Batman 5 - Batman Begins

by Dennis O'Neil

  Or maybe they’d argue. The same old argument. Barbara would tell Jim that there was no future in the Gotham PD and no future for him in any police work, not since Chicago, and Jim would probably lose his temper. What had happened in Chicago hadn’t been his fault, even if he took the heat for it, and Barbara knew that and why the hell did she keep bringing it up?

  But later, lying in bed, he’d admit to himself that his wife was right. He was only in Gotham because, after Chicago, the Gotham force was the only one that would hire him. He’d had to return to his hometown with his tail between his legs. But, dammit, he was a cop. That’s all he had ever been. Even in the Marines, he’d been assigned to a shore patrol unit.

  He pulled a standard form from the stack on the corner of the desk and began writing a report that no one would ever read—hell, that probably wouldn’t even get filed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rachel Dawes sat in the courtroom for forty-five minutes, listening to Dr. Jonathan Crane’s testimony. Much of what the thin, bespectacled psychiatrist said was the medical equivalent of boilerplate, filling up air and time without communicating much, but two sentences caught Rachel’s attention. As she listened she twisted a handkerchief in her lap and bit her lip.

  “In my opinion,” Crane told the court, “Mr, Zsasz is as much a danger to himself as others.”

  The doctor looked at Victor Zsasz, a bulky man with a completely bald head wearing an orange jumpsuit who sat beside his lawyer at a long table.

  “Prison is probably not the best environment for his rehabilitation,” Crane concluded. “But he would be a welcome addition to our group at Arkham.”

  When the hearing was over, Rachel ran down the long, curving marble steps and caught up with Crane in the lobby.

  “Dr. Crane!” she called breathlessly.

  Crane stopped by the door to the portico and said, “Yes, Miss Dawes?”

  “Do you seriously think that Victor Zsasz shouldn’t be in jail?”

  “I would hardly have testified to that otherwise, would I, Miss Dawes?”

  Together, they went through the door and began walking in the portico toward an adjoining building.

  Rachel said, “This is the third of Carmine Falcone’s thugs that you’ve seen fit to have declared insane and moved into your asylum.”

  “You shouldn’t really be surprised,” Crane answered. “The work offered by organized crime has an . . . attraction for the insane.”

  “And the corrupt.”

  Crane stopped in midstep, turned to Rachel, and spoke over her shoulder: “Mr. Finch, I think you should check with Miss Dawes here. Just what implications has your office authorized her to make? If any.”

  Crane stalked away as Rachel watched her boss approach. Carl Finch took Rachel’s arm and said, “What are you doing, Rachel?”

  “What are you doing, Carl?”

  “Looking out for you.”

  Finch guided Rachel to an alcove before speaking again. “Rachel, Falcone’s got half the city bought and paid for . . . drop it.”

  “Flow can you say that?”

  “Because much as I care about getting Falcone . . . I care more about you.”

  “That’s sweet, Carl. But we’ve been through all this.”

  Rachel stood on her toes and gave Finch a sisterly kiss on the cheek.

  Across the street, sitting on a bus stop bench, a man wearing a baseball cap and sweat clothes that were old and frayed, watched Rachel kiss Finch and hurry toward the parking lot. Then Bruce walked down the block and behind a greeting-card store, where Alfred waited in the car.

  Several hours later, shaved, showered, and dressed in jeans and a Gotham U. sweatshirt, Bruce sat on the floor of his library shuffling through papers and photographs. He paused at a picture of Rachel leaving the court, taken with a telephoto lens. He heard a chittering sound and dropped the photo, stood, and strode into the mansion’s main hall. He squinted and stared upward, trying to see clearly a shadowy thing that fluttered just outside the window.

  Alfred, holding a silver tea service, spoke from the doorway to the kitchen: “Another blessed bat again, sir. They nest somewhere on the grounds.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  Ten minutes later, Bruce, wearing a long overcoat, with a coil of rope over one arm, walked past the greenhouse. The long, low building where Bruce and Rachel had played together as children had not fared well: glass was cracked or completely missing; paint was peeling from the wrought-iron frame. Bruce continued to the old well shaft; it was almost completely overgrown with weeds.

