Heroes and villains can come from everywhere. Norman Pinkus, the unsung savior of the Gotham Globe , is the man who no one notices. But he harbors a secret, he may just be the smartest man in Gotham.
Monday morning in Gotham City, and all the sounds of late spring were competing to be heard. Garbage trucks. Honking horns. The occasional battle-weary bird. And the cracking voice of a child engaged in gainful employment. “Extra, extra!”
Fresh off the bus into downtown, Norman Pinkus heard the newsboy for the Gotham Globe call out the headline. “Batman Busts Out Boys in Blue! Extra, extra!”
Norman adjusted his glasses and stepped toward him. He rarely spoke to anyone on the street, but the newsie was just a kid, and they were on the same team. “Um—it’s not an extra,” he said.
The boy turned toward him. “What?”
“That’s not an extra edition,” Norman said, struggling to speak up loud enough to be heard. “We always do that one.”
“What are you babbling about?”
Norman tentatively took one of the newspapers and showed the kid. “See the stars under the flag?”
“There ain’t no flag!”
“The nameplate. The Brits call it the masthead,” he said. He found more of his voice as he explained. “See the little stars under the ‘e’ in the word ‘Globe’? There’s five.”
“So?”
“So this is the second run of the early city edition. Some papers add stars as they go back to press. We start with six and count down, masking the stars on the negative with tape. That’s so we don’t have to—”
“Listen, Four-Eyes, are you gonna buy a paper or not?”
“Umm . . . no.”
“Then scram!” The kid snatched the paper from Norman’s newly quaking hands and resumed shouting. “Extra, extra!”
Norman backed off, having been intimidated again by an eleven- year-old. He never fared well in such situations, when he could get his words out at all. But at least the kid knew something now.
And the next thing that happened caused him to forget his dis- comfort altogether. “Don’t miss today’s Riddle Me This!” the kid shouted. “Super jackpot’s up to nine thousand dollars! Twenty-four second prizes today, five hundred dollars each!”
“I’ll take one!” declared a man in a fedora.
“So will I,” announced a woman just off another bus. “Did you say nine thousand ?”
“Gimme three copies,” another man said.
“You can only send in one,” the woman replied.
“I make a lot of mistakes!”
Norman stared, dazzled, as the commuters snapped up the kid’s copies. He saw the phenomenon again when he walked up to the corner newsstand: people jockeying to get copies of the Globe —while the other papers just sat there. People could read about Batman or work a crossword puzzle anywhere. But the Globe had something other papers didn’t—or rather, someone .
I’m a hit!
Riddle Me This was simple enough in concept: a block of four riddles yielded four answers, which then became multiple-choice answers for a fifth question. The correct response to that chained together with the solution to three more riddle blocks to form a final clue. The answer to that was the day’s “jackpot word.”
Two things had made it a phenomenon. First, Norman’s riddles were fun on their own, sometimes ribbing local or national fads and figures—and some were easy enough to give people a chance. You only had to turn on the news to know “I’m found on a fender, or fighting a defender” referred to “Dent.”
And as the kid had suggested, people could win money by clipping and mailing in their finished puzzles. Entries with correct answers were entered in different drawings—the value and number of which were tied to single-copy and subscription sales. With the third-place prizes, there’d be a hundred winners today, better odds than any lottery—and since Gotham City didn’t have one of those, this game of skill represented the only legal gambling outlet most people had.
Batman and Edward Nygma were the two most popular people in the city that spring. All because Norman had finally gotten enough nerve to submit his feature, in addition to doing his usual job at the—
Oh, no, Norman thought as a clock tower bell rang the hour. My job!
A frantic run brought him to the Gotham Globe, a towering edifice on Printers Row. He reached the revolving door and, in his haste, pushed at the wrong side. The door pushed back, smacking him backward and off balance. He got caught in a stream of people entering and exiting the building; one revolution deposited him back on the street before he pushed through again.
He punched the clock and rushed into the newsroom. Norman had loved newspapers ever since those halcyon days bringing them into the main library; working for one had been a dream. And work he did—the instant the reporters laid eyes on him.
A sports reporter was first. “Dinkus, the coffee maker’s on the fritz.”
“Yes, sir.”
The market reporter tugged at his shirt. “More paper, Pink.”
“Will do.”
“I need everything we’ve got on the fire commissioner in Central City,” the wire editor said. “The one they sacked.”
Norman pretended to write it down. “Fire, Central, sacked. Coming up.”
A columnist called out. “How old was Mussolini when he died?”
Sixty-one, he thought. “I’ll get that for you.”
