Batman 5 - Batman Begins (16 page)

Bruce asked Jessica where the Applied Sciences Department was and, following her directions, took an elevator to the sub-basement level and went through a heavy metal fire door into a windowless chamber. There was a single lightbulb hanging from a wire over a battered steel desk. A wiry African American man in his fifties, wearing a rumpled suit and a bright red bow tie, sat behind it and contemplated Bruce over the top of his glasses.

“You’re Bruce Wayne?” he asked in the laziest drawl Bruce had ever heard.

“Guilty.”

“Lucius Fox.” Fox came around the desk and shook Bruce’s hand. Nothing about how he moved was as lazy as his drawl. “What did they tell you this place was?”

“They didn’t tell me anything.”

Fox chuckled. “Earle told me
exactly
what it was when he sent me here—”

Fox flicked a switch on the wall, the sudden light revealing that they were standing in a massive warehouse. Crates and boxes and bales, many under dust covers, were stacked everywhere.

“—A dead end,” Fox continued, “where I couldn’t cause any more trouble for the board.”

“You were on the board?”

“Back when your father ran things.”

“You knew my father?”

“Sure. Helped him build his monorail. Want to see some of our more interesting stuff?”

“Sure.”

Fox led Bruce around a stack of crates to a steel box and pulled from it what looked like a small electric drill and a coil of thin wire. “If you’re a climber, you’ll like this. Pneumatic. Magnetic grapple.”

Bruce lifted the gear and bounced it on his palm. “Light.”

“Strong, too,” Fox said. “Monofilament tested to 350 pounds.”

Bruce picked up something else. “This go with it?”

“Yep. A harness. Try it on.”

Bruce slipped his arms through the shoulder straps and tightened a wide belt around his waist, then shoved the pneumatic gun into the belt buckle. It clicked into place.

“What use did you have in mind for this stuff?” Bruce asked.

“Your father’s philosophy was, if you have an idea for a gadget, build it first, figure out what it’s good for later.”

“A variation on ‘if you build it they will come.’ ”

“I guess.”

Bruce shed the harness and followed Fox deeper into the jungle of crates.

“Beautiful project, that elevated train of your father’s,” Fox reminisced. He had apparently forgotten what they had been talking about. “Routed the tracks right into Wayne Tower, along with the water and power utilities. Made Wayne Tower the unofficial heart of Gotham. Course, Earle’s left it to rot . . .”

Fox stopped and peered at the stenciled lettering on a narrow, upright crate. “Found it. Knew it was here someplace.”

He lifted the lid up and set it aside. A dark bodysuit hung inside the crate. “The nomex survival suit for advanced infantry. Kevlar bi-weave, reinforced joints . . .”

Bruce rubbed the fabric between thumb and forefinger. “Tear resistant?”

“This sucker’ll stop a knife.”

“Bulletproof?”

“Anything short of a direct hit with a large-caliber slug.”

“Why didn’t they put it into production?”

Fox sighed. “The bean counters figured a soldier’s life wasn’t worth the three hundred grand.”

“I’d like to borrow it. For spelunking. You know, cave diving.”

Fox shrugged and put the lid back on the crate. “You get a lot of gunfire down in those caves?”

Bruce smiled. “Never hurts to be ready for the worst. Listen, Mr. Fox, I’d rather Mr. Earle didn’t know about me borrowing . . .”

“Mr. Wayne, the way I see it”—Lucius Fox swept his arm in a wide arc—“all this stuff is yours anyway.”

“I have another request, Mr. Fox.”

“Fire away.”

“I’m in need of a kind of . . . tool belt, I guess you could call it. Do you think I could keep the harness and belt as well?”

“Of course.”

Bruce smiled. He would never again have to hold an attaché case between his teeth.

A
t nine the next morning, Alfred telephoned the
Gotham Times
Society Page editor to report that Bruce Wayne, son of the late Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Wayne, had returned from an extended sojourn abroad and had taken up residence at the ancestral Wayne Manor.

By one that afternoon, eleven other news organizations had called and three local television stations had sent reporters and camera crews to interview Bruce, who took the calls and met with the newspeople. He smiled, chatted, showed them around the estate.

All the local papers ran brief items about Bruce’s return, though none of them were in the main news sections, and most of the local radio stations mentioned it during their hourly news breaks. One of the television outlets ignored the story completely and the other two ran it as thirty-second items right after the weather forecasts.

A television reporter named Kassie Cane told her boyfriend why Bruce Wayne’s return got so little play.

“There was no way we could make a story of it,” Kassie said. “I mean, I wanted to . . . good-looking guy, richer than Croesus, return of the prodigal, all that . . . But I swear, talking to him is like talking to a wall. The lights are on but nobody’s home. He was nice, even kind of sweet, and he obviously wanted to please us, but there was no personality there.”

“Who’s Croesus?” her boyfriend asked.

At eleven-thirty that night, Bruce thumbed the off button on the remote and the television screen he and Alfred had been watching went dark.

“Your fellow Gothamites seem remarkably unperturbed by your reappearance among them,” Alfred said.

“They
do
seem to be containing their excitement. One has to admire their self-control.”

“I take it that all has gone as you wish.”

“The old ‘hide in plain sight’ ploy. Still one of the great ones.”

Bruce, wearing the climbing harness and belt that Fox had sent to Wayne Manor, hung thirty feet above the cave floor, hammering a bracket into the stone. A line of industrial lamps hung from the bracket and an electric wire ran from the lamps to a generator below.

