Batman 5 - Batman Begins (6 page)

Bruce had just been beaten senseless for the third time. His first week on the ship had not been bad. The captain was willing to take on a new hand, one without experience or papers, provided the new hand was not choosy about where he slept, what he ate, or what kind of work he did. So Bruce slept on rags in a corner of the engine room, ate whatever was left when everyone else had eaten, and worked harder than he had known it was
possible
to work: lifting heavy crates, pulling at heavy cables, scraping paint off the ship’s hull, cleaning foul-smelling gunk from the bilges. At the end of each fifteen-hour day, he dropped onto his rags, every muscle aching, but particularly the muscles in his back and calves, and drifted off to sleep despite the roar of huge machines only feet away. But despite the toil and discomfort, the first week was bearable because the crew pretty much ignored him.

The second week was bad. He was not ignored; he was tormented. It began when a wiry man, a bosun’s mate, motioned for Bruce to join him on the ship’s fantail. Bruce smiled, thinking that he was finally going to make a friend.

The bosun grinned and said, “I am Hector.”

Still smiling, Bruce neared the bosun and was kicked in the groin. He doubled over, falling to the deck, and without a word the bosun kicked him on the top of his head. Bruce fell into a whirl of eddying color and awoke hurting.

The following day, a member of the black gang hit him with a garbage-can lid, and as Bruce reeled against a bulkhead, he tossed the lid aside and punched Bruce, twice in the chest and once in the face. When Bruce opened his eyes—a minute later? an hour?—his attacker was gone.

Bruce went to the toilet and turned on a rusty faucet. He splashed cold, salty water on his bruises and tried to understand what was happening to him. An initiation? Maybe that, but probably he was being hit because he was a stranger and life aboard ship was boring. Okay, he’d accept this reality and take what he could from it. He didn’t like being punched and the color of his own blood held no delight for him, but there were lessons to be learned here, and Bruce was determined to learn them.

The bosun initiated the third attack. This time, Bruce was ready and managed to land a blow before being knocked out. Bruce awoke with water in his face. He looked up and saw the bosun standing over him with an empty pail.

“I teach you,” the bosun said.

And he did—in odd, five-minute intervals between jobs, he educated Bruce in dirty fighting. The lessons amounted to this: trust no one, hit first, preferably with something harder than a fist, and then hit or kick again, until your enemy can no longer resist. Then hit him once more. Or kick him. Or stomp him.

Bruce had an idea of his own. Hector, and a lot of his other shipmates, were bigger and more powerful than he—the hard labor he’d been doing for months they’d been doing for years. But none of them seemed particularly bright, including Hector. By contrast, Bruce
was
smart, as a whole battery of IQ tests had proven.

Okay, I can’t outmuscle them, but I
can
outthink them . . .

When they were within sight of land, Bruce asked the captain about his salary. Salary? The captain chuckled. Bruce was a stowaway and stowaways did not get paid.

After the ship was off-loaded and the crew had gone ashore, the bosun, Hector, invited Bruce to the fantail. “Let’s see how good I teach you,” he said.

Okay, pal, you asked for it
. . .

While Bruce was thinking about his first move, Hector knocked him down and began kicking him senseless.

Every morning Alfred Pennyworth waited by Wayne Manor’s main gate, next to the mailbox, until the postman arrived in his odd, three-wheeled vehicle with the day’s delivery, and every morning Alfred thumbed through the envelopes, hoping for a letter from Bruce. But there were only bills, and occasionally a postcard from his niece in London.

Something brand-new was happening to Bruce, something he could not have imagined eighteen months ago, when he was the soft and pampered scion of a wealthy family. He was starving. He knew that his body had exhausted its store of fat and was consuming its muscle and that soon he would collapse and would probably lay in the filthy street until he died, unnoticed unless someone decided his rags were worth stealing. How long since he had eaten? At least three days. It had been a cup of undercooked rice and Bruce had gulped it down almost without chewing.

He sat with his back against a tree. He raised his eyes and looked out over the African marketplace. There were dozens of tents and tables heaped with fruit, vegetables, curried meats, and a throng of colorfully clad shoppers inspecting, haggling, buying, and hurrying off to feed their families.

