Batman 5 - Batman Begins

by Dennis O'Neil

  Alfred slowed the car and pressed a button on the dashboard. The gates that fronted the Wayne property swung open and Alfred drove past the guesthouse and up a curved driveway to the mansion.

  Bruce got out of the car and stood staring at the huge old home. After a minute, he followed Alfred inside. Wayne Manor was not as he remembered it. The place was clean and stark and, although Alfred had kept everything preserved, there was a musty smell in the air. White dust cloths covered the furniture, and all the paintings and pictures were covered with white paper.

  “I’ve prepared the master bedroom,” Alfred said.

  “My old room will be fine,” Bruce said.

  “With all due respect, sir, your father is dead. Wayne Manor is your house.”

  Bruce allowed irritation into his voice. “No, Alfred, this isn’t my house. It’s a mausoleum. A reminder of everything I lost. And when I have my way, I’ll pull the damn thing down, brick by brick.”

  “This house, Master Wayne, has housed six generations of the Wayne family.”

  “Why do you give a damn? It’s not your family, Alfred.”

  “I give a damn, sir, because a good man once made me responsible for what was most precious to him in the whole world.”

  Bruce stared at Alfred, and nodded.

  “Miss Dawes has offered to drive you to the hearing, by the way.”

  Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Rachel? Why?”

  “She probably wants to talk you out of going.”

  Bruce gestured to the window and the grounds behind the greenhouse. “Should I just bury the past out there with my parents, Alfred?”

  “I don’t presume to tell you what to do with your past, sir. Just know that there are those of us who care what you do with your future.”

  “Still haven’t given up on me yet?”

  “Never.” Alfred said the word as though it were a vow.

  Bruce climbed the staircase and entered his room. It hadn’t changed much. The childhood toys were gone as were the bedspread and pillows festooned with cartoon characters. But his high school pennant and the picture of his graduating class were still on the wall. He dropped his bag onto the bed. Breathing deeply, he looked at a photograph on the mantelpiece: young Bruce, on his dad’s shoulders, arms raised in triumph. His father’s stethoscope lay beneath the photograph. It was the same stethoscope Father had held to Bruce’s chest after the incident with the bats. Bruce smiled. He returned to the bed and opened his bag. Reaching inside, past a wad of T-shirts, he removed an automatic pistol and a cardboard box full of nine-millimeter cartridges. He dumped the magazine from the gun and, with steady hands, began inserting bullets into it.

  He heard a car engine on the drive outside and footsteps on the walk. He finished loading the gun, stuffed it into his belt, and put on a cashmere overcoat he had never before worn, a Christmas gift from Wayne Enterprises.

  He left his room and descended the rear staircase to the kitchen. A young woman in her early twenties, with a face that mixed cute with beautiful and was enormously attractive because of it, stood just inside the pantry, running her fingers over shelves of cans and boxes. This was Rachel and she was not what Bruce was expecting. All these years, he had carried the image of Rachel as a scabby-kneed, freckly child—Rachel as he had last seen her. This Rachel, this grave young woman, was definitely not that child. She wore a camel overcoat over an aquamarine top and black skirt, and just a hint of makeup. She was devastatingly attractive.

  “Hello,” Bruce said. “By the way, Alfred still keeps the condensed milk on the top shelf.”

  “Hasn’t he noticed that you’re tall enough to reach, now?”

  “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

  Rachel grinned. “Never used to stop us, anyway.”

  “No, no it didn’t.”

  “You still trying to get kicked out of the entire Ivy League?”

  Bruce shook his head. “Turns out you don’t actually need a degree to do the international playboy thing. But you . . . head of your class at law school, editor of the law review, and now assistant at the D.A.’s office . . . quite the overachiever.”

  Rachel shrugged. After a while she said, “I miss this place.”

  “It’s nothing without the people who made it what it was. Now there’s only Alfred.”

  Rachel stepped close to Bruce and looked up into his eyes. “And you?”

  “I’m not staying, Rachel.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe this time . . . but you’re just back for the hearing? Bruce, I don’t suppose there’s any way I can convince you not to come.”

