Wayne of Gotham

by Tracy Hickman

It was the cathedral of Patrick Wayne, Thomas thought, and he always felt like an infidel when he entered it.

  The chair swiveled around silently, its occupant deigning to acknowledge the young man’s presence at last.

  “You’re late.”

  Not late enough, Thomas thought. “Dr. Horowitz kept me longer than expected…and good afternoon to you, too, Father.”

  “Good afternoon, then,” Patrick answered with a single, humorless chortle. Patrick Wayne’s shoulders were still broad but had become somewhat bowed with time and the weight of carrying Wayne Enterprises. His hair had gone white and was thinning perceptibly at the crown. His large hands had grown somewhat gnarled with arthritis, but they still looked strong enough to tear the Gotham phone book in half twice. His tone was casual, even pleasant. “I trust you had a good time last night?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Thomas crossed the long floor over to stand in front of his father’s desk. “It was Martha Kane’s party.”

  “From what I hear, she has a lot of them,” Patrick said, and seeing his son’s look, he raised a hand. “No, I don’t mean anything by it. She’s always been a spirited girl, Thomas, you know that. Sit down. I think it’s about time we talked, you and I.”

  Thomas raised his eyebrow and then sat down on the arm of one of the leather chairs. He had learned long ago that his father had a full inch cut off the bottom of these chairs just to ensure that anyone who sat there would be slightly below his eye level. “What would you like to talk about, sir?”

  Patrick reached across the desk, pulling a large folder out of a stack and opening it in front of him. “Well, actually it’s about Martha Kane…and the company she keeps.”

  “Sir, you are way out of line.”

  “Damn it, boy, stop talking and pay attention for once,” Patrick barked, picking up the sheaf of papers in front of him. A number of black-and-white photographs spilled out from between the pages. Some of them looked as though they were not quite dry. “The Kane family are our neighbors. Hell, Roddy Kane and I have been trading golf scores for more than a decade now, but that girl just seems to attract trouble. She doesn’t take to the right people, boy. She’s brushed off every matron of Gotham society, including your mother, yet she has time to go slumming in the Bowery or that little apartment she keeps in Otisburg for who knows what purposes! And now she’s started running around with this Sinclair hood—”

  “I know all about Denholm Sinclair, sir,” Thomas countered, standing up.

  “Do you, boy?” Patrick shuffled through the papers, quickly finding the one he wanted. “Then I suppose you know that he’s working for the Rossetti mob. He’s into them for the kind of money he can’t hope to pay off.”

  “Denny and Martha are both full grown, sir,” Thomas countered. “They know what they’re doing.”

  “Oh? And I suppose that means you do, too?” Patrick shot back across the desk. “You haven’t been home more than a day, fresh plucked from almighty Harvard Medical School, and I wake up to hear that you’ve been hanging around Lewis Moxon’s little café. Damn it, boy, the man’s Julius Moxon’s kid, the biggest crime lord this city’s ever seen.”

  “So what?” Thomas shouted. “So they’re not your kind of people? They’ve got problems, sure, who doesn’t? But what’s wrong with them?”

  “They’re criminals, boy!” Patrick roared, standing up behind the desk. “What do you think? With all the knowledge they stuffed into your head up there and all your medical voodoo, you’re gonna just give them a couple of aspirin and make them all better? You can’t cure them like they’re some case of the measles. I’ve known these kind of people all my life—had to work with them, watch out for them, protect you from them—and I can tell you, boy, that they do not change! They are just out to take you down, feed on you, suck you dry, and then spit you out.”

  Thomas was staring at the photographs spilled onto the desk. Photographs of him from last night at the Koffee Klatch…of Denholm and Martha…of her passed out in the front of Thomas’s car. He reached down and touched the photograph as he spoke. “Real nice, Dad. You had me followed?”

  “Oh, wake up, boy!” Patrick grumbled. “You’re a Wayne! You have a responsibility to the business and to the name…and these people will never be worthy of you. Leopards cannot change their spots, and these parasites can’t, either. I supported you all through this medical school nonsense and you managed to get through that just fine, but you need to wake up to your responsibilities. There is an empire here you need to learn how to run. You had better get your life in order, son, stop the daydreaming, and get a vision of your future before these vermin strip you clean.”

