Wayne of Gotham (13 page)

“I shall, Mr. Grayson,” Doppel responded, using the door to push Bruce the rest of the way onto the stoop. The closing door nearly cut off her words. “Do call again.”

H
e stepped down the stairs of the Brownstone on Murphy Street with a book wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with string turning over in his hands.

Bruce moved with quick steps toward the intersection with Elm Avenue—contemplating why every city in the United States seemed to have a street named after that particular tree—and descended the stairs of a subway station. He had unwrapped the book in his hands, discovering it had only a fading embossed year on its cover: 1957. Bruce opened the old diary and began reading. A security camera on the entrance ceiling recorded him reaching the bottom of the stairs but not reaching the subway platform. To the ever watching eyes of Gotham, he had vanished.

DIARY OF ERNST RICHTER
(
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL
G
ERMAN
)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1957: Regents are idiots! Shortsighted fools. Dr. Hemmingway called me a communist sympathizer! Me! And Professor Goldstein said I was calling into question the reputation of the hospital and the university. This from a Jew, no less! After all the effort the Americans made to bring me and my family here—to give us this new life so they could have the profit of my research—now they do not want it? They cannot respect it or me? And now they accuse me of being a Stalinist—after I fled the Russians with the Americans bearing Promethean gifts! Almost thirty years of research, much of it practical, and now they want nothing to do with it? What am I doing here?

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1957: New gaggle of interns today. Goldberg had me take them in hand as punishment, no doubt, for my accent. Hate to leave Juliet and Mari on the weekend, but I cannot afford to upset the hospital bosses further. One was more promising than the rest of the dull, waddling gaggle they sent me: a young man named Thomas Wayne. He is bright and promising—and apparently very wealthy as well. He takes great interest in my research. Perhaps I should get to know this young man better …

Gotham University Hospital / Gotham / 1:56 p.m. / October 5, 1957

Thomas pushed his way toward the front of the lecture hall. The smell of the paint on the walls was still fresh. The Kane Foundation—ostensibly directed by Roddy Kane but largely influenced by the pet projects of his daughter Martha—had recently funded this new research wing of the hospital. Thomas smiled slightly at the thought, because while the building had been funded, the equipment needed to run it had not. The wing was, so far, a very public gesture struggling to find practical use. The chairs were of new, hardened plastic. The desks were of a tough new Masonite finish with gleaming surfaces. The linoleum tiles were polished to a shine. But many of the students using the facility were left to scrounge their own diagnostic tools and pool their own medical books to fill the empty shelves of the research library. This was not the fault of Martha or her father's tax-sheltered charities so much as the regents of the university, who could easily find matching funds for the construction of buildings—the literally concrete and very visible symbols of Kane's generosity. University presidents had difficulty impressing wealthy alumni or prospective star students with tours through ephemeral principles, philosophies, or concepts.

Thomas promised himself to do something about that.

He made his way down the aisle against the flow of other interns, who were exiting the hall as quickly as possible. Several of them were laughing and at least one of them called out to Thomas, but his attention was focused on the lectern at the bottom of the hall.

The doctor gathering his notes there was a slight man almost completely bald except for a closely cut swath of white, bristling hair extending from one large ear to another around the back of his head. He had eyebrows like white brushes and intense green eyes. Most striking was the long scar that extended from just above his right eye down his right cheek, cutting through the right brow. He had high and prominent cheekbones above a narrow, jutting jaw that seemed to project an air of constant defiance. He wore his doctor's smock that had been cleaned to an almost blazing white. There were razor-straight creases in his black slacks and a mirror shine on his shoes. His instructions to the new interns at the hospital had been given with a thick German accent and an almost obligatory edge of contempt.

“Dr. Richter!” Thomas called as he neared the podium. “Sir?”

The doctor looked up, puzzled to hear his name falling from the lips of an unfamiliar intern. “Yes … who are you? What do you want?”

“Sir, my name is Thomas Wayne.”

“You are a new intern, no?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“And why am I spending my valuable time listening to you, Dr. Wayne?”

Thomas knew he was giving Richter a stupid grin, but he plunged on anyway. “I just wanted to tell you that I am a great admirer of your work, sir. I was at your lecture at Harvard last year. Your ideas on utilizing an engineered virus as a positive carrier were groundbreaking.”

Richter offered a slight, rueful smile. “I must congratulate you, Dr. Wayne. My interns usually do not have the courage to attempt flattering me until their second year.”

“They should take more initiative,” Thomas offered. “Perhaps have a little more vision?”

“Are you a man of such vision, then, Dr. Wayne?” Richter said, setting down his notes on the lectern and then gripping it on either side as he looked down on Thomas.

“Maybe I'm a man in search of a vision,” Thomas answered, pushing his hands down into the pockets of his lab coat.

The Bowery / Gotham / 9:04 p.m. / October 8, 1957

“Good to see you, Mr. Wayne.” Lewis Moxon thrust his hand out, a genuine smile splitting his face. “I was hoping to see you again. Welcome back to the Klatch.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Moxon,” Thomas said, matching the firm, companionable grip with his own.

“Lew to my friends,” Moxon replied. “You call me Lew.”

“Then I insist on being Thomas,” Wayne replied. He had not quite gotten the knack of the whole beat generation's dress code. He was in an argyle patterned sweater and loafers, but at least he wore his collar open and had lost the bow tie. “Is Martha here yet?”

“Sure, sure,” Moxon replied, his smile fading a bit. “She's waiting down on the floor with Celia and that Sinclair prick. Thomas, maybe you could have a word with her about him. He's bad news.”

