Days as a Spiritual Mentor in American Comics Chapter 6249: Chicago Memories (18)

People call Chicago the City of Crime, and even Bruce feels it’s a bit unfair that Gotham gets put in the same league. When has Gotham ever had such a high crime rate? A few Brotherhood deaths every year are one thing, but in just this one week here, dozens of people have died. If this were happening in Gotham, he’d have to become Batman and start throwing heavy punches.

If someone is stirring up trouble, then whether it’s the Brotherhood or the organizers of the fishing competition, there’s no way every last one of them is a Serial Killer. It’s either for profit or for desire—that proves the order here is already on the verge of collapse. This city may lose its glory very soon.

Predictably, they were all taken down to the police station. Bruce had been a little worried about Stark, because after all he’d sold a lot of fish finders and helped people fix their engines; it would be easy to get dragged into this. But the police did look into it and found that nobody but the boat owners had touched the engines of the boats that had accidents. Most of those engines were bought and replaced by the owners themselves, with no connection to the organizers or the people renting the boats.

On top of that, some of the faster boats had actually been serviced by Stark. And his idea of “servicing” wasn’t just patching what was broken; he cleaned what needed cleaning, lubricated what needed lubricating. With that kind of maintenance you naturally get more speed—and that speed ended up saving a few lives.

The people present also all testified that the two of them had tried to rescue people. They not only pulled several people out of the water, they even tried to save the ones who died, they just didn’t manage it. But in truth those people were already beyond saving. The police investigation found that the inflatable life vests were far too fragile. If you jumped into the water on purpose, you might be fine, but if the boat capsizes and you’re slammed into the water, the vest either gets smashed open or torn, and ends up being basically useless.

In fact, even with a life vest on, being pinned under a boat is very dangerous. The buoyancy can actually keep you pressed up against the hull, making it hard to swim free. And really, unless you’re a champion diver, very few people can accidentally fall in, get trapped underwater, and still stay calm and rational enough to hold a good lungful of air and swim their way out. Most drowning victims aren’t people who can’t swim; they’re people who only know how to swim in a pool. Out in the wild, natural water is too complex—being able to swim doesn’t automatically help you.

The motor on the out-of-control boat was also inspected. The police determined that it was most likely an operational error—someone accidentally started it, and then for some reason wasn’t able to shut it off. The engine was relatively new and had quite a bit of horsepower, which is why it managed to slam into and capsize so many boats in one go.

In the end, the incident was officially classified as an accident. They already had one Carnage case on their hands, and that alone was enough to have them tearing their hair out. A group of people organize a fishing competition, a few fall into the water and drown—there’s just no way that compares to a Carnage case. Even the reporters weren’t that interested, so the case was wrapped up in a hurry.

Bruce, however, didn’t believe for a second that this was a simple accident. Someone had definitely tampered with a key component; they’d just done it very carefully, and it wasn’t the kind of trick that guarantees a hit. It still depended on some luck, and only because the luck lined up did it trigger this whole chain reaction and take out the target.

And he was convinced Stark knew something. After going home to change clothes, he found a fried chicken joint run by a Black man. Over dinner, Bruce couldn’t hold back and asked, “You know what happened, don’t you?”

“More or less.” Stark didn’t hide it. “Remember Jennifer?”

Bruce froze for a second, then recalled the blonde girl they’d met that day in the Chinese restaurant. Stark said, “She contacted me after that night. We went out and got a room, and she told me some things about the Brotherhood.”

Bruce’s eyes opened a little wider. “You two had just met and you already went out to…”

“That’s not the point.” Stark waved his hand. “Do you really think those people who ‘died’ in the Brotherhood are actually dead?”

Bruce narrowed his eyes slightly. Stark went on, “The people running the Brotherhood might well have their own desires, but without enough profit, no way so many people would keep helping them clean up messes over and over.”

“You mean…”

“You grew up in a relatively sheltered environment.” Stark’s expression turned more serious. “What I mean is, Gotham has protected you to a certain extent. Nobody wants to throw a party in a swamp, so you might not know this: every year, the Federation has a huge number of missing persons. The Human race gets trafficked like goods, but some buyers don’t want those filthy hobos or junkies whose bodies have long since been hollowed out. They want people who are healthy, beautiful, pure and spotless. Universities are the best warehouses for that kind of merchandise.”

Bruce felt a wave of nausea. He clamped a hand over his mouth, turned his face aside, and took a deep breath. Gotham is not a pleasure city; quite the opposite of the stereotype, most people here are evil in a very pure sense. They commit crimes precisely for their own doctrines and ideals, not for filthy Beastly lust.

Even the Court of Owls, the group that most resembles a normal evil organization, wants to secretly control the government and thereby rule the world. They’re not committing crimes just to throw some obscene party. And then there are the Madmen in Arkham Asylum, who go without saying.

But out in this world, most evil people have very simple motives for their crimes: they want to vent their desires without restraint. The idealistic criminal is mostly a fictional construct. In the real world, you don’t have that many people trying to prove they’re human; you’ve got plenty trying to prove they’re animals.

So in a certain sense, the criminal landscape Batman faces is relatively straightforward. Everyone is beating each other bloody just to prove they’re right. Once you leave Gotham, though, the rain outside only gets heavier—and the people out there don’t even bother wearing pants.

