“I beg your pardon, Alfred?”
“In Rio de Janeiro, sir. I assume that is your destination. To join Miss Vera for the Carnival. And if you’ll excuse my saying so, it’s just what you need, sir. A change, and a little amusement in your life. You have been rather on the gloomy side of late, sir, if you’ll permit the observation.”
Bruce smiled. “I’m touched by your concern, Alfred, but I’m afraid you’ve jumped to an erroneous conclusion. I will need no carnival costume where I’m going.”
“I apologize for my incorrect assumption, sir. Might I ask where you’re going?”
“The New Era Hotel, here in Gotham City.”
“Indeed, sir?” Alfred’s aplomb was unshakeable. Bruce could have told him he was going to the North Pole and the faithful servant would merely have inquired if he should pack ice skates.
“I’ll need about half a dozen evening suits, and some casual clothing for daytime wear, and the usual shirts and socks.”
“A wardrobe such as you describe is already packed and ready to go, Master Wayne. I packed the Charlie Morrison wardrobe for you, sir.”
“Alfred, you anticipate well.”
“Yes, sir. One thing I didn’t know, sir. Will you require the Batman Suit?”
Bruce looked up sharply. Somehow he hadn’t considered taking the Batman Suit. He hadn’t quite brought himself to the point of considering that there were at least two interpretations of his hallucinations. One, that he was going crazy. Two, that someone was planning something clever and criminal and was trying to put a scare into him.
“Yes, pack the Batman Suit,” Bruce said. “And put in the small leather bag marked OPS 12. And one of the standard utility belts.”
“At once, sir,” said Alfred. He didn’t bother to mention that he had also packed those things in expectation of just such a trip. You don’t stay Batman’s batman for long if you can’t anticipate his needs.
Despite all the advantages of his Batman persona, there were a few disadvantages, too. For surprising hoodlums and criminals, the shock value of Batman was great. But for everyday use, it was too noticeable. When it was necessary for him to go somewhere, it was often an advantage to go looking like an ordinary citizen. But there were problems to going as Bruce Wayne, and then suddenly appearing later as Batman. Someone might find it a little more than coincidence that Bruce was around whenever Batman appeared.
Because of this, Bruce had adopted several other personas, to be used when occasion demanded it. The most recent of these, whom he called Charlie Morrison, had been invaluable when Bruce had gone to Europe to detect and foil a counterfeiting ring operating in several cities of northern Europe. Bruce remembered how Commissioner Gordon himself had congratulated him at the end of the case when they met in the mayor’s office in Hamburg. Gordon might have suspected that Charlie Morrison was Batman; but that was all right. He was supposed to think that. It helped keep suspicions off Bruce Wayne, the progenitor of both personas.
Working with Lafayette Boyent, one of the masters of classical drama, Bruce had mastered makeup, posture and voice. His impersonations could have earned him a place in the theater if the direction of his life had not been decided long ago.
When Charlie Morrison checked into the New Era Hotel, the assistant manager helped him sign in with no hint of remembering his earlier visit as Bruce Wayne.
The assistant manager was cheerful and helpful. Charlie Morrison was a man whose sapphire and ruby American Express card allowed him luxuries unknown to the ordinary citizen. Even among the crowds of visiting oil sheiks and heads of industrial parks, he was a welcome guest—tall, good-looking, quiet-mannered, and renowned for his liberal tips.
The assistant manager brushed back his muttonchop whiskers, a habitual gesture, and swiftly plucked out of a nearby tray a shimmering, plastic oblong slightly larger than a credit card. He held it out to Bruce.
“Your suite is penthouse A2, Mr. Morrison. It is one of our choicest suites, and I’m sure you will find it eminently satisfactory. This card will give you entry to all of the New Era’s facilities—the health club, the restaurants and nightclubs, the solarium, the flying room, and so on. There is a complete list of our services in your suite. My name is Blithely. It is my ambition to serve you. If there is any complaint at all, please do not hesitate to call on me day or night.”
