Batman 5 - Batman Begins (5 page)

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 point.

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.

“Enough,” Falcone said and the man who was hitting Bruce stopped. Falcone rose and came close to Bruce. “You got spirit, kid, I’ll give you that. More than your old man, anyway. In the joint, Chill told me about the night he killed your parents . . . said your old man begged for mercy. Begged. Like a dog.”

Falcone jerked a thumb in the direction of a rear door and the thugs dragged Bruce through it and flung him into the street.

Bruce pushed himself to his feet and staggered to a wall. He leaned against it and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, tasting something copper, recognizing it as blood, wondering if he was going to lose any teeth.

All those people, watching me be beaten . . . What had Falcone said? “That’s power you can’t buy. The power of fear.”

He shoved away from the wall and walked toward the dock, aware that he was being observed from doorways and alleys. He approached an oil barrel with flames licking out of its top.

A man huddled near the barrel, warming himself, said, “Maybe ya shoulda tipped better.”

Bruce drew closer; the glow of the flames revealed a face with grime in deeply etched lines and a splotchy beard. Bruce stared thoughtfully into the flames as the man rubbed his hands over them.

“You have a name?” Bruce asked the homeless man.

“Name’s Joey. Last name’s none a’ your business.”

Bruce removed his wallet and gave a wad of money to the homeless man.

“For what?” Joey asked.

“Your jacket.”

Bruce dropped his wallet into the fire. Joey laughed. He shrugged out of his overcoat and bundled it into a ball.

“Let me have it,” Joey shouted. “That’s a good coat.”

They traded: a nine-hundred-dollar, fawn-colored, cashmere overcoat for a frayed and torn Navy pea coat that had cost some sailor a ten spot when it was new three decades ago.

“Be careful who sees you with that,” Bruce said. “They’re going to come looking for me.”

Joey was buttoning the overcoat. “Who?”

“Everyone.”

Bruce smiled, saluted Joey with two fingers, and walked onto the pier, threading his way among stacks of freight containers. A horn blared, deep and loud, and Bruce looked toward one of the ships, its hull trembling as its engines churned the water. Bruce ran toward it.

FROM THE JOURNALS OF RĀ’S AL GHŪL

Early this morning, I walked as far as the nearest dune and back again, breathing in the clean desert air and rejoicing in it. Here, in the heat, and in the mountains, on the glacier, I can remember the planet as it once was before the stink of the greed of man made it a purgatory that is quickly becoming a hell.

I begin to feel the rigors of age, as I have so often before. Soon I must descend again into the Pit to rejuvenate myself. The rejuvenation will be followed, as it always is, by a period of insane rage and violence. Once, I hoped to find a cure for this inevitable consequence of my chemical bath, but apparently there is none. Everything has a price.

I have also decided to abandon my attempts to alter my genes in such a way as to allow me to sire a male child. The reason for my long inability to generate a boy apparently has to do with my Y chromosome that, once damaged, does not repair itself as does the heartier X chromosome. Not having a son is the greatest personal burden I bear. It is a consequence of my visits to the Pit that keep me alive. I have made a strange bargain with the universe.

I am as always sustained by the righteousness of my mission and the realization that I am humanity’s savior. In another man these might seem like boastful words. I am not like other men. My long life has proven this, if nothing else.

We will soon relocate our domicile to the building above the glacier. I think that is a strategically desirable location for the next phase of my efforts. I will augment my army and bring the League of Shadows to its greatest strength in three hundred years. I will continue to seek an adequate leader, someone to replace me in the event that I never create my own replacement.

The experiment in Gotham City was at best a qualified success. I have given long consideration as to the means I shall use next in my crusade to save humanity and I may have come to a conclusion. I have decided against nuclear bombs. To use enough nuclear power to rid the earth of the eighty percent of its human inhabitants would be to render the planet inhospitable to most life forms and this has never been my wish. Neither can I use the environmental outrages humanity has already perpetrated for they, too, could leave the earth a barren cinder. Microbes and other biological means are also difficult choices for in the amounts I require they are almost impossible to control. I sense that the answer I seek is one I already possess. My problem is to recognize it.

During my few moments of tranquility, I reflect on the irony of my plans for the mass eradication of Homo sapiens. For the first century of my life, I devoted all my efforts to furthering human existence. I ministered to the ill in the lowest hovels and the grandest palaces alike, with no thought except to ease suffering. Even after the slaying of my wife, I continued to ply my altruism. Only slowly, over dozens of decades, did I come to realize that there are occasions when to heal, a physician must first harm. This is a lesson my daughters seem unable to absorb. I am certain a son would have no difficulty understanding it.

Our task grows urgent and our time short. Every day the earth becomes still more toxic. Within a generation or two at most it will reach the point of no return. I must succeed before it does, and I will.

T
hroughout the long, snowy winter that followed, Gotham’s glitterati wanted to know what had happened to that handsome young Bruce Wayne. There were no shortage of rumors:

—I heard he was wintering on the Riviera.

—My cousin saw him. in Charlotte Amalie.

—I know it was him playing baccarat in Monaco. He was in disguise—bald and short, but it was him, all right.

—Bruce Wayne? Skiing in Gstaad.

—The real truth is, the death of his parents drove him mad. They have him in an asylum.

—
Well,
wherever
he is, you can bet that he’s enjoying himself.

By spring, however, Bruce Wayne’s name was not being mentioned so much. There were other matters to discuss: the antics of that divine Ms. Fitzgerald—
when she jumped into the fountain, we thought we’d die
—and, of course, the summer fashions and vacation plans . . . Oh, and crime.
Isn’t that situation down by the docks getting
dreadful?