Wayne of Gotham

by Tracy Hickman

  Suddenly, Amanda threw her head back in a spasm. She shook violently and then collapsed so quickly that Bruce barely managed to catch her before she fell to the ground.

  Bruce swept Amanda up into his arms, feeling the muscles in his back protest as he straightened up. The other people in the park had studiously moved away from where he was standing or were pointedly looking in other directions.

  Bruce turned with the woman in his arms and started across the parkway toward the rows of brownstone homes on the far side of the Sprang River Drive and Burnley district beyond.

  It was, indeed, time to take Amanda home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF?

  * * *

  Murphy Street / Gotham / 10:46 a.m. / Present Day Bruce pressed the doorbell awkwardly with his extended right index finger, the rest of his hand otherwise occupied holding the limp form of Amanda Richter.

  The dawn had not yet broken over the Atlantic to the east. All the streets in the early morning light were bathed in a rosy morning glow. A few citizens were stirring and a number of lights shown through the windows up and down the street, but among those early denizens no one took particular notice of the man in the flannel shirt and jeans carrying the woman up the brownstone steps.

  He had secured the Batmobile in a side tunnel of the Gotham mass transit system specifically designed to keep the vehicle—and his Batsuit—away from prying eyes or hands. It was as close as he could get to Elm Avenue and Murphy Street and be sure his equipment—especially his Batsuit—would be safe. Walking to the park had been a casual distance. However, the park had been four blocks from Amanda Richter’s brownstone steps and Bruce was feeling the exhaustion from the effort of carrying the woman this far. Now, standing on the stoop with the woman in both arms and struggling to press the doorbell, he wished not for the first time that he were back in the exomuscular Batsuit and letting it take away the years that he was feeling now in his complaining arms and legs.

  He managed once more to find the doorbell and leaned against it.

  The door opened at last.

  “What in the name of…!”

  “Delivery, Ms. Doppel,” he grunted.

  “Who are you?” the nurse demanded at once.

  “Gerald Grayson,” he answered, sweat beading on his forehead. “Do you mind if we come in?”

  “What have you done to her?” Ms. Ellen Doppel, RN, was a frumpish middle-aged woman who had the general appearance of having just been shaken in a large paper bag and rolled out of it. Her dark cotton skirt and white blouse were both rumpled, and a bright pink sweater was draped over her shoulders unevenly. Her eyes were also uneven; one appeared slightly lower than the other and drooped perceptibly. Her iron gray hair was sticking out of its loosening bun at odd angles. Despite her worn appearance, Bruce noticed she moved surprisingly well.

  “Nothing compared to what’s going to happen to her if I drop her on these stone steps,” Bruce replied through gritted teeth. “You want to get out of the way?”

  Ms. Doppel did not want to get out of the way but did so anyway. She dropped back against the entry wall, clutching her sweater closed as she did. “Straight down the hall and the first door on the left. There’s a couch in the study. Put her there.”

  Bruce obeyed quickly, uncertain as to how long his legs would hold out.

  There was a time when I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. There was a time long since past…

  He crabbed sideways down the narrow hall and rotated through the open doorway. The study had stained panels up to a chair rail with a light khaki paint above running to ornate crown molding along the ceiling. A heavy desk stained to match the wall panels sat near the center of the room, while tall bookcases filled one wall. There was a window that let in light from a small garden nestled between the brownstones. An overstuffed leather couch sat against the back wall. It had been a man’s room, yet Bruce decided that the room had not known a man’s presence in perhaps half a century.

  “Where did you find her?” Ms. Doppel asked. She had followed them to the room and was standing in the doorway.

  “She was at Curtis Point,” he said. “I was waiting for a delivery and just thought I’d pass the time.”

  “At Curtis Point.” Ms. Doppel was not buying it.

  “That’s about it.”

  Ms. Doppel considered him for a few moments before she spoke. “You must be cold, mister, ah—”

  “Grayson, ma’am. Gerry Grayson.”

  “May I offer you some coffee before you go, Mr. Grayson?”

