Clockwork Redux

Chapter Three

standing over jordan, what did I see,

coming for to carry me home?

-"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"

----

When he looked at the strip of dime-store pictures, he did not hear the name of the mother in his head. Rather, the following memory came to mind:

A classroom full of light. Mid-afternoon in Belvedere, Ohio, the May sun streaming yellow through a dusty window. Four rows of eight-year-olds, giving a concert to the first-graders.

"Swing low, sweet chah-ree-uhht! Cah-min' for to cah-ree me hoooooome!"

In the third row, a boy and a girl stand side by side, as upright as soldiers on parade, their shoulders pressed together. The boy wears dungarees and a striped t-shirt; his buddy has had Mom iron her red Sunday dress for the occasion. On an impulse, the boy grabs her hand and squeezes it. She turns and grins at him mid-verse, her eyes as brown and alive as the moss on a river rock.

Now he walks down a gritty Gotham street, head bowed against the rain. He is not in the fourth grade anymore. The towheaded child who favoured denim and stripes is dead.

The outfit he has chosen for his first big crime is suitably outlandish. Apparently, this birthday clown went bust and donated his suit (handmade, and it came with a snazzy coat!) to Goodwill. When he saw it, he knew that it was stupid, impractical, and would make him identifiable to astronauts on the International fucking Space Station.

So, he bought it.

Anyway, he's right back where he started: trying to keep his footing on a puddled sidewalk, caught in a storm, his green hair plastered to his neck. He has a knife in each of his dozens of pockets, and a disintegrating map clutched in his hands.

Getting this Durante shithead's address was easy-all it took was a quick phone call to Chuckles-and, as it's only a couple of blocks away, getting there shouldn't give him any grief. It's the meat of the plan that has him peppering.

He's no stranger to murder-he blew up a subway carriage in New York about five months ago, which made six new holes in a graveyard somewhere. But he wasn't there for that-he set the charges at ten o'clock the night before, when no-one was coming home or going to a party and the carriage was empty. He never saw who he killed. Tonight he'll have to, because Durante is most likely at home, enjoying his prize, and he won't just give her to him.

He can see the house in the near distance. It's in a pretty part of Gotham, a classy neighbourhood about a mile away from the Narrows' stench. Here, leaves rustle above his head, waterworks bubble and murmur, and nude statues favour him with serene smirks. The local elementary school costs about three thousand dollars a term. He feels dirty just looking at the houses.

Durante lives in an art-deco monstrosity, brand-new and ugly as a pug, built a century after the last of Gotham's true deco buildings went up. He clambers over a narrow gate set between two ten-foot-high stone walls and saunters up the garden path.

In every alcove, a statue lurks. Most are the same sort of soft-porn darlings that he admired in other gardens, but here and there stands a hint of variety: one of those Chinese terracotta soldiers; a herd of deer, arranged in a patch of timothy grass and painted to mimic life; an ornamental stork in a Zen pond. It's like trespassing in the garden of Medusa.

Getting into the house itself poses a bit of a problem. It's tricked out with a bunch of nasty security devices-he can hear their beeps and hums from just outside the door. He puffs out his breath and shuffles on the mat, trying to think.