Batman 5 - Batman Begins (11 page)

“Quite so, sir.” Alfred closed his eyes. “You’re welcome to borrow the Rolls, by the way. Just bring it back with a full tank.”

The plane refueled once that day, and twice more before flying over a Gotham City whose spires were catching the gold of first morning light. Bruce peered from his window down at a place he had not seen in a long time, and wondered what dramas were occurring in its streets.

PART II
B A T M A N

B
ruce considered making a big show of his return to Gotham but decided against it. Oh, he would certainly reveal himself with all appropriate bells and whistles sooner or later, and probably sooner, but first he wanted to accomplish a few things without being scrutinized by every gossip hound on the East Coast.

The first item on Bruce’s agenda was to find out just who and what he had spent the last year of his life with. Neither Ducard nor any of the trainees explained the exact nature of the League of Shadows, much less any of its particulars—when it had originated, how it was financed, and most important, what its purpose was.

Bruce asked Alfred for help and so Alfred spent five days in various Gotham City libraries, and another day telephoning professors at the local universities. Unfortunately, he learned very little.

On the morning of Bruce’s sixth day back, he and Alfred met in the library after a late breakfast. Alfred flipped back the cover of a notebook and said, “I’m afraid I must disappoint you, Master Bruce.”

“You never have, Alfred.”

“Then you are about to experience an historic first. All I managed to glean regarding this ‘League of Shadows’ is that no one believes it ever really existed. It seems to be a chimerical organization like the Illuminati or the Order of St. Dumas. There are a few scattered legends concerning it, but according to my sources, not a scrap of genuine evidence.”

“Nothing written down? Memoirs, business papers . . .”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Well, I hate to contradict the experts, but they’re wrong with a capital W. I didn’t
imagine
the monastery, Ducard, Rā’s al Ghūl, and all the rest.”

“I am reminded of something the French poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote. ‘The devil’s deepest wile is to persuade us that he does not exist.’ ”

“Alfred, I had no idea you were so erudite.”

“I’m not. I was dusting a book of French verse one day and it happened to fall open and . . .” Alfred tilted his head to one side and shrugged, as if to say,
What is one to do? These things happen.

Bruce thanked Alfred, borrowed the notebook, and drove his Lamborghini Murcielago toward the city. He was sure that Alfred had been thorough, but he was still not satisfied.

It won’t kill me to find out what I can learn on my own . . .

The one thing he had liked when he had taken his few liberal arts courses was doing research papers. There was something about pursuing a fact and finding it despite obstacles that he found deeply satisfying. He remembered a grad student at Gotham U.: Sandra Flanders. When he was a freshman, she had once pointed him in a fruitful direction and, at the time, confessed that she wanted nothing more from life than to be a research librarian. He remembered reading somewhere—the alumni newspaper still sent to his father?—that Sandra had, indeed, done exactly that. She was now the university’s chief researcher.

Bruce parked the Lamborghini in the visitors’ lot amid a cluster of huge SUVs and walked across a quadrangle toward the administration building. The campus had deteriorated since his last visit. The grass was badly in need of mowing, the sidewalks were cracked and uneven, the paint on the walls of the buildings was faded and peeling. But the coeds he passed were pretty and the male students certainly seemed energetic. Three of them were throwing a Frisbee around. One of them missed a catch and the disk spun toward Bruce. He caught it and sent it back—a bit too hard. It struck a young, blond-haired man in the chest and almost knocked him over.

“Sorry,” Bruce shouted, and wondered to himself:
Could those things be adapted to weapons?

He entered the admin building and wrinkled his nose. Was that
urine
he was smelling? Could it
possibly
be? He went through a door marked
INFORMATION
and spoke to a middle-aged man whose trim haircut and pressed suit were in marked contrast to his surroundings. He was polite and helpful and able to direct Bruce to Sandra Flanders’s office.

Bruce recrossed the quadrangle to the library, climbed a flight of stairs off the main lobby, and found Sandra Flanders behind a large wooden desk, surrounded by thousands of shelved books, peering at a computer screen. The place smelled of old leather and old paper—a
nice
smell, this was, unlike what he had sniffed in the admin building. It reminded Bruce of the library in Wayne Manor. When he entered, Sandra raised her eyes and smiled a welcome. She was in her late thirties, with dark brown hair, regular features, and a trim figure. Bruce wondered if he should tell her his real identity, but decided against it. He and Alfred had yet to sort out what Alfred had called “the legal ramifications of raising you from the dead.”

But would she remember, and recognize, him?
One way to find out
. . .

Bruce extended his hand. “Ms. Flanders? I’m . . . Gene Valley.”

“You remind me of someone . . . Bruce. Bruce Wayne?”

“My cousin. Some say the resemblance is uncanny.” He sighed. “Poor Bruce.”

“What happened to him? I heard he just vanished.”

“Yes. Several years ago. Perhaps he’ll turn up someday . . . But I need your help
now
.”

“What can I do for you?”

Bruce told her about the League of Shadows and saw that she was immediately interested. Obviously, Ms. Flanders enjoyed a challenge. She proceeded to dazzle him. He had not known there were so many ways to pursue facts and five hours later he had filled Alfred’s notebook with information—enough for him to make several good guesses about the League of Shadows.

“One more thing,” Bruce said as Sandra pushed back from her computer.

“Yes?”

“Can you find anything on Rā’s al Ghūl?”

“Well, he’s mentioned in one of the references. Let’s see what else there might be.” Sandra returned to her computer and reference books and, after another hour had passed, gave Bruce more information.

As Bruce was leaving Sandra’s office, he thanked her and asked if there was anything he could do for
her.