  Bruce smiled his most winning smile.

  “I would like that very much, Ms. Doppel.”

  She backed out of the doorway, slipping back into the kitchen. “Come with me, please.”

  Bruce followed her. The kitchen itself was definitely old, the floor covered with white tiles, accentuated by smaller black ones. The appliances had been replaced about ten years before, by the look of them. The nurse motioned Bruce to sit at a small table with a ridiculously old-fashioned pink Formica top. The chairs looked as though they might have come from a malt shop, and the plastic on one of the cushions was split.

  “What do you know of Miss Amanda, Mr. Grayson?” Ms. Doppel asked without preamble as she poured the coffee from the gleaming metal pot into two large cups on matching saucers.

  “Not much, really,” Bruce answered. “I’m not sure all her wiring is up to code, if you know what I mean.”

  Ms. Doppel almost smiled. “That is quite true, Mr. Grayson.”

  She picked up the cups and saucers, stepping across the kitchen and setting them on the table.

  “Since we’re sharing coffee, how about you just call me Gerry?”

  “I’d prefer to keep things formal, Mr. Grayson,” the nurse said as she sat down across from him. “Remaining impersonal will make my news easier.”

  “You do have a first name, though, don’t you?” Bruce persisted.

  She looked at him across the table, always considering what she said before she spoke. “My name is Dr. Ellen Doppel, I am—or was—a doctor of clinical psychology. I was treating Mrs. Richter and her daughter at the time of their unfortunate demise and am now barred from public practice due to inaccuracies in testimony at the inquest. However, it was the uncontested wish of both the mother and the daughter in their last wills that I inherit their house and their financial holdings. I have been a prisoner to their largess in this house ever since. Does that satisfy your curiosity, Mr. Grayson?”

  “And so now you’re treating the youngest daughter on your own?” Bruce asked with studied casualness.

  “No, we both know that is impossible, now, don’t we?”

  Bruce looked up over the edge of his cup. “Pardon me?”

  “Miss Amanda, as you know her, cannot possibly be Amanda Richter,” Ellen Doppel continued with studied cool. “Ernst Richter died at Arkham in an accident in 1958. Marion, the elder daughter, was fifteen years old at the time. Her younger sister Amanda was eleven. Had Amanda survived, she would be over sixty years old by now.”

  “She looks pretty good for sixty,” Bruce chuckled.

  “Well, the Richter women were known to carry their age well,” Nurse Doppel said.

  Bruce raised his eyebrows.

  “A joke,” Doppel shrugged. “No, Mr. Grayson, that is not Amanda Richter.”

  “Well, I carried somebody into this house,” Bruce said.

  “But not Amanda Richter,” the nurse said flatly.

  “Well, she certainly believes she is Amanda,” Bruce countered. “Where did she come from?”

  “I don’t know,” the nurse answered, a troubled look creasing her brow for the first time. “She arrived on the back porch one day in the middle of a thunderstorm, soaking wet and barely able to speak.”

  “Where did she say she came from?”

  “This house.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I said she is not Amanda Richter,”
Nurse Doppel interrupted, crossing her arms. “I have tried my best to help her, but she firmly believes that whoever she once was, she is now Amanda Richter. She believes she is possessed by the ghost of Amanda and that all her father’s powers to redirect men’s minds are hers as well. She believes she will not be free of this ghost until Amanda has been avenged of her father’s death.”

  “Possessed?” Bruce shook his head. “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes,” Nurse Doppel responded, sipping at her cup. “I do believe it is.”

  Bruce watched Doppel for a moment. There was a resigned sadness to the woman, like an animal who had been captured in the wild and whose spirit had been broken by too many years in a cage.

  “She called herself Marion,” Bruce offered into the silence.

  Doppel looked up with sudden interest. “She did? When?”

  “Just before she blacked out,” Bruce said. “Who’s Marion?”

  “That was the elder of the Richter daughters,” Nurse Doppel responded, shaking her head sadly. “This is very bad.”

  “Bad?” Bruce said. “I thought we were well past bad already.”

