“Martha’s a good egg, Lew,” Thomas said, trying to keep up in Lew’s wake as they moved through the liquid crowd flowing around them. “She’s just like you and me, Lew: trying to survive the world our parents left us.”
“Well, I’d be a lot happier if she’d slow down a little, because she’s liable to total her life before she’s had a chance to hold the pink slip,” Lew grumbled. “Maybe we all would.”
“What did you say, Lou?” Thomas asked, the noise in the café swelling just as they reached the top of the metal stairs.
Moxon turned suddenly to face Thomas. “Look, can I bend your ear a minute?”
“Lou, I really ought to be getting down to—”
There was something in the look of Moxon’s eyes that made him stop; something that both warmed him and shook him to the core.
Fear and hope all at once.
“Sure, Lou…I can spare you a few minutes.”
Lou nodded. He turned from the top of the stairs to a heavy black door set in the wall. He opened it quickly, gesturing for Thomas to follow.
They stepped into a hallway that ran back into the building. There was a staircase and an elevator on the left. The elevator opened and out stepped one of Lew’s waitresses, a tray of drinks balanced on one hand while she patted her hair back into place with the other. She nearly dropped the tray when she saw Lew, who turned to the right and opened a door with a frosted glass panel set in the top and the single word “Office” painted on the surface.
Beyond was a waiting room with two overstuffed leather chairs and a matching couch. The couch leather was stained and worn but still largely intact.
A very large, broad-shouldered man in an ill-fitting gray suit dropped the Life magazine he was thumbing through and stood up at once, his hand reaching without conscious thought beneath the lapel of his coat.
“Relax, Donnegan,” Lew said to the gorilla in a suit. “Go get yourself a sandwich or something.”
Donnegan slipped his hand out from his coat and stepped around Thomas, his steely eyes never leaving him as he stepped through the outer door.
“Public relations?” Thomas asked as the door closed.
“Just another gift from my father,” Lew laughed as he opened the inner door, gesturing for Thomas to go through.
The office had too much furniture in it. The desk was finished cherrywood, as was the matching credenza behind it. Two more large leather chairs faced the desk, which had a high-backed swivel chair behind it. All of this was difficult to see beneath a thick patina of papers carefully stacked everywhere on the desk as well as the credenza. This surprised Thomas; this was a working man’s office rather than a showplace. The right-hand wall was fitted with one-way mirrored glass. Thomas looked through it into the club below, his eyes fixing on Martha curled up against Denholm Sinclair.
“He should drop dead,” Lew said, coming to stand next to Thomas.
“She says she’s in love with him,” Thomas said with practiced detachment in his voice.
“Sinclair’s a shuckster, and he’s takin’ her for a ride in more ways than one.” Lew shook his head.
“She’s a big girl, Lew,” Thomas said quietly. “I never could tell her what to do. And now she’s all grown up.”
“That she is,” Lew said, nodding.
“But you didn’t invite me in here just to watch Martha Kane,” Thomas said, turning from the window and setting himself slowly into one of the large leather chairs.
“Right,” Lew said, swallowing hard and adjusting his bow tie as though it had suddenly gotten too tight. He cleared his throat and stepped back over to the desk. The high-back chair squealed slightly as he settled into it and then leaned forward to move aside three piles of papers that were obstructing his clear view of Thomas. He took a deep breath and launched into a cascade of words. “Thomas, you know who my old man is?”
“Who hasn’t heard of Julius Moxon?” Thomas said carefully as he pressed his fingertips together.
“Well, he ain’t exactly Father Knows Best, if you know what I mean,” Lew replied. “What he wants, he gets…and what he can’t have, he takes.”
“Sounds familiar enough,” Thomas said, folding his hands in his lap.
