Batman 6 - The Dark Knight Read online

  Rachel smiled, and half stood to look over Dent’s shoulder at Bruce Wayne, who was entering accompanied by a beautiful woman. Wayne shooed away the maîtred’ and strode to Dent’s table.

  “Rachel!” Bruce said. “Fancy that.”

  “Yes, Bruce. Fancy that.”

  Bruce nodded to the woman standing next to him. “Rachel, this is Natascha. Natascha, Rachel.”

  In a pronounced Russian accent, Natascha said, “Hello.”

  Dent looked up at Bruce. “The famous Bruce Wayne. Rachel’s told me everything about you.”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  Rachel said, “Bruce, this is Harvey Dent.”

  “Let’s put a couple of tables together,” Bruce suggested.

  “Will they let us do that?” Dent asked.

  “They should! I own the place.”

  “For how long?” Rachel asked. “Let me guess, about three weeks?”

  Bruce stared at his shoes. “How’d you know?”

  Rachel turned her gaze to Natascha. “Aren’t you . . .”

  “Prima ballerina for the Moscow Ballet,” Bruce prolaimed.

  “Harvey’s taking me next week,” Rachel said.

  “You’re into ballet, Harvey?” Bruce asked.

  “No,” Rachel said. “He knows I am.”

  Bruce motioned to the maîtred’ and whispered in his ear. A minute later, two busboys carried an extra table from the kitchen area and placed it next to Dent’s.

  “Let me order for everyone,” Bruce said.

  It was almost eleven when the four of them ate their last bite of dessert. The Ocelot was empty except for the wait staff and a handful of late diners.

  Natascha dabbed at her lips with a napkin and continued the conversation they’d been having. “No, no, come on. How could you want to raise children in a city like this?”

  “I was raised here,” Bruce said in mock outrage, “and I turned out okay.”

  “Is Wayne Manor in the city limits?” Dent asked.

  “Sure. You know, as our new DA, you might want to figure out where your jurisdiction ends.”

  “I am talking about the kind of city that idolizes a masked vigilante,” Natascha said, her voice rising.

  “Gotham’s proud of an ordinary man standing up for what’s right,” Dent said.

  Natascha shook her head. “No. Gotham needs heroes like you—elected officials, not a man who thinks he is above the law.”

  “Exactly,” Bruce said. “Who appointed the Batman?”

  “We did,” Dent said. “All of us who stood by and let scum take control of our city.”

  “But this is a democracy, Harvey,” Natascha said.

  Dent leaned forward, his elbows and forearms on the table. “When their enemies were at the gate, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city. It wasn’t considered an honor. It was considered a public service.”

  Rachel said, “And the last man they asked to protect the Republic was named Caesar. He never gave up that power.”

  “Well, I guess you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain,” Dent said. “Look, whoever the Batman is, he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life doing this. How could he? Batman’s looking for someone to take up his mantle.”

  Natascha looked directly into Dent’s eyes, smiled, and purred, “Someone like you, Mr. Dent?”

  “Maybe. If I’m up to it.”

  Natascha leaned over the table and covered the top half of Dent’s face with her flattened hands. “What if Harvey Dent is the Caped Crusader?”

  Dent took Natascha’s wrists and gently drew her arms away from his face. “If I were sneaking out every night, someone would’ve noticed by now.”

  Rachel glanced quickly at Bruce.

  “Well, you’ve sold me,” Bruce said to Dent. “I’m gonna throw you a fund-raiser.”

  “That’s nice of you, Bruce. But I’m not up for reelection for three years. That fund-raising stuff won’t start for—”

  “I don’t think you understand. One fund-raiser with my pals, you’ll never need another cent.”

  The next day, the Gotham Times’s headline was:

  WHO IS HARVEY DENT?

  The paper tried to answer the question in a six-column profile that filled the entire front page of the Metro section. It began with basic biographical stuff: Public-school education; middle-class parents, father a cop, mother a housewife; scholarship to Gotham University, with history and pre-law majors; law school at the state university; both parents dead while Harvey was still a teenager; clerk for a supreme court judge; appointment to the Gotham City Internal Affairs Division and . . . from there on, Harvey was a meteor. Then, he snared one of the big prizes; he had been promoted to district attorney following the death of the previous DA. He wasn’t the most popular man who ever held the job—the cops and courthouse guys hung nasty nicknames on him—but he was the most effective. He was sometimes slow to prosecute, but when he did, he won. Period.