  “I mean worse,” Nurse Doppel corrected. “She had adopted the persona of Amanda, but now it appears she is forming schisms into multiple personalities. First Amanda and now apparently Marion. Dissociative identity disorder is a setback for Amanda—a worsening of her issues. This is usually brought on by inordinate stress, but I cannot think what kind of external stress she might be under that would be a causal factor in this newly manifest disorder.”

  A moaning sound drifted into the kitchen from the study. Nurse Doppel set down her cup carefully on the saucer and stood up, the legs of the chair squealing against the tiles. “Excuse me, Mr. Grayson, I’ll be back directly.”

  Nurse Doppel moved past him, careful to keep as far out of his way as possible. She opened the door to the study, closing it behind her. Bruce strained to hear, but the voices through the door were muted and muffled.

  Dissociative identity is extreme. Could an alternate personality be his opponent while the Amanda personality knows nothing about it? Dual personalities…isn’t that what I am? Or does Gerry Grayson count as three?

  Nurse Doppel appeared again through the study door, closing it softly behind her. In her free hand she held a package, covered in plain brown paper and tied fast with twine. “She said I was to give this to you.”

  Bruce took the parcel, turning it over in his hands. “What is it?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Nurse Doppel said, looking away and moving down the hall toward the front door. Her manner was polite, but there was a sense of accelerating farewell about her tone.

  “Well, then, tell her ‘thank you’ for me,” Bruce said, holding the object up as he passed her at the threshold. By weight and size, it appeared to be a wrapped book.

  “I shall, Mr. Grayson,” Doppel responded, using the door to push Bruce the rest of the way onto the stoop. The closing door nearly cut off her words. “Do call again.”

  He stepped down the stairs of the Brownstone on Murphy Street with a book wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with string turning over in his hands.

  Bruce moved with quick steps toward the intersection with Elm Avenue—contemplating why every city in the United States seemed to have a street named after that particular tree—and descended the stairs of a subway station. He had unwrapped the book in his hands, discovering it had only a fading embossed year on its cover: 1957. Bruce opened the old diary and began reading. A security camera on the entrance ceiling recorded him reaching the bottom of the stairs but not reaching the subway platform. To the ever watching eyes of Gotham, he had vanished.

  DIARY OF ERNST RICHTER (translated from the original German) FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1957: Regents are idiots! Shortsighted fools. Dr. Hemmingway called me a communist sympathizer! Me! And Professor Goldstein said I was calling into question the reputation of the hospital and the university. This from a Jew, no less! After all the effort the Americans made to bring me and my family here—to give us this new life so they could have the profit of my research—now they do not want it? They cannot respect it or me? And now they accuse me of being a Stalinist—after I fled the Russians with the Americans bearing Promethean gifts! Almost thirty years of research, much of it practical, and now they want nothing to do with it? What am I doing here?

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1957: New gaggle of interns today. Goldberg had me take them in hand as punishment, no doubt, for my accent. Hate to leave Juliet and Mari on the weekend, but I cannot afford to upset the hospital bosses further. One was more promising than the rest of the dull, waddling gaggle they sent me: a young man named Thomas Wayne. He is bright and promising—and apparently very wealthy as well. He takes great interest in my research. Perhaps I should get to know this young man better…

  CHAPTER TEN

  KISMET

  * * *

  Gotham University Hospital / Gotham / 1:56 p.m. / October 5, 1957

  Thomas pushed his way toward the front of the lecture hall. The smell of the paint on the walls was still fresh. The Kane Foundation—ostensibly directed by Roddy Kane but largely influenced by the pet projects of his daughter Martha—had recently funded this new research wing of the hospital. Thomas smiled slightly at the thought, because while the building had been funded, the equipment needed to run it had not. The wing was, so far, a very public gesture struggling to find practical use. The chairs were of new, hardened plastic. The desks were of a tough new Masonite finish with gleaming surfaces. The linoleum tiles were polished to a shine. But many of the students using the facility were left to scrounge their own diagnostic tools and pool their own medical books to fill the empty shelves of the research library. This was not the fault of Martha or her father’s tax-sheltered charities so much as the regents of the university, who could easily find matching funds for the construction of buildings—the literally concrete and very visible symbols of Kane’s generosity. University presidents had difficulty impressing wealthy alumni or prospective star students with tours through ephemeral principles, philosophies, or concepts.