“Yeah?” Lewis said, leaning forward, his own hands folded on the desk. “You’re all right in my book, Thomas. Maybe we have a lot more in common than most people would think. We both come from wealthy families, and I think I know you well enough to say that we’re a lot alike, you and I. I mean, sure, our daddies are rich and powerful but…but we don’t have to be who our fathers are. Okay, maybe you had a great childhood—”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Thomas whispered.
“Yeah? Well, me neither! And now I can’t get away from being twelve years old my whole life,” Lewis sneered. “My old man, Julie, owns me…still. Me, I don’t like being owned. I built this club from the ground up, practically with my own hands, Wayne, and it’s a successful business, too. We’re in the black and making everybody good money, but that ain’t enough for my old man. It ain’t enough money, he says! He thinks I’m running a hobby here—clean enough to give him something respectable to point to when the feds or the press starts nosing about, but nothing he would consider to be a life. So I’m looking for the exit—not from this club, see, ’cause I love this place—but from my old man and his so-called family. Only he holds all the paper on this place, and he won’t hand it over to me ’cause it makes him look good to have his name on the title.”
Thomas snorted once softly. “We’re both looking for the exit, friend.”
“Yeah,” Lewis smiled, his shaved head bobbing up and down as his smile widened. “So I have a proposition for you, Thomas…a business deal that’s strictly on the up and up. You see your way clear of buying the Klatch, see? My old man won’t see you comin’ at him. Maybe offer him something else respectable in exchange.”
“Then what?” Thomas said, opening his hands with the question.
“Then I work for you—pay back every dime plus interest over time,” Lewis answered with quick intensity.
“Why go to all this trouble?” Thomas asked. “Why me?”
“Because you’re the only boy scout I know and we got a bond between us, you and me,” Lewis said. “I want out, Thomas. Out of the whole stinkin’ mess of my family. I’m tired of the rackets and the dope pushers, the payoffs and the vice money. They never let it near me on account of I’m supposed to be the guy they hold up in front of the family and say what a good boy I am in the sunshine while they bleed the city dry at night. My socks may be clean, Thomas, but I’m standing in blood all the time, and there ain’t enough polish in the world to get rid of it. I gotta get out before anyone notices the stains…and I need help to make it work. What do you say, Thomas? I’m trying to do the right thing here; you’re gonna let me down, too, are ya?”
Thomas gazed at Lewis for a moment, then smiled. “Despite what you’ve heard, I don’t control Wayne Enterprises or its money. I have to go to my own father for my living expenses.”
Lewis’s face reddened. “So that’s the play, then?”
“No, Lew, that’s not the play,” Thomas said, standing up. “I don’t know how, yet, but I’m going to help you find that exit.”
Thomas thrust out his right hand.
Lew Moxon stood up, staring at the hand for a moment, and then reached forward, gripping it so hard that Thomas feared some of the bones might snap.
“I’ll do right by you,” Lewis promised. “Anytime you need a favor—anything—you just come to me.”
* * *
Arkham Asylum / Gotham / 10:19 a.m. / November 14, 1957
“Welcome to Arkham, Doctor,” Thomas said, thrusting his hands down into his lab coat as he stood in the center of the windowless laboratory beneath the newly installed fluorescent lights. “Will this do?”
“It is perfect, my boy,” Dr. Richter answered with the first hint of a smile Thomas had ever recalled seeing on his face.
Thomas was not nearly so sure. Dr. Richter had some very peculiar requirements for his experiments, and taken all together, Arkham Asylum had been the best, if a somewhat bizarre, fit. It had been built under the direction of Elizabeth Arkham, the widow of Captain Jeremiah C. Arkham. His family had invested in a number of arms manufacturers in the previous century, and the resulting riches had catapulted them into High Society. One of Jeremiah’s holdings was Winchester Arms, through which Elizabeth became acquainted with Sarah Winchester.