  “You think I don’t know what I want?” Thomas said. “There’s a better way to live than this, sir, and I’m going to find it.”

  “This is life, boy,” Patrick said in a tone that defied contradiction. “There are predators and there are prey, and the sooner you learn that, the better.”

  “Sir, you just don’t—”

  “Did Dr. Horowitz talk to you about administering that endowment?” Patrick said.

  “Yes, sir,” Thomas answered, feeling the wall fall again between them.

  “Good. Go on and get out,” Patrick said, looking away as he sat back down. “I’ve got work to do. Maybe I’ll see you for breakfast.”

  The audience was over.

  “Yes, sir,” Thomas said with a sigh. “Maybe.”

  Thomas stepped out of the doors of Wayne Tower and onto Moench Row. He took in a deep breath, though he still could not quite escape the feeling of claustrophobia that had come over him in the building.

  The Buick was parked at the curb with one of the doormen standing next to it. Upon seeing Thomas, the man quickly opened the driver’s side door and came to attention. Maybe the man had been a soldier during the Korean War, maybe he was a veteran…or perhaps just as likely he had watched a lot of war movies and was pretending to be the hero of the Buick door. Was the young man a thief or a slacker or a con man? Would he pick Thomas’s pocket or die defending him? What makes a man who he is? And if there really was something wrong with how he thought, why couldn’t he be cured like anything else?

  Thomas moved around the Buick and slid into the driver’s seat. The doorman already had the motor running for him and closed the door firmly as soon as Thomas was in.

  Thomas sat considering things for a moment and then reached inside his coat pocket.

  Dr. Richter—Kane Lecture Hall / Monday, 2 p.m.

  Thomas slipped the note back into his pocket and shifted the transmission selector into drive.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  COINCIDENCE

  * * *

  Curtis Point / Gotham / 10:16 a.m. / Present Day

  A laughing couple walked past. Their eyes were bright and fixed on each other as the rhythm of their conversation continued to be their entire world. The skies were clear in their three-foot universe, with no room for the nameless figure with his shoulders hunched slightly into his light jacket and a knit cap on his head despite the unseasonably warm weather.

  They might have expanded their universe considerably had they been aware that Bruce Wayne, the most celebrated recluse in all of Gotham, was quietly and determinedly slipping by them. More airtime, bandwidth, Internet posts, chats, forums, and column inches had been written, typed, blogged, podcast, or broadcast about what the world did not know about Bruce Wayne than any other celebrity citizen of Gotham, with the exception of the Batman. The rare paparazzi would win the fame lottery and achieve their cherished goal of taking a fuzzy photograph through an extremely long lens past the barred gates or towering fences of Wayne Manor, their obscure and hastily focused images of an older man, frail with long, ragged hair sticking out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Sometimes he would be discovered packed in blankets as he sat in a Nantucket wooden lawn chair or with Alfred pushing the feeble figure about the manor’s gardens in a wheelchair. Each of these images could fetch a fine commission from the var
ious media outlets, regardless of its legitimacy, and had spawned something of an industry in false Bruce Wayne images.

  Bruce enjoyed these intricately and carefully choreographed “exposures” of his reclusive alter ego. There were considerable challenges to choreographing these paparazzi events so that the photographers set up to take these pictures never suspected they were being used. Now the image the city had of the heir to the Wayne fortune was of something like a cross between Howard Hughes and Charles Foster Kane.

