Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (5 page)

The Chechen had always planned to kill Maroni as soon as it was convenient, but he found that their informal partnership was useful. As the Americans would say, they had each other’s back. Perhaps later, when he understood America better, the Chechen would kill Maroni, but for the time being, and for the foreseeable future, they were allies. Maroni introduced him to others of what the press called “the underworld” and, again, deals were made and everyone profited.

The Chechen bought himself a nice house in a Gotham suburb, one with a high fence and living quarters for his bodyguards and large, luxurious kennels for his dogs. The rottweilers were the animals he favored, big and nasty and ferocious, like himself. Next, he sought recreation. None of the nightspots were to his liking, nothing like the clubs he’d seen in old Hollywood movies, except for the one owned by Maroni, and the Chechen didn’t want to get
too
close to his partner because . . . well, perhaps Maroni planned to kill
him
—it was surely possible—and if he allowed himself to be distracted by the pleasures of a nightclub, the killing would be easy, and that was to say nothing of poison in the food and drink. The Chechen’s solution was the obvious one, a nightclub of his own, and it proved to be an
excellent
solution.

His nightclub was where he preferred to do business, surrounded by his rottweilers, bodyguards, and lady friends, and it was in his nightclub that he met with a small time dealer named Burton. It was a Tuesday night, not a big night in the nightclub business; there was only one couple on the dance floor, a man with white hair and a woman who looked to be in her late teens, and no one at the bar. Burton came in with his two bodyguards who took up stations opposite the Chechen’s bodyguards and the two sets of men glared at each other, hands near the lapels of their jackets, while their bosses sat in a circular banquette upholstered in rhinoceros hide and conferred.

Burton had news: he had discovered a new source of product he felt the Chechen should know about. A highly trained man with doctorates in both chemistry and medicine who was able to synthesize a product that would put the average user into orbit.

“This man has name?” the Chechen asked.

“Most people do,” Burton said. “This guy has two. The one he was born with is Jonathan Crane—”

“Sounds like sissy,” the Chechen said.

“—but the one he likes to use is the Scarecrow.”

“Sounds like sissy at costume party. Why we can trust him?”

“He has this little problem with the cops. They’d like to hang his ass on a flagpole. You maybe heard about what happened in Gotham last year? Lotta people going nuts? Crane was part’a the reason. Nobody knows all that happened, but Crane was in on it. We give him a place to work, a cut of the profit, he delivers us the goods, and we don’t haveta worry about foreign suppliers. Nice little domestic operation. Good for us, good for America.”

“You vouch for him?”

“I ain’t gonna go that far. What I’m saying is, he’s a solution to a problem. He stops being a solution, he ain’t bulletproof, know what I’m saying? You in or out?”

“In. What you need from me?”

“Right now, money. A couple days, I’ll call, set up a meet with you and Crane.”

“Deal.” The Chechen leaned back and almost smiled. “You hungry? Thirsty? You want drink? Food—steak?”

“In
your
place? Do you think I’m crazy?”

R
upert Casterbaugh was what some people, the charitable ones, would have once called a “remittance man.” Others, less charitable, might have used words like “wastrel,” “lay about,” “worthless waste of protoplasm.” He had no job, no relationships, no prospects and, truth to tell, no idea how he landed in Gotham City. But land there he did, in a studio apartment in an expensive building. This gave him a fixed address, a place for his mother to send a monthly check that paid the rent on the studio and Rupert’s other, quite modest, living expenses, and his single
major
need, the stuff he absolutely could not live without: drugs. Rupert Casterbaugh was an addict—a
junkie,
to the uncharitable and a “bright young man with a problem” to his mother—and he could and did easily blow a hundred thousand a year feeding his habit.

He was nice. Polite, well-spoken, even funny. The few women who drifted in and out of his life found him sad and in profound psychological pain, but they couldn’t help him, and neither could the platoon of therapists his mother employed from time to time. So he wandered from city to city, country to country, befogged and lonely and not caring. Gotham City? Why not? It was as good a place as any, and a man he’d met in Tangiers had set him up with a supplier, which meant that Rupert would not lack for life’s necessities once there.

