Batman 5 - Batman Begins

by Dennis O'Neil

  That sounded kind of interesting to Bruce. Not exciting, but kind of interesting, so he was looking forward, sort of, to attending the opera with his parents.

  Father wore a black suit and black bow tie and a snowy white shirt—what he called his “tux”—and Mother had on an elegant short black dress. Bruce stood in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, watching Mother dab rouge on her cheeks.

  “Help me a second, Tom?” she called and Father joined her and circled her neck with a string of pearls. He snapped a catch into place, took his wife by the shoulders, spun her around, and said, “Gorgeous!”

  Mother smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

  Bruce smiled, too. He liked it when his parents were nice to each other.

  The three of them descended the wide, curving staircase to where Alfred was waiting in the foyer.

  “We won’t need you tonight,” Father told him.

  “Ah, that’s right,” Alfred said. “You’re riding the monorail. But might I take you to the station, Master Wayne?”

  “No thanks. I feel like driving.”

  They went in the “smaller car”—a Lincoln, Bruce had heard his father say—down the winding driveway, out onto the main road, past several small clusters of stores and houses to a lot which was lit by tall, bluish lamps on curved stands. There were already several cars in the lot, neatly parked between white lines. Father stopped the Lincoln near a row of steps that led to a platform.

  The Waynes went up the steps, Mother holding Bruce’s left hand and Father holding his right hand. Several other people were already on the platform, which was alongside a metal rail, gleaming in the blue light. Father glanced at his watch. “The train should arrive in about a minute,” he said.

  Bruce saw a round light coming down the rail and as it approached, he could see that it was on the front of a vehicle of some kind. There was a rumble and the train stopped in front of them. Doors slid open with a soft hiss and the Waynes entered the train car and found seats. Another hiss, another muted rumble, and Bruce was watching the sights of Gotham City speed past the window. He had been to Gotham City before, of course, with his parents and Alfred and once with Miss Daisy. But he had never seen it as he was seeing it now. On those earlier visits, Gotham had seemed to be nothing but walls and cars and lights and confusion. He had never thought to look up, at the tops of the buildings, and so he had never realized how tall they were—tall and, in a way Bruce could not quite understand, impressive. Looking out the train window, Bruce began to get an idea of what the city actually was, and it both fascinated and frightened him.

  “Your father built this train,” Mother told Bruce.

  “Not exactly,” Father said. “I didn’t actually build it—”

  “Well, you paid for it,” Mother said.

  “That I’m guilty of,” Father said to Bruce. “Kind of a family tradition. Your great-grandfather built the first trains in Gotham. The city’s been good to our family, but now the city’s suffering. People less fortunate than us are enduring very hard times. So we built a new, cheap public transportation system to unite all of Gotham.”

  “And at the center of it,” Mother added, “is Wayne Tower.”

  “Is that where you work?” Bruce asked.

  “No,” Father said. “I work at the hospital. I leave the running of the company to better men.”

  “Better?”

  “Well . . . more interested men.”

  The train slowed. Mother pointed out the window to a gigantic building that seemed to stretch to the sky. “Wayne Tower,” she said.

  The train slid beneath a roof, hissed, stopped. “Here we are,” Father said.

  The Waynes left the train and walked among a crowd of commuters, beneath a vaulted ceiling, and went through a wide door to a covered walkway that spanned the area between the station and the tower. Bruce saw a sign in the form of an arrow that read: TO OPERA HOUSE.

  The Waynes walked toward where the arrow pointed, Bruce’s hands again folded into his parents’. They went up an escalator, through a hallway with red fabric on the walls and thick red carpet on the floor, and passed through a door. Father handed three tickets to a pretty young woman who glanced at them, smiled, and led the Waynes down an aisle to a row of seats only a short distance from a stage that was partially covered by a red velvet curtain. They sat in cushioned chairs and Bruce looked up at a gigantic chandelier, even bigger than the one they had at home, and to the left and right and behind himself, at row upon row of men and women dressed like Mother and Father. Bruce saw no children; apparently, he was the only one in the place, which made him feel a bit funny. There was a funny smell in the air that reminded Bruce of Mother’s closet and the backseat of the family limousine. The operagoers were rustling as they shifted in their seats, getting comfortable, and murmuring in the voices that people used in libraries.