  Bruce wrenched loose the boards covering the well and tossed them aside. He tied one end of his rope to a nearby tree and began lowering himself into the dark, chilly shaft. When he reached the bottom, he felt air blowing on his face. He unclipped a flashlight from his belt and shone its beam into a crevice. He remembered an old panic . . .

  . . . bats tearing at him . . .

  He stooped and pulled stones from the well’s curving wall until the crevice was wide enough to accommodate him. Then, on his hands and knees, the flashlight wedged between chin and shoulder, he crawled.

  Within a few yards, the crevice widened into a low-ceilinged chamber. By bowing his head, Bruce was able to stand. He heard running water. Crouching, he inched forward. The angle of the stone under his boots changed. In the flashlight beam, he saw that the chamber floor was tilting downward. Bruce lay on his back and slid, slowly lowering himself into—

  Someplace huge—Bruce sensed that. He got a chemical torch from inside his coat, cracked it, and threw it. The harsh metallic glare revealed a vast cavern, long, tapered stalagmites rising from its floor, equally long stalactites jutting from above.

  The torchlight glinted on a wide gap full of running water that roared and sprayed white foam in the center of the cavern.

  I wonder if I’m the first person ever to see this place . . .

  He swept his flashlight beam upward, to the darkness between the stalactites, and saw a flicker of movement. A second before they descended—thousands and thousands of flapping, chittering, screeching bats—Bruce realized what they were and knelt and covered his head and face with his arms. He felt hot panic—

  Then he remembered the bats that had swarmed from Rā’s al Ghūl’s box and felt himself grow calm. His moment of terror, he knew, had been created by the memories of someone who no longer existed—who had not existed since he saw his parents’ blood spilling over pearls in a Gotham street alleyway. Bruce had a secret that child had not yet learned: Embrace your worst fear . . .

  He threw back his arms and stood calmly in the midst of the fluttering maelstrom, smiling.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was midnight and the Friday evening crowd in Carmine Falcone’s club was getting rowdy. Falcone listened to the raucous laughter and occasional shouting, intermixed with the feeble efforts of the jazz combo, through his office wall. Sitting behind his mahogany desk, he was leaning back in his overstuffed leather chair and contemplating the thin, bespectacled man who stood before him, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “No more favors, Falcone,” Jonathan Crane said. “Someone’s sniffing around.”

  “Hey, Doc. Remember how it works? I scratch your back, you scratch mine. I’m bringing in your shipments.”

  “We’re paying you for that.”

  “Maybe money isn’t as interesting to me as favors.”

  Crane leaned forward. A moment ago, he seemed nervous. Now, he did not. “I’m aware that you’re not intimidated by me. But you know who I’m working for and when he gets here—”

  Falcone straightened in his chair. “He’s coming to Gotham?”

  “And he’s not going to want to hear that you’ve endangered our operation just to get your thugs out of jail time,”

  Falcone stared at his desktop for a minute. “Okay, who’s bothering you?”

  “There’s a girl in the D.A.’s office—”

  Falcone shrugged. “We’ll buy her off
.”

  “Not this one.”

  “Idealist, huh? Well, there’s an answer for that, too.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Yes. You do, Dr. Crane.”

  Most of Gotham’s businesspeople were just straggling into their offices, pouring their first paper cupful of company coffee, logging onto their computers, strategizing about how to get through their day. But William Earle believed in early starts and so, although the clock on the boardroom wall indicated that it was not yet nine, the Wayne Enterprises staff meeting had been in full session for over an hour. A young, smartly dressed blond man in a tailored suit named Barry McFraland was standing, a sheaf of papers in his hand, addressing the ten other executives in the room.

  “We’re showing very healthy growth in these sectors,” he was saying.

  An older man named Joseph Fredericks spoke without getting up. “I don’t think that Thomas Wayne would have viewed heavy-arms manufacture as a suitable cornerstone of our business.”