  Thomas promised himself to do something about that.

  He made his way down the aisle against the flow of other interns, who were exiting the hall as quickly as possible. Several of them were laughing and at least one of them called out to Thomas, but his attention was focused on the lectern at the bottom of the hall.

  The doctor gathering his notes there was a slight man almost completely bald except for a closely cut swath of white, bristling hair extending from one large ear to another around the back of his head. He had eyebrows like white brushes and intense green eyes. Most striking was the long scar that extended from just above his right eye down his right cheek, cutting through the right brow. He had high and prominent cheekbones above a narrow, jutting jaw that seemed to project an air of constant defiance. He wore his doctor’s smock that had been cleaned to an almost blazing white. There were razor-straight creases in his black slacks and a mirror shine on his shoes. His instructions to the new interns at the hospital had been given with a thick German accent and an almost obligatory edge of contempt.

  “Dr. Richter!” Thomas called as he neared the podium. “Sir?”

  The doctor looked up, puzzled to hear his name falling from the lips of an unfamiliar intern. “Yes…who are you? What do you want?”

  “Sir, my name is Thomas Wayne.”

  “You are a new intern, no?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “And why am I spending my valuable time listening to you, Dr. Wayne?”

  Thomas knew he was giving Richter a stupid grin, but he plunged on anyway. “I just wanted to tell you that I am a great admirer of your work, sir. I was at your lecture at Harvard last year. Your ideas on utilizing an engineered virus as a positive carrier were groundbreaking.”

  Richter offered a slight, rueful smile. “I must congratulate you, Dr. Wayne. My interns usually do not have the courag
e to attempt flattering me until their second year.”

  “They should take more initiative,” Thomas offered. “Perhaps have a little more vision?”

  “Are you a man of such vision, then, Dr. Wayne?” Richter said, setting down his notes on the lectern and then gripping it on either side as he looked down on Thomas.

  “Maybe I’m a man in search of a vision,” Thomas answered, pushing his hands down into the pockets of his lab coat.

  * * *

  The Bowery / Gotham / 9:04 p.m. / October 8, 1957

  “Good to see you, Mr. Wayne.” Lewis Moxon thrust his hand out, a genuine smile splitting his face. “I was hoping to see you again. Welcome back to the Klatch.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. Moxon,” Thomas said, matching the firm, companionable grip with his own.

  “Lew to my friends,” Moxon replied. “You call me Lew.”

  “Then I insist on being Thomas,” Wayne replied. He had not quite gotten the knack of the whole beat generation’s dress code. He was in an argyle patterned sweater and loafers, but at least he wore his collar open and had lost the bow tie. “Is Martha here yet?”

  “Sure, sure,” Moxon replied, his smile fading a bit. “She’s waiting down on the floor with Celia and that Sinclair prick. Thomas, maybe you could have a word with her about him. He’s bad news.”

  “Denholm?” Thomas laughed. “He’s a bit rough around the edges, but he’s a straight arrow. The guy volunteers with Celia out at the orphanage. He’s helping her straighten out the books over there on his own dime.”

  “Yeah?” Moxon replied. “I’ve no doubt he’s doing something with the books, but I don’t think it’s his dimes he’s concerned about. Look, Mr. Wayne—”

  “Thomas,” he corrected. “Just Thomas, Lew.”

  “Right, Thomas,” Moxon nodded. “Look, you seem like a nice guy. It’s out of my jurisdiction, but somebody needs to pull in the reins on your friend Martha. She’s got a classy chassis, don’t get me wrong, but she’s drivin’ her life just a little too fast. Don’t get me wrong, pal. She’s all right in my book, but trouble just seems to follow her and she never seems to see the train coming until it’s too late.”