Is Bookworm’s Crime League

Batgirl had tested the strength of the wires binding her body to the spine of the closing book earlier and found no fault with it. Her breath was coming more rapidly as pressure mounted on her hips. "Can't panic," she almost literally gasped. She closed her mouth and exhaled through her nose. Slowly she inhaled and began to concentrate on regulating her breathing.

Once she had mastered the urge to panic, she began to reconsider her situation. Her hips were already being squeezed and the pressure was becoming noticeable on her shoulders as well. She began to bend the joints in her legs experimentally and was surprised when she realized some slack had developed in the bindings. "The book covers pressing against the wire and my body will reshape the bindings if I let them," Batgirl said aloud. “I may have one slim chance. If those vile crooks had used rope . . . .”

She stretched and dipped her ankles toward the spine of the book. She held the position and felt the book clamp onto her wire-bound extremities. “Perfect,” Batgirl said. “Now, if I can just roll over.” This process was painfully slow. Through a combination of patience, wiggling and brute force exerted with single-minded determination, she was able to rotate her entire body one hundred, eighty degrees and reach her arms down toward the spine of the book.

Positioned thusly, Batgirl bent her ankles experimentally and felt the slack she hoped would enable her eventual escape. ‘Now, it's a matter of letting the trap do the work and remaining perfectly still.’ She was tired and breathing heavily again, but painfully aware of the importance of the waiting. She would need to recover her strength.

It seemed an eternity had passed when Batgirl felt the pressure of the closing pages against her sides and realized it was time to see if her plan had worked. She held her breath and bent her arms, pulling them upward toward her head. Joyfully she felt her hands move a full inch. “Yes!” she shouted expelling her breath. It wasn't much, but it was enough.

The movement of her arms toward her head spread her wrists apart, enabling Batgirl to pull her hands free of their fiendish bindings. The next step was to bend her legs, spreading her thighs and calves to loosen the wires on her ankles and knees. As she exerted herself, she reached for her utility belt and the wire cutters it contained.

In order to free herself before the book closed, she would need to take advantage of the slack her exertions were freeing around her shoulders, hips and legs. She still had a long way to go, but her body was writhing fiercely and her hands were free.

The closing book pushed her body upward as she sweated and snipped her way free of the last few wire bindings. By the time she was finally free, she was breathing heavily and seated atop the closed tome.

“That was close,” she said once her breathing had regularized and she had slid gracefully to the floor. ‘Now, to escape from this room and do the search I’d planned from the beginning.’

She put her wire cutters away and retrieved a tiny set of lock picks, which made short work of the reading room locks. Before leaving, Batgirl took her time going over the contents of the room without finding any new evidence the police could use against Bookworm.

“I’ll start from the top,” Batgirl decided. “This time they won’t be expecting me.” With that happy pronouncement, the Dark Angel of Gotham slipped quietly into the deserted hall.

Batgirl used her lock picks to search the headquarters of the Red Headed League from the top down. She was surprised to find the headquarters utterly deserted. This fact, however, gave her the time she needed to go over the first item of interest she encountered: the League’s computer.

She turned it on and began to systematically go through the files on the hard drive. She made copies of the employee roster and a few other documents that might be of interest to the police. She copied the disk and taped it to the bottom of the keyboard so it could easily be found when police searched the office. “I still don’t know what you’re up to, Bookworm. But you won’t get away with destroying computer records to cover your tracks,” Batgirl said. She shut the system down and continued searching until she reached the stairs leading to the basement.

There she found the second item of interest, a printing press with more boxes of Red Headed League business cards. Her tiny Batlight played over the controls and stopped at a smudge. Batgirl bent to examine it more closely. “Dirt,” she whispered. “Now, where would that have come from?” She began searching the room for the answer when a noise heralded visitors.

At the foot of the stairs she froze. “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go,” Bookworm chortled as he steered his black-robed henchwoman down the stairs with the arm encircling her waist. His hat, gloves, coat and tie were conspicuously missing and his shirt hung outside his pants.

Batgirl backed into the shadows as they passed and watched as Bookworm touched the side of an overhead shelf.

“Through the looking glass and on to Wonderland?” Irene asked, as a panel slid aside to admit the pair into yawning darkness.