  The one thing no one in the city expected was a nondescript, late middle-aged version of Bruce Wayne in a cloth jacket and a knitted cap moving with athletic ease down the cement walkway along the shoreline of Sprang River Park, his shoulders hunched slightly despite the unseasonably warm weather. Alfred had insisted that some contingency planning be in place for Bruce when he decided to go on these walkabouts. Bruce’s solution had been a miniature ELT—an emergency locator transmitter similar to those used in aircraft—that Bruce had implanted under the skin of his right ear. Bruce had engineered the device and had the implant done overseas under the guise of a hearing aide. The result was a subcutaneous transceiver that he could trigger simply by tapping the sequence behind his right ear. Always monitoring the specialized frequency whenever Bruce was walking in the city, Alfred was ready to call in the cavalry whenever necessary. He could even speak to Bruce through the device with complete privacy, his voice transmitted through bone conduction directly into the cochlea of Bruce’s inner ear and thus heard by him alone. It had never been used, but at least it made Alfred feel he had the option and stopped him from worrying about his charge when he was out.

  The Sprang River was on his left, separating the Burnley district of Uptown Gotham from the downtown districts to the south. The apartment towers overlooking the river on the north side lay across Riverside Parkway, the sounds of its afternoon traffic a muffled encroachment on the peace of the park itself. Autumn leaves from the great maple trees lay scattered across the blush of green lawns and the walkway beneath his feet. It might have been pastoral, but that was not within the sphere of Bruce’s own world.

  He had come with his own purpose, his own vision colored and narrowed by his focus. His intention had been merely to observe the house at the woman’s address, but then she had emerged alone, walking down the street of facing brownstones and continuing into the riverside parkland beyond.

  He approached Curtis Point, a small section of the park that jutted out beneath the high, double-arched span of the Schwartz Bypass bridge almost directly overhead. Curtis Point was the perfect overlook for downtown Gotham. Most of the benches had been placed facing southward toward the might and majesty of the skyscrapers across the river, and several of the city’s tourist brochures featured images of that vista taken from this vantage point.

  One bench, however, in deference to the original design of the park, faced to the west and was usually studiously shunned by its patrons from the brownstones across the parkway who brought visitors or tourists to the park for the view. It faced an aspect just beyond the point where the tidal Falstaff Branch of the Gotham River converged with the Sprang River. There, the island known as the Narrows was formed by these two tidal rivers and the greater Gotham River to the west.

  There, on the eastern point of the island, rose the dark collection of Georgian and Gothic towers known as Arkham Asylum.

  There, on the usually shunned bench, sat the lone figure of the woman.

  “We seem to always be meeting in parks,” he said to her.

  Amanda Richter did not turn to face him, but she did smile as she replied. “Of all the parks in all the towns in all the world…you walk into mine. Gerald…Grayson, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Bruce lied as he sat down on the bench with studied, casual ease. “You remembered.”

  “Surprised?” Amanda said, still facing the towers of Arkham. “I remember everything…too many things. What brings you to me, Gerald Grayson?”

  “Just chance, I—”

  “Fate,” Amanda interjected with conviction, her smile fading. “Fate brought you to me.”

  “Actually, it was more like Ms. Doppel,” Bruce said, turning toward her and lying his arm along the backrest of the metal bench. “I tried to find you at home, but instead encountered Ms. Doppel, herself on her way out to look for you. I told her I’d bring you home.”

  “Home…where is home?” Amanda said. She wore an outdated cardigan sweater, pearls, and a long skirt. Her hair was pulled back and her eyebrows thinned to narrow lines. She looked as though she had stepped out of the past. “Some people call Arkham home. For some, it’s the only home they know.”

  “Is it home for you?” Bruce asked.

  “It was home for my father,” she answered, her voice wistful and her eyes slowly shifting focus to another time. “His life was there…even when he was home. Arkham was where his heart resided, deep and locked away. There he truly lived…and there he died so completely that even his memory was buried with him. And my father was where my heart lived, and I died there, too.”

  “Your father, Ernst Richter?”

  Amanda slowly turned toward him. “What do you know of—”

  “People like the Waynes are very careful about their visitors, but they don’t often keep too close a watch on their gamewarden,” Bruce shrugged. “After you visited their grounds the other day, they did a complete dossier on you, the most curious thing about which was how thin it was compared to most.”

  “You regularly read the Wayne security reports, Mr. Grayson?” Amanda asked with narrowed eyes.

