Wayne of Gotham (7 page)

Cold gel shot out from the shadow, encasing the gun and Gordon's hand in a terrible mass. Gordon's finger pulled against the trigger but the gel was hardening too quickly. The commissioner pulled back the gun, staring down through his glasses at the barrel, now plugged and encased in the hard, rubbery glob.

Gordon cried out in rage, trying to get the gun free of the thick mess encasing both it and his right hand. “Damn you! You son of a bitch!”

“You need to calm down, Gordon,” the Dark Knight said roughly, his cape shifting slightly behind him. Batman was perched atop the stairwell casing looking down on the commissioner. The wide lens of the Bat-Signal—the name another press affectation—stood dark at the edge of the roof, its beckoning eye shuttered. “If you manage to pull the trigger, the bullet has nowhere to go. The gun will explode and you could lose that hand … and it's probably best not to bring my mother into this.”

Emotionally exhausted, James Gordon fell to his knees. “What are you doing here?”

“I came because you need me,” the Bat whispered. “Because the chase isn't over … The monsters are still out there.”

“The monster's right here,” Gordon responded. He hated the Batman more than anything he had ever hated in his life. He needed him just as badly. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“Hold out your gun hand,” Batman said, slipping down quietly from his perch to stand on the roof in front of Gordon.

The commissioner raised his arm. Batman took Gordon's wrist in an iron-vice grip with his right hand, pulling a small aerosol canister from his Utility Belt with his left. He sprayed the solvent on the commissioner's encased hand. The gel crystallized and then crumbled away in a heartbeat. Batman was ready for it, snatching the gun out of Gordon's grip before he had time to react. The Caped Crusader took a step back into the shadows of the rooftop, his eyes fixed warily on his old friend.

“Barbara is still alive, Gordon,” Batman urged. “She's upstate at school. She was put in a wheelchair, but she
is
still alive—and I didn't do that. Joker did.”

“Don't lie to me,” Gordon seethed.

“I've never lied to you,” Batman replied in a voice like gravel. “It's a false memory, Gordon. A phantom conjured by the Spellbinder to make you and the others commit crimes all across the city.”

“No, you're wrong—it wasn't the Spellbinder,” Gordon smiled with smug satisfaction. “That maniac uses hypnosis to control her victims, and we both know that hypnosis wears off if it isn't reinforced. Besides, we've got Spellbinder, I mean, Fay Moffit, back in Arkham, and she's suffering from her own set of delusions.”

“She's a psychotic sociopath,” Batman grunted. “Delusions would be a step up for her.”

“She says you seduced her into stealing the Scarface dummy,” Gordon replied. “She believes it, too.”

“Then it isn't hypnosis,” Batman replied. “Psychotropic drugs, perhaps with a memory or behavioral modification component. Someone cast a spell on the Spellbinder, eh? So now you have a mess, and you want me to clean it up. Is that why you wanted me?”

“I don't
want
you at all,” Gordon seethed.

“Then let's just say that's why you're standing on the roof,” Batman replied, “
not
using the Bat-Signal to summon me.”

Gordon blinked, trying to see past his rage. “About three months ago, everyone who was committing these crimes got a card in the mail. It read, ‘This card will bring you luck.' Nothing else, and each with a Gotham Central postmark.”

“Let me see it,” Batman demanded.

“I don't have it,” the commissioner replied. “Threw it away months ago.”

“Show me your wallet,” Batman demanded.

The Commissioner reached back and pulled the wallet out, spreading the folds with his fingers.

Batman reached forward, swiftly pulling out the card.

“Hey,” Gordon said. “I would have sworn that wasn't there.”

“But that's not why you came to the roof
not
to use the Bat-Signal,” Batman said, examining the card carefully. “These are the same type of cards that are now all over the city.”

“That's right,” Gordon responded. “We were able to trace their manufacture to Lunar Products in their plant down by Dixon Docks off Englehart Boulevard. It's a property registered to a Dr. Chandra Bulan. Both words are aliases for …”

“Moon,” Batman spat the word. “Both are Southeast Asian words for moon.”