  Father leaned over to Mother and whispered, “I forgot to ask. What are we seeing, anyway?”

  “Mefistofele,” Mother said, “by Boito.”

  “French?”

  Mother nodded.

  “Any good?”

  “Excellent.”

  “Okay,” Father said, and leaned back in his chair. Bruce saw a bunch of men file into an area below the stage and pick up musical instruments: musicians, he realized.

  A minute later the musicians began to play music that sounded much like what Mother listened to in the sunroom, and the red curtain rose, and Bruce was looking at women dressed like Halloween witches—wearing costumes, as Miss Daisy predicted—singing and cavorting around the stage. Bruce knew they were only performers, people like himself who happened to be able to sing and whose faces were covered with some kind of paint. But to him, they seemed real, more real than the unpainted audience members around him. Then bats dropped from above, hung from wires, their black wings flapping, and began to circle over the witches’ heads . . .

  Bruce stared at the bats.

  And he was again at the bottom of the well and the screeching bats were exploding from the crevice and tearing at him . . .

  He was being silly, he told himself. He was not in the well, he was in a theater; watching a—what had Miss Daisy said?—a story, an opera, and there was nothing to be afraid of . . .

  But he could not control his terror.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Mother said, her face inches from Bruce’s.

  Bruce was gasping, unable to catch his breath, and he could not answer his mother . . .

  Finally, he was able to ask, “Can we go?”

  Mother looked over Bruce’s head at Father, giving him a questioning look, and Father said, “I guess we’d better.”

  Father stood and held Bruce’s hand and said, “Take it easy, champ.” Then the three of them were moving across the carpet and down the stairs and out onto the street.

  “We’ll just take a few minutes to get some fresh air,” Father said and, squeezing Bruce’s hand, added, “A bit of opera goes a long way, right, Bruce?”

  Bruce looked up at Father and Father winked. “What say we take a little walk?”

  Bruce nodded yes.

  “Come on,” Father said.

  Then, in the shadow cast by Wayne Tower, Bruce saw something move and a moment later a man stepped from the darkness and approached them. He was tall and young, dressed in dirty clothes. His face was thin and scared, and he was pointing something at them that gleamed in the light of a nearby streetlamp.

  “Wallet, jewelry—fast!” the man said.

  “That’s fine, just take it easy,” Father said, stepping between the man and his family. He shrugged out of his overcoat and handed it to Bruce.

  “Hurry up,” the man said.

  Father took his wallet from beneath his jacket and extended it. “Here you go,” he said.

  The man grabbed at the wallet with a shaking hand and missed, and the wallet fell.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Father said, in the same tone of voice he had used when he pulled Br
uce from the well.

  The man knelt on the pavement and groped for the wallet. Bruce recognized the object he was pointing up at Father from pictures he had seen in the newspaper: a gun.

  The gun was shaking.

  The man retrieved the wallet and shoved it into a pocket. “Just take it and go,” Father said.

  The man stood and shifted his gaze to Mother. “I said jewelry, too.”

  Mother began to pull off her diamond engagement ring. Father took a step toward the man. “Hey, just—”

  Bruce saw the gun twitch and in the same instant he heard a sound like two boards being slapped together. Puzzled, he turned to his father for an explanation. Father was staring down at a red splotch on his snowy white shirt that spread outward from a small, black hole.

  Father crumpled, as though all his bones had dissolved at once.

  Mother screamed. The man reached for the strand of pearls around her neck. Mother pulled back from him and the man said, “Give me the damn—”

  The gun twitched and there was the slapping board sound again. The man curled his fingers around the pearl necklace and yanked and the necklace broke. Pearls spilled past Bruce’s face and clattered lightly on the pavement.