“Denholm?” Thomas laughed. “He's a bit rough around the edges, but he's a straight arrow. The guy volunteers with Celia out at the orphanage. He's helping her straighten out the books over there on his own dime.”

“Yeah?” Moxon replied. “I've no doubt he's doing something with the books, but I don't think it's
his
dimes he's concerned about. Look, Mr. Wayne—”

“Thomas,” he corrected. “Just Thomas, Lew.”

“Right, Thomas,” Moxon nodded. “Look, you seem like a nice guy. It's out of my jurisdiction, but somebody needs to pull in the reins on your friend Martha. She's got a classy chassis, don't get me wrong, but she's drivin' her life just a little too fast. Don't get me wrong, pal. She's all right in my book, but trouble just seems to follow her and she never seems to see the train coming until it's too late.”

“Martha's a good egg, Lew,” Thomas said, trying to keep up in Lew's wake as they moved through the liquid crowd flowing around them. “She's just like you and me, Lew: trying to survive the world our parents left us.”

“Well, I'd be a lot happier if she'd slow down a little, because she's liable to total her life before she's had a chance to hold the pink slip,” Lew grumbled. “Maybe we all would.”

“What did you say, Lou?” Thomas asked, the noise in the café swelling just as they reached the top of the metal stairs.

Moxon turned suddenly to face Thomas. “Look, can I bend your ear a minute?”

“Lou, I really ought to be getting down to—”

There was something in the look of Moxon's eyes that made him stop; something that both warmed him and shook him to the core.

Fear and hope all at once.

“Sure, Lou … I can spare you a few minutes.”

Lou nodded. He turned from the top of the stairs to a heavy black door set in the wall. He opened it quickly, gesturing for Thomas to follow.

They stepped into a hallway that ran back into the building. There was a staircase and an elevator on the left. The elevator opened and out stepped one of Lew's waitresses, a tray of drinks balanced on one hand while she patted her hair back into place with the other. She nearly dropped the tray when she saw Lew, who turned to the right and opened a door with a frosted glass panel set in the top and the single word “Office” painted on the surface.

Beyond was a waiting room with two overstuffed leather chairs and a matching couch. The couch leather was stained and worn but still largely intact.

A very large, broad-shouldered man in an ill-fitting gray suit dropped the
Life
magazine he was thumbing through and stood up at once, his hand reaching without conscious thought beneath the lapel of his coat.

“Relax, Donnegan,” Lew said to the gorilla in a suit. “Go get yourself a sandwich or something.”

Donnegan slipped his hand out from his coat and stepped around Thomas, his steely eyes never leaving him as he stepped through the outer door.

“Public relations?” Thomas asked as the door closed.

“Just another gift from my father,” Lew laughed as he opened the inner door, gesturing for Thomas to go through.

The office had too much furniture in it. The desk was finished cherrywood, as was the matching credenza behind it. Two more large leather chairs faced the desk, which had a high-backed swivel chair behind it. All of this was difficult to see beneath a thick patina of papers carefully stacked everywhere on the desk as well as the credenza. This surprised Thomas; this was a working man's office rather than a showplace. The right-hand wall was fitted with one-way mirrored glass. Thomas looked through it into the club below, his eyes fixing on Martha curled up against Denholm Sinclair.

“He should drop dead,” Lew said, coming to stand next to Thomas.

“She says she's in love with him,” Thomas said with practiced detachment in his voice.

“Sinclair's a shuckster, and he's takin' her for a ride in more ways than one.” Lew shook his head.

“She's a big girl, Lew,” Thomas said quietly. “I never could tell her what to do. And now she's all grown up.”

“That she is,” Lew said, nodding.

“But you didn't invite me in here just to watch Martha Kane,” Thomas said, turning from the window and setting himself slowly into one of the large leather chairs.

“Right,” Lew said, swallowing hard and adjusting his bow tie as though it had suddenly gotten too tight. He cleared his throat and stepped back over to the desk. The high-back chair squealed slightly as he settled into it and then leaned forward to move aside three piles of papers that were obstructing his clear view of Thomas. He took a deep breath and launched into a cascade of words. “Thomas, you know who my old man is?”

“Who hasn't heard of Julius Moxon?” Thomas said carefully as he pressed his fingertips together.

“Well, he ain't exactly
Father Knows Best
, if you know what I mean,” Lew replied. “What he wants, he gets … and what he can't have, he takes.”

“Sounds familiar enough,” Thomas said, folding his hands in his lap.

“Yeah?” Lewis said, leaning forward, his own hands folded on the desk. “You're all right in my book, Thomas. Maybe we have a lot more in common than most people would think. We both come from wealthy families, and I think I know you well enough to say that we're a lot alike, you and I. I mean, sure, our daddies are rich and powerful but … but we don't have to be who our fathers are. Okay, maybe you had a great childhood—”

“I wouldn't count on that,” Thomas whispered.

“Yeah? Well, me neither! And now I can't get away from being twelve years old my whole life,” Lewis sneered. “My old man, Julie, owns me … still. Me, I don't like being owned. I built this club from the ground up, practically with my own hands, Wayne, and it's a successful business, too. We're in the black and making everybody good money, but that ain't enough for my old man. It ain't
enough
money, he says! He thinks I'm running a hobby here—clean enough to give him something respectable to point to when the feds or the press starts nosing about, but nothing he would consider to be a
life.
So I'm looking for the exit—not from this club, see, 'cause I love this place—but from my old man and his so-called family. Only he holds all the paper on this place, and he won't hand it over to me 'cause it makes him look good to have his name on the title.”