  From his seat at the head of the table, Earle said, “I think, Fredericks, that after twenty years we ought to be at a point where we stop asking ourselves what Thomas Wayne would have done. Thomas Wayne wouldn’t have wanted to take the company public, either, but that’s what, as responsible managers, we’re going to do.”

  Fredericks stared down at the yellow legal pad in front of him and said nothing.

  At that moment, about fifty feet away, down a heavily carpeted hallway, Bruce Wayne emerged from an elevator, looking quite debonair in a business suit and tie, and walked briskly to the reception desk where a young woman was arranging some reports in a folder.

  “Good morning,” Bruce said through a wide smile. “I’m here to see Mr. Earle.”

  The woman dropped the reports and brought up the visitors’ list on a computer screen. “Name?”

  “Bruce Wayne.”

  The woman began to scan the list, then stopped and looked up, her eyes widening.

  The phone at her elbow buzzed.

  “You can answer that,” Bruce said pleasantly. “I’m in no hurry.”

  The woman put the receiver to her ear and heard Earle bark, “Jessica, get me that prospectus . . . never mind, I’ll get it myself.”

  Thirty seconds later Earle came from the hallway. “Jessica—” He stopped in midstride and stared at Bruce.

  “Good morning, Mr. Earle,” Bruce said. “You may not remember me. We met years ago, when I was a kid.”

  Earle seemed to have a problem speaking. But finally he said, “We thought you were dead.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  Twenty minutes later, Bruce and Earle sat in Earle’s large office with windows overlooking all of Gotham City’s downtown area, and with a view of twenty miles or more, stretching beyond the suburbs. Jessica poured coffee into china cups, set them on a low, marble table in front of Earle and Bruce, and asked, “Will there be anything else?”

  “Not at the moment,” Bruce said. “Later—who knows?”

  “I suppose you know that we’ve taken the company public,” Earle said.

  “I did hear something about that.”

  “You realize, Bruce, that the public offering is a done deal.”

  Bruce sipped coffee and sighed. “Excellent. What is it—Kona? From Hawaii?” He sipped again. “Wherever it comes from, it’s first-rate . . . Where were we? Oh, yes. The public offering. I understand I’ll be handsomely rewarded for my shares.”

  “Very handsomely indeed.”

  “I’m not here to interfere, Mr. Earle. Actually, I’m looking for a job.” Bruce paused, and put his cup on the table. “I just want to get to know the company that my family built.”

  “Any idea where you’d start?”

  “Applied Sciences caught my eye.”

  “Lucius Fox’s department? Perfect. I’ll make a call.”

  “Thank you.” Bruce rose and moved toward the door.

  “Oh, and, Bruce?” Earle called after him. “Some of the assistants and so on . . . because of your name they may assume . . .”

  Bruce held up a flat hand. “Not to worry. I’ll be absolutely clear with everyone that I’m just another humble employee.”

  Bruce was curious about Lucius Fox. His father had once called Fox “the best hire I ever made. The man’s darn near a universal genius. Doctorates in both engineering and chemistry before he was twenty-five and only a thesis away from another doctorate in physics.” How would a universal genius with a couple of PhDs react to a world-class college dropout?

  Bruce asked Jessica where the Applied Sciences Department was and, following her directions, took an elevator to the sub-basement level and went through a heavy metal fire door into a windowless chamber. There was a single lightbulb hanging from a wire over a battered steel desk. A wiry African American man in his fifties, wearing a rumpled suit and a bright red bow tie, sat behind it and contemplated Bruce over the top of his glasses.

  “You’re Bruce Wayne?” he asked in the laziest drawl Bruce had ever heard.

  “Guilty.”

  “Lucius Fox.” Fox came around the desk and shook Bruce’s hand. Nothing about how he moved was as lazy as his drawl. “What did they tell you this place was?”

  “They didn’t tell me anything.”

