▸ Column · Modern Gotham underworld — the asker works the inventory floor of one of the Penguin's "discreet" warehouse operations, with the corporate handbook reframed as house rules.
THE PENGUIN replies.
Replied to by The Penguin, with a rebuttal from The Riddler.
The letter
I run the Tuesday count on your stockroom floor, Mr. Cobblepot — me and a fellow named William, tallying crates nobody's supposed to ask about and splitting a sleeve of crackers in the back when the cameras blink. Somewhere between the pallets and the pretzels it stopped being banter. Now his name lights up my burner and my stomach does a barrel roll. Trouble is, the house rules are blunt: nobody on the same crew gets sweet on anybody else on the same crew. Our floor boss, Lorena, recited that very line at the last all-hands staring — I'd swear it on my mother — directly at the two of us. We've done nothing you could write up. But the long looks and the after-hours messages are a relationship in all but the paperwork. I love this work, and I'm in line for a lead slot come autumn. I can't be the warning story they tell the new hires. So do I keep playing dumb until one of us moves floors, or is the clean move to kill it before anyone upstairs has to notice?
The Penguin replies
Waugh-waugh! My dear inventory pigeon, you've waddled in clutching the only two options a frightened mind ever offers itself — surrender or confession — and both are beneath a creature with ambitions. Let us be gentlemen of business about this.
Who holds the cards? Lorena. She stared because she suspects, and suspicion she hasn't acted on is leverage she hasn't yet aimed. Strange, isn't it, that she watched you and not the till? A boss with that much free attention has something she'd rather you not count. Find it.
Confess to "upstairs"? My dear, one does not turn oneself in. I have never once knocked on a door to volunteer my own throat, and I've outlasted every caped busybody who hoped I would.
Here is the elegant play. Land the lead post first — once you perch above William rather than beside him, the "same crew" clause simply melts off the page like rain off a good umbrella. Until then, no breadcrumbs. Those late-night messages? That's precisely the paper trail the flying rat uses to build his little cases. Burn them.
Sentiment, I'll grant you, is expensive. I loved exactly one person — my mother — and the world made me pay retail. So keep the spark. Just don't let it light anything you can't sell. Waugh-waugh!
— The Penguin
The Riddler weighs in
Predictable Oswald. Hand the man a love letter and he answers with a balance sheet — "find dirt, climb the perch." A vulgar accountant mistaking leverage for thought.
Riddle me this, stockroom dreamer: Lorena stared straight at you and did nothing. Cobblepot calls that a card she hasn't played. Wrong. It's a clue, and you both walked past it. Why warn the two people who haven't broken a rule yet? Because she wants the confession — it tidies her floor without costing her a thing.
You asked the lazy riddle: hide or tell? The real one — what are you protecting, the job or the man? You can't smuggle both past her forever. Choose the prize, then I'll let you deserve the answer. Aha.
— The Riddler
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