“Precisely, my dear,” Bookworm replied, releasing her to light a lantern which silhouetted them briefly as they stepped through the panel. “And now to see how close to the thrilling climax of this crime the boys have gotten us.”

Batgirl watched the light fade as the villains moved off. Bookworm returned his arm to his companion’s waist, thus preventing him from closing the panel behind them. Batgirl waited a moment longer and silently stepped forward and into what she guessed would be the tunnel the crooks had mentioned before they left her to die.

“Of course,” Batgirl said softly. “The Red Headed League was a Sherlock Holmes story where the great detective discovered the League was a front for a robbery that involved tunneling to the loot. That explains the dirt on the business card.” Her theory had to be right, even though neither Bookworm nor his men had red hair. Now it was time to do something about it. She slipped through the panel and silently followed the villains. As she proceeded, Batgirl noted bags of dirt lining the walls and thick wooden beams supporting the ceiling of the tunnel at regular intervals.

“They had better be ready for us,” Irene was saying when Batgirl caught up. “I was enjoying our time away from work.”

“’Work is play for mortal stakes’ Frost tells us,” Bookworm said.

“It seems our work is almost done,” Irene observed as they come upon Doyle and Arthur sweating profusely and covered with dirt. Their breath rasped as they leaned against a brick wall their efforts had excavated. “This gives us something else to celebrate.”

“Indeed, the death of Batgirl earlier tonight and moments ago the boys moved us to within inches of a fortune. As Lewis Carroll would say, ‘Oh frabjous day!’”

“Do we get the stuff now?” Irene asked, indicating a pair of sledge hammers lying in the dirt beside the shovels the men had dropped.

“Not yet. The boys need to rest and I want to savor our victory.”

“You’re serious?" she asked incredulously. "You won’t be opening the League today. Our people would be hard at work researching the Pharaohs if you were. What are you thinking, Bookworm?"

“‘In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree’ Coleridge relates,” Bookworm said, drawing Irene closer to him.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said with mock surprise as he steered her around and began to move back down the tunnel.

The men were still breathing heavily as they passed Batgirl and the others were too involved in each other. She was able to emerge from the shadow of a tunnel support and follow them back to the entrance. She had them. She would take out Bookworm and Irene in the basement and mop up the Baker Street Boys afterwards.

She quickened her pace before the villains reached the end of the tunnel, but was still a ways behind as Bookworm paused to extinguish the lantern. She had caught up and was just about to leap into action, when Bookworm touched the side of the shelf causing the panel to close abruptly in her face.

Batgirl’s tiny Batlight played quickly over the back of the panel, looking for the means to open it from inside. Not finding it, she slowed her search and went over the panel meticulously. Still finding nothing, she took a deep breath and resigned herself to the fact the panel could only be operated from the other side.

“End of the line,” Batgirl said. She paced the length of the tunnel twice before taking a cell phone from her hip and calling her father at home to cancel the lunch she had planned with him and the library to tell her assistant, Myrtle, she would not be in.

Next, she called stately Wayne Manor.

“Alfred, this is Batgirl. I need you to find out something for me.” She spoke for several more minutes and listened while the faithful butler repeated her instructions back. “Thank you,” she concluded.

“I will endeavor to discover the answer, Miss,” he said pausing, “Batgirl.”

She made herself as comfortable as she could for the wait. The ring of her phone told her she had fallen asleep.

“Hello,” she said.

“Batgirl?” Alfred’s cultured voice asked.

“Yes, Alfred.”

“I apologize for making you wait so long for your answers. Masters Wayne and Grayson returned from their vacation unexpectedly. Nevertheless, I believe I’ve learned what you wanted to know.”

As Alfred related the results of the research he had done in the Batcave, he wondered if Batman and Robin would be able to help and if there were a way he could inquire without giving them away.

“Thank you again, Alfred.”

“You’re very welcome, Batgirl. It’s always a pleasure to help you directly. It’s a good feeling to do more for Gotham City’s crime fighters than merely keeping our little secret.”

“I understand, Alfred. And I’ll keep that in mind. Goodbye.”

As he hung up, Alfred wondered if he would ever learn the secret identities of Batwoman and Flamebird. He straightened and turned toward the voice of Mrs. Harriet Cooper calling from outside Bruce Wayne’s study. He permitted himself an elegant shrug as he prepared to make his appearance.