  “Only when they interest me personally,” Bruce answered. “I know your father was a research doctor at Gotham University Hospital and that he worked with Thomas Wayne—”

  “There,” Amanda said, looking back across to the Narrows. “They worked there together.”

  “In Arkham?” Bruce replied, raising an eyebrow. “No, I’m sure that Dr. Wayne never worked at Arkham.”

  “I used to sit here and watch for them,” Amanda said, a deep sadness coloring her voice. “My mother would bring me here because Papa would meet us in the afternoons. He would walk across the Murdock Bridge for lunch and we would meet him here. He would always smile when he saw me, call me Mari.”

  “Mari?” Bruce looked at her oddly.

  “Then he was gone and Mama ended up in Arkham and she died there, though not like he did. Then I followed to Arkham hoping to make it all right…and eventually it killed me, too.”

  Bruce followed her gaze. “Marion Richter died in 1997. She was a behavioral psychiatrist at Arkham at the time, having been the principle caretaker of your mother, Juliet Renoir Richter, who passed away—also in Arkham, in 1983 while suffering from a mental collapse. Amanda Richter was born in 1947…which would make you about sixty-four years old. You seem to carry your age very well.”

  “I invaded your place and now you’ve invaded mine, Mr. Grayson,” Amanda said, shaking off the dream. “I prefer to wander on my own.”

  “Perhaps we can wander for a time together,” Bruce offered.

  “One person wanders, Mr. Grayson,” Amanda replied. “Two people are always going somewhere.”

  “It seems I heard that in an old movie once,” Bruce chuckled.

  “Really?” Amanda asked. “When did it come out?”

  “Oh, I think it was 1958,” Bruce replied.

  “Ah, that explains it,” she said. “I’ll see it after it premieres. I suppose Miss Doppel sent you after me.”

  “Miss Doppel?”

  “My nurse. The woman who lives with me,” Amanda insisted. “She sent you after me, didn’t she?”

  “I was looking for you anyway.” Bruce shrugged. “So, can I see you home?”

  “Yes,” Amanda replied with a sigh, standing up. “We may as well go. Papa isn’t coming today.”

  “Maybe I can find him for you,” Bruce said as he too stood up. “It is my day off, and I’m pretty good at finding lost people.
”

  “Yes, I believe you are, Mr. Grayson,” Amanda replied, her gaze unfocused on the dark towers of Arkham across the river, her voice whispering as though she were murmuring through a dream. “I’m more lost than anyone and you managed to find me. How far did you have to come? Was it miles or years? How far do you think I’ll have to go before I can be home, too? Before I can find my way back among the living?”

  Bruce stood up, his eyes fixed on her. “Where are you, Amanda?”

  She turned suddenly toward him, her eyes bright and pleading. “I don’t want to die…I want to live! Please, I’ve got to find a way back. You’ve got to help me find my way back.”

  “Back from where?” Bruce demanded.

  “Back from this hell,” she pleaded. Her voice was frantic and rushed, her eyes darting. “Back from wherever they’ve put me. Back from the grave and the dark and the cold, Mr. Grayson. I see the shadows as they pass—young and old all at once—and I see you, too, the echo of your father as the echo of mine driving me to do things I do not want to do and say things I do not want to say. We’re only echoes, shades, shadows of our fathers, you and I, but their sins still run through our veins and now the blood is calling us back…back to a past that is better forgotten. You’ve got to stop the ghosts. They’re coming for us—both of us—in our dreams at night and they will devour everything that we are or ever will be!”

  Bruce reached his hands up, grabbing her firmly by the shoulders. “I’ll take you home, Amanda. It’s just across the parkway and—”

  “NO!” Amanda screamed, pushing away from him. A few of the people admiring the view glanced in their direction. “I don’t believe you, Thomas! You said you would help! You said you would be there! You said it was our dream, but the nightmare came and it never went away.”

  Bruce blinked. Thomas?

  “Amanda,” Bruce said in a firm, quiet voice. “I am here to help now. I’ll take you home—”

  “Stop calling me that!” she yelled. “My name is Marion and you too well know it! You did this, Thomas! It’s you who will pay for it, not me! You…you will pay for…for…”