was “Jonathan”, was by far on the receiving end of the Bulgarian’s benevolent side. She offered him a cigarette as she listened intently to his broken Bulgarian that he had memorized earlier that morning.

“Jonat’in,” she repeated.

“Jona-than.”

“Jonat’in.”

“Close enough,” Crane said. Tatiana gestured to Joker with her thumb as she said a few words in Bulgarian. Crane looked puzzled for a moment before taking a shot in the dark, and saying carefully in a low voice, “he is the Joker, but we’re just gunna call him ‘Jay’, for now,” Crane said.

“Jay.”

“Exactly.”

“Dobre togava,” Tatiana said before taking a puff. “Haïde,” she said, swinging her arm down the street.

“Jay” sighed, conceding to his fate for the day and grumbled, “I’m so excited.”

The two men trailed behind Tatiana, who underneath the bug-eye sunglasses was admiring the boutiques and businesses lining the street. If her hair wasn’t coloured like an Easter egg, she would have blended in perfectly with the sea of scrawny hipsters. Joker was griping in a low voice while Crane made sure Tatiana didn’t disappear from his sight, even though she wasn't particularly difficult to miss.

“You know, if you’re nice to her, you could probably score some pot later,” Crane whispered.

Joker contemplated this for a moment before replying, “I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything.”

Crane raised his head as they approached the curb, and then glanced back down at the sheet of paper printed with simple phrases in his hand. “Spretay tuk, molya,” he called to Tatiana, who then stopped and turned to face the two men.

“Kyde otivame?” she replied. Crane paused to think as they approached the Bulgarian. As she looked at him questioningly, he pointed southward down the street.

“There … ?” he said simply, jabbing at the air. His answer seemed to satisfy the Bulgarian who crossed when the little man picture in the light post flickered on.

“Where are we going, anyway?” Joker asked.

“Izzy Skinazzi,” Crane replied. “Maroni figured the two ladies should probably get to know each other.”

“She’s the other, er, street pharmacist, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Crane answered. “She’s in Gastown – down this way,” he said, guiding the Bulgarian through an entrance emblazoned with a sign that said, Monorail – Granville.

They passed by two homeless men sitting by the ticket machines busking with two dusty and out of tune guitars. Tatiana turned to Crane, talking to him in Bulgarian. Crane in turn nodded even though he had no honest idea what she was talking about. “Yes,” he said forcefully with a distinct nod, taking yet another shot in the dark.

The company strode down an escalator into the lower levels to the monorail station. They passed by huge advertisements for Shreck’s department store, H&M and mindless cell phone ads – Fat Free Texting!

Whatever that means.

Tatiana applied a fresh layer of pink lip gloss that had the sheen of cellophane while waiting for the monorail. There was a fair amount of vagrants waiting on the platform for the monorail. A few yards away was a small company of teenage morons with their pants hanging halfway down their asses dancing like squirrels on crack to silly nineties pop music.

“You can’t smoke on the train,” Crane said quietly to Tatiana as she reached into her purse for another cigarette. She gave him a vacant stare before furrowing her brows and asking him to repeat what he said in her very broken English.

“You. Can’t. Smoke. On the. Train,” Crane whispered definitively in her ear. He then pointed to her cigarettes, shook his head, and mouthed, ‘no’.

The Joker was getting a bit of a giggle out of watching Crane and the Bulgarian stumble over translation fallacy, lost in translation. Tatiana pouted and pushed her sticks back into her bag. She whispered to herself in indiscernible Bulgarian, crossing her arms over her chest.

The train came to a stop before the platform. A swarm of people got off before the company stepped on. There were no empty seats, so our three friends were left standing, supporting themselves on the poles by the doors. The train grumbled to a start, then sped out of the underground tunnels and onto the track, gliding over the lower level buildings. Tatiana was peering inquisitively out the windows, studying the skyline and geography of the area. A few seats away sat a young mother with her daughter, who could not have been older than three. She too was gazing with wonder out at the city. She turned to her mother and exclaimed, “look, Mummy; there’s an aeroplane up in the sky!”

Crane let a small smile slide across his lips.

The mother and her daughter departed the train two stops down the way, when the automated woman’s voice said coolly, “Stadium / Chinatown”. The train then whizzed over the rooftops on the Narrows, then the Bowery, the Cauldron, then Ace Chemical Processing Inc. The train came to a halt in the East End, where our friends got off the train.

“You will really want to get to know these parts of the city,” Crane said to Tatiana with the added primitive hand gestures and slow pronounced tone, as Tatiana reached in her bag for the cigarette she was earlier denied. She again offered one to Crane, who politely refused. The Bulgarians’ attitude toward Joker had evidently been lifted, as she too offered him one, which he graciously accepted.

“This is where a lot of drug trafficking goes on,” Crane continued as two tufts of purple smoke veiled their faces. “Maroni will want you to really monopolize on these areas.”

“So where is this chick we’re supposed to meet?” Joker asked as the group meandered down the street.

Crane reached inside his jacket pocket, and then retrieved a small slip with the address marked down in messy blue ink. “She’s in the Park Royal Towers, apartment 391.” Joker nodded as he took another drag.

“Kolko e daleche?” Tatiana asked Crane.

