Chapter 29: I Told You I Don't Know How to Use a Gun

On the streets of Gotham at dusk, a light rain washed over the hazy neon glow. On a rainy night like this, ordinary people should have gone home early.

But Ma Zhaodi had not gone home. It was already nine in the evening, and his shift was not over yet. At that moment, he was deeply worried about whether he would be able to clock out on time.

“Bang! Bang!”

Santos’s face was twisted with rage. He clutched a handgun and crouched behind the overturned round dining table alongside Bridget. Neither of them looked anything like their usual mild and courteous selves. Veins bulged on their foreheads, making them look positively ferocious.

“You bastards! You dare cause trouble at the Red Dragon Restaurant? You’re dead!”

Near the restaurant entrance, a group of burly gunmen were exchanging fire with the armed waiters. Clearly, they had not come in with reservations.

A gunman wearing a gentleman’s top hat and a tailcoat shouted from the doorway, “Cobblepot sends his regards! This is what happens when you try to steal business from the Iceberg Lounge!”

Gunfire, curses, and the laughter of madmen mingled together. The hazy atmosphere of the rainy night was instantly torn apart by that cacophony of violence.

Crouched in a corner, Ma Zhaodi watched as bullets battered the wooden tabletop, revealing the solid bulletproof steel plate hidden within. With a sigh of relief, he took a Pocky stick from the box and tucked it between his lips.

Damn it. No wonder all the tables in this restaurant were so ridiculously heavy that several people had to lift them together. So they had been preparing for this sort of thing all along...

Ever since arriving in Gotham, he had not enjoyed a single peaceful day. It was either a robbery or a shooting; at best, it was merely a burglary. The most tranquil day he had experienced was the one when he performed an exorcism on a possessed car bearing nine spirit rings.

“What a godforsaken city. Anyone who lives here is truly blessed. They get a lifetime of excitement for free.”

The restaurant where he worked was no ordinary establishment, either. It was always receiving outrageous customers. Last time, it had been Two-Face, Harvey Dent. This time, it was Cobblepot’s thugs.

Like Mr. Freeze, Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot was far less widely known by his long birth name than by his identity as the supervillain called the Penguin.

The Cobblepot family had been one of Gotham’s four founding dynasties, and when Oswald was young, the family had not yet completely fallen into decline. His father still possessed a considerable fortune. But Oswald himself was short and obese, with a long, hooked nose, and he was ostracized and envied by his classmates because of his appearance.

His father later died of pneumonia after being caught in the rain. His mother descended almost entirely into madness, and the Cobblepot family collapsed. Through self-education, Oswald transformed himself from the impoverished heir of a fallen dynasty into an intellectual supervillain, eventually becoming one of Gotham City’s most notorious underworld tycoons.

He also suffered from pathological insecurity and paranoia. Affected sophistication, explosive anger, and constant indignation had always been his trademark.

The Iceberg Lounge was one of his enterprises. On the surface, it was a popular and perfectly legitimate restaurant. In reality, it handled underground money laundering and other illegal financial operations, as well as the countless affairs between Cobblepot and the city’s various criminal organizations.

Clearly, when his men spoke of “stealing business from the Iceberg Lounge,” they were probably not talking about restaurant customers.

Under normal circumstances, the Penguin would never have dared to come charging through the front door and provoke them directly. But Batman’s recent assault on the Falcone family had been devastating. Taking advantage of the situation, Wayne Enterprises had seized and purged a great deal of the gray-market business previously controlled by the Falcones. In retaliation, they had begun squeezing Cobblepot and taking over his own illicit operations.

The Falcones’ gangs had pulled the same trick against him plenty of times before.

Clearly, the Penguin of the past would have swallowed the insult. But now, he had grown rather impatient with the Falcone gang, whose authority was no longer what it once had been.

Amid the storm of gunfire, Ma Zhaodi sighed. He bit into the Pocky stick between his teeth and checked the cross pendant beneath his clothes. Its durability was still at nine uses, which meant he had been fortunate enough to avoid any genuine danger to his life.

He gazed through the window at the fine drizzle and found himself momentarily distracted. Gotham at night, seen through the rain, possessed a distinctly cyberpunk, hallucinatory beauty. There was also a bone-deep chill woven through it, but he personally enjoyed sitting indoors and watching such beautiful rain.

At that moment, he desperately wanted to go home, buy himself a fat man’s comfort meal, and watch television against that backdrop. In reality, however, he could not even be sure he would make it home from the restaurant at the end of his shift.

Ah, that was the life of a wage worker. There was never much room for choice.

The manager spotted Ma Zhaodi crouching behind the table and assumed fear had reduced him to a stupor. He shouted in his direction, “Ma Zhaodi! Don’t just sit there like an idiot! Shoot!”

“I don’t know how!”

Ma Zhaodi did not know whether it was his imagination, but the manager seemed to freeze for a moment when he heard those words.

“What kind of nonsense are you talking about?” The manager’s eyes widened. “This is Gotham!”

“Can’t Gotham have a few people who don’t know how to shoot?” Ma Zhaodi protested. “The Waynes didn’t even carry guns when they went out that night!”

“You ought to move to Star City while you still can!” the manager shouted through clenched teeth. “Take off the safety! Pull the trigger!”

Following his instructions, Ma Zhaodi fumbled frantically with the gun for quite some time before finally figuring out how to operate his Beretta. The manager watched as he aimed hesitantly for a long while, only to lower the weapon again.

“I might hit something in the restaurant.”

“Don’t worry about that!” The manager had already been frantic with impatience. Seeing the man lower his gun once more sent his blood pressure soaring. He roared, “Those tables and chairs are meant to be shot up in moments like this! Just fire!”

“You said it!”

Ma Zhaodi immediately aimed across the room and pulled the trigger.

The shot struck the chandelier overhead.

“Crash!”

A chain of splintering sounds rang out. The enormous crystal chandelier fell to the floor, bursting apart like a splash of water into countless tiny gemstones that glittered with every color of the rainbow.

“No—!”

It was admittedly rude to say so, but the manager’s voice sounded uncannily like that of an old acquaintance from Ma Zhaodi’s memories.

He could almost hear a familiar melody beside his ear.

“Snowflakes drifting, northern winds sighing...”

“Ma Zhaodi!”

The manager’s furious roar suddenly rang out, dragging him back from his distracted reverie.

“Do you have any idea how much that chandelier cost—”

“I was aiming at the table!”

“You were aiming—”

The manager had not been especially angry before, but upon hearing such an absurd explanation from Ma Zhaodi, he felt another agonizing stab in his chest.

The room had never been particularly well lit to begin with. Now that the great chandelier was gone, it grew even darker. Even the hazy lights outside and the thin moonlight filtering through the clouds could barely illuminate this corner.

In the darkness, Cobblepot’s men heard that the manager had gone down and exchanged uncertain glances.

“Did their leader just fall?”

“Looks like it. So... are we still fighting?”