▸ Column · Classic Gotham noir — the Penguin holding court at the Iceberg Lounge, fielding letters from the city's stranded motorists
THE PENGUIN replies.
Replied to by The Penguin, with a rebuttal from Batman.
The letter
My dear Umbrella Man — last week my motorcar gave up the ghost dead in the middle of a Gotham intersection at the worst hour, horns screaming, and before I could so much as raise my hand, a workman in a paint-spattered lorry had pulled in behind me. With some boy who appeared from nowhere, he shoved my car clear into a chemist's lot. He gave only a name — "Marcus" — waved off the bills I tried to put in his fist, and was gone before I'd finished thanking him. I cannot stop thinking of him. It feels like a debt to one specific man that I can never square, which is both lovely and maddening. Everyone says "pay it forward," but I fear that wish will quietly rot into nothing if I just wait for some grand roadside moment. Is there a more deliberate way to honor what Marcus did — something that actually lasts?
The Penguin replies
Waugh-waugh! My dear motorist, you've stumbled onto something rarer than a snow-white raven and you intend to squander it on a fortune cookie like "pay it forward." Heavens. Listen to old Oswald, who learned his manners at a school that expelled him for the crime of looking like me: there are no free favors in Gotham. Most men who help you want a piece of you later. But a man who acts before he's asked, then refuses your forty and vanishes — that, my dear, is not a saint. That is an asset. The rarest one there is. Loyalty that costs nothing to summon and everything to buy.
So do not fling your gratitude into the wind for strangers who'll never know your face. Find Marcus. Learn what he wants — every man wants something. Put him on a quiet retainer, send work his way, become the one name in his phone he'll answer at three in the morning. Build the web; sit at its center under a fine umbrella. That is how the King of the Birds repays a debt — by making the creditor part of the empire. The pretty ones pay it forward. Gentlemen pay it upward. Squawk!
— The Penguin
Batman weighs in
Cobblepot collects people. Do not let him collect you. Or Marcus.
He missed the point on purpose. Marcus wanted nothing. That is the whole thing. A debt like that is not paid by buying the man. It is paid by becoming him.
Stop waiting for drama. Drama is not a plan. Put a jack, a strap, and flares in your trunk tonight. Learn to use them. Then the next time someone is stranded in a live lane, you will already be the one who stops.
That is how it sticks. Not a retainer. A habit. Someone is always watching what you do with it.
— Batman
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