  Fox chuckled. “Earle told me exactly what it was when he sent me here—”

  Fox flicked a switch on the wall, the sudden light revealing that they were standing in a massive warehouse. Crates and boxes and bales, many under dust covers, were stacked everywhere.

  “—A dead end,” Fox continued, “where I couldn’t cause any more trouble for the board.”

  “You were on the board?”

  “Back when your father ran things.”

  “You knew my father?”

  “Sure. Helped him build his monorail. Want to see some of our more interesting stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  Fox led Bruce around a stack of crates to a steel box and pulled from it what looked like a small electric drill and a coil of thin wire. “If you’re a climber, you’ll like this. Pneumatic. Magnetic grapple.”

  Bruce lifted the gear and bounced it on his palm. “Light.”

  “Strong, too,” Fox said. “Monofilament tested to 350 pounds.”

  Bruce picked up something else. “This go with it?”

  “Yep. A harness. Try it on.”

  Bruce slipped his arms through the shoulder straps and tightened a wide belt around his waist, then shoved the pneumatic gun into the belt buckle. It clicked into place.

  “What use did you have in mind for this stuff?” Bruce asked.

  “Your father’s philosophy was, if you have an idea for a gadget, build it first, figure out what it’s good for later.”

  “A variation on ‘if you build it they will come.’ ”

  “I guess.”

  Bruce shed the harness and followed Fox deeper into the jungle of crates.

  “Beautiful project, that elevated train of your father’s,” Fox reminisced. He had apparently forgotten what they had been talking about. “Routed the tracks right into Wayne Tower, along with the water and power utilities. Made Wayne Tower the unofficial heart of Gotham. Course, Earle’s left it to rot . . .”

  Fox stopped and peered at the stenciled lettering on a narrow, upright crate. “Found it. Knew it was here someplace.”

  He lifted the lid up and set it aside. A dark bodysuit hung inside the crate. “The nomex survival suit for advanced infantry. Kevlar bi-weave, reinforced joints . . .”

  Bruce rubbed the fabric between thumb and forefinger. “Tear resistant?”

  “This sucker’ll stop a knife.”

  “Bulletproof?”

  “Anything short of a direct hit with a large-caliber slug.”

  “Why didn’t they put it into production?”

  Fox sighed. “The bean counters figured a soldier’s life wasn’t worth the three hundred grand.”

  “I’d like to borrow it. For
spelunking. You know, cave diving.”

  Fox shrugged and put the lid back on the crate. “You get a lot of gunfire down in those caves?”

  Bruce smiled. “Never hurts to be ready for the worst. Listen, Mr. Fox, I’d rather Mr. Earle didn’t know about me borrowing . . .”

  “Mr. Wayne, the way I see it”—Lucius Fox swept his arm in a wide arc—“all this stuff is yours anyway.”

  “I have another request, Mr. Fox.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I’m in need of a kind of . . . tool belt, I guess you could call it. Do you think I could keep the harness and belt as well?”

  “Of course.”

  Bruce smiled. He would never again have to hold an attaché case between his teeth.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At nine the next morning, Alfred telephoned the Gotham Times Society Page editor to report that Bruce Wayne, son of the late Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Wayne, had returned from an extended sojourn abroad and had taken up residence at the ancestral Wayne Manor.

  By one that afternoon, eleven other news organizations had called and three local television stations had sent reporters and camera crews to interview Bruce, who took the calls and met with the newspeople. He smiled, chatted, showed them around the estate.

  All the local papers ran brief items about Bruce’s return, though none of them were in the main news sections, and most of the local radio stations mentioned it during their hourly news breaks. One of the television outlets ignored the story completely and the other two ran it as thirty-second items right after the weather forecasts.

  A television reporter named Kassie Cane told her boyfriend why Bruce Wayne’s return got so little play.

  “There was no way we could make a story of it,” Kassie said. “I mean, I wanted to . . . good-looking guy, richer than Croesus, return of the prodigal, all that . . . But I swear, talking to him is like talking to a wall. The lights are on but nobody’s home. He was nice, even kind of sweet, and he obviously wanted to please us, but there was no personality there.”