Maroni bit down on his cigar and watched the television.
The man in the broadcast had good hair — the kind that caught studio lighting well and photographed cleanly, a warm blonde that read as trustworthy from a distance. He was answering a question that Will hadn't heard but clearly didn't need to hear, because the answer was the same answer Harvey Dent gave to every question.
"—once this legislation takes effect, Gotham's crime rate will fall by twenty percent. I'll be personally overseeing implementation to ensure the law is enforced without exception. No one escapes accountability — not corrupt officials, not criminal organizations—"
Dent pointed at the camera.
"I'm Harvey Dent. And I will make you answer for what you've done."
Maroni exhaled smoke toward the ceiling in a long slow stream, then rested his arms along the top of the couch like a man settling in.
"Boyle," he said, to the empty room. "Did he just — through the screen — was he pointing at me specifically?" He tilted his head. "I think he was. He's got nerve, I'll give him that. No wonder New York sent him down here."
He turned to look down at the floor beside the couch.
"What do you think? We could do something with that face of his. Get some creativity in here. A mechanism — he opens a door, a little surprise comes down — what do you think?"
The man on the floor didn't answer.
"Oh. That's right. You've got the handkerchief."
Maroni leaned forward and pulled it out.
"BOSS — I didn't want to — he took my wife — I had no—"
"I know," Maroni said. He set the cigar down on the edge of the ashtray and dusted his hands. "I know you were coerced. I even believe you." He studied Boyle's face for a moment, something almost sympathetic in his expression. "But you still did it. And you know what I can't stand."
His voice dropped a register.
"Betrayal."
He extended two fingers. Held them apart. Considered Boyle's left eye.
The screaming lasted a while.
Maroni stepped out of the study and beckoned the guard at the end of the hall.
"The arrangement we discussed. Tonight." He buttoned his jacket. "For Mr. Harvey Dent."
He paused.
Looked at the guard's face. Really looked at it.
"You know what," he said. "That is a remarkable face."
The guard did not know what to do with this information.
"Go on then," Maroni said, and walked away.
Will left Selina's apartment at eleven.
The coffee had been coffee. The conversation had been direct and low-pressure in a way that felt like a calibration — she was figuring out what category he went in, and he was figuring out the same about her, and neither of them had reached a conclusion yet. The Catwoman had set herself aside for the evening. What remained was a woman who'd grown up harder than her current address suggested, and who had questions she was working toward asking.
At the door, coat already on, she'd tilted her head.
"I meant to ask earlier — do you know whose aircraft that was? The one that pulled us out of the water. It looked like a bat."
Will stood very still for a moment.
"You saw it too."
"You saw it?"
"I thought I was hallucinating."
She shook her head. "I had better visibility from the surface. It was there."
He walked home.
The city did what it always did at this hour — contracted into its own concerns, the volume dropping without the tension dropping. A group of men were working over a figure in a doorway two blocks from the Senate. Will heard it, registered it, and kept walking with his hands in his pockets.
A month ago he would have stopped. He knew the distance between that fact and this one and didn't examine it too closely.
His phone rang.
"Do you have time?" Gordon said. "There's someone who wants to talk to you."
"Harvey Dent."
A pause. "The newspaper headlines."
"The newspaper headlines." Will looked at the rack on the corner. Dent's face was on three of the four visible covers. The White Knight: Can Gotham's New Hope Deliver? ran above the fold on the Gazette. "Tell him I need half an hour."
He ducked into the nearest men's clothing store before it closed.
The black suit was Roman. The slicked hair was Roman. He was not, for the purposes of this meeting, Roman. He found a grey hoodie in his size, paid for it, changed in the fitting room, and ran his fingers through his hair until the definition was gone.
The man who came out looked like someone who fixed things, or drove things, or existed in one of the thousand categories of Gotham that didn't register on anyone's radar.
He took the back entrance to the precinct.
The conference room was the kind of space that had been used for difficult conversations for a long time and showed it. Dent was already there, standing when Will came in, hand extended before Will had fully cleared the doorway.
The handshake was confident without performing confidence — a distinction that mattered. Up close, Harvey Dent was not particularly handsome in the conventional way: the jaw pushed forward slightly, the nose broader than the photographs suggested, the skin tone a little uneven under the overhead light. But the eyes were engaged and specific, and the smile that came with the handshake was the smile of someone who had decided to treat you as a peer before you'd earned it.
Will found himself recalibrating upward.
"Before we get into anything," Dent said, "I'd appreciate it if we powered down the electronics." He pulled out his own phone and turned it face-down on the table.
Will produced his phone, battery removed, and held it up.
Dent looked at it. Looked at Will.
"You do that before every meeting?"
"When the meeting matters."
Dent nodded slowly. "I think we're going to work well together."
Across the city, the Senate's block was quiet.
Oswald was in the Mustang, driver's side window down, working on a warm beer. The hot dog on the passenger seat had given up on being appetizing an hour ago.
Day five of recruitment. No results. The casino massacre had spooked everyone — or Dent's press conference had, which was almost worse, because it meant the pool of available talent had developed something like caution, and caution didn't help Oswald's staffing situation.
He tipped the can back.
Knocked.
He was out of the beer before he identified the sound as knuckles on glass.
The figure outside wore a hat pulled low and sunglasses. At midnight. On a residential block in Gotham's lower district, wearing sunglasses.
Oswald's right hand found the door lock. His left hand found the knife at the back of his belt.
The figure tilted the hat.
Oswald's knife hand relaxed. Then tensed again for a different reason. His mouth, involuntarily, went through a sequence of expressions that arrived somewhere between astonishment and indignation.
"Harvey Dent," he said.