▸ Column · Modern noir Gotham — the criminal underworld and its watchful Dark Knight
THE PENGUIN replies.
Replied to by The Penguin, with a rebuttal from Batman.
The letter
I was slumped on a bench outside the Gotham Hall of Records, half in tears — some pickpocket had lifted my wallet, and with it any way to pay for a title transfer I'd queued three weeks for. A woman I'd never met, late sixties, in a bright yellow rain slicker, sat down, heard my whole miserable tale, and pressed two twenties into my hand. She refused my number, refused to be paid back. "Pass it along sometime," she said, and went back inside. I've kept that forty in a separate pocket ever since, waiting for the right moment — but every chance I weigh feels too small or too staged. How do I know the genuine moment when it arrives? Or am I overthinking it, and should I just hand it to the next soul who looks like they're drowning?
The Penguin replies
My dear correspondent, permit me a moment of genuine education. That woman in the yellow slicker did not give you forty dollars. She purchased something far more valuable — your gratitude, indefinitely, payable to strangers she will never meet. "Pass it along," indeed. That, my drenched little sparrow, is how one seeds an entire city with people who feel they owe. The dear old bird is running an empire of obligation on pocket change, and you have already enlisted. Waugh-waugh!
Nobody ever pressed forty dollars into the palm of young Oswald Cobblepot. I was handed an umbrella and a sneer and shown the servants' door. So I clawed. I leveraged. I learned that sentiment is a currency the clever spend on the gullible.
My advice? Do not fling it at the first sad face in the rain — that is charity, and charity is what fools mistake for power. Keep the forty. Lend it, at interest of loyalty. Make someone need you. Then you hold the umbrella, and they stand in the downpour, grateful for the privilege. That, old bird, is how a gentleman turns a gutter kindness into a perch.
— The Penguin
Batman weighs in
Cobblepot sees a debt. It was a gift. He has never been able to tell the difference. That is the whole of his sickness.
The woman wanted nothing. No leverage. No perch. People like her are why this city has not finished burning.
Do not lend the forty. Do not hold it over anyone. Give it. The moment will not announce itself with trumpets. Small is enough. A stranger in the rain. Done quietly, asking nothing.
Oswald clawed his way up alone and calls it strength. It is just a man who never learned what that woman knew.
Pass it along. Before the cold sets in.
— Batman
▸ Read next