“Dr. Moon,” Gordon agreed. “He was an expert in memory tampering, and this looks like his M.O.”

“
Was
an expert is the point,” Batman agreed. “Moon is dead and has been for years.”

“He's been pretty active for a corpse, then,” Gordon responded. “We have been getting reports there's an Eastern cult growing in Chinatown with Dr. Moon at its head.”

“I don't suppose you mean Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church.” Batman smiled beneath his cowl.

“Would I be asking
you
if I did?” Gordon grumbled.

“You think Dr. Moon's come back from the grave and is spreading these cards all over the city,” Batman stated, slipping the card into an evidence pouch on his Utility Belt.

“
Someone
is spreading these all over the city,” Gordon stated, “and if that's true, then this last little crime spree will have been a tame preview to the storm that's coming.”

Batman nodded, then held the gun out to Gordon, grip first.

Gordon stared at the gun for a few moments, then shook his head. “You had better take it with you.”

“It never happened, Gordon,” Batman insisted. “It's a memory that is only a dream.”

Gordon drew in a deep breath. “Not for me. I remember every detail … seeing her fall in the entry to her apartment … the blood spreading out beneath her on the tile … you standing in the doorway. My rational mind knows it's all a fake … but if I take that gun, I also know I'll use it on you. It hurts too much and it seems too right.”

Batman nodded. He released the clip and tossed it across the roof, then released the slide, pulling the recoil rod and spring from the pistol frame. He scattered the components around him in an arc. “I'll let you know when it's done.”

“What are you going to do?” Gordon asked.

“Pay a visit to a dead man,” Batman said.

Gordon was going to ask how … but Batman was gone.

Dixon Foundation College / Gotham / 9:42 p.m. / Present Day

Batman sweated. The Batsuit was overheating badly, the charge levels of the Utility Belt drawing dangerously low despite the additional capacitors he had mounted. The Batsuit's cooling system was taxed to the limit, but beneath it all, Bruce Wayne reveled in the challenge and gloried in the exertion.

Eight young cultists had managed to converge on him at once in the sound booth of the crumbling auditorium. Their blows were starting to penetrate the weakening active armor of the Batsuit, reaching his ribs.

Batman smiled.

This was his kind of fight.

The Lunar Cultists were drawn largely from the gangs of nearby Chinatown, and Moon's guard had been well trained in martial arts. Their enthusiasm for their leader was fanatical and absolute, driving them with the same kind of zeal that fueled Batman. He had the advantage of experience, but his body was aging. They had the advantage of numbers, but were not trained in group combat. Neither side would relinquish the field.

It was the balance that made it interesting for him.

With a cry, Batman pushed outward with all his strength. The Batsuit responded, drawing more power from the fading capacitors. The cultists exploded away from him, two of them crashing through the glass of the booth and falling limp among the broken seats below.

Batman was at once on his feet. Two of the remaining cult guards regained their stance, their shaved heads glistening with blood, nunchucks appearing in their hands in a sudden blur.

Too many movies. Maybe not their first mistake… certainly their last.

Batman stepped into the first, the hard end of the chain-bound weapon whistling toward his head. He shifted, twisting, and then blocked the nunchuck with his forearm at just the right moment, causing it to rebound into the face of his assailant, whose nose broke with a satisfying crunch. Batman spun, adding injury to injury, as his elbow rose up under the broken nose and drove the bones upward into the face.

The turn left him facing the second remaining opponent, whose own nunchucks were wheeling in a blur toward the panting Dark Knight. Batman crossed his forearms in front of him, arresting the sweeping nunchucks between the gauntlets of his gloves. His arms slid down the polished wood, wresting the weapon from the hands of the young, surprised cultist.

“Never spin the weapon,” Batman instructed, wheeling the sticks around their metallic link until both came together side by side in his hand. “It's better to hold it firmly.”

