Wayne of Gotham (28 page)

“They call me the Disciple,” he replied, his left hand pressing against his abdomen. Thomas could see blood seeping out between his fingers.

“The Disciple?” Wayne asked.

“
Your
Disciple, Thomas,” he replied evenly. “You made me strong. You made me wise. You made me see the purpose of my existence.”

I've got to get the authorities. I've got to buy some time.

“What … what purpose?” Thomas asked.

“To be the cure, Doctor!” Disciple smiled, his eyes bright. “We are the antibody of Gotham—my companions and I. We flow through the lifeblood of the city, searching for the antigens of crime and corruption, of intimidation and greed. Fate finds them, Chanteuse calls them home, and the Reaper … Well, he is always busy.”

“And you?”

Disciple smiled again. “Me? Why, I am the judge, the jury, and sometimes the executioner all in one.”

Keep him talking. There's got to be a way to get help.

“You've been very busy,” Thomas continued. “Too busy if the newspaper reports are true.”

“It's a living,” Disciple chuckled darkly. “But it's all been nothing compared to what's coming tonight. Moxon, Rossetti, and even Falcone all set aside their differences tonight so they could face their common enemy, but the laugh was on them. We were ready for them. Now Moxon's got a few slugs in him, and he's on his way up to the Kane Mansion with what remains of his goon squad.”

“The Kanes'?” Thomas's mind raced. “Why would he go there?”

“Last time I saw him he didn't look too good,” Disciple shrugged. “I guess his little boy bragged you up to his old man. He needs a doctor who knows how to keep his mouth shut … so he's looking for
you
.”

“Oh, no,” Thomas breathed.

“You needn't worry, Thomas. I'll take care of them; I'll put them out of their misery,” Disciple said, rubbing his large powerful hands together. Blood stained his palms, fingers, and forearms. Thomas realized those stains had not all come from Denholm's wounds. “We're a lot alike, you and I: it's just that my surgery is a good deal messier than yours in the end. And come to think of it, while I'm cleaning out the Moxon cancer at the Kanes' ball, there are a few among the upper crust I think could use my attention, too … a few of them who could use a good cleaning as well.”

The line of his moral judgment is shifting more and more toward the perfect and the ideal. If this continues, everyone at the ball could be in mortal danger—simply by not being perfect. I've got to stop him.

“You … you're hurt,” Thomas observed, pointing to the wound.

“Can you help me, old friend?” Disciple asked in a pleading voice as he sat down on the divan next to the costume. “I seem to be in need of your help.”

Thomas nodded. “I'll … need to get my bag.”

“Your bag?”

“My medical bag. It's downstairs. It will only take me—”

“No,” Disciple said, shaking his head. “That's not the help I need.”

“But it will only take—”

“NO!” Disciple screamed, his face suddenly purple with rage.

Thomas shook off a chill at the dreadful sound of Disciple's voice. The man was manic and possibly schizophrenic. Moreover, he appeared far stronger than Thomas remembered him. “All right … what do you need?”

Disciple stood up, moving carefully toward Thomas. “I need your help to exact justice on those who are unjust.”

“How?”

“I need to be you,” Disciple said through a Denholm Sinclair smile … and then knocked Thomas Wayne cold with a single, perfectly placed punch.

Batcave / Wayne Manor / Bristol / 11:39 p.m. / Present Day

Bruce stepped up to the Batmobile on its service platform, where it was recharging. He considered fueling it but decided there was not time, and besides, the distance he had to go was not that far.

He opened the gull-wing doors and started pulling out the components of his Batsuit. The capacitors were somewhat discharged from the previous night's activities, but he gauged them sufficient for his needs.

He began assembling the Batsuit around him as a knight might have donned his armor, connecting its components until it was a seamless whole. He ended with the cowl, completing his costume.

He had a party to stop by at the abandoned Kane Mansion next door.

Kane Mansion / Bristol / 11:42 p.m. / Present Day

Batman passed as a shadow beneath the porte-cochère that dominated the main entrance to Kane Mansion and moved silently up the broad, deserted steps. The main doors, long since barred, were open wide, inviting him into the dark foyer beyond.

He slipped into the enveloping shadows, closing his eyes to get his bearings. The old foyer sprang into three-dimensional relief in his mind, a place at once familiar and alien.

I played here as a boy. My mother would stand at the bottom of this staircase and call me down from the landing above. I always tried to slide down the wide banister, and Mother would always warn me it was too dangerous. It was a game we always played … here on these steps …

Batman frowned in the shadows, too dark to be seen.

That was before Grandma Kane died and Mother sold the property to Kane Corp in '65. The entire estate had gone into receivership following my mother's murder. The company folded not long afterward and locked the doors, and the estate has been in litigation ever since. Gotham Bank acquired the paper on the grounds twenty years ago and locked the doors on a property it could not maintain and for which it never gave a damn.

The faint sound of music drifted into his ears from the back of the foyer. He switched to night-vision mode and a brilliant rectangle of spilling light sprang into view outlining the double doors at the back of the foyer.

Batman moved toward the doors, opened his eyes and pushed them open.

Kane Mansion / Bristol / 11:44 p.m. / October 26, 1958

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the doorman announced to the hall, banging down his ornate staff. Bertie had been dressed as an Elizabethan footman and was all too pleased to maintain the appearance for his part.

The band stopped playing at the far end of the ballroom. Brightly costumed oddities stopped their gyrations on the dance floor to look, while those crowding the edges of the floor turned in curiosity. Several of the guests on the patio beyond the French doors squeezed back inside to gawk.

