Marvel Novel Series 09 - The Marvel Superheroes

by Len Wein

  Eventually, Helen discovered that her employers were making sizable investments for their clients in what turned out to be dummy corporations. From that discovery, it required only the most rudimentary deductive skills to arrive at the conclusion that organized crime was implicated. And, unfortunately for Helen Markesson, hers was also the kind of mind that clung tenaciously to notions which were regarded by the society she lived in as outmoded and dangerous. Helen clung to notions about things like civic duty and personal integrity.

  Helen’s nervous testimony before a federal grand jury resulted in a lengthy investigation into the dealings of Norback, Perry. It did not result in any indictments. Meanwhile, the Markessons were—to use the quaint terminology of the Justice Department—“enrolled” in the Federal Witness Protection Program, which resulted in their relocation, under aliases, in three different western cities in a period of sixteen months. In no instance did the Justice Department furnish the promised identification papers—the birth certificates, the employment histories and the like—that were to accompany their new names.

  It was not until they had been relocated in a small town north of Albany, New York, and a budget cutback reduced the Markesson’s bimonthly stipend from the government to a figure slightly less than three hundred dollars, that Peter and Helen decided to leave the program. They knew they would risk reprisals from the organized-crime syndicate that was allegedly involved with Mister Norback and his partners.

  Because Helen also had outmoded and dangerous notions about things like self-reliance and self-worth, she found it difficult to understand how she, who had successfully held three executive-secretary positions prior to her employment by Norback, Perry, and her husband, who had been a seventy-five-thousand-a-year account executive with J. Walter Thompson, had come to be living in two rooms in the basement of a two-family house and doing the laundry in the bathtub.

  By the time they made a difficult trip down to Manhattan to consult Franklin P. Nelson, Peter and Helen Markesson had lost close to sixty pounds between them. And by the time Foggy decided he was willing to play a long shot and institute a breach-of-contract suit against the protection program administrators, alleging that their representations to the Markessons constituted a verbal contract, Helen was able to make jokes again. Foggy would chuckle politely when she would remark that licking food stamps left a bad taste in her mouth.

  “They knew the risks involved when they left the program, right?” Foggy was asking as Matt started in on his dessert. “I told them that whatever action I would—” He belched. “—Bring would prob’bly get a lot of publicity. And their real names would get in the paper. Couldn’t he helped.”

  “Take it easy,” Matt said. “Helen was a grown woman. She could make up her own mind. She knew she was taking a chance when she testified in the first place.”

  “For God’s sake, will you stop talking about her in the past tense?”

  Matt motioned for the waitress and wished he could see the woman’s face. The waitress was probably wondering how Matt had known what direction to gesture in.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Jeez, I hope you have a clear calendar this afternoon.”

  “After Carole left, I told the old bat out front to cancel everything. The only appointment I have now is with the couch in my office.”

  “Good move. I didn’t think you’d do this to yourself if you had to be in court today.” He handed the check to Foggy. “If you can’t read this, we’re in trouble.” Foggy snorted as he took the check. “Look, I’m really sorry to hear all this,” Matt said.

  Matt hadn’t heard the news that Peter had died, that much was true. But he knew about the fire bombing at the Hilton. His other self had been on the scene.

  There were others like him, men and women gifted by strange meanderings of fate with powers no one seemed to understand; men and women who went out in Halloween clothes to tilt at windmills.

  He had met one or two of them on occasion and they had compared notes. It appeared that all of them were accepted by the authorities when they first showed their made-over selves in public. The lawmakers and the law enforcers alike allowed them to operate; and if they worked outside the law in that, had they been deputized, their methods would have been proscribed by the rigid code of police procedure, they at least seemed to respect due process, which was enough to make the official lawmen look the other way. But the tacit understanding that allowed these costumed Don Quixotes their freedom to function was based on an uneasy trust.

  They all had one thing in common: at the same time that unknown hand had touched them and made them different, it steered them onto a course they could not stray from if they wanted to. It was enough to make a nihilist believe in destiny: it had become clear to these chosen few that there was little question to what end their gifts would be applied. Some of them called it “maintaining order”; others called it “justice.” There were a few who were possessed of a metaphysical turn of mind, and they called it “doing good works.”

  In Matt’s case the matter had been both simpler and more complex. His father’s decision, arrived at somewhere between the canvas and the ropes, that Matt would follow in his dodging footsteps had turned the old man into a coach. Channeling his son’s athletic aptitude into the ring, he trained young Matt tirelessly until the boy became what the old man would call “a fine physical specimen.” This was muttered in the same reverential tone as his references to his prime.

  The products of the old man’s efforts were ripplings of muscle on his son’s adolescent torso that not even the long weeks in a hospital bed could atrophy.

  The cancellation of Matt’s vision had little effect on his agility or strength. And like all the other processes that were manifestations of his sensory nerves’ improved interaction with his brain, his reflexes were sharper than ever. It was in those first few months of sightlessness, when he was only just discovering what he had become, that Matt told himself, with a curious combination of bitterness and awe, that he had indeed been the victim of a freak accident. It had, after all, turned him into a freak.