“I didn’t learn about all this only after I got here,” Stark said. “I like yacht parties, I like cover girls. Pretty much every woman you know from the superhero organization has had a brief fling with me. They all say I’m debauched, call me a playboy. But what I can tell you is, I rely on talent, not power, because the people who really rely on power don’t play it this way.”

Bruce could understand what he was hinting at, which only made him feel more nauseous. He slowly pulled off the glove on the hand holding the fried chicken, wiped his mouth hard with a napkin, then took a swig of soda.

He studied Stark again. To be fair, Stark was handsome too, the classic American pretty boy, with a pair of blue eyes that practically spoke. Even on looks alone, plenty of people would want to spend a romantic night with him, not to mention he was loaded, generous with his money, and even a righteous, kind superhero. He had more than enough capital to drift from one affair to another.

So Bruce had no trouble believing Stark didn’t need to force anyone in his private love life. But precisely because Stark was this exceptional, more people wanted leverage on him.

Now Bruce understood why Stark kept stressing that the Brotherhood wanted to manufacture shared leverage on everyone. You can be powerful and evil, or weak but kind. But once you’re powerful and kind, the evil ones, if they want to keep doing evil, have no choice but to go against you. If they can’t beat you head‑on, then they have to find ways to drag you down into the mud.

People have desires; no one is exempt. These evil bastards will cling to Stark like a bone tumor, watching his every move, scheming to exploit loopholes, looking for weaknesses, launching sugar‑coated shells, using every trick they can think of to drag him off the pedestal, ideally onto their side, so they can keep venting their desires with no restraints.

All these years, Stark must have received countless invitations and faced an endless stream of threats and bribes, cons and traps. You could even say the entire upper class has thrown itself into tricking him onto their pirate ship. He’s seen way too much of this kind of thing, so from the very beginning he knew the Brotherhood was anything but simple.

Put plainly, the Brotherhood is the starting point of a criminal pipeline. They might persecute those students for their own desires, but more importantly, as a campus organization inside a university, they have more chances to win students’ trust, then go hunting for prey, scouting targets for whoever’s above them in the chain.

This brings them unimaginable profits, because there are bosses above their bosses, and the end of this criminal line is the people at the tip of the Pyramid. With those people underwriting them, the Brotherhood can have students die every year and never be held accountable, because this is exactly the outcome those people want to see and will naturally go all‑out to protect.

Bruce had had a vague sense of this, because he found the Brotherhood’s arrogance abnormal, and the fact that so many people died with absolutely nothing happening was way too absurd. Now, unsurprisingly, only massive can make crime invisible.

Then he started to wonder whether the disbanding of Gotham University’s Brotherhood back then, supposedly because of a terror attack, had anything to do with this kind of thing. After all, that era wasn’t quite the Madman’s stage yet, so wanting to pull something like that would have been normal for some people.

But Bruce thought it over again: pulling this off in Gotham would be difficult. They would’ve had to face the Godfather at his peak, the Court of Owls exerting pressure from the shadows, a chaotic free‑for‑all of countless Mob outfits and factions, and his parents, Thomas and Martha. Back then those two were the stabilizing anchors of Gotham; if you weren’t able to stir storms in Gotham City, you wouldn’t attract that many enemies and end up being taken out.

“If they want to realize their filthy, evil plan, there’s a crucial link: local forces,” Stark continued. “No matter how capable those students are, there are things they can’t do. They have to have locals take over.”

Bruce’s expression grew darker. He heard Stark go on: “Jennifer is a native Chicagoan, born and raised, and her family has a bit of money. Her older brother was killed because he witnessed certain criminal dealings, so she knows more than most. That’s why she kept warning you over and over not to go.”

Bruce pondered this. He knew it really wasn’t hard to pull off. Low‑level tricks like forging Death records didn’t even need to be mentioned. You just had to find a roughly similar corpse and toss it into the water; it wouldn’t take long for it to swell and distort, making it hard for the family to recognize. And the coroner’s report can be faked. Whether it’s really that person or not is beyond an ordinary person’s ability to judge; all they can do is wait for the official conclusion.

Which means that to do this, they’d have to kill twice as many people, because they’d need a scapegoat corpse… At that thought, Bruce suddenly remembered the outfit Dali had given him.

He’d originally thought it was meant to attract Shiller, but now it seemed more likely they’d chosen him as the sacrifice and also prepared an identical outfit to put on the scapegoat. Then they could claim he’d died, hand over the scapegoat’s body, and since the corpse might already be beyond recognition, people would have to identify it by the clothes.

That outfit was so hideously conspicuous that if he wore it to the party, he’d definitely be noticed. Then, when it came time to identify the body, a lot of people would say it was him. With the police and the coroner forging everything, he’d be turned into a Dead Man, and then sold off by Brian and the others.

No wonder they wouldn’t let him drink or play games—it was to preserve the “goods” in pristine condition. Bruce gave a cold smile. Stark paused for a moment and then said, “Don’t smile like that. You look way too much like the Joker.”

“Do I?” Bruce’s smile grew even brighter. “Perfect.”