Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (18 page)

Dent crouched by the guardsman. “Tell me what you know about the Joker.”

The man smirked. Then Dent noticed the name tag on his uniform:
Officer Rachel Dawes
.

Dent glanced past the guardsman and saw through a small window that the driver’s seat was empty, and the keys were in the ignition. He told the cops to be sure the area was secure, and after they’d gone, he circled to the front of the ambulance, got in, and drove away.

Clara Street, near the city limits, was a crowded block in a poor state, with run-down buildings, broken sidewalks, and very little green where the neighborhood’s children could play. The Gordon house was a modest building in the middle of the block. Barbara Gordon stood speechless on the run-down front porch as Officer Gerard Stephens tried to console her.

“I’m sorry, Barbara,” Stephens said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

Barbara brushed it off and stepped past Stephens. She looked out in the dark and shouted, “Are you there? Are you? You brought this on us.
You did! You
brought this . . .” Her voice caught, she sobbed, and collapsed into Stephens’s arms.

Batman was nearby. He hung his head.

It was dark in Gotham City by eight, and the streets were emptier than usual. All civic events and most theater and musical performances had been canceled following the afternoon’s shooting. The movie houses and multiplexes and nightclubs were still open, and a few citizens were inside them, determined to be amused no matter how far into despair everyone else had fallen.

At police headquarters, all of the Gotham City Major Crimes Unit stood next to the searchlight, its beam vanishing into a cloudless sky.

“Let’s switch it off,” Officer Stephens said. “He ain’t coming. He doesn’t want to talk to us. God help whomever he
does
want to talk to.”

S
alvatore Maroni fancied himself an old-time kind of guy—an old-fashioned crime boss, a mobster with class. He liked flash: flashy clothes, flashy cars, flashy woman, and flashy clubs. Tonight, he was in one of his favorite haunts, a nightclub near the waterfront, a joint he considered a lot classier than the dumps the Chechen owned. He was sitting in a booth next to his newest flashy woman and his bodyguards, listening to music with a beat a man could feel in the pit of his stomach, watching dancers whom he saw in half-second intervals because, just now, the entire place was lit by strobes.

“Can’t we go someplace quieter?” the flashy woman shouted. “We can’t hear each other talk.”

“I don’t wanna hear you talk,” Maroni shouted back.

He leaned back to watch the dancers on the floor below, visible in half-second bursts of brightness filled with human motion.

Two men with assault rifles were on the catwalk above the dance floor and across from Maroni’s table, gazing down at the moving bodies, charged with watching for trouble. They didn’t see a skylight open behind them, nor the figure that seemed to congeal from the night. The bigger of the two felt a breeze on the back of his neck and was turning when a fist caught him beneath the chin. His partner caught a glimpse of him falling in a burst of light and was raising his weapon when something struck him behind the ear. His gun slipped from his hand and fell onto the catwalk. One of Maroni’s bodyguards reacted immediately, jerking a pistol from beneath his jacket and running onto the catwalk.

A burst of light: a silhouette dropping from the catwalk.

Darkness.

Light: A caped figure standing in front of the bodyguard.

Darkness.

Light: the bodyguard collapsing.

Darkness.

Light: Maroni half-out of his seat, gun in hand, eyes wide.

Darkness.

Light: Batman was crouching on the table, his hands on Maroni, his teeth clenched, and his mask a devil’s face.

Darkness.

For Rachel Dawes, the day had been hellish, and now the evening was becoming the same. She hated funerals, hated displaying herself, and had agreed to take part only to please Harvey Dent. Then the gunfire, the panic, the stampede . . . She had gotten herself out of the thick of it, had learned from a cop with a radio what had happened, had walked downtown to her office at the courthouse, where she might be of some use to somebody. The situation was chaotic there, too, but she had managed to organize the deployment of the junior prosecutors and was beginning to deal with the interns when her cell phone rang.

“Harvey, where are you?” she asked, her voice rising above the din around her.

“Where are
you
?”

“Where
you
should be, at Major Crimes, trying to sort through—”

“Rachel, listen to me. You’re not safe there.”

“This is Gordon’s unit, Harvey.”

“Gordon’s dead, Rachel.”

“They didn’t tell me that. He vouched for the honor guard . . .”

“He’s gone. And the Joker’s named you next.”

Rachel gazed around the room, at the people she knew and the people she didn’t. There were a lot of the latter.

“Rachel, I can’t let anything happen to you,” Dent said. “I love you too much. Is there someone—
anyone
—in this city we can trust?”

“Bruce. We can trust Bruce Wayne.”

“Rachel, I know he’s your friend, but—”

“Trust me, Harvey. Right now, Bruce’s penthouse is the safest place in the city.”

“Okay. Go straight there. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. I’ll meet you there. I love you.”

Harvey Dent hung up the phone and turned to a man with a bandage on his leg and duct tape on his wrists and ankles. Then he started the ambulance up again and drove east.

When Sal Maroni finally opened his eyes, he didn’t know where he was or what had happened, not at first. Then the masked face swam into his vision—the Batman. The vigilante must have knocked him out in the club.

“I want the Joker,” Batman growled.

Maroni twisted around to get a better look at where he was. A fire escape. Outside the club, probably, one floor up.

“From one professional to another,” Maroni said, “if you’re trying to scare someone, pick a better spot. From this height, the fall wouldn’t kill me.”

“I’m counting on it.”

Batman released Maroni, who fell hard to the sidewalk and yelped.

In a moment, Batman was beside him. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Maroni said from between clenched teeth. “He found
us”

“He must have friends.”

“Friends? You met this guy?”

“Someone
knows where he is.”

Batman grasped Maroni’s collar and hauled him back up the fire escape.

