DC – I am Batman

Champagne on the hallway carpet. Someone had spilled it before the event started and the staff had attacked the stain with something industrial, and the chemical smell was losing to the money smell from everything else. Crystal chandeliers, catered salmon, a string quartet playing Vivaldi in the corner because rich people in Gotham believed Vivaldi was the sound of caring about the less fortunate.

Wayne Foundation Annual Benefit. Thomas was on stage for five minutes giving a speech about pediatric healthcare funding that was good enough that the applause sounded real. Martha was working the room in a blue dress and pearls, doing the version of herself that made people write checks. Alfred was somewhere near the coat check, doing whatever Alfred did at these things. Everything nobody noticed.

He stood near the dessert table because it was close to an exit and because Mrs. Brennan had sent cheese puffs and he liked cheese puffs. He ate four. The body had no opinion about cheese puffs one way or the other, which made them the safest food in his life. There was a plaque on the wall next to the dessert table dedicating the east wing to someone named Arthur Reeves. Brass, polished, probably cost more than the wing itself.

Carmine Falcone came in at eight-fifteen.

The room reorganized around him. Dark suit, silver cufflinks that caught the light. His face looked like it had been carved from expensive stone and left in bad weather. Strong features going hard. Eyes that moved across the room and didn't like what they found.

Two men came in behind him, positioned like bookends. Security that was trying to look like guests and failing because guests didn't stand with their weight on the balls of their feet and their hands loose at their sides.

Thomas crossed the room to shake Carmine's hand. Two men who moved in the same city and attended the same events and probably couldn't stand each other, performing the ritual of Gotham civility. Carmine smiled. Thomas smiled. Neither smile had anything behind it except the agreement that smiling was what you did.

Someone dropped a glass on the far side of the room and a waiter appeared from nowhere with a dustpan. He watched the waiter sweep up the shards because it was the only honest thing happening in the building.

The girl was at Carmine's side.

He almost missed her. She was small and still and standing close enough to her father's hip that she was practically in his shadow. Dark hair pulled back tight, away from her face, with the kind of precision that meant someone else had done it. A dress that was too formal for a seven-year-old, dark green, with a collar that buttoned to her throat. Her posture was trained-straight. Spine, shoulders, chin. Someone had taught her how to stand at events, and she had learned it completely.

Sofia Falcone. The file said things he didn't want to think about at a charity benefit. The things Carmine's daughter became. The things she did after he died, the bodies, the silk cord. The file said a lot. The girl at her father's hip had careful hands and a face that was working very hard to be blank.

She was watching the room. Exits, faces, who was talking to whom.

He was reaching for his fifth cheese puff when he saw her hands.

She was standing next to the buffet table, slightly apart from the crowd, and her hands were moving. Quick, small, precise. She was picking up pastries, one at a time, and wrapping each one in a cloth napkin. Folding the napkin around the pastry with the corners tucked in. Packing, not eating. She had three already, stacked in her left hand like small packages.

Nobody was watching her do this. Her father was fifteen feet away talking to a man in a gray suit. The bodyguards were watching the room, not the girl. The catering staff walked past without looking down. She was invisible. Children at adult events were invisible, and she was using the invisibility.

The pastries weren't for her. She was packaging them, carefully, for someone who wasn't in the room.

He didn't think about it. He picked up one of the small plates from the stack at the end of the buffet table, put two cheese puffs and a slice of the good bread and one of the little sandwiches with the crusts cut off on it, and walked over and set it down next to her.

She looked at the plate. Then she looked at him.

She checked the edges for a catch first. Then her eyes moved to him and the assessment was different from how other kids looked at each other. She was measuring. What he wanted. What the plate cost. What the angle was.

"I wasn't sure what you liked," he said. "So I just grabbed stuff."

She didn't say thank you. She looked at the plate again, at the cheese puffs specifically, and then back at him.

"Why?"

"You looked like you were busy."

Her mouth pressed together. The mouth of a person deciding whether to accept something at face value or take it apart and check the wiring. Her eyes were dark and very steady for a seven-year-old. For anyone, really.

"The sandwiches are good," she said. She picked one up and bit into it. Small bite. Clean. No crumbs. Even eating was managed.