The first meeting between merchant and customer was the usual—furtive and fast. But the drug, whatever it was—a white powder—the drug was way better than anything he’d ever tried, and he didn’t know why. A lot of his drug use was about, at first, killing pain and later about simply quelling the need. But
this
. . . It was always impossible to convey to lucky nonaddicts—and he admitted that they
were
lucky—why putting the liquid into a vein or sniffing the powder or puffing the pipe was happy-making. But
this
. . . he couldn’t explain it even to himself!

When the high was done, he became worried that something that powerful must have damaged his body somehow. But he could detect no new problems. He’d been undernourished for years, and pale, and a bit yellowish in certain light, and he still had all those symptoms. But no new ones. Oh, he desperately wanted some more of the white powder, but after a high, he
always
wanted and needed more. Maybe the wanting and the need were a bit more intense, but hey . . . small price to pay, right?

The second transaction was better than the first—more civilized, more friendly. The merchant came to Rupert’s apartment: no meetings on dark street corners, parks, bars. No, a call from the doorman, a doorbell ring, and in came a pleasant-looking fellow in his early 30s who introduced himself as Crane. They shook hands and Crane asked if he might trouble Rupert for a glass of water. Water was all Rupert could supply because, as usual, his pantries and refrigerator were empty, but that was okay—water was all Crane wanted, really.

Rupert handed Crane a wad of bills, which Crane did not bother to count—classy!—and received in return a baggie with a few ounces of white powder visible through the plastic.

“Try it,” Crane suggested.

Rupert snorted directly from the bag . . . and looked up to see Crane with a crude burlap mask over his head.

Why was he screaming? And why was Crane putting tape over his mouth?

He slid over an edge, and drowning or burning or being torn apart would be better than this namelessness and
no no no no no no no no no
. . .

Rupert was dead. Crane used a cell phone to call for help in removing the body. “I want to examine it more closely,” he told somebody.

The so-called
authorities
would have said that Jonathan Crane wasn’t qualified to conduct an autopsy since his license had been revoked after his activities as the Scarecrow became known. He knew this because the information appeared in the last paragraph of a story in the
Gotham Times
about the chaos in Gotham City that ended, somehow, when a commuter train car exploded. Crane had fled Arkham Asylum by then. He was in hiding and not, himself, at all certain what had happened after he’d been thwarted by that insane meddler in the bat costume; that was why he was bothering to read news reports.

Crane wondered exactly where he would examine Rupert’s body and, more particularly, Rupert’s brain. It would have to be a place with plenty of light and . . . yes, plenty of running water. Autopsies could be messy. If he were still in residence at Arkham, he would have no problem. Although the asylum was, in most ways, a bit old-fashioned, even Gothic, someone somewhere along the way had equipped it with a first-rate morgue.

That morgue was just one of the reasons Crane had found a home at Arkham. He’d found the institution’s relaxed attitude toward the silly rules of ethical practice congenial, not like his previous place of employment. Not that rules didn’t have their place, but they were for those of limited intellect who needed them, and Jonathan Crane did
not
need them because he had known from an early age that his intellect was anything but limited. He was a visionary. He was a
genius.
To hamper him in any way was to do a disservice to mankind.