“Okay,” Bruce shouted. “Give it a try.”

Alfred threw a switch and the lamps flickered on, dimly lighting the length of one wall and hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling.

“At least you’ll have company,” Alfred said, staring up at a throng of bats.

Bruce rappeled down, unhooked his rope, moved to a wrought-iron spiral staircase at one end of the cavern, and shook it.

“This was grandfather’s?” he asked.

“Great-grandfather’s. During the Civil War he was involved with the underground railroad. He secretly helped transport escaped slaves. I suspect these caverns came in handy.”

Bruce shone a flashlight beam on the small river and then on the place where the water disappeared under rocks. He stepped over the rocks and continued following the river around a bend until he stopped and stared at what his flashlight beam was revealing: a beautiful curtain of water.

“Alfred, come here,” Bruce shouted, and his words echoed throughout the cavern. He hopped over slick, glistening rocks and reached out to touch the waterfall.

The following day, Bruce was back at work in the cave. He brought a few items down with him: tools, lumber, some apples, and the sooty, bloody ninja suit he’d brought from Kathmandu—his first trophy. He had fashioned a rough worktable by putting a board between two sawhorses and laid on it two bronze gauntlets, the ones he had salvaged from Rā’s al Ghūl’s monastery. He picked up a battery-powered paint sprayer and gave them a matte-black finish. Next, he lay the combat suit he had gotten from Lucius Fox on his makeshift trestle and sprayed
that
black.

“Ohhh-kay,”
he murmured.

Alfred descended the spiral staircase carrying an armful of rolled papers. He spread them onto the table and said, “I believe I have our problems solved.”

“Tell me,” Bruce said.

Alfred pointed to a diagram. “If we order the main point of this . . . cowl? If we order that from Singapore—”

“Via a shell corporation.”

“Indeed. Then, quite separately, place an order through a Chinese manufacturer for these—”

He pointed to a drawing of what looked like a pair of horns.

Bruce nodded. “Put it together ourselves.”

“Precisely. Of course, they’ll have to be large orders to avoid suspicion.”

“How large?”

“Say, ten thousand.”

“At least we’ll have spares.” As Bruce was refolding the schematics, he said, “The cave still needs a lot of work to be what I want it to be.”

“And what exactly is that, Master Bruce?”

Bruce hesitated, gazing up into the darkness at the top of the cavern. “A workshop, of course. A laboratory. A place to store things. A garage and . . . a place to be who I’m becoming. A place fit for a
bat man
to live. And some other stuff . . . TV cameras to scan all the roads in the area so I don’t get surprised coming or going. And I think we should have a second way in and out in case something blocks the pantry. We’ll need carpentry, masonry, electronics, maybe hydraulics . . . a lot of skills we don’t have.”

“Perhaps not yet. But the world is brimming with information and we have access to most of it.”

“So you’re saying we can do the work ourselves?”

“We managed the lights, didn’t we?”

“That we did, Alfred. That we did.”

I
t was a few minutes after ten and already Falcone’s club was filled to capacity. The air was dense with smoke and liquor fumes and occasionally the hoot of a ship’s horn could be heard from outside, over the sound of the three-piece jazz combo that was mostly ignored by the clubbers.

Judge Faden sat between two young women who wore satiny cocktail dresses; he had a drink in one hand and a green cigar in the other. Carmine Falcone stopped next to the judge and put a friendly hand on his shoulder, then moved away.

“Carmine,” the judge shouted. “Where are you going?”

Falcone looked back over his shoulder. “Duty calls. You have yourself a good time, Judge.”

The judge assured Falcone that he would, finished his drink, and whispered something to one of the young women. He and the woman rose and threaded their way to the front of the club, went up the flight of steps and across the neon-lit sidewalk to a waiting limousine. Faden opened the door, bowed ceremoniously, and guided the woman into the car. A stooped man, obviously a street person, scurried from where a fire burned in an oil barrel nearby, leaving a companion who was wearing a fawn-colored, cashmere overcoat to continue warming himself at the flames. He went to the limo’s rear door and, with a foot, prevented Judge Faden from pulling it shut.

“Help a guy out?” he asked the judge.

“Get away,” the judge said, and the woman giggled.

The homeless person seemed to slip and fall halfway into the car. He was muttering an apology when the uniformed driver grabbed the back of his collar and yanked. The driver flung him to the sidewalk and kicked him.

The second man by the fire shouted, “Leave him alone. Let him be.”

The limo sped off, bumping on the rough pavement toward a beltway that led out of the city. The man who had been kicked smiled and straightened and looked at a tiny video receiver he was holding waist-high. On it, in grainy black-and-white, were the images of Judge Faden and his companion sitting in the backseat of the limo.

“The picture’s not great,” Bruce said. “But it will do. It will certainly do.”

Detective Flass entered Falcone’s club by a side door and sat across from the mob boss.

“I need you at the docks tomorrow night,” Falcone said.

“Problem?”

“Insurance. I don’t want any problems with this last shipment.”

“Sure,” Flass said. “Word on the street is you got a beef with someone in the D.A.’s office.”

“Is that right?”

“And that you’ve offered a price on doing something about it.”

“What’s your point, Flass?”

“You’ve seen this girl? Cute little assistant D.A. That’s a lot of heat to bring down, even in this town. Even for you, Carmine.”

“Never underestimate Gotham. Besides, people get mugged on the way home from work every day.”