Batman smashed his fist, still gripping both sticks, across the youth's face, driving him to his knees. His smile grew on his face as he drove the fist clenched around the nunchucks again and again, hammering down on the cultist.

When the boy quit moving, the fist stopped.

Batman jumped through the shattered window, the cape dutifully billowing to slow his descent as he landed ten feet below on the bodies that had preceded him.

Dixon Foundation College had once been a private institution, but when the funding left, so did the students. The teaching auditorium was crumbling, but bright red cloth had been draped in bunting along the crumbling Sheetrock of the walls. There was a podium, the focal point of the empty auditorium.

Dr. Moon stood at the podium.

I have to admit he looks pretty good … considering he's been dead for ten years.

His facial skin was drawn back into a leathery mask, the lips pulled into a hideous grin. Moon stared back at the approaching Batman from empty eye sockets. He wore a jester's hat, colorful with bells at the ends of five different points. The hair sticking out beneath it was unkempt and his fingernails long, but that was understandable for someone dragged from the grave. He wore resplendent red silk robes. He did not appear to mind at all that he and his robes were supported by means of an iron pipe affixed vertically to the floor, thrusting into his lower back and up into his chest cavity. Moon's hands rested on the podium, his bony fingers wrapped around a stack of papers.

Batman's face fell into a scowl.

The papers on the podium were yellowed with age, dry, and fragile, but the old-fashioned letterhead was easily recognizable.

WAYNE ENTERPRISES

FROM THE DESK OF DR. THOMAS WAYNE

Batman felt the sweat pooling at the base of his spine, a chill coursing through him despite the residual heat of the Batsuit. He gave the corpse of Moon a shove, dislodging the clavicle bone from its perch and causing the cadaver to slide down the pipe into a heap at his feet.

Batman and all the layers of his Batsuit could not shield Bruce Wayne from the words on the pages he took up in his hands.

To: Dr. Ernst Richter

Dear Ernst
,

I can understand your reticence to proceed with this project and write to you today in the hopes of shedding some light for you on my apparent obsession with your work. I am having this letter delivered to you personally by my servant, in whom I have complete trust, so I may be assured it come into your possession only.

Perhaps for you to fully understand, I have to explain about how Martha introduced me to Denholm Sinclair in the first place and how that led to my friendship with Lewis Moxon …

The Bowery / Gotham / 11:15 p.m. / October 4, 1957

“Welcome to the Koffee Klatch, Mr. Wayne.”

He almost turned around and walked out.

Thomas Wayne was impeccably dressed for anywhere but here. His trim frame supported the white dinner jacket and the black tie perfectly, and he had taken extra care with the Brylcreem to make sure his dark hair swept back from his brow and stayed in a flattop. His dress slacks were elegantly tapered, tailored down to break perfectly atop the shine of his patent-leather dress shoes. A red carnation in his lapel gave color to his otherwise monotone ensemble, and his face was rapidly approaching the same hue.

He would have fit in at any of the finest clubs and restaurants in town—only he wasn't in any of those places.

He was standing on the brink of anarchy.

At least he was if anarchy was defined as the upper level of this basement coffee house in the Bowery. The Koffee Klatch was in a run-down section of Uptown south of the Park Row theater district but not quite south enough to be fashionably adjacent to Riverfront Park. The theater district was booming with bright lights, heralding first-run productions of
My Fair Lady, Auntie Mame
, and
Bells Are Ringing
—stagings that reflected the veneer of optimism that glossed over the nation as a whole. But feeding those nightly dreams were an army of actors, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights who preferred Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
and Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” to Rodgers and Hammerstein. The Bowery had become the center of the counterculture Beat Generation in Gotham: a nexus of intellectuals, artists, and freethinkers who celebrated nonconformity and spontaneous creativity. These lofty words were themselves a thin coating over hedonistic excess, bohemian lifestyles, and dabbling in recreational drug use. The Beat Generation was not so much
for
anything in particular as they were
against
everything that remotely could be defined as a boundary. They saw the ordered concrete and steel of postwar United States showing stress fractures and were determined to bring it down and break free.