  Bruce stopped smiling and turned away from her. “Someone at this proceeding should stand for my parents.”

  “Bruce, we all loved your parents. What Chill did was unforgivable—”

  “Then why is your boss letting him go?”

  “Because in prison he shared a cell with Carmine Falcone. He learned things and he’ll testify in exchange for early parole.”

  “Not good enough, Rachel.”

  Rachel looked away.

  “Are you still good for a ride to the courthouse?” Bruce asked.

  “Of course.”

  Bruce passed the ride into Gotham City staring out at a metallic blue sky that spread above the city’s spires. He and Rachel were both silent, which was fine with Bruce.

  Rachel left the freeway and, a minute later, turned in to a blacktopped lot and parked the Honda in a slot with her name stenciled on it.

  Bruce touched her shoulder and said, “Rachel, this man killed my parents. I cannot let that pass.”

  Rachel opened her mouth to say something, then apparently changed her mind and merely shrugged.

  Bruce spoke more urgently now: “Rachel, I need you to understand.”

  Rachel studied Bruce’s face as though seeking answers there. Finally, she nodded and silently opened the car door. Bruce, too, got out of the car, knelt quickly, slipped the gun out from under his overcoat, and slid it behind the front wheel of the car.

  Bruce stood and looked over at Rachel, who was giving him a questioning look. “Shoelace,” he said.

  Bruce followed Rachel through a side entrance into Gotham’s Central Courthouse, a rambling old pseudo-Roman building erected just after the Civil War by one of Bruce’s ancestors and refurbished by his father twenty-two years ago. They ascended a flight of marble steps to a small chamber on the second floor. A five-person panel sat at a long table at the front of the room—four men and, sitting in the middle, Judge Faden, a heavyset man with red hair. Four other men sat at a table facing them. Bruce took a chair near the rear wall as Rachel continued to the group of four and, smiling a greeting, joined them.

  Bruce waited while others, men and women in business attire, filtered in and sat. Ten minutes passed. Finally, from a rear door, a red-haired cop entered with a tall man whom Bruce recognized instantly, although he had seen the man only once before, fourteen years earlier, on a cold November night in the shadow of Wayne Tower. Joe Chill’s face was even more pained and his hair had thinned slightly, but in all other ways, he had not changed.

  “We all know why we’re here,” said Judge Faden. “Mr. Finch, would you like to begin?”

  A handsome man in a dark suit who was sitting next to Rachel stood and addressed the panel. “The depression hit working people like Mr. Chill hardest of all. His crime was appalling, but it was motivated not by greed but by desperation. Given the exemplary prison record of Mr. Chill, the fourteen years already served, and his extraordinary level of cooperation with one of this office’s most important investigations . . . we strongly endorse Mr. Chill’s petition for an early release.”

  The judge looked at Chill. “Mr. Chill?”

  Chill rose, cleared his throat, and glanced around nervously. “Your Honor, not a day’s gone by when I didn’t wish I could take back what I did. Sure, I was desperate, like a lot of people back then. But that doesn’t change what I did.”

  Chill sat.

  The
five people he had spoken to all nodded, as though on cue, then glanced down at papers on the tabletop. One of them, a florid man wearing tortoiseshell glasses, cleared his throat and said, “I gather a member of the family is here today. Does he have anything to say?”

  Joe Chill turned his head and scanned the onlookers who sat behind him. For a moment, his gaze locked with Bruce’s. Then he lowered his eyes and turned back to the front.

  Bruce stood and walked from the room, aware that everyone, including Rachel, was watching him. Moving briskly, he went down the steps and out into the parking lot. He knelt by the front of Rachel’s car, picked up his gun, and crammed it into the left sleeve of his coat.

  He leaned against the car, facing the courthouse, and waited.

  The side door opened and the red-haired cop came out followed by an officer in another kind of uniform—a security man, or a prison guard, Bruce guessed.

  There was a shout from the street and dozens of reporters and television cameramen rushed around from the front of the building, where they had been waiting for Chill’s appearance.

  “They’re taking him out the side,” someone shouted.