  Bruce stared up at the man’s eyes. The man jerked, as though he had been stung, and he spun and ran into the shadows.

  For a long time, Bruce stared at his father’s face. He heard a groan and bent down so that his face was close to Father’s.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Father whispered. He smiled at Bruce, then closed his eyes. Bruce sat among the bloodstained pearls. Something began to swell within him. He had no idea what it was, just that it was somehow connected to his parents and that he had to keep it in check . . . had to.

  A while later a policeman came, and then more policemen, and some of them put Mother and Father into bags and loaded them into the rear of an ambulance. Someone, Bruce did not know who, took him in a car to a big building. There was a crowd on the sidewalk in front of the building, and some of them snapped pictures as Bruce passed by. Bruce, still clutching his father’s overcoat, went inside and was led to a chair. He sat, and waited, and felt himself becoming numb all over, inside and outside, except for the swelling thing in his chest. He wondered if everyone had forgotten about him and decided he didn’t care if they had. After a while, he seemed to leave his body and watch it from somewhere else—not any particular place, just somewhere else.

  A hand on his shoulder jerked him back inside his body.

  “You okay, son?”

  Bruce saw that the hand belonged to a tall, ruddy man whose hair and mustache were thick and black and whose blue eyes were warm and kind.

  “I’m Jim Gordon,” the man said. “You need anything? A sandwich? Soda?” He gestured to the overcoat in Bruce’s hands. “Is that your father’s?”

  Bruce nodded. Gordon gently took the coat and draped it over Bruce’s shoulders.

  Another man, wearing an officer’s uniform, approached and said loudly, “Gordon! You gotta stick your nose into everything!”

  Jim Gordon turned to the man in the uniform and stared, not saying a thing.

  “Get outta my sight,” the uniformed officer commanded. Gordon touched Bruce’s shoulder again, then spun on his heel and stalked away.

  The man knelt in front of Bruce and said, “My name’s Captain Loeb, kid, and I got some good news for you. We got him.”

  “Got . . . who?” Bruce murmured.

  “Who do you think? Joe Chill. The skel that iced your folks.”

  The man’s words were English, yet it was as though he were speaking a foreign language. Bruce understood the words, but he could not grasp their meaning. So he just sat and felt the thing inside him continue swelling until it filled him, and his own skin was just a thin covering over it, a garment he was wearing like the opera singers’ costumes, and after a while it became him. It was the real Bruce. Everything else was false.

  Detective Jim Gordon got home late that night, but Barbara had put his meal in the oven to keep it warm. He kissed her soundly and ate the pork chops and mashed potatoes she had prepared. In the six months they had been married, Babs had not once neglected to make a hot dinner for her Jimmy.

  Afterward, they watched the late news on television. As they were preparing for bed, Barbara said, “Something’s wrong.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Yes it is. Tell me.”

  He told her about the killing of the Waynes and the frightened little boy who had been orphaned by it. He told her about Loeb and how Loeb had treated young Bruce.

  “Loeb is the whole damn department,” he concluded. “He’s not the exception, he’s the rule.”

  “You’re thinking about Chicago?”

  “The offer’s still in place, but it won’t be forever. So yeah, I’m thinking about it. I know it’d be a pain, moving away from your family and friends . . .”

  Barbara was sitting on the edge of the mattress, her slender body tense. “Yes. Yes, it would.”

  “Well, we don’t have to decide tonight.”

  Barbara rolled onto her back and pulled the blanket up to her chin.

  Two days later, at a plot of unused land behind the greenhouse, Bruce watched as coffins containing Mother and Father were lowered into two oblong holes. Some of the mourners were crying softly and a few of them looked at Bruce, as though trying to gauge his feelings. He wanted to cry, he really did, because he realized that tears were expected and, more important, appropriate. So he bowed his head, but no tears would come. The thing inside him, the thing that filled his body, would not allow crying.