  And what would he do, this freak? What would he do now that he could no longer see in the accepted sense, but the rest of him had compensated for that loss so that he functioned no less efficiently than if he still did see? He would go on as before. Everything, and nothing had changed.

  The redheaded kid who wore dark glasses as he worked out on the bag had taken some getting used to down at Stillman’s Gym. But eventually the grizzled gray heads would turn to watch in openmouthed fascination, and in a very short while they found that the glasses were the only thing that reminded them the boy was different.

  The boxing commission, of course, had more reservations than the crowd down at Stillman’s. And the old man remained bitter, unable to believe that the accident had made Matt something better than he had been. Thus Matt learned that though he was not helpless, there were those who would thrust helplessness upon him.

  The turning point came when it looked as if Battling Murdock would don his gloves once more. The old man was finally going to get his shot at that big-money bout. And the money could easily have been his. But the money wasn’t clean, and the old man would not have made it by winning. His refusal to take the dive as instructed ended Matt’s ambivalence toward the fight game and his indecision about the future. It also ended his father’s life.

  Matt helped find his father’s killers and bring them to justice. And those who had assumed he was helpless were proven wrong.

  So, the matter had narrowed down to a simple thing that had nothing to do with a carefully reasoned decision. Those strange, incredible powers, the body conditioned by the old man’s futile dream, a son’s profound sense of loss, and an adolescent need to punish the kind of men who had killed his father forged the other self. The path Matt would walk became quite clear. It forked in two directions: the life of a blind lawyer, always deferred to, always protected despite his pointed demonstrations of his self-sufficience; a
nd the life of the other, the strange hero to millions who was deferred to without condescension and who needed no protection. The other self was an acrobatic vigilante who had been tagged—in that lurid tabloid style peculiar to New York—“Daredevil.”

  At the time the suite on the top floor of the Hilton had been hit by a fire bomb thrown in through a window, Daredevil had been moving east over Fifty-First Street by his unique method of travel.

  The form-fitting clothing he wore was equipped with a holster which held a billy club. Through an opening in the club’s tip, a cable which unspooled at the touch of a spring-lock mechanism in the grip of the club could be released. The cable had a reach of at least half a city block, and its other end was fitted with a small, sturdy grappling hook. With Daredevil’s flawless aim, the hook could be anchored on anything high up and available, allowing him to swing an entire block in the time it would take an earthbound man to cross the street. In the absence of any ledge or outcropping, the hook could be used like a mountain climber’s piton to imbed itself in concrete or brick, but the procedure was risky.

  Ordinarily, hooking the line was an effortless task. The waves which emanated from inside his head could outline the shape of buildings for him with total accuracy. This “radar sense” enabled him to determine the buildings’ composition and to gauge their distance from him unerringly.

  The citizens of New York had quickly become accustomed to the oddly garbed mystery man hurtling over their heads. How strange could he be to a population inured to the sight of street-corner evangelists and old men who pounded the pavement with drumsticks? But he kept one other secret in addition to the fact that he was Matthew Murdock. The public was jaded, but it was also just paranoid enough to envision all manner of harm to itself if it became known that the man swinging around up there on the end of a fancy rope happened to be blind.

  So they were allowed to remain secure in their belief that the man they called Daredevil was as normal as they were. Only a tourist could be found looking upward in amazement at the figure in red bounding from rooftop to rooftop on West Fifty-First Street.

  Daredevil’s attention was caught by the sound of the explosion immediately. As he followed it in the direction of the Hilton, he became aware of the noise of an engine overhead and a rhythmic flapping sound, like great wings beating the air: a helicopter.

  He filtered out both the engine and the churn of the rotary blades and concentrated on the sounds from within the cockpit. The first things he noticed were the heartbeats. There were three of them, one of them vaguely familiar and all of them in a fine state of tachycardia. Those boys were highly excited about something. Until one of them spoke, Daredevil could only tell himself that the crew of a traffic helicopter would be more dispassionate in its observations.

  He alighted atop a building on the west side of Sixth Avenue, across Fifty-Second Street from the hotel. He had to filter out the sound of approaching fire engines. From the time it had taken him to get near the Hilton, he concluded that if anyone had been hurt by the explosion he had heard, it was too late to do anything for them. So he turned his full attention to the helicopter overhead.

  “You think Molly got both of them?” one of the voices in the cockpit said.

  “There’s no way to tell until morning,” a voice Daredevil had heard somewhere before replied. It corresponded to the familiar heartbeat.

  He removed his grappling hook from the edge of the low retaining wall around the rooftop, and retracted it into the club, preparing it for another use.

  “Now what?”

  “We go pick up Molly and go back,” the familiar voice said. “We tell the man it was a ‘go.’ Then we wait.”

  They were within the cable’s reach. They probably had their landing lights out. If they were flying so low to begin with, the sound of the ’copter would call more attention to them than they were comfortable with. They would have reasoned that there was no point in making themselves more conspicuous.