Bruce forced himself to his feet and joined the throng. He stopped by a fruit vendor, and as the old woman behind the table eyed him suspiciously, he picked up a mango in his right hand and made a show of examining it as with his left hand he stole a plum from the table and dropped it into his pocket.

He hurried into an alleyway and bit into his plum and almost fainted from joy—the sweetness of it, the juiciness—nothing had ever tasted so good. Nothing
could
ever taste so good.

He heard something, the slightest stirring, and saw a child, about four, squatting in a doorway. The child, a boy, was naked and covered with grime. His ribs stretched his skin and his eyes, wide and glazed, were in hollows above his cheeks.

Bruce gazed down at the half plum in his fingers—
the wonderful plum!
—and then handed it to the boy. Bruce could probably get more food. The boy probably could not.

Later, Bruce was able to steal a handful of dates, and eat them, greedily sucking the last bits of flavor from the pits.

I’ve committed, my first crime. I’m a
criminal.
Well, well, well
. . .

The next day, Bruce got himself hired by a tramp steamer and in the following months saw a lot of Africa and some of Asia. He jumped ship in Marrakesh, slept under a bridge for a couple of nights, and signed onto a tanker bound for the United Kingdom.

He hung around London long enough to learn something about stealing cars from the ship’s cook, then shipped out on a freighter and found himself in Shanghai. One of the deckhands from his last ship had a way to make some quick, easy money, and Bruce was interested. This was yet another opportunity to do what he had been trying to do for months, to understand the kind of human being who had deprived him of all he cherished—the Joe Chill kind. He went with the man, whom he had nicknamed “Stocky,” and together they traveled by taxi to an airport terminal at the edge of the city. There, they sat on a bench across the street and watched laborers fill a truck with crates. That night, Bruce felt fear, the fear of one preparing to commit a crime, and perversely, he was exhilarated by it.

Stocky and Bruce hijacked the truck: no problem, the driver was not about to be a hero. After the job was done and they were speeding down a dark road, Stocky driving, Bruce suddenly began to laugh. Soon he was laughing and gasping and pounding the dashboard and Stocky, who was behind the wheel, began laughing, too.

“We
did
it,” Bruce said in English, then repeated himself in Mandarin.

Stocky drove into a warehouse near the docks. The two men climbed down from the truck’s cab, still laughing.

In Mandarin, Bruce asked Stocky, “Where is your friend? The man who is supposed to meet us?”

“Not a friend,” Stocky replied. “The friend of a friend.”

Something in Stocky’s tone of voice, in his body language . . . Bruce knew he was being lied to and began looking for an exit. He was considering a run at a side door when it slammed open and at almost the same second every other door in the warehouse opened and uniformed policemen with guns and truncheons ran through them, shouting in Mandarin. The policemen surrounded Bruce and several other men who had been in the warehouse when he arrived, pointed guns at them, handcuffed them, and shoved them down to sitting positions on the floor. Stocky had vanished. Obviously, he had made a deal of some kind, traded Bruce for his own freedom. The policemen began unloading the truck and stacking the crates near where Bruce sat.

One of the policemen, a young man with cold eyes, asked Bruce his name in English.

Bruce considered telling him and decided against it. He did not want to tarnish his family’s reputation, but more important, he did not want anyone in Gotham hearing about what happened and sending help. Whatever Bruce was doing—and he still was not sure what it was—he knew he had to do it alone.

“I would rather not tell you,” Bruce said in Mandarin.

“Fool, what do I care what your name is? You are a criminal.”

“I am not a criminal.”

“Tell that to the guy who owned these,” the policeman said, kicking a crate bearing a Wayne Enterprises logo.

Bruce expected a formal internment procedure: a reading of his rights, an appearance before a judge, perhaps even a phone call. Because he continued to refuse to give the policemen his name, he got none of that. Instead, he was put into a cell with four other men. After a few days behind bars, someone got him released. He never learned the identity of his benefactor, but he was met outside the jail by a small Asian man wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a diamond ring on his right index finger who asked him if he might be interested in some work in Bhutan. It seemed to be a given that the work would be illegal.