Harold Ryder shifted his Bell and Howell 70D 16 mm newsreel camera toward the entrance and pressed the shutter trigger. He was dressed as a cowboy for the occasion, taking for a costume what he considered to be the path of least ridiculousness. The camera held to his face required that his cowboy hat be pushed back on his head. The party was a bore: he preferred to be working the crime beat, but crime was down. He had heard about some action going down on Amusement Mile earlier in the evening, but by then he was stuck out here covering the cotillion crowd.

Still, only a certain few of the guests rated this kind of general introduction, and their entrance was worth a few feet of film for the news broadcasts later in the evening. He had only a few feet of film left on this reel anyway and this would give him an excuse to run out the film before putting in a new one.

“Who is it this time?” asked Virginia Vale, reporter for the
Gotham Gazette.
She was in her Little Bopeep outfit, complete with bonnet, but the illusion was spoiled by the cigarette bouncing at the corner of her lower lip as she spoke.

“Don't know,” Harold replied, checking the focus as the camera whirred on. “Number five hundred and one of the five hundred, I supposed.”

Bertie straightened up in his costume, giving all eyes in the crowded ballroom opportunity to pay proper attention.

“Dr. Thomas Wayne!” Bertie announced.

The costumed figure stepped into the doorway to the applause of the packed ballroom. The clockwork camera drive whirred on.

“Dr. Wayne looks like he's been exercising,” Virginia sniffed.

“But get a load of that costume,” Harold breathed. He had not bothered with the balky and bulky sound equipment and could say whatever he pleased, so long as he said it in a way that would not shake the camera. “Who's he supposed to be?”

“The Kane press release says he's coming as Douglas Fairbanks,” Virginia said, looking down at his folded sheet.

“Fairbanks?” Harold said. “Then what's with the tights and the trunks?”

“If that's Douglas Fairbanks, then I'm Bettie Page,” Virginia snorted.

“Don't get my hopes up,” Harold chided. He released the shudder trigger, pulling the camera down in front of him. Without thinking, he flipped out the winding key, holding it steady in his right hand while twisting the body of the camera with his left. It was an old habit from his days as a war photographer in the South Pacific, making sure the camera was wound quickly and always ready. “I'll tell you what, though … He looks more like a bat than a hero in that getup.”

“Well, it seems to be working for someone,” Virginia said, pointing.

Martha Kane, in her flapper dress and wearing a sequined white domino mask above her dazzling smile, crossed the floor and took her new guest by the arm.

Kane Mansion / Bristol / 11:47 p.m. / Present Day

The air smelled strongly of burning dust and lavender.

Batman's eyes narrowed behind his cowl, his lips stretching thin against his teeth as he drew back from the assault on his senses and pushed through the double doors.

The ballroom was enormous, and its extents were difficult to see. Everything was in motion, the room filled with dizzy, sweeping dance.

Long, red silk streamers cascaded downward from the cracked dome ceiling overhead, suspended from a complex of horizontal metal rods, motors, and more rods—an enormous mechanical mobile that nearly filled the hall. Between the silk bolts, several dozen life-sized mannequin couples swung inches above the floor. The figures, suspended from the mobile above, swayed and whirled in their poses, each costumed for a masquerade.

The noise of an old phonograph echoed from the distant end of the ballroom, a scratching version of a big band song.

Batman stepped gingerly into the hall.

Let's see if we can crash this party.

The walls seemed to writhe beneath shifting shadows of the silk cascades and suspended figures. Gaudy chandeliers glowed too brightly overhead beneath their cheap linen coverings. Thin smoke drifted up from where the old light bulbs touched cobwebs. Each of the enormous fixtures twisted and swung as the silk brushed them in passing, their hanging crystals sounding with painful brightness in his ears. The cracking paint and golden gilding of the plaster wall ornaments lay dulled beneath two decades of neglect. The soap-coated French doors obscured any view of the terrace.

A pair of suspended marionette figures swung into view. One was dressed in what looked like a bad imitation of some of his early Batsuits. A female figure hung limp in a matching dance pose, suspended from the ever-shifting rods overhead. This one clothed in a flapper dress with the head lolled backward, jaw hanging open.

Amanda Richter!

Amanda swung almost at once out of view, wheeling into revolutions of the shifting figures suspended from the ceiling and disappearing among the red silk drapes that also swung in arcs through the hall.

He reached down without looking to his Utility Belt. The Teflon-bladed Batarang snapped open in his hand. He checked the Batsuit power levels and discovered they were at 38 percent. There had been no time to recharge the Batsuit since its last use earlier that day. It would have to be enough.

The figures jerked slightly. The recording made a ripping sound, as though the needle had been pushed across the grooves. Then another sound filled the room, hollow, echoing, and vaguely distorted. It sent a chill down Batman's spine like none he had experienced before.

“
My name is Dr. Thomas Wayne … I suppose this is my testimony … or, perhaps, my confession regarding the events of October 26, 1958 at the Kane Charity Ball. I've kept silent far too long
.”

Batman stepped in among the costumed mannequins swinging between the silk cloth, his index finger set along the curved back edge of the Batarang, prepared to cut the cables should the life-sized marionettes get in his way. He could see the red flapper dress of Amanda ahead of him through the maze of shifting forms.

“
I could not rest until I had left a record for my sons, both of whom are dear to me. I could not bear the thought that they might be confronted by my past without hearing from me the reasons for what happened, how it had all gone wrong despite my most noble intentions …”

One of the mannequins to his right moved.

Batman ducked low and pushed under the arm of the Confederate soldier, shoving the Uzi in his hand upward as it sprayed a stuttering stream from its muzzle. The Marie Antoinette mannequin in front of him jumped from the impact of the bullets, the head exploding into plaster shards that clattered onto the warping hardwood floor.