Crane shrugged and replied bashfully, “I don’t know what that means.” He made a mental note to ask Stanislav the next time he saw him.

“Vat’s dis?” Tatiana then suddenly asked, stopping in her tracks to let the two men almost walk into her. Her head was turned to study a graffiti wall, covered with symbol slang – little doodle art drawings whose meanings were unknown to mature adults.

“I like this wall,” Joker said. Every week, someone would add to the hieroglyphs. Crane sensed that a story was building on the wall, and found it very frustrating not to be able to decipher it. He pondered if there was some inner-city Rosetta stone that would crack the code.

“What does it mean?” Crane asked. Joker snickered and told him nothing.

“I keep forgetting how elderly I am,” Crane replied sarcastically. But give or take a few years, and the two men were roughly the same age. Even though he didn’t understand what the wall said, Crane found it moving, maybe because the only symbol he could recognize was the anarchist ‘A’ and a heart.

Charmed and puzzled, Crane was led away when Joker and Tatiana got bored of the wall and began to walk ahead of him. Their attention had been diverted elsewhere to a scene happening up the block. Two patrol cars with their lights winking were parked outside of an old bank building. There were no cops present – it was assumed that they were all inside the building. A small camera crew for GCN was set up. On top of the old bank was a flag, emblazoned with the crest of the city – an eagle surrounded by two proud black lions.

“Eagle!” Tatiana exclaimed. Joker looked at her like she had three heads.

“Yeah, that’s an eagle, what about it?” he asked.

“Eagles,” she repeated. “Hotel California.”

“Yeah, I know the song - ”

“On a dark desert highway!” the Bulgarian began to sing at a level louder than the two dubious men would have liked. “Cool vind in my hair - ” The Bulgarian was cut off when Joker slapped a hand over her mouth and dragged her behind a dark green dumpster.

“Will you shut up?” he scolded her. “Last thing we really need at this moment is attention from good ol’ Jimbo in there. I mean, are you like, challenged or something? Did your mom smoke a little too much crack when she was pregnant with you or what? Come on, stop being a dumb bitch.”

Sensing the hostility in his voice, Tatiana reached into her bag once again for her handy dandy hot glue gun. Joker raised a hand to stop her. “No more trouble,” he said slowly. “In case you haven’t noticed, there are police over there.”

“Ah, policiya!” Tatiana replied.

“Yeah, out here, we just call them police,” Joker answered. He peeked his head out from behind the dumpster just in time too spot a man with mousy brown hair and a bushy moustache escort a man with a gaping beer gut out of the building. “See that guy over there?” Joker said quietly. “That’s Jim Gordon. We don’t like him,” he said with a shake of his head. “We don’t want him on our tails. You play it cool when Jim-Bob’s around.” Tatiana nodded, although Joker doubted she really understood a word he was saying.

But the two waited behind the dumpster until the patrol cars had driven off. It was then they realized that they had lost Crane.

“Jonat’in!” Tatiana called out. Joker surveyed the cluster of people until he found his friend chatting it up with a woman with chestnut coloured hair, with a GCN press pass clipped to the lapel of her blazer.

“Ooh, who’s that?” Joker wondered. Crane and his lady friend were unaware of the two watching them intently. They got impatient after a few minutes, and to Jokers’ chagrin, Tatiana called out once more, “Jonat’in!”

This time Crane responded, and his head revolved back to see the two other members of his company waiting restlessly. He turned to his lady friend, issued a quick excuse and apology before they embraced in a friendly hug of old friends who’d just been reunited.

“Who was that?” Joker teased.

“That’s for me to know and you to ponder,” Crane answered smarmily.

“Got yourself a hot date?”

“Perhaps,” Crane said, his cheeks flushing at the apples. Joker snickered.

“C’mon, let’s not be children about this,” Crane said. “Remember what we’re down here to do, right?”

Jokers’ smirk melted into a scowl of displeasure. “Right.”

“It’s not far from here,” said Crane as the party continued on their epic quest down the street. The ember at the tip of Jokers’ lips burnt out and he threw it to the ground as they approached a five story building, painted firebrick and sienna with off white balconies.

The glass door to the apartment complex that was Park Royal towers was stained and slicked with dirty fingerprints, Sharpie graffiti and what looked like ironed ketchup. A man exiting the building held the door open for the three as the walked in. They waited for an elevator in the lobby, with the walls covered in garish floral wallpaper.

The trip to the third floor was uneventful, aside from Crane finding a used condom in the corner of the elevator. When they reached the third floor, they turned right down the hall and stopped at apartment 391. Crane knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he knocked on it again, more forceful this time; but the door slowly creaked and swung in. Joker pushed the door further into the cheap and sparse apartment.

“Izzy?” Crane called out as he led the party further into the apartment. “Ms. Skinazzi? This is weird,” he said when no one answered. Tatiana looked just as confused as Crane, but Joker was about as casual and collected as if they had just been invited in for a cup of coffee.

“Izzy?” Crane repeated once more. As he turned left down the hall he noticed the light in the bathroom was left on. He pushed the door open.

Izzy Skinazzi was staring straight ahead.

Her body was contorted as it lay in the bathtub in the most awkward position.

She was covered in blood.