  The grappling hook struck the undercarriage of the chopper and locked onto one of the landing struts on the first try. He was up the cable and fastened onto the undercarriage like a lamprey without missing a word from the cockpit.

  “What if Molly didn’t get them both?”

  “Will you stop whining? If that’s the case, we take another shot.”

  “Tomorrow, I hope,” the whiner said.

  “Nope. Tomorrow Doyle wants Nelson.”

  There was the sound of a long, low whistle and Daredevil imagined the whiner’s eyes widening. Somebody was in up to his armpits and what he was in was obviously a hell of a lot heavier than he’d counted on.

  The reference to Foggy completed the picture. Daredevil felt a shudder of dread, not so much for this goon squad’s victims—he had not known them—as much as for his partner. If the Nelson those guys had on their minds was Foggy, then they had just tried to torpedo the Markessons. If it turned out they had succeeded, he would handle the danger to Foggy in his own way. He would not worry his partner with it. If the Markessons were dead, Foggy would take it pretty badly.

  “Tomorrow? You sure?” the whiner was saying.

  “Midnight. Doyle had a man on the inside. The guy couldn’t find what Doyle wanted, so Doyle figures it’s in the mouthpiece’s head. So we go to the oflice, we set the charge, and Thursday morning, Nelson walks in and bang! Whatever he’s got, he keeps it to himself. Silencio. Permanent.”

  It was Foggy they were talking about, all right. And those guys worked for whoever Helen Markesson was running from. Or a middleman, more likely, a guy who had hired a specialist to torch the Hilton. A guy who had sent his own goons to back up the firebug. Doyle.

  And if the Doyle in question was who Daredevil thought it was, he was guaranteed a rough time or two before the whole mess was finished.

  There was some mumbling from the cockpit. Not even Daredevil’s ears could make it out.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” The whiner’s voice rose in panic.

  “We should be up higher. Something’s slowing our airspeed. Ain’t gonna make it all the way in like this. Feels like we got added weight.”

  Daredevil could not be sure that there was no way they could see him from the cockpit. He would have to back off; though he had hoped that the chopper would bring him face to face with Doyle that night, he decided the encounter would be worthless if it wasn’t going to be on his terms. The waves carried back the information that there was a rooftop less than twenty feet below him. Pretty low for a pass with a helicopter. His weight was dragging them down, but the distance was still a bit much for a straight drop.

  The building’s façade was stainless steel, his radar told him, and the grappling hook wouldn’t do him any good, but he sensed a flagpole just over the edge of the roof. He snapped the cable into place with one hand, readying it for a toss. He had to put all his concentration into it, but he was able to wrap the cable’s other end around the flagpole a few times.

  Waiting until the chopper was the right distance from the building, he swung his legs down and let go of the landing strut. As he broke away from the helicopter’s underbelly he squeezed the trigger in the club’s grip that would retract the cable. The chopper was almost directly over the flagpole when he let go. He dropped straight down, missing the flagpole by inches. As he fell, he clamped his free hand onto the grip, just above his other hand. He felt the pull across his shoulder blades as the cable went taut and he jerked to a stop less than two feet below the flagpole. To catch his breath he let himself dangle there for a full ten seconds before scanning for a ledge. The strain of the wrenching stop had been distributed across both arms. They would be sore for quite awhile, but by morning he would be functional.

  There was no ledge! There were only huge stainless-steel panels between the windows. The panels were studded with convex shapes that protruded from the surface at regular intervals. 666 Fifth Avenue, the Tishman Building.

  He swung in close to one of the panels and
grabbed the edge of it. He remained there, pressed up against the side of the building, for several minutes, in case one of the men in the ’copter was bright enough to look down and see what had caused their temporary weight problem. He was sure it was dark enough so that staying close to the building would conceal him. After awhile the sound of the helicopter faded in the distance.

  The next day he went to lunch with Foggy after Carole Lehrman left the office, and Foggy got quietly drunk as he told Matt that Peter Markesson was dead.

  Matt returned to the office in an irritable mood. He hadn’t left the courthouse until 6:15. Judge Palmieri had a crazy thing about handicaps, and he seemed to regard the concept of a blind trial lawyer as a mockery of the entire judicial system. The first time he had heard one of Matt’s cases, he had made some strange remark about how he hadn’t recognized Matt without a set of scales in one hand. Ever since, Matt had been unable to go up before Palmieri without remembering that remark. He still didn’t know just what the hell Palmieri had meant by it.

  So it had been a few hours of unfriendly sparring, with Palmieri denying motions and overruling objections before Matt could finish making them. Matt hoped that if someone were going to get that dangerous old crackpot off the bench, they would do it before Matt got an ulcer.

  Foggy was still on the couch when Matt got back and it took almost twenty minutes to get him up and into his coat. Evidently, the receptionist had given up over an hour ago.

  After some of her cold but still-formidable coffee, Foggy said he felt refreshed. He had had a very satisfying dream in which he had fired Miss Meyerson.