  Chill, surrounded by uniformed cops and men in overcoats—obviously detectives—followed the red-haired cop and the security guard out into the parking lot as the reporters and cameramen stampeded toward them.

  “Mr. Chill,” someone in the mob called, “any words for the Wayne family?”

  Joe Chill bowed his head and ignored the question.

  Bruce straightened and gulped down cold air. Hands in his coat pockets, he began walking toward Chill.

  “It’s Bruce Wayne,” another reporter yelled and the mob parted, making a path for Bruce.

  A bright light mounted on a camera momentarily blinded Bruce and when he could again see clearly, a tall, blond woman holding a tape recorder was approaching Chill. Bruce took his hands from his pockets. He slid his right fingers into his left sleeve and walked faster.

  “Joe, hey, Joe Chill,” the blond woman said. She was only inches from Chill now. “Falcone says hi.”

  She pulled a revolver from her shoulder bag, aimed it at Chill’s chest, and fired: a sound like two boards being slapped together. Bruce saw Chill’s eyes widen, and the corners of his lips curl upward, as though he had just experienced a wonderful surprise. Then, as he started to sag against the red-haired cop, his expression changed to one of disbelief, and he slipped from the cop’s grasp and crumpled to the blacktop. For a moment there was a confused milling around and then people began yelling.

  The other cops in Chill’s escort had wrested the woman’s gun away and shoved her down before she was dragged off. Bruce was fifteen feet away, his right fingers curled around the gun in his sleeve, staring.

  Eventually he realized that someone was shaking his arm and speaking his name. From the corner of his eye, he saw it was a young woman and realized it was Rachel.

  “Come on, Bruce. We don’t need to see this.”

  Bruce yanked his arm away. “I do.”

  He watched it all: the arrival of the ambulance, the putting of Joe Chill into a bag and the closing of that bag, the ambulance leaving, belching blue smoke, and the ebb and flow of reporters, cops, medics—watched until everyone was gone except for himself and Rachel.

  They got into Rachel’s car. A few blocks away, Rachel turned onto the freeway and headed for the suburbs.

  “The D.A. couldn’t understand why Judge Faden insisted on making the hearing public,” Rachel said. “Obviously, Falcone paid him off to get Chill out into the open.”

  “Maybe I should be thanking them,” Bruce said, his lips barely moving.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “What if I do, Rachel? My parents deserved justice.”

  “You’re not talking about justice, Bruce. You’re talking about revenge.”

  “Sometimes they’re the same.”

  “They’re never the same, Bruce. Justice is about harmony. Revenge is about you making yourself feel better. That’s why we have an impartial system.”

  “Well, your system of justice is broken,” Bruce said.

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed and her voice was low and edgy. “Don’t tell me the system’s broken, Bruce. I’m out there every day trying to fix it while you mope around using your grief as an excuse to do nothing.”

  She spun the steering wheel and, tires screeching, cut across two traffic lanes to an exit ramp. “I want to show you something.”

  They went down an off ramp and glided into an area Bruce had never visited. His parents and Alfred had always taken him to Gotham’s glories: wide, tree-lined streets and lavish homes and museums and theaters and parks—places full of smiling people and bright lights. Here, the streets were narrow, cramped, and dark because most of the streetlamps had been broken. They passed blocks of storefronts with sheets of plywood nailed over their windows. Trash littered the gutters and sidewalks, and despite the car’s window being closed, Bruce smelled something fetid and decaying. There was occasional movement in the shadowed alleyways—furtive people engaged in furtive transactions.

  Rachel gestured to the filthy streets. “Look beyond your own pain, Bruce. The city is rotting. Chill being dead doesn’t help that—it makes it worse because Falcone walks. He carries on flooding our city with crime and drugs, creating new Joe Chills . . . Falcone may not have killed your parents, Bruce, but he’s destroying everything they stood for.”

  Rachel steered the Honda to the curb and turned off the engine. They were parked in front of a nondescript, two-story building. Above a doorway there was a neon sign—CLUB—and a neon arrow pointing to a flight of stairs.