  A crowd of people, all of whom had spoken condolences to Bruce, began to walk slowly away from the gravesite. Bruce stood beside Alfred until the coffins were out of sight and then turned toward the mansion. It started to rain, and the wind was cold.

  “There’s someone who would like a word with you, Master Bruce,” Alfred said, and escorted Bruce to the driveway in front of the mansion. A tall man in what Bruce recognized as a cashmere overcoat stood next to a black car—a Rolls-Royce, Bruce knew.

  “This is Mr. Earle,” Alfred said to Bruce, and Mr. Earle smiled and reached down to shake Bruce’s hand.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bruce said.

  “I want you to know that you’re in excellent hands,” Mr. Earle said, nodding at Alfred, “and we’re minding the empire. When you’re all grown up, it’ll be waiting for you.”

  Bruce understood none of what Mr. Earle had told him, but thanked him anyway.

  Mr. Earle ducked into the Rolls-Royce and Alfred led Bruce into the mansion.

  Bruce took off his coat and went to his favorite window, the big one that looked out on the drive. He peered at the rain, now heavy and beating against the windowpanes, and at the mourners, hunched in the rain and wind, folding umbrellas as they got into their cars. Rachel walked past, glanced up, and waved to Bruce. Bruce hesitated, then returned the wave.

  From the doorway behind Bruce, Alfred said, “I thought I’d prepare a little supper.”

  Bruce continued to stare out of the window.

  “Very well,” Alfred said. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts.”

  Suddenly Bruce felt the urge to speak swelling within him and without knowing what he was going to say, he blurted, “It was my fault, Alfred. They’re dead and it was my fault.”

  Alfred hurried across the room and knelt in front of Bruce. “Master Bruce . . .”

  “I made them leave the theater.”

  Alfred put his arms around Bruce. “Oh, no, no, no . . .”

  “If I hadn’t gotten scared—”

  “No, no, Master Bruce. Nothing you did—nothing anyone ever did—can excuse that man. It’s his fault and his alone. Do you understand?”

  Bruce pressed his face into Alfred’s chest and for the first time he sobbed. “I miss them, Alfred. I miss them so much.”

  “So do I, Master Bruce. So do I.”

  CHAPTER THREE


  It was the day after Bruce’s twentieth birthday, a year and a half after he’d stood beneath a clock and waited for a cute girl who never arrived, and six months after he had completed an advanced race-driving course in western Missouri, which he had really enjoyed. He stood at the front of the first car of the monorail train, swaying, enjoying the spectacle of Gotham City rushing past—the many-colored roofs, the tiny side streets and wide avenues, the millions of windows gleaming in the morning sunshine. The train slowed, stopped. Bruce picked up his duffel bag, swung it over his shoulder, and stepped onto the platform. He saw Alfred at the far end of the platform and waved.

  “You didn’t have to pick me up,” he said as Alfred approached. “I could have transferred to the red line—”

  “I’m afraid not, Master Bruce. The red line . . . well, it’s closed. Apparently Mr. Earle thought it wasn’t making enough money.”

  Bruce followed Alfred through a station he barely recognized. His father’s splendid achievement had become shabby: cracked glass, chipped marble, men and women huddled against the walls, some of them next to fires built in trash cans, others huddled by shopping carts filled with rags and bottles.

  “How is Mr. Earle?” Bruce asked.

  “Oh . . . successful.”

  They left the station and Bruce looked up at Wayne Tower, gleaming in the sun, magnificent as ever.

  A few minutes later, driving through start-and-stop rush-hour traffic, Alfred guided the Rolls-Royce up the Walnut Street ramp and onto the freeway.

  “Will you be heading back to the university tomorrow?” Alfred asked. “Or could I persuade you to spend an extra night or two?”

  “I’m not heading back at all,” Bruce replied.

  “You don’t like it there?”

  “I like it fine. They just don’t feel the same way.”

  Bruce smiled and settled back in his seat. They had left the city and were proceeding along a country lane, past tall elms and oaks, their foliage glorious this fine November morning, and, every half mile or so, past a cluster of buildings that included a big house.