Maroni looked at him and sneered. “No one’s gonna tell you anything. They’re wise to your act—you got
rules . .
. The Joker, he’s got no rules. No one’s gonna cross him for you. You want this guy, you got one way. And you already know what that is. Just take off that mask and let him come find you. Or you want to let a couple more people get killed while you make up your mind?”

Batman dropped Maroni again and listened to him yell.

Dent drove until he found what he was looking for, an underground parking garage with an automated ticket dispenser and no attendant in sight. He guided the ambulance down the winding ramp until he stopped on the bottom of the structure, away from security cameras. He went to the rear of the ambulance, searched the bound man’s pockets, and found an address.

Dent then pulled a .38 revolver from his coat pocket and was holding it inches from the bound man’s nose.

“I didn’t find anything useful around here,” he said. “But I
will
get information. Count on it.”

The man spat at Dent.

“You want to play games?” Harvey asked. He showed the man a handful of cartridges and fed them into the gun. He snapped the magazine closed and rammed the gun barrel hard against the man’s temple, then pivoted it an inch and fired. The sound was loud in the filthy basement, and the slug pocked the wall behind the bound man’s ear.

The man’s eyes were wide, his voice unsteady. “You wouldn’t . . .”

Dent stepped back and took his lucky coin from his pocket. “No, I wouldn’t. That’s why I’m not going to leave it up to me.” Dent held the coin in front of the man’s eyes. “Heads—you get to keep your head. Tails . . . not so lucky. So, you want to tell me about the Joker?”

The man lowered his eyes, bit his lip, said nothing. Dent flipped the coin, caught it, slapped it on the back of the hand that was holding the gun. Heads.

“Go again?” Dent asked pleasantly.

“I don’t
know
anything,” the man blurted.

Dent flipped the coin, but did not catch it. Batman did that.

“You’d leave a man’s life to chance?” Batman asked Dent.

“Not exactly.”

“His name’s Thomas Schiff. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, a former patient at Arkham Asylum. The kind of mind the Joker attracts. What did you expect to learn from him?”

“The Joker killed Gordon and . . . and Loeb. He’s going to kill
Rachel
. . .”

“You’re the symbol of hope that I could never be. Your stand against organized crime is the first legitimate ray of light in Gotham for decades. If anyone saw this, everything would be undone, all the criminals you got off the streets would be released. And Jim Gordon will have died for nothing.” Batman handed the coin to Dent. “You’re going to call a press conference. Tomorrow morning.”

“Why?”

“No one else will die because of me. Gotham is in your hands now.”

“You can’t. You can’t give in.”

But Batman was gone.

It was almost 4:00
A.M.
when Bruce Wayne finally got back to his penthouse. He saw light under the door of the guest bedroom and knocked softly on the door.

Rachel Dawes told him to come in.

She was sitting on a window seat, staring out at the silhouetted buildings all around, still dressed in her work clothes. She glanced up at Bruce. “Harvey called. He says Batman is going to turn himself in.”

“I have no choice.”

“You honestly think it’s going to stop the Joker from killing?”

“Perhaps not. But I’ve got enough blood on my hands. I’ve seen, now, what I would have to become to stop men like him—what I’ve already become. Last night, I tortured Maroni. The end never justifies that kind of means.”

Bruce stopped talking and looked past Rachel, out the window. Finally, he said, “You once told me that if the day came when I was
finished . .
. we’d be together.”

“Bruce, don’t make me your one hope for a normal life.”

Bruce moved next to her. “But did you mean it?”

“Yes.”

Their faces moved close together, and for a moment, Rachel laid her cheek against Bruce’s. Their lips touched, tentatively at first, then passionately.

They remained locked in the kiss for a full minute before Rachel pulled away, and said, “But they won’t let us be together after you turn yourself in.”

Bruce said nothing. He stepped closer to Rachel. She put her hands on his shoulders and gently pushed him away.

“All right,” he murmured.

He went to the door, reaching for the knob. He hesitated, turned to look sadly at Rachel over his shoulder, then left the room.

He went into his own bedroom and lay on top of the covers, lost in thought and feeling melancholy. Eventually, he drifted off to a fitful sleep. Although he knew that he must dream—every sane person did—he usually did not remember his dreams. This night—morning, really—was an exception. He saw his father, not dressed as he had been the night he’d been murdered, not dressed for the opera, but as he used to dress for work, in a doctor’s white jacket with a stethoscope around his neck, and he was frowning, obviously angry, shouting words Bruce could not hear, but somehow understood anyway, words about means and ends and becoming what one beheld . . .

Bruce awoke with a start, the question ringing in his mind:
Have I become what I beheld? Really? And if I have, what am I? A fighter for justice, the salvation of my city, a bulwark, a hero, a champion . . . Or an egoist who enjoys dominating people weaker than I am? Is my whole crusade against crime just an excuse? Everything I said to Dent was true, I
must
put an end to it. Dent needs to become Gotham’s true hero, not me . . .

When Alfred arrived in the bunker later that morning, Bruce gave him instructions, and they began to feed documents into an incinerator. Alfred paused, looking down at a book. “Even the diaries?”

“Anything that could lead back to Lucius or Rachel.”

Alfred tossed the book into the incinerator and looked questioningly at Bruce.

“What would you have me do, Alfred? People are dying. What would you have me do?”

“Endure, Master Bruce. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman . . . he can be the outcast. He can make the choice no one else will face. The right choice.”

Bruce shook his head. “Today I’ve found out what Batman can’t do. He can’t endure
this.
Today you get to say I told you so.”

Alfred looked sadly at his master. “Today I don’t want to.”

Rachel went into the guest bedroom. She
had
to get some sleep. She lay fully dressed on top of the bedspread and closed her eyes. A clock ticked, and she could hear the distant murmur of the traffic in the street below.