Bruce thanked Blithely, picked up his key and went to the elevators. There was a special elevator for the penthouse suites. His luggage had already gone up. He pressed the button and stepped in when the heavy, ornate brass door opened. Just as the door was about to close, a woman slipped in with him.
She was tall, sleek and attractive, wearing a frock whose simplicity accentuated rather than belied its price tag. Her dark hair was tied back with a simple ribbon. She carried a small, richly brocaded purse that must have cost plenty, even in Hincheng, China, which Bruce remembered as the home of these objects.
“Yes,” she said, following his gaze. “It’s Hinchengese. Do you like it?”
Bruce shrugged. “It is quite attractive.”
She looked at him boldly. He didn’t like the intensity of her inspection. Yet there was something exciting about her, something forward yet subtle, and unashamedly feminine.
“You are also in one of the penthouses?” she asked.
“Yes. And you?”
“Of course. I always stay here when I am in Gotham City.” He had detected her faint foreign accent. But what was it? Not German. Something farther east . . . Czechoslovakia, perhaps. “Dear old penthouse A1 has become something of a home for me. Do you stay here often?”
“My first time,” Bruce said.
“You will like it here very much,” she said, as the elevator came to a soft stop and the door slid open.
They walked together down the corridor. Penthouses A1 and A2 were opposite each other, the only apartments on the floor. They opened their doors with their cards.
“By the way,” Bruce said, “I’m Charlie Morrison.”
“Perhaps we will meet again,” she said. “I am Ilona.” She closed the door softly behind her.
Bruce’s clothes were already laid out by the hotel staff, all except the one large leather case to which he kept the only key. In it was the Batman equipment he might soon need, if his instincts were to be trusted.
The suite was indeed beautiful, with a breathtaking terrace view of Gotham City. The city looked magnificent at this hour, a sleeping giant composed of the bodies and minds of its millions of inhabitants.
Was one of those inhabitants the Joker? Impossible. Yet he had seen something.
Or had he?
He sighed and turned away from the terrace.
The living room of his suite was furnished with rare antiques from Eastern Europe and the Near East. There were Turkish wall hangings on one wall, a Picasso on another. A quick inspection told Bruce that the Picasso was genuine, worth perhaps several million dollars. The television was state-of-the-art. The VCR came with a complete tape library, and a catalogue of others that could be called up on a moment’s notice. The music console was also impressive.
These things meant little to Bruce, however. This was the same sort of equipment he had at home. He knew from personal experience how difficult it is for the rich to buy anything really special.
He sat in an Ames chair and leafed through a magazine. He was preoccupied, morose. What was he doing here? What could possibly happen in a place like this? The New Era was one of the great bastions of safety with luxury. He was wasting his time.
He called room service and ordered a light dinner: eggs poached in Normandy butter, toast points, slice of Paris ham, fruit cocktail, demitasse. He showered and shaved and dressed in a lightweight evening suit. He had just finished combing his hair when a discreet tap at the door told him the meal had come.
The waiter wheeled the cart, with its high silver-domed salver, to the little table near the balcony. Bruce seated himself and opened the day’s newspaper that th
e man had brought. The waiter deftly laid out the silverware, then whisked the top off the salver and set the plate down in front of Bruce. He bowed, said, “anything else, sir, please call,” and started toward the door.
Bruce folded his newspaper and looked down at the plate. His expression froze. There, on the fine Spode china, was a mass of writhing snakes, little green ones and a few red ones. Among them were several small toads. They looked up balefully at Bruce with their evil pop eyes.
“Waiter!” Bruce called out as the waiter was going through the door.
“Sir?”
“What is the meaning of this?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Come here and tell me how you explain this.”
Dutifully enough the man came back into the room. Bruce noticed now that the waiter was almost bald, and that there were faint tattoo marks on his shining skull.
“What seems to be the trouble, sir?”
“Just look here and explain it,” Bruce said, indicating his place.