“Well, as you may have noticed, things have gotten a bit shabby around here . . . I realize that you’re probably not as well off as your cousin . . .”

“I’ll send a check.”
And it will be a large one.

Back at the manor, Bruce sank into his father’s favorite easy chair in the library and opened the notebook. As Alfred had said, solid information about the League of Shadows was sparse. The earliest recorded mention of it was appended to a piece of parchment dating to the fourteenth century, copied by a monk in an Irish monastery. According to this fragment, the League had already been in existence for hundreds of years. The next reference was in a letter, again just a fragment, sent from Paris to Berlin in 1794, at the height of the French Revolution. Then another, more cryptic message concerning the League sent from a clothier in London to a Manchester sea captain; there was no month or day on it, but the year was 1866.

In the early twentieth century, an Oxford don had done a monograph on what he termed “secret societies” that was mostly concerned with the Masons, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights Templar, the Order of St. Dumas, the Illuminati, and the League of Shadows. The learned academic dismissed the latter three as “very likely the turbulent fabrications of overwrought imaginations,” and did not bother to list the sources he had consulted, an omission Sandra Flanders apparently considered grievous.

“But,” she had concluded, “despite his pedagogical slovenliness and his turbulent and overwrought prose style, I guess he was right. There doesn’t seem to have been a League of Shadows.”

“Do you always say things like ‘pedagogical slovenliness’?”

“Only when I’m tired or trying to impress someone. I’ll let you decide which applies here.”

As for Rā’s . . . there was even less information about him than about his League, and what there was Bruce found hard to believe. The name itself was easy: Sandra had found a meaning a few minutes after she’d accessed a lexicographical database. In Arabic it meant: “Head of the Demon.” And that was about the extent of what Bruce considered reliable: data.

So that leaves me . . . where?

The telephone rang, a loud jangling from an old-fashioned phone on Thomas Wayne’s desk that seemed to shake the walls of the library.

“I’ve got it, Alfred,” Bruce yelled, picking up the receiver.

The caller was Sandra Flanders. “I’ve come across something,” she said.

“I’m all ears.”

“There was an eccentric collector named Berthold Cavally who got very interested in the kinds of things that seem to interest you. Amassed quite a collection of artifacts of all kinds, but he had a special interest in lost civilizations, cults, secret societies, and the like. He died in a fire in 1952 and his collection burned up with him.”

“Very interesting, Sandra, but how does this . . .”

“Wait. There’s a bit more. A nephew found one of Cavally’s notebooks in the ashes along with a badly charred fragment of a parchment. Both items had been partially burned, but a lot of it survived. Apparently, it contains Cavally’s translation of a parchment he acquired in North Africa and it mentions this Rā’s al Ghūl character.”

“And how might an earnest young fellow get a look at this notebook?”

“Well, if he’s earnest
and
rich, he might buy it. The nephew got wiped out in a dot-com fiasco and is selling everything he can get his hands on.”

“Where and when?”

“I hope you have a bag packed. The items are up for sale at an auction tomorrow at ten in New York City, at a place called the Olympus Gallery.”

“I’ll be there—if you’ll give me an address.”

Sandra recited an address on Madison Avenue and Sixty-first Street. Bruce thanked her again and began to call airlines.

Alfred volunteered to learn something about the Olympus Gallery and made a few calls. He reported that it had once been a prestigious venue for acquiring antiquities, but lately had become “decidedly second-rate.”

Bruce thanked him and moved toward the door.

“Another moment?” Alfred asked. He held up the bloodstained clothes Bruce had been wearing at the airstrip in Kathmandu.

“Let’s hang on to them.”

“I doubt they’ll ever be clean again, Master Bruce.”

“They’re souvenirs. Souvenirs don’t have to be spotless.”

“Souvenirs of what, if I may ask?”

“Most people get a diploma when they complete their schooling. I got a sooty, smoky, bloody ninja suit. I think I got the better deal.”

“I doubt that the diploma manufacturers are a bit worried.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Bruce busied himself making more telephone calls. The one he considered most important was to the Wayne Enterprises offices in Wayne Tower. A chirpy-voiced receptionist told him that Mr. Earle was not in and was not expected, but would return from his vacation in a few days and perhaps the gentleman would like to leave his name and call back at that time. The gentleman said he would prefer
not
to leave his name, thank you, but would be happy to call again.

Bruce wandered into the kitchen where Alfred, wearing a white apron, was feeding something into a blender. When Bruce explained what his problem was, Alfred took a credit card from his wallet. Bruce thanked him and returned to the library and his phone calls. Using Alfred’s card number, he made a round-trip plane reservation to New York City for the following day and a hotel reservation at the Plaza in Manhattan.

At six twenty-five the next morning, Bruce was walking through a terminal at La Guardia Airport in Queens, New York. He remembered liking airports when he and his family had passed through them on vacations, en route to Paris, London, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, the Caribbean Islands: a different destination every year, and all of them enchanting to a wide-eyed little boy. But
this
airport,
now . . .
maybe his time with Rā’s al Ghūl had changed his tastes, or maybe the years he had lived since childhood did. For whatever reason, he found La Guardia at six-thirty in the morning to be depressing. His fellow passengers mostly walked with their heads down, as though moving into a ferocious wind, and carried their tote bags and suitcases and attachés as though they were the burdens of the damned.

It’s early. Maybe they’ll cheer up later on . . .

Bruce was far from chipper himself. He was not a morning person—that was one of the many lessons he had learned at the monastery. It was not a matter of character, as some of his high school teachers had apparently believed, but of the body’s natural circadian rhythms. But he had also learned that willpower, judiciously applied, could trump lethargy. If he
had
to be wide awake and fully functioning in the morning, he could be.