When Jeremiah died suddenly in a hunting accident just before the birth of their first child, Elizabeth turned to spiritualism and Sarah, her West Coast friend, for answers. Sarah believed they were both cursed by the sins of their families, and when Elizabeth became convinced of this too, she embarked on the construction of Arkham House, decreeing the building would forever offer protection against the spirits of all those who had died from the bullets on which her family had made its fortune. She chose the location for the building on Crane Island during a séance, and work began at once. The edifice rose above the low shores of the land that drove like a wedge into the Sprang River, with the Burnley District across the river to the north and the Coventry neighborhoods to the south. Its bizarre walls, angles, and ornaments were patterned after a Gothic Revival structure, but they grew wild, expanding with no clear architectural purpose. The mandate to continually build created a maze of rooms, hallways, staircases, wings, turrets, and spires that was ever expanding and never made architectural sense—in order, Elizabeth believed, to confuse the spirits that visited there. It was said in those days that to wander through the halls of the ever-burgeoning Arkham House was to walk through the mind of the mad Elizabeth herself. Workmen regularly got lost in the labyrinthine tangle of the weird halls, having to be rescued and led back into the light. Some were rumored never to have returned, with their hammering still occasionally heard in the dark recesses of the massive structure’s seemingly endless foundations.
In 1921, Amadeus Arkham, Elizabeth’s son, turned Arkham House into the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum, a facility he named after his late mother following her alleged suicide. The construction of Arkham had, it appeared, not allayed the family curse: Amadeus’s wife, Constance, and their daughter, Harriet, were both brutally assaulted, murdered, and mutilated by an escaped inmate of Arkham Asylum, Martin “Mad Dog” Hawkins. Amadeus appeared to have dealt well with this horrific turn of events until Mad Dog was returned to his care. At the time, it was not known that Amadeus had years before actually facilitated his mother’s demise and subsequently repressed the memory. While strapped down for electroshock therapy, Mad Dog unfortunately brought it all back to Amadeus. In the end, Mad Dog was dead, and Amadeus became a tenant of his own asylum, listening for the ghosts that walked the twisted, convoluted halls both in the building and within his mind.
With no living heir, Gotham City took over the estate, and though a succession of caregivers managed the facility under different names down through the decades, the Arkham family always seemed to be a part of its strange walls.
Thomas never gave any credence to the ghost stories. Arkham was strange, indeed, but understandable when one reflected on the strange twists of the human mind. And, as his investigations had discovered, it had some major benefits to Dr. Richter’s proposed project.
First, it was secure. Neither of them wanted to go public with their work until they had properly tested Richter’s methodology and prepared it for peer review. Richter’s ideas were groundbreaking, but many an excellent researcher had been forgotten both in history and in the patent office by publishing their findings too rashly. There were a number of hidden corridors and forgotten suites that could be easily converted into laboratory space. Thomas had used his father’s name in city hall and had been given access to the original construction drawing as well as the remodel. He had found exactly what he needed.
“It is something of a miracle, Dr. Wayne,” Richter said, nodding in appreciation.
“It was originally a coal bin in the house,” Thomas explained. “The original coal chute was enlarged into a ramp with steel doors at both ends.”
“The door is huge,” Richter observed. “It nearly fills the far wall.”
Thomas nodded. Amadeus had intended the space for his private laboratory after the remodel, but his own fall had prevented him from ever using it. The space was forgotten in all the noise of the trial. “The ramp is large enough for a truck. We can bring in pretty much whatever you need that way. The doors are electronically activated and alarmed. I assure you they are very secure.”
“What about power?”
“This was being converted into a laboratory space long before I found it,” Thomas continued as he stepped into the large room. His voice echoed slightly in the open space around them. “Gotham is just finishing its new power plant across the river from here. The main power lines for the entire Uptown area go through a conduit that passes under Arkham. This room was specifically wired for high loads, so you needn’t worry on that account. With the twelve-foot ceiling, you should be able to fit your equipment in here without any trouble at all.”
Richter nodded in approval. “You have done well, Dr. Wayne.”
“Thank you.” Thomas grinned. “But there is more.”