  He dated. No commitments, nothing that could be called a relationship, but he had no trouble finding attractive young women to share an evening with. No surprise there—he was a man on his way up, and, who knows, the last stop might even be the White House. And he was handsome, as handsome as any leading man, as handsome as Bruce Wayne, and though he wasn’t much of a dancer and not awfully good at small talk, he was socially adept enough to get through any reasonable social situation.

  Hobbies? Well, he ran around the reservoir daily, and three times a week he used a gym near his office, but those activities weren’t exactly recreational. They were like his high-protein, low-fat diet—tools to maximize his effectiveness. So, the answer to the hobby question was no.

  The Times article was accompanied by a four-column color photo of Harvey Dent’s head and shoulders. Handsome? Oh, yes indeed.

  Rachel, knowing that Harvey seldom had time for newspapers, gave him a copy of the Times, which he tucked into his briefcase but did not actually forget about. He was curious about the profile, but he didn’t want anyone to know he was curious. So the folded paper remained nestled among briefs and warrants until Dent was alone in his apartment, a bit after midnight. He checked his voice mail, listened to a message from Rachel, and debated calling her back, then decided not to; Rachel was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of woman. He shucked his clothes, got into bed, and only then removed the Times from his briefcase and read about himself.

  It didn’t take long: Dent had taught himself speed-reading in law school. He threw the paper aside.

  There were no errors of fact. But they got it all wrong.

  Take Dad, for instance, and for openers: Police officer, member of Gotham’s finest, badge and gun and nightstick and pressed blue uniform. Check. That’s what the world saw, that’s what made young Harvey the envy of kids whose fathers did things like drive trucks or tend bars. But what the world didn’t see—that was the reality. The raging drunk. The smasher of dishes and furniture. And that nightstick . . . how many times had Harvey seen it slammed onto his mother’s shoulders or across her belly? And when the neighbors called 911, and the uniforms arrived and saw Harry Dent, their brother-in-blue, they apologized for bothering him and left, and the beatings began again. Once, Harvey was hiding in the stairwell outside the apartment, he heard cops talking about his mother, about how before she married Harry she’d been one of them and probably deserved everything Harry gave her. Harvey didn’t know what one of them was, but he did know that it was not a good thing to be called.

  Lucy was his mother’s name . . . He remembered her combing his hair and telling him what a handsome young man he was and how proud she made him. Sometimes her eyes were black, and sometimes her mouth was scabbed, but she always dressed and combed him and told him how wonderful he was.

  The teachers at school echoed his mother. He was a good boy, and a good-looking boy to boot, and he got good grades as well. He didn’t believe it—how could a good boy ha
ve a father like his?—but he realized that as long as others believed it, he might be able to find a better life for his mother and himself.

  When he was ten, his father moved out. His only explanation was, I can’t stand the sight of either of ya. His father took a rented room near the precinct where he worked, and once Harvey saw him on the street with a middle-aged woman who resembled his mother, but Harry never visited, never sent birthday or Christmas cards. His parents did not get a divorce; people of their age and backgrounds simply did not do that. But they never lived together again or, Harvey believed, even saw each other until the night they both died. How that happened, how his estranged parents were in the same room, and what exactly they did or said to each other, neither Harvey nor any of the investigators ever learned. Harvey was late getting home that night: a school day, followed by his job at a local drugstore until ten. So it was almost ten thirty when he opened the apartment door and saw them: his mother with a knotted sheet around her neck, eyes open, feet dangling, hanging from a ceiling light fixture, and his father, gun in hand, lying on the floor beneath her, the wood under his hair soaked with blood. Harvey knew, immediately, without touching them, that they were dead, and he knew what he had to do: call the police, answer questions. The bodies were eventually put in bags and removed, and then Harvey was alone, in a dark apartment, filled with an unidentifiable odor and the creaks and groans of an old building: alone because he had no one, no relatives, no friends who could be awakened at three in the morning.