“Yes sir. I’m looking, but I fail to see anything amiss.”
Bruce looked down. The snakes and toads were no longer there. What was on the plate now was what he had ordered: ham and eggs by any other name.
“It’s the toast points,” Bruce said, recovering quickly. “They’re soggy.”
“They look all right to me, Mr. Morrison,” the waiter said, bending down to peer at the golden brown triangles of bread.
“You can see the moisture shining on them. And those eggs are practically hardboiled, not poached at all.”
Bruce glared at the waiter, daring him to dispute, but the waiter was not there for that.
“Yes, sir, of course, sir,” he said, his tone of voice indicating that he thought Bruce was acting a little peculiar but that he was prepared to humor him. “I’ll have the order replaced at once.”
He wheeled the cart out, closing the door quietly behind him.
It didn’t take long to replace his dinner, and this time it underwent no change. Bruce ate quickly. After he was through he wheeled the cart into the corridor. As he turned to return to his room, he saw a figure vanish around the corner at the end of the long corridor. A familiar figure. Tall, emaciated, with green hair and a crazy smile . . .
It took Bruce Wayne only three strides to reach full sprinting speed as he raced after the figure of his old enemy, who was looking remarkably healthy for one who was well and truly dead.
The corridor was empty. On this side of the hotel there were no suites, no doors at all. The Joker, or whoever it was, had vanished into a blank wall.
Bruce inspected the wall closely. Beneath a light fixture he saw a thin, metal-lined slit. He slipped the card the hotel had given him into it. A panel in the corridor’s wall slid back. Retrieving his card, Bruce went through the opening into the darkness within.
The corridor led down a long slope. Bruce hurried down it, just faintly hearing the sound of distant footsteps ahead of him. In another twenty yards the corridor branched. A faint swirling of dust in the left-hand branch told him which way to go. He plunged down a steepening incline. The corridor had at first been lit by fluorescent panels set into the ceiling. As Bruce proceeded, the corridor became dimmer. Some of the panels weren’t working. The pitch was so great that he was having difficulty maintaining his balance. There was a blocked-up window ahead of him, dimly perceivable in the gloom. There was no place to go other than through that or back up the slope. Bruce picked up speed and rammed the window with his shoulder, crashing through it and tumbling into a brightly lit room beyond.
The room was done entirely in white tile and was lit by overhead fluorescents. It was steamy and warm. As Bruce rolled to his feet, he noticed that there were many men in the room, some of them wearing shorts, some towels, a few nothing at all. There were machines scattered around the room. Bruce was familiar with them. They were exercise machines of the sort he had himself in his workout room. He was in the health club.
If there had been any doubt, that doubt would have been cleared up immediately when a short, muscular man with a wrestler’s build, wearing white slacks and a white T-shirt that read, New Era Health Club Instructor, strode up to him in a belligerent manner and said, “Say, look here, bub, what’s the big idea trying to break in here through the ventilator system?” Then he noticed the card in Bruce’s hand. “Oh, sorry, sir, didn’t know you were a guest. Our clients usually come through the door.”
The instructor was starting to grin. Bruce reached out and took the man’s biceps in his hand. It looked like a friendly gesture. And his grip tightened only slightly. But the instructor went pale, tried to pull free, saw it was no use and turned to Bruce with a frightened look on his face.
“Did you see someone just enter?” Bruce asked. “A very tall, thin man with green hair?”
“Green hair!” the instructor said, and seemed ready to laugh. A slight application of pressure to his biceps convinced him that it was not really a laughing matter.
“No sir, I didn’t. Really. I’d tell you if I did.”
Bruce released the man. A quick glance around the room told him that nobody answering the Joker’s description could possibly have come here.
Bruce said, “Get me a pair of swimming trunks, please. I think I’ll have a dip before I go back up.”
“Yes sir,” the instructor said. “And which way will you be leaving, sir? Going by the ventilators again?”
“No,” Bruce said, “they’re only fast getting here.”
