Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (3 page)

Some Gothamites, confused by conflicting reports, thought that the bat-man had caused the crash, others regarded him as a hero, and still others, perhaps the majority, doubted his existence.

When Alfred Pennyworth carried a tray of toast and coffee into Bruce Wayne’s bedroom area, he found it empty, though the bed had been slept in—not always the case where Alfred’s employer was concerned. He went down a long, empty corridor. Twice he had to flatten himself against a wall and inch past cartons that were still unpacked and were in the way. They had occupied this penthouse for less than a month and there was still work to do before Alfred could pronounce it livable.

Bruce Wayne was in an empty area performing one of the strange, dancelike routines Alfred knew was called a
kata,
and whose purpose was to train in Asian martial arts.

“Something Rā’s al Ghūl taught you?” Alfred asked.

Bruce finished his exercise before answering: leapt and kicked simultaneously, and landed lightly on the balls of his feet. “Nope,” he said. “Korean master. Last I heard, he was living in the Changansan mountains.

“Does this resumption of martial-arts practice indicate that you plan further nocturnal forays?”

“Not necessarily. I’m used to being in shape. Makes me feel good. I tried just sitting around yesterday, and it gave me the crawlies.” Bruce looked at the tray. “That for me?”

Alfred nodded and put the tray on a windowsill. Bruce poured himself a cup of coffee.

“May I assume,” Alfred asked, “that you’re done with . . . busting heads?”

Bruce sipped his coffee. “I prefer to use the term ‘vigorous persuasion.’ What you’re really asking is, am I done with Batman? I’ve given it a lot of thought these past few days and . . . no, I’m not.”

“Rā’s al Ghūl is dead.”

“But there are others, close to home, who are just as dangerous. The job isn’t done. For openers, there’s the Maroni thing, the Rossi thing . . . I’m far from done . . .”

Alfred sighed. “I suppose I should begin to shop for some new equipment.”

“For here? No, this room isn’t nearly big enough. No room in the penthouse is.”

“May I remind you that the cave beneath the mansion is . . .”

“. . . Temporarily inaccessible, yes,” finished Bruce. “That’s something that has a high priority. What I have in mind will take a lot of hard work. You can expect a whopping Christmas bonus this year.”

“Splendid. In the meantime, if you insist on continuing your nocturnal exploits, what will you do for a headquarters? You can hardly wear the cape and mask and pass the doorman downstairs without being noticed.”

“I think I’ve got that covered. I’ll show you the place this afternoon. With a little elbow grease, we should be able to transform it into a bunker of sorts.”

“My life,” Alfred said, “becomes fuller and fuller.”

Bruce finished his coffee as Alfred carried the empty tray to the kitchen.

I
t was what most of Gotham’s citizens thought was a typical afternoon in the life of Bruce Wayne, playboy. A quick stop at a gallery opening, where he ignored the photographs on display but managed to get the phone number of the pretty receptionist. Lunch at a hip downtown bistro. A dash out to the country club, where he decided
not
to play golf but instead chased the female employees around with his clubs.

A trip back to central Gotham, waving at passersby from the window of his steel gray Lamborghini Murcielago.

Bruce drove the Lamborghini into the basement garage of the tall building he currently lived in, managed to knock over a Vespa scooter on the way to his parking slot, paid the Vespa’s owner twice what it would cost to replace it, stashed the Lamborghini next to the other Wayne vehicle, a Rolls-Royce, and rode the private elevator to his penthouse. There, he found that Alfred had company. He and Rachel Dawes were perched on stools in the kitchen, facing each other across a marble countertop, clutching mugs of what Bruce was sure was tea, deep in conversation. Both looked at him when he entered, and he called out a greeting.

“What brings you uptown?” he asked Rachel. “Or do you come
down
town . . . I can never remember where that office of yours is.”

“Up
town, as you well know.”

“I thought you’d be busy . . . middle of a weekday and all.”

“The case I was trying was plea bargained. No court time needed.”

“Tell me . . . is that good or bad? This law stuff . . . so confusing.”

“You don’t have to do your act with me, Bruce. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t. It annoys me.”

“Sorry,” Bruce said.

“I hope so.”

“What are you and Alfred up to?”

“I came to see
you.”

“Okay. Shall we go into the living room?”

“Here is fine.”

“More tea?” Alfred asked.

“That would be nice,” Rachel said. Alfred refilled Rachel’s cup and poured one for Bruce, then excused himself.

Bruce looked at Rachel across the counter. She had aged, but no one could complain about that. She had always been
cute;
now she was, by any reasonable criterion,
beautiful.
Beautiful and strong, and ferocious, compassionate, and brave.

“What you’re doing is wrong,” she said.

“Wrecking sports cars? Dating debutantes? What exactly . . .”

“Please, Bruce. No masquerade, not with me.”

“Fair enough.”

“There’s something else. I’d like you to abandon your
other
masquerade.”

“Which one would that be?”

“The Batman.”

Bruce hesitated and sipped tea, then set down the mug. “Okay. What’s your objection to . . . my new life?”

“I think you’ve begun to enjoy it. Too much. Oh, I’m sure you’ve constructed an elaborate rationalization—you’re saving Gotham, et cetera et cetera et cetera . . . I’m afraid that sooner or later you’ll become addicted to it, and that will cause you to cross the line.”

“You’re afraid I’ll kill someone.”