Back in the tunnel, Batgirl stretched, preparing herself for the combat to come. She took a position in the shadow of a tunnel support, near the wall Bookworm’s Baker Street Boys would break through to steal the prize she had identified with Alfred’s help. Now, she had to contact the police and wait.

Later, the panel at the other end of the tunnel opened. Batgirl pressed herself against the wall behind her, as a trio of villains, bathed eerily in lantern light, moved toward her.

They passed without noticing the concealed crimefightress. The two henchmen picked up their sledge hammers. “Time and tides wait for no man, men. Get cracking,” Bookworm ordered as he held the lantern up for his minions.

The men beat the wall savagely, creating a web of cracked brick. “Wait,” Bookworm ordered. He pulled a crowbar from beneath his coat and inserted it in the topmost horizontal crack. “Proceed.”

“Boss, why don’t we just knock the wall in?” Arthur asked.

“Behind that wall are a number of fine engravings with poems and etchings on them. A group of private collectors I know will pay fortunes for them. If part of this wall were to fall on one of the engravings, a priceless piece of art and literature would literally shatter to dust.”

“We don’t want that,” Doyle explained.

Bookworm nodded patiently. He cleared his throat as his men began to pull the parts of the shattered wall toward them and toss the wreckage to the sides of the tunnel.

Behind them, Batgirl also nodded. She had been right.

“Through and through his vorpal blade went snick a snack,” Bookworm said. He followed his men into the vault beyond the wall and motioned for them to begin gathering the engravings.

Batgirl moved forward, stepping into the vault after them. She spread her legs to shoulder width and put her hands on her hips, waiting for the villains to begin their escape and notice her.

“Bookworm to Irene,” the villain said into his radio glasses. “We have the goods. Repeat. We have the goods.” He turned to lead his minions from the vault. Then he stopped.

He stared wide-eyed, opening his mouth and closing it again a moment later. He raised a trembling finger to point at the Petite Paragon posed before him. “Is this a Batgirl I see before me?”

“You’re corrupting Shakespeare, Bookworm,” Batgirl informed him, referring to the line from Macbeth.

“I ask because I’m concerned you are an apparition, brought about by an undigested splotch of mustard or something!”

“Do I look like Jacob Marley to you?” She was matching him at every turn, responding to his reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

“No,” Bookworm admitted. “But I see the time has come to talk of many things."

“You don’t look like a walrus to me either. And before I let you go, the sea will be boiling hot and pigs will have wings. Unlike Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter, you weren’t able to kill me after you talked me into your trap. I think it’s time you gave up. The police are waiting outside this vault and the Red Headed League headquarters is also surrounded. There is nowhere to run, Bookworm.”

“I have not yet begun to fight,” Bookworm said. “Boys!”

Before Batgirl had a chance to comment on Bookworm’s quote of Oliver Hazard Perry, Arthur and Doyle rushed her.

Batgirl met her opponents with a few of her ballet high kicks and spun out of range of their counterattack. The battle was joined.

Bookworm, meanwhile, moved to gather his treasure. He was just setting the last engraving in a bag when he spotted Irene emerging from the tunnel. He moved toward her as she watched the battle raging on the other side of the vault.

“Did you get everything?” Irene asked as she shifted her gaze from the battle to her boss.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

“What about the boys?”

“Forget them. From now on, babe, it’s you and me.”

“You mean it? You want to--“

“Escape. Hurry.” As he spoke he led the way to the tunnel entrance.

She followed. “Do you want me to engage the contingency?” she asked as they reached the panel at the other end.

A sly smile spread across his face as he considered her suggestion. “Yes,” Bookworm said, waiting for her in the basement. A moment later, she joined him and he put an arm around her as they mounted the stairs.

Back in the vault, Batgirl’s fist sent Arthur’s head banging into a wall, where he slid to the floor, defeated. Doyle swung the broken handle of his sledge hammer at Batgirl’s head and felt the impact of her foot against his ribs. He doubled over and felt himself propelled rapidly into his partner’s prone form. His head collided violently with a wall and his grip slackened on the weapon. As he slipped from consciousness, he was aware of a large number of men rushing into the room.

“Where is The Bookworm?” Chief O’Hara demanded.

Batgirl looked around and did not spot him. “Only one place he could have gone. I’ll be right back, Chief.” She turned to the tunnel and began to sprint in pursuit.