He sat down at the nearest chair. She didn't sit. She stayed standing, how her father stood. How the bodyguards stood. Weight distributed. Ready for the room to change.

"Your dad and my dad pretend to like each other," he said.

She stopped chewing. Swallowed. Looked at him. Her jaw tightened, the hinge going sharp for a second, and then it smoothed out. That was trained too. Seven years old and she already knew how to eat a flinch.

"Does yours mean it?" she said.

"Does yours?"

Neither of them answered. The string quartet shifted from Vivaldi to something he didn't recognize. A woman laughed somewhere across the room, bright and fake.

Sofia picked up a second sandwich. She sat down. In the chair across from him, so she could see his face.

"Who are the pastries for?" he asked.

"My brother." She said it flat. "He doesn't come to these."

"Why not?"

"He doesn't like people." Alberto doesn't like people. It rains in April. "He likes cars. And dogs. He's better with dogs than people."

She paused. The sandwich was half-eaten and she was holding it like someone who'd been taught that putting food down on a plate was acceptable but putting it down on a table was not.

"These are his favorite," she said. About the pastries. "He counts them when I bring them back. If there's fewer than four he thinks I ate one and he gets upset."

"Did you eat one?"

The corner of her mouth moved. The faintest twitch. "Once."

He waited to see if she'd say more. She didn't. She ate the sandwich and her back was straight and her napkin was on her lap and the wrapped pastries were stacked next to her plate, four small neat packages for someone who wasn't here, and she was seven and she was carrying a weight he recognized because he was carrying it too. A performance. A set of rules about how to stand and what to say and how to eat a flinch.

Zee would have talked. Zee would have filled the silence with rabbits and Tuesday rooms and a card game with rules that changed every thirty seconds. This girl didn't fill anything. She sat in the quiet and let it be quiet.

He watched her wrap the fourth pastry. Her fingers worked the napkin corners in, tucking them tight and flat, each fold identical to the last. She stacked it on top of the other three and lined up the edges. The stack was perfect. Four identical packages, corners aligned.

"You're good at that," he said.

"Practice."

The corners of her mouth moved. The very beginning of up. She caught it and stopped it and went back to aligning the stack. She did that too. Caught the real thing before it got out.

"The cheese puffs are good," she said.

"Yeah."

"I don't like salmon."

"Me neither."

She looked at him for another few seconds with those dark steady eyes, and then she picked up her pastry stack and stood, and he stayed at the table eating cheese puffs.

Martha was across the room when he looked up. She was talking to a woman in a red jacket, nodding at something, her hand on the woman's arm, warm, deliberate. But her eyes were on the two children at the buffet table. Her wine glass was in her hand, not moving. She was watching. Her son had just walked across a room full of adults to bring a plate of food to the daughter of Carmine Falcone, unprompted, without being introduced, like he'd caught it from twenty feet away before the girl's own father hadn't noticed from two.

Martha Wayne was still trying to figure out the very old little boy she was raising.

He turned back to Sofia. She was finishing the last pastry wrap, folding the napkin corners in with the same careful precision. Her hands were small and fast and sure.

"Same time next year?" he said.

She looked at him like the question was a coin she couldn't find the trick to.

"Maybe," she said.

She picked up her stack of pastries and walked back to her father's side without saying goodbye. Her back was straight. Both socks up, both shoes clean, posture perfect, the green dress buttoned to her throat. Carmine's hand found her shoulder when she returned, heavy and brief, a hand that owned everything it touched, and she stood beside him and didn't look back.

He ate the last cheese puff. It was cold. He ate it anyway.

Thomas found him ten minutes later and said they were leaving. Martha was already at the coat check. Alfred had the car pulled around. The Falcones were gone. He didn't see when they left.

In the car, Martha said, "You spent a long time with the Falcone girl."

"She was by herself."

Martha looked at him in the rearview mirror. That look. The one that was always measuring, always connecting. She didn't say anything else about it.

The quarter from Zee was in his jacket pocket. The scratch on the eagle's wing caught against his thumb through the fabric. Two girls in two months. Zee talked. Sofia didn't. He liked both of them and didn't know what to do with that.

He leaned his head against the window and watched Gotham slide by in the dark.