“Or cause someone to die . . . what you’d call ‘collateral damage.’ And you’ll rationalize, tell yourself that it was necessary, it couldn’t be helped, you were only following the dictates of the moment . . . Does that sound familiar to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“You should read history books. Then you might recognize some of the excuses war criminals offer.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’ll
try
to be careful, at least at first. But you’ll be creating situations that you won’t be able to control, situations in which people panic. I deal with cops and crooks all day, every day. I know what can happen to a person.”

“With all due humility . . . I’m not just any
person
.”

“You’re richer than most. You’re also incredibly intelligent, athletic, handsome, determined, motivated. But you swim in the same gene pool as we lesser mortals. You’re fallible, and you’re going to fail and someone
will
die. Then you’ll either destroy yourself with remorse or become a homicidal sociopath. I don’t know which would be worse.”

“Sometimes violence is necessary.”

“Yes. To save your life or someone else’s life. But not as policy—you’re proposing to use violence to solve enormously complex problems, and when has that ever worked? And it’s been tried, oh, has it been tried! Remember the old definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

“Rachel, I promise you . . . I won’t go off the deep end.”

“I think you will.”

“You know how much I respect your opinion, but this time, you’re wrong.”

“We’ll see, then won’t we?”

“I guess we will.”

Alfred was feeling a bit guilty. He shouldn’t have been listening to the private conversation, but if information passed between those two . . . he had to know what it was. And now he did, and now he was disturbed because he shared Rachel’s misgivings. He wasn’t as alarmed as she obviously was, but . . . he tended Bruce Wayne’s wounds, always trying to joke about them to lighten the moment, and he’d observed the subtle changes in Bruce since his return from his adventures abroad and his time with Rā’s al Ghūl. Of course, Bruce was no longer the bright, charming child he’d been when he and Alfred met and, people did change as they age; perhaps the traits Alfred was observing were simply the result of Bruce getting older. But he still couldn’t help being bothered.

When she got up to leave, he escorted Rachel to the door, told her that he would see her soon, and went to see how Bruce was enjoying his tea.

The Joker saw the bus, about a block away, and—was this great or what?—an old lady waiting near the curb. It would be a matter of perfect timing, but the Joker loved that kind of challenge. He stood directly behind the old lady. The bus came closer, closer, just a few feet away . . .

The Joker let it pass.

Then he tapped the old lady on the shoulder and handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

M
idafternoon, Friday, downtown Gotham City. North Julius Street, on the edge of the financial district. Noise and confusion. Blaring horns and rumbling engines and sunlight glaring on thousands of panes of glass. A thin blue haze of exhaust fumes hanging in the air.

Above it all, on the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper still under construction, two men wearing clown masks, with weapons and tools strapped to their bodies, were standing in a vacant loft facing a ten-foot-tall window. The first of the men, whose code name was Dopey, aimed upward, fired a silenced automatic pistol at the glass, and watched shards of it fall to the floor. The second man, code named Happy, stepped to the now empty window frame and lifted what looked like a spear gun to his shoulder, aimed, squeezed the trigger, and a hook trailing a length of cable, hissed across the street and buried itself in the wall of another building. Dopey secured his end of the cable to a naked I-beam and nodded to his partner. Happy hooked a bag to the cable and sent it across the emptiness. A moment later, Happy and Dopey followed the bag, dangling from wheeled devices that fit over the line. If anyone happened to look up and see them . . .
Hey, this is Gotham City, whack-job central. Just another pair of loonies doing something loony, and if it’s interesting, maybe it’ll be on the eleven o’clock news . . .

Below, and three blocks away, a black SUV with dark-tinted windows and out-of-state license plates sped between two school buses and jerked to a stop at an intersection. The front passenger door opened, and a tall man wearing coveralls dashed from a doorway and climbed into the vehicle. Once inside, he pulled a clown mask from his pocket, pulled it on, and turned in his seat to face another clown, code named Bozo, in the driver’s seat. “Three of a kind. Let’s do this,” he said, now going by the name Grumpy.

The man in the backseat, code named Chuckles, looked up from loading a compact submachine gun, and said, “That’s it? Three guys?”

Grumpy said, “There are two on the roof. Every guy is an extra share. Five shares is plenty.”

Chuckles said, “
Six
shares. Don’t forget the guy who planned the job.”

Grumpy said, “Yeah? If he thinks he can sit it out and still take a slice then I get why they call him the Joker.”

On the rooftop, Dopey and Happy pried open an access panel. Happy paused and stared at Dopey. “Why do they call him the Joker?”

“I heard it’s ’cause he wears makeup,” Chuckles said, pulling out a thick bundle of blue CAT5 cables. “To scare people. War paint.”

Back on the street, Bozo guided the SUV to a metered parking spot in front of the bank. He switched off the engine and, without bothering to feed the meter, went into the bank. Grumpy, Bozo, and Chuckles carried assault rifles; they carried several empty duffel bags as well. Once inside, Grumpy fired a burst into the ceiling as Chuckles hit the security guard on the head with the butt of his weapon, and Bozo closed the door and lowered the blinds.

Grumpy fired another burst, and yelled, “Everybody down on the floor—now!” Customers and employees alike dropped to their hands and knees, then to their bellies. One of the senior tellers managed to press a silent-alarm button as she went down. Fifteen floors above her, on the roof, Dopey stared down at a palm-sized electronic device and heard a faint
ping.