Bruce felt better after doing a hundred or so laps in his explosive Australian crawl. He returned to his suite.
Mr. Blithely came to visit him a little later. Blithely wanted to know if there was anything the matter. By his expression, Bruce surmised that he really meant, is there anything the matter with you, sir? Bruce merely glared at him. Blithely explained that although it was not so posted, the management encouraged guests to stay out of the ventilation system. Bruce managed to hold his temper. Now was not the time for an outburst.
When the manager had left, Bruce went to the balcony and looked out at the night for a long time. He could hear music from the suite next door, and sounds of laughter and the clink of glasses. It sounded like someone was having a good time.
He was starting to get the idea that something was going on in the New Era Hotel. So far it seemed to be something done especially for him.
It was much later in the night that the noise woke him up. He sat bolt upright, moving instantaneously from deep sleep to immediate alertness. What had it been? A muffled thud from the next suite. It must have been something thrown against the wall, thrown hard enough for the sound to penetrate the soundproofing. Bruce dressed quickly in the dark. He was utterly silent, listening, his senses at full alert. Then he heard a scream. It was from the suite next door.
He hurried out to the balcony. It was about a fifteen-foot jump to the balcony of the next suite. Bruce could do better than that in the standing broad jump, but that was under ideal conditions. Here he would have to crouch on the very edge of his balcony and push off without the benefit of being able to swing his arms. And he would also have to be careful not to let his feet slip on the bevelled facing material.
He leaped. His calculations were not amiss, no matter what else might be wrong with him. His fingers closed crisply around the rail of the next penthouse. He used his back flip to vault neatly over the railing.
The terrace doors to the penthouse were open, but long fluttering white curtains obscured his view within. He moved forward into the darkened room. He felt something soft under his foot and recoiled sharply. Then he had found the light switch and flooded the room with light.
She had been beautiful in life, but death had taken something out of her. She lay with one arm thrown back, the other bent beneath her. Her eyes were open and she seemed to be smiling. This was remarkable in view of the fact that her throat had been cut.
There was nothing to do there. The woman, sole occ
upant of the suite, was dead. The telephone line had been cut. Her brocade purse seemed to be missing, but Bruce had no time for a complete search. Nor did he know what to look for.
He went back to his own suite. There he made two calls, one to Commissioner James Gordon, the other to Assistant Manager Blithely. And then back to await further developments.
Soon thereafter, he received a telephone call from the assistant manager. Would Mr. Morrison come to the main office.
Bruce was already dressed. He paused only to check his attire, then went down to the lobby. Although it was the small hours of the morning, there were still many people there milling around. Fun ran late in Gotham City.
Blithely greeted him as suavely as before. But he had a curious expression on his round rosy face as he looked at Bruce. Could it be pity?
Also present in the office was Police Commissioner James Gordon. The tough cop had cooperated secretly with Batman on more than one occasion. Despite Gordon’s skepticism, they often teamed up in their fight against crime.
“Hello, Morrison,” James Gordon said. “Been quite a while.”
“Hamburg, about three years ago,” Bruce said.
“Tell me what you saw tonight, Charlie,” Gordon said.
“But you’ve seen it yourself by now.”
“Never mind. Describe it for me, please.”
Bruce described the scene in the suite.
“OK,” Gordon said. “Let’s take a look.”
Bruce, Gordon, and Blithely took the penthouse elevator to the top floor. There was the same corridor, with Bruce’s suite on one side, the other belonging to the woman who had ridden up in the elevator with him.
“Is this the place?” Gordon asked, indicating the door through which the woman had passed.
“Of course it is,” Bruce said. “What’s the problem?”
Blithely opened the door with his pass card. He entered and turned on the light. The first thing Bruce noticed when he went in was the smell of fresh paint. Under the strong overhead lights, he could see that the whole suite had been freshly painted. Before painting, it had been stripped of furniture. A pile of dropcloths was stacked in a corner. Aside from that, the room was empty.
The Further Adventures of Batman Page 2