  “You want to thank him for that,” Rachel said. “Here you go. This is Falcone’s main hangout. It’s no secret—everyone knows where to find him. But no one will touch him because he keeps the bad people rich and the good people scared.”

  Rachel poked a forefinger into Bruce’s chest, hard, and asked, “What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?”

  “I’m not one of your ‘good people,’ Rachel. Chill took that from me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bruce pulled up his left sleeve and removed the gun. “All these years I wanted to kill him. Now I can’t.”

  Rachel looked at the weapon lying on Bruce’s palm, gleaming in the glow from the neon sign, and then up into his eyes. “You were going to kill him yourself.”

  She slapped him. Bruce did not respond. Rachel slapped him again, and again and again.

  Bruce shoved the gun into a jacket pocket.

  Rachel stared down at her lap for a full minute, crying silently. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and said, “Just another coward with a gun. Your father would be ashamed of you.”

  Without replying, Bruce opened his door and got out of the car.

  He watched the taillights of Rachel’s car vanish around a corner and then turned to orient himself. He was in the harbor area. Bulky shapes of freighters and tankers were silhouetted against a sky brightened by the reflection of the city’s lights and there was a mingled odor of oil and salt in the air. Bruce walked to the water, his footfalls echoing hollowly on the boards of a pier. He took the gun from his pocket and held it up to let the stern lights of one of the ships shine on it. He turned it slowly, squinting, as though he were examining some unimaginably alien artifact, then flung it into the water.

  He walked from the pier back onto the street, his shoes crunching on broken glass, and went to the CLUB sign and down the stairs beneath it. He passed through a metal door and gasped: the air was a brew of smoke, sweat, perfume, cologne, and alcohol. Bruce wiped his suddenly watering eyes on his sleeve and stood, trying to acclimate himself to the noise of a hundred conversations, a hundred raucous laughs. He had never seen so many people jammed into such a small space.

  Falcone was not hard to spot. He was at a corner table surrounded by men in suits and women in cocktail dresses, spreading his hands, making a poin
t.

  Bruce crossed and stood in front of him.

  “You’re taller than you look in the tabloids, Mr. Wayne,” Falcone said in a surprisingly pleasant voice.

  A burly man in jeans and a blue jacket appeared at Bruce’s side and ran his hands over Bruce’s body. The man looked at Falcone and said, “Clean.”

  Falcone said, “No gun? I’m insulted.”

  “Only a coward needs a gun,” Bruce replied.

  Falcone gestured to a chair and the man in the blazer pulled it away from the table. Bruce sat.

  “Coulda just sent me a thank-you note,” Falcone said to Bruce.

  “I didn’t come here to thank you. I came to show you that not everyone in Gotham is afraid of you.”

  Falcone laughed. “Just those that know me, kid. Look around. You’ll see two councilmen, a union official, a couple off-duty cops, a judge . . .”

  Bruce recognized one of the men who had been at the hearing sitting at a nearby table. When Bruce returned his attention to Falcone, he was looking at a silver pistol aimed at his chest.

  “I don’t have a second’s hesitation blowing your head off in front of them . . . that’s power you can’t buy. The power of fear.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Because you think you’ve got nothing to lose. But you haven’t thought it through . . . you haven’t thought about your lady friend from the D.A.’s . . . or that old butler of yours . . .”

  Falcone slid the gun beneath his jacket. “People from your world always have so much to lose. That’s why they keep me in business. I stop the desperate heading uptown the way Joe Chill did. You think because your mommy and daddy got shot you know the ugly side of life, but you don’t. You’ve never tasted desperation—you’re Bruce Wayne, Prince of Gotham. You’d have to go a thousand miles to meet someone who didn’t know your name. So don’t come down here with all your anger . . . trying to prove something to yourself. This is a world you’ll never understand. And you’ll always fear what you don’t understand.”

  Falcone nodded and the man in the jacket punched Bruce in the face, knocking him off his chair. Two other men hauled Bruce to his feet and it began: a brief, savage beating, perpetrated in front of a hundred club-goers. The room quieted, and for a while the silence was broken only by grunts and the sound of blows.