“More?” Richter replied, his white eyebrows rising precipitously. “What more is there?”
Thomas gestured into a large, darkened opening at the far end of the laboratory space. He reached inside, found the switch, and flipped it.
“Holding cells?” Richter said with a frown.
“Yes—or at least that’s what they were intended to be,” Thomas explained. There were five cells arranged in a semicircle around the crescent of the room. Each had thick metal doors that swung outward, each with its own electronic lock that could only be activated from the opposite doorway. “I thought you might use these for your laboratory animals.”
“Yes…yes, of course.” Dr. Richter was pale, sweat breaking out on his forehead.
“Are you all right, Doctor?”
“Yes…I am fine, my boy,” Richter said, his accent somehow thicker than usual. “Have you any other surprises for me?”
“Why, yes,” Thomas beamed. “One more.”
They sat in the office. The new Formica tabletop gleamed under the desk lamps. They could still smell the fresh paint in the room. Richter sat at the desk in an oversized leather executive chair while Thomas sat across from him in his own leather chair. An open bottle of champagne sat on the desk between them as they both held aloft their filled glasses.
“Here’s to our dreams,” Thomas said.
“And may they remain ours for the time being,” Richter chorused, clinking his glass against Thomas’s. “The hospital is not that keen on my teaching as it is. If they find out about our little arrangement before we are ready to publish things, it could go very badly for us both.”
“Then please don’t tell anyone,” Thomas chuckled. He sat back in his chair, sipping at the champagne for a moment before continuing. “Do you really think it will work, Doctor? I mean, I think I understand the theory, but in practical application—”
“Work?” Richter snorted. “It already has. It needs refinement, especially when it comes to the higher brain functions, but in terms of behavioral modification, it is already proven. It is the new work by Watson and Crick in the area of DNA that has really made all of this viable.”
“Watson, Crick, and Franklin, you mean,” Thomas said from behind his glass.
“Yeah, yeah…and Franklin,” Richter said with a shrug. “Poor girl. Not so much as a thank-you when they handed her hat to her, and now I hear she’s quite ill. Still, their research makes it possible for us to modify the DNA and use it as an information carrier on the back of a virus. We use the chemical memory techniques I’ve previously developed and couple them with the altered DNA carried by the viral host.”
“Brings a whole new meaning to contagious thought,” Thoma
s chuckled. “Doesn’t it?”
“It is our dream, Dr. Wayne,” Richter said in suddenly serious tones. “It means we can chemically and genetically alter the individual’s underlying moral foundation. If we think of crime and corruption as a disease infecting the body of humanity, then we can engineer criminals to become a counter-virus to that same disease. It’s like creating a sociological vaccine. Think of it, Thomas! We can turn the criminals of the world against themselves, destroying their organizations from within.”
“No more bullies,” Thomas sighed, taking another deep drink from his glass. “No more fear.”
“A world where there is no more crime. No more war. No more injustice. For the first time, we’d have the means to correct the basic motivations of a human being—turn criminals into upstanding citizens, communists into capitalists if we choose. There would be no more prisons. No more war.” Richter smiled, raising his glass. “Drink up, Dr. Wayne. You are about to end all the ills of the world.”
“And that would really make me something,” Thomas nodded. “Wouldn’t it?”
“Are you not something now?” Richter asked.
“I’m a cipher, Doctor,” Thomas answered, turning the glass as he examined the swirl of bubbles in his hand. “I’m Patrick Wayne’s little boy. Nobody notices Thomas, nobody sees Thomas, nobody listens to Thomas, and that, sir, is a cipher.”
“So you want to be something more?” Richter asked.
“Oh, yes,” Thomas answered, draining his glass. “So much more.”
“You have provided the means,” Richter bowed slightly in his chair. “What shall you name our little project, then, Dr. Wayne?”
Thomas looked up at the stone ceiling overhead. “Let’s call it Elysium…Project Elysium.”
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