She was twenty feet down the tunnel when she spotted something that made her eyes enlarge and her body spin around, her legs propelling her at top speed back in the direction of the vault. A tiny flame was burning rapidly along a short fuse! She leaped through the opening Bookworm’s men had made as the fuse finished burning.

“EVERYONE DOWN!” she shouted seconds before the blast propelled her across the vault into a cinder block wall.

Her arms were spread to absorb most of the shock of impact, but she slid to the floor anyway and remained still for a moment, recovering her wits.

“Are you all right, Batgirl?” Chief O’Hara asked.

“I will be in a moment, Chief. Have your men move in on the Red Headed League headquarters and nab Bookworm.”

O’Hara turned to follow Batgirl’s instructions and supervise the apprehension of Bookworm’s Baker Street Boys. When he returned to consult Batgirl, she was gone.

“And the headquarters of super-criminal the Bookworm was deserted. Both Batgirl and the police are baffled,” the news report concluded the next morning as Barbara Gordon stepped from the shower.

“That’s impossible,” she said aloud. “The police surrounded the building and that was the only place the tunnel went. They fled down the tunnel and didn’t go outside once the police surrounded the area moments later. It’s possible they slipped out ahead of the police, but when they searched, they saw no evidence of a hasty getaway. And they didn’t find any crooks either.”

Barbara’s mind was light years ahead of her words, but she spoke aloud to give her thoughts a chance to coalesce. Suddenly she snapped her fingers.

“Wait a minute. That’s the same thing that happened when I searched that hideout. Odds are they didn’t slip out ahead of the cops.” She reached for the phone. “Commissioner, this is Batgirl. You must search Bookworm’s Red Headed League headquarters again.”

“Batgirl, we’ve gone over every inch of the place and come up with nothing. What makes you think a second search will help?”

”Well,” Barbara said, “Bookworm based his latest crime on a Sherlock Holmes story. This fact got me thinking about the great detective’s methods.”

“You think we missed an obscure clue that will magically drop the crooks into our laps?”

“No. But Holmes said that once you eliminated every possibility, whatever remained, however improbable, must be the truth. We know Bookworm went to that hideout, but that the police did not catch him there. They arrived moments after I escaped from the tunnel and he did not race outside for the police to catch him.”

“That is all true. What does it mean?”

"Bookworm was still in his headquarters while the police searched it. He has to be there, because he never left!"

“How could he have done that?”

“By using one of the oldest cliches in gothic fiction, Commissioner. His headquarters has a secret room somewhere.”

“Brilliant. I’ll get a warrant.”

But even as the Law made its preparations, Bookworm was setting aside the text he was planning his next crime from and switching off the news of his escape. He leaned back against the rich leather of his chair and allowed himself a deep, rich laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Irene asked, emerging from the secret room. Her hips swished toward him under her robe as she approached.

“We’ve baffled the police and Batgirl, according to the news,” he said.

“I always said you were brilliant. We could celebrate.” As Irene spoke, she leaned forward.

“Again?”

“Why not?” Her voice dripped with mock innocence.

“I’m truly sorry, my dear. But my super-criminal intuition tells me it’s time we were going. So, you get ready to travel, while I gather the goodies.”

“I thought you said the authorities were baffled,” Irene said as she moved to the bathroom.

“That’s true. But, I don’t expect Gotham City’s bats to be baffled for long. For them, the game is afoot as long as we remain at large.”

“You’ll just have to kill them,” she said and turned on the shower.

“Another time perhaps,” Bookworm murmured, but Irene never heard him. Bookworm set his book in a briefcase with the stolen engravings and locked it. His case and another large bag went into the trunk of the car parked inside beside his trademark Bookmobile. He tossed his coat and hat carelessly into the passenger seat to complete his disguise before slipping into the driver’s seat.

“I am truly sorry, Irene. I will always treasure the memories you and I share. Making those memories was the best of times. My immediate future shall be the worst of times without you. Thus, my life has taken a Dickensian turn. But, as Sam Spade said after clearing up the affair of The Maltese Falcon and sending his companion up the river, ‘I won’t play the sap for you.’” As Bookworm concluded his quiet aside, he bent his head and turned the key.

Irene did not hear the engine as Bookworm pulled away. The sirens of the approaching officers, however, were quite clear.

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