Why not? I’m already a criminal . . .

He was taken to a small airstrip in a rural area and put on a World War Two vintage aircraft, a refitted old DC 6, with smoking engines and no passenger amenities, and flown over the Himalayas to a similar airstrip in southwestern China. He never learned what he was supposed to do there because a company of soldiers armed with automatic weapons erupted from the surrounding woods as soon as the plane’s engines had stopped and placed Bruce and the two pilots under arrest. Obviously, another deal had been made, somewhere, by someone, with Bruce as a bargaining chip.

As in Shanghai, Bruce refused to give the authorities his name. He was taken to a prison near some farmland and told he would remain there until he cooperated.

Was this the time to reveal his identity? To summon Alfred or a Wayne Enterprises lawyer and go home? No. He still didn’t know whatever it was he had to learn. He had a hunch, though, that his next lessons would be painful.

The first night, in the mess hall, as Bruce was carrying a metal bowl of gruel to a table, one of the inmates stuck out a foot and tripped him. Bruce broke his fall with his left hand and the bowl skittered across the floor. The man who had tripped Bruce drew back a foot to kick. Bruce grabbed the man’s other leg and yanked and as the man was falling Bruce threw an awkward punch and caught the man under the chin. The man’s head snapped back and struck a chair and he lay still. Bruce got up and looked around: the guards, who had not moved from their places along the wall, were grinning. Apparently they enjoyed a good fight.

Bruce waited, without supper, until he was returned to his cell. He slept fitfully that night.

He awoke to find his cellmate, a man who looked to be at least eighty and was almost as skinny as the child Bruce had shared his plum with in Africa, staring at him. Already, the corridors of the prison rang with shouts and the occasional scream.

The next incident happened during the afternoon recreation break in the yard. The day was bleak. A cold drizzle was falling, turning the tan dust on the ground to a dark brown mud. Bruce was walking toward the cover of a tower when someone grabbed him from behind in a choke hold. Bruce drove his elbow into his attacker’s ribs, twice, and reached back, grabbed the man’s hair, pulled forward, and then got his shoulder under the attacker’s chest and heaved. The attacker, a young man whose skin was mottled and flaking, fell into the mud.

Bruce continued to the tower and hunkered down, scanning the yard, aware that he was being stared at.
This is bad,
he realized. Life had been hard on the ship and he had acquired a few scars, but none of the crewmen had actually wanted to kill him. They tormented him because they were bored, and sometimes drunk, and they did not know how else to amuse themselves. But here, these men . . . they were full of hate and rage and he was a stranger, not of their kind, and so he was their natural enemy, and enemies died.

FROM THE JOURNALS OF RĀ’S AL GHŪL

A young man from the United States has come to my attention. He is of wealthy parentage but seems to have retained a modicum of character despite a privileged upbringing. At this time he is in a Chinese prison. I can change that quite easily, as the warden of the prison has long been a paid ally of ours. It may be that I will investigate this Bruce Wayne further, although he will undoubtedly prove to be as disappointing as his many predecessors.

Bruce and his ancient cellmate were in the mess hall, waiting to have gruel plopped into their bowls.

“They are going to fight you,” the old man said.

“Again?”

“Until they kill you.”

The cook dumped a ladle full of gruel into Bruce’s bowl. “Can’t they kill me
before
breakfast?”

Bruce moved toward a table. He stopped. His way was blocked by an enormous man with dozens of knife scars on his face and arms. Five other prisoners stood behind him. None seemed friendly.

The scarred man spoke English in an accent Bruce could not identify. “You are in hell.”

He punched Bruce in the face and Bruce fell.

“I am the devil,” the scarred man said.

Bruce got to his feet and smiled as he brushed dust from his shirt. “You’re not the devil—you’re practice.”

The scarred man swung. Bruce caught the fist, kicked the man’s knee, and as the man fell, Bruce kneed his face.

The scarred man’s five companions all charged at once—a mistake, because they got in each other’s way. Bruce fought, using everything he had learned on the ship, everything he had seen in back-alley brawls, and some things he did not know he knew.