cocktail dance

“But this is all so sudden.” Oswald’s heart is fluttering. The needle drops and the record wheels back to its starting place, again.

Zsasz draws close against him, smelling like gunpowder. “Where did you learn to dance? Not in Arkham.”

“My mother taught me. Of course, she was considerably shorter than you are.”

That was then — counting out loud and taking wobbling steps on carpet in the parlor, wearing pinching shoes and the suit his mother bought him for his first appearance in juvenile court. This is now, past midnight on a polished floor. For all he knows his friend Zsasz never had a mother; maybe he ate her.

Victor’s leather-clad girl friends are taking a smoke break in the alley after a job well done. The two of them have all the time they need.

They sway body to body, perilously close, Zsasz’s holstered guns stubbing into Oswald’s side through his tailored coat, still warm. For a killer Zsasz moves with unsettling grace, and he clearly knows the steps, even where Oswald keeps a limping lead — Oswald’s arm around Victor’s waist, Victor’s arm tossed rakish over his shoulders, a close and happy clinch.

Oswald presses his face to Zsasz’s shirtfront, humming the wheedling tune off an old record. The dance marks out its steps in blood — the mingled prints of Zsasz’s heavy boots and Oswald’s small neat wingtips, smudging and swirling out legible charts on the marble floor. Two dancers alone on a darkened floor, gloved hands clasping as the music slides through phrases — no fingerprints.

The old couple who owned this lonely dance hall lie slumped in a welter of blood and scorched hair — two fresh tallies for Victor’s score. They hadn’t been willing to sign over the property lease, not in the face of any amount of persuasion — and they’d even been bold enough to call Oswald some very nasty names. In front of a crowd of sympathetic patrons, maybe the effect would have been different, doomed but bold resistance to the new regime. Not even in Gotham do well-mannered citizens relish the prospect of becoming a gangland casualty, or catching a stray bullet on their night out.

But the owners were foolish enough to arrange a meeting after closing time, and the only collateral damage was a few bottles behind the bar, now in shards with their contents filling the air with sticky sweetness. By Monday the stock will be replenished and a new sign will hang in the window.

Starting now, this hole-in-the-wall club is under new management. There’s nothing for a broken heart like a dance with a different partner.

The balance shifts in a single moment — Victor waltzes Oswald off his feet, and off the dance floor. Their tangled bodies hit the wall hard enough to make the needle skip, and their mouths meet. Beyond amused tolerance, Zsasz cuts like a knife; he wants what he wants, urgently.

Against the wall, Victor’s gloved hand against his cheek and his knee pressing between Oswald’s legs to bring up his hips against, Oswald fumbling through the layers of clothing and finding the body beneath. He leans up on his toes to pull down another kiss, coppery blood smudging in his mouth — Zsasz’s smooth face, beatific in red.