The style columnist shoved a paper into his hand. “Normie, find out why proofreading keeps changing ‘manikin’ to ‘mannequin.’ ”
They’re two different things. “I’ll ask,” Norman said.
Crossing the room just once resulted in him having an armload of material to go to typesetting—and a raft of research questions that he already knew the answers to. He’d joined the Globe as a copy boy right out of high school; the job was on the way out at a lot of newspapers. He’d taken on new responsibilities—yet somehow managed to keep the old ones. That was partly his own fault. When he answered research questions too fast, his editor would just give him more drudge work to do.
But sometimes he couldn’t help himself. He passed the desk of Sarah, the pretty new international columnist, when she asked her colleague a question: “What’s the capital of Upper Volta?”
“Ouagadougou,” Norman piped in, his voice barely audible.
“Wagga do who?”
“Ouagadougou. O-U-A—” Flustered in her presence and nearly dropping his files, he leaned over and scribbled it for her. “And it’s Burkina Faso now.”
“What is?”
He raised his voice a bit too loud. “Upper Volta!”
“Pinkus!” came a yell from the periphery of the bullpen. Norman knew who it was immediately: Hubert Coggins, the sixtyish editor, standing just like a football coach trying to get a player off the field. Norman quickly dropped the pencil and hurried over to see his boss.
Some newspaper editors were transformative historical figures, like Turner Catledge. Hubert Coggins always looked like he was ready to kick a cat off a ledge. “On time, all the time, or I’ll see you doing time!” was his mantra. Exactly how he intended to imprison tardy journalists was neither here nor there. The starriest of star reporters disappointed Coggins at their peril.
And people in Norman’s station?
“You were four minutes late, Pinkus.” He crossed his arms as Norman reached him. “What was it? Out all night dancing?”
“Actually, I’ve never—”
“There’s a news flash.” Coggins had no compunction about berating him in front of the newsroom. “I need Thursday’s Riddle Mine .”
“Uh—that’s Riddle Me This.”
“Stupid name. Makes no sense.”
“It’s Dryden. From the Third Satire of Juvenal, 1693.”
“Juvenile is right. And we’re talking about Thursday!”
Norman shuffled uncomfortably. “Thursday’s is still at home, but I have Wednesday’s. Here!” He offered his folder.
“For the millionth time, features needs it three days out so we can send it through proofreading.”
“But Mister Coggins, there are never any errors. There’s no need to check.”
“There is a need, Mister Pinkus, because we’re a newspaper. We don’t run a bowling score without checking it six ways to Sunday. And legal’s got to make sure these secret messages of yours aren’t libeling anyone.”
“Oh, I would never do that!”
“How would I know? I don’t work puzzles, Pinkus. I have a job. And I’m not going to lose it because somebody secretly inserts a line saying that their landlord gets amorous with goats!”
Norman blushed. “I remember that.”
“I sure as hell do! Columnist hid a whole screed using the first and last letters of every line. Into a what-do-you-call-it—”
“An acrostic,” Norman said, his mouth moving faster than his common sense. “Actually, a double acrostic.”
“Pinkus—”
“I was impressed he worked all those words into a bridge column.”
“Pinkus!”
Norman lost three inches of height. “Yes, sir?”
“You’re nattering again. Those goats were nearly my ass. Three days ahead, comprende?” He snatched the folder away from Norman and opened it. His eyes scanned the puzzle inside. He read aloud, “ ‘He gives the best parties, though Elmer always uses this excuse not to go.’ ”
Coggins looked baffled. Norman figured he’d better help.
“Wayne.”
“Wayne?”
“Because of Bruce Wayne’s parties. And Elmer Fudd, you know, talks like—”
“I get it. I don’t want it, but I get it. Our readers must be crazy.” The editor snapped the folder shut. “Get to work, Fudd. And be on time coming back from lunch!”
Coggins spun and headed for the staircase going up. Norman decided he’d better bring in all the puzzles he had completed, fully polished or not. He fulfilled the remaining newsroom requests and took the stairs heading down—and down.
He felt like he was crawling when he finally got to his haunt in the morgue. Aptly named, it was where the bound back issues of the Globe and many other newspapers were stored, as well as the cabinets that held the clip files. The newspaper had an actual librarian; she was upstairs in the room with the microfilm reader. There was actual light in that space, which seemed unnecessary as she was nearly legally blind. She got that way from working in the morgue for ten years.
Norman had been doing it for twenty.
Excerpt of Batman: Revolution by John Jackson Miller. Copyright Penguin Random House.