The fossils he’d associated with earlier in his career were too dense, too involved in “procedure,” to comprehend the benefits Crane’s work could eventually confer on the herd known as humanity. Not that anyone doubted his brilliance. He had, after all, gotten his doctorate in psychology as the absurdly early age of twenty-one, after submitting a thesis on the etiology of the fear reflex in higher mammals, including
homo sapiens.
His dissertation committee called the paper “brilliant,” “groundbreaking,” “as important in its way as anything Freud ever wrote.” Jonathan Crane, now
Doctor
Jonathan Crane, was hired by Gotham University, the same university that had given him his degree, and ensconced in the psychology department where many predicted for him a long and distinguished career. Many, but not all. He did have a habit of annoying his colleagues, mostly by showing open contempt for achievements, ambitions and, occasionally, even their physical appearances. And he generally described his students as “dumber than pond scum.” But he
was
a professor, and weren’t professors
supposed
to be eccentric? For a while, Dr. Crane’s bad manners merely enhanced his mystique—for he did have a mystique, woven from his intelligence, youth and, yes, personal beauty. He was as handsome as he was smart, and he knew it—and let everyone else
know
he knew it.

Then, the rumors began. Only Dr. Crane and five of his grad students knew they were more than rumors, these hushed tales of illicit experiments. Some said it was just a retelling of what had happened to Richard Alport and Timothy Leary at Harvard in the sixties: certain favored youngsters fed illegal drugs by a charismatic teacher. They stopped being rumors and became facts when one of Dr. Crane’s students ran through the a plate-glass window of a department store on Christmas Eve and tried to dismember the Santa Claus mannequin who was
ho, ho, hoing
to a bunch of mannequin elves. At the emergency room, she told the admitting nurse that she was only “trying to face” her fears. Further questioning revealed her connection to Dr. Crane; she had taken a shot of what Dr. Crane called a “party potion” an hour before her collision with Santa.

That was the beginning of the end of Dr. Crane’s academic career. His situation got worse, and quickly. One of the other professors, a man Dr. Crane had treated with particular scorn, had been quietly investigating Crane’s vaunted doctoral thesis and discovered that the research was either plagiarized or faked. Crane was called before a meeting of the university staff and asked for an explanation. He had one: he said that he
knew
his conclusions were valid because his insight was so much deeper than that of his inquisitors and had chosen not to waste his valuable time doing the dreary, boring chores that would constitute “proof.” Most of the faculty wanted to fire him immediately and as publicly as possible. They were overruled by the school’s president, Dr. Titus V. Blaney, and some of them guessed why. Dr. Blaney, whose own doctorate was in psychology, had been especially voluble in praising young Crane, and had personally vouched for the dissertation. “I’d stake my reputation on this young wizard’s achievement,” he had told the
Gotham Times.
In making this statement, he
had,
in fact, staked his reputation on Crane, who now appeared to be more than an egotistical braggart; he was a
fraudulent
egotistical braggart. Not good for the university, not good for the fundraising effort and the repute of the president. A compromise was reached: Crane was quietly dismissed at the end of the semester. The public relations office distributed a press release stating that Dr. Crane was reluctantly leaving his post to pursue other opportunities, including research in the private sector.

Members of the academic community knew the real story, of course. All the men and women who had been mocked by Jonathan Crane fired up their computers and spread the word, gleefully. Apparently, the doctors at Arkham Asylum didn’t get the bad news about Dr. Crane. They hired him as chief of research and gave him license to experiment on the inmates. There, at Arkham, he had discovered that putting on a mask furthered those experiments, and gradually he developed an alter ego he called “the Scarecrow.” By then, some fellow psychologists might have said that Crane, himself, was insane.

Crane was willing to admit the possibility that he was, by clinical standards, unbalanced to the point of insanity. But what he was not ready to admit was that those standards, while relevant to most humans, were not relevant to him. He vowed to leave his brain to science when he died because he knew that he was extraordinary, and his immense gifts probably originated in his brain. In the meantime . . . he was content to be Arkham Asylum’s resident genius. He was sure that in five years, maybe less, he would arrive at a grand theory, one that would prove that fear was the basis for all of humanity’s errors and that he could
cure
fear and thus usher mankind into a true Garden of Eden, one that would endure until the sun cooled. Crane envisioned himself as the benevolent ruler of the entire planet once the fear-induced borders and barriers had been eradicated and the Earth became, truly, a brave new world. He would begin by learning to induce fear and with the knowledge he gained would learn to inoculate against it. He just needed a little more time.