  He didn’t even try to sleep. He just sat staring out the front window at an empty street lined with tenements and tried to understand. Why had they done it? No, what was done? Did Mother kill Father, then hang herself? Or was it the other way around—he killed her, then himself? But if so, why did he hang her instead of just shooting her? Why had they been together? None of it made sense, and for Harvey, that was the worst part, the not-making-sense.

  The sun rose, and Harvey showered, changed clothes, walked to school. A kid he didn’t know mumbled sorry as Harvey passed him in the hall, and two others nodded to him, so Harvey knew that news of his parents’ death was out there. Concerned teachers sent him to the guidance counselor, a kindly older woman who tried to get through Harvey’s distant look. She made him promise to see a counselor, then Harvey asked to be excused. He remained silent and by himself for the remainder of the school day.

  After school, he went to his job at the pharmacy. His boss stopped him as he was tying on his apron and said it was too bad, what happened to the mister and missus, and Harvey agreed, “Yeah, too bad.”

  On Saturday, he went to the church his mother sometimes attended and spoke to the pastor. The pastor said, “The Lord’s plan is mysterious, all right, but someday you’ll know this was all for the best, you just have to have faith.”

  Harvey never returned.

  He didn’t attend the prom, or any dances, or any football or basketball games. But he did study, and he did get those scholarships, and somewhere in there he discovered the Law, and he knew he’d found his profession. No, not merely profession—his vocation! The law made sense. The law transformed the chaos of human existence into logic, fairness, rules that were reasonable and could be obeyed. The law offered stability and structure, not only for Harvey Dent the citizen, but for Harvey Dent the orphan.

  It was about the time that the Law revealed itself to Harvey that he became aware of what many thought was his greatest asset: his looks. He was, by any criterion, an extraordinarily handsome man. He himself could see that every morning when he looked in his bathroom mirror. It was odd: he could see it, but he didn’t believe it. Well, okay, he didn’t have to believe in something to use it. His face became a tool, like his intelligence and memory, and he would show it to the world and reap whatever benefits the display conferred.

  He rose rapidly, playing by the rules, but playing hard. Part of the game was being seen with women, having the occasional romance, and he did these things, too, but he never found a female who interested him until he was introduced to Rachel Dawes.

  At first, Harvey Dent was nothing more than a name to Rachel. He was the new guy working in association with the Internal Affairs Division, and, she heard, a wiseass and a fast gun. Not her type. She did not actually meet him until he began working in the DA’s office, and that first time was briefly in court, and she had to like his looks—he was an extraordinarily handsome man. Which was another strike against him, really. By then, Rachel had had enough experience in the dating game to know something about men; one of the things she’d learned was that beautiful men tended to be more self-involved and egotistical than beautiful women. Their idea of a good time was to lean back and be admired. Not Rachel’s idea. Not at all. But that day in court . . . the attorney in her had to admire his easy command of case law and the assertive way he presented his case. If he was impressed with his appearance, he concealed it well. He seemed totally focused on the business at hand and, again, the Rachel-the-lawyer liked what she saw.

  Later, in the hall outside the courtroom, she caught up with him, told him she was an observer from the DA, and if her office could help in any way.

  “Actually, there are a couple of items we should discuss,” Dent said. “Buy you a cup of coffee?”

  Rachel glanced at her watch. Half past five. She was officially off duty. “Okay,” she said. “But we go Dutch.”

  “We’ll see,” Dent replied.

  They strolled through rush-hour crowds to a diner favored by the courthouse set, went inside, ordered, then waited in a booth for their food. Dent took out his wallet.

  “I said we’d go Dutch,” Rachel reminded him.

  “Okay,” Harvey said. “Let’s let fate decide.”

  He took a coin from his pocket, flipped it in the air, and as it was falling said, “Heads, I pick up the bill. Tails, it’s yours.”

  He caught the coin and showed it to Rachel: heads.

  He gave the waitress a five.

  After several more cups and a shared piece of pie, Rachel told him, “I’m not impressed by your looks. Just so you know.”

  “We have something in common then. I’m not impressed by them, either.”

  Later, she said, “I lied, you know.”

  “How so?”

  “I am impressed by your looks.”

  In coming months, she often remembered that hour they sat in a booth by the window, drank coffee, and discussed Dent’s case. She was seeing another aspect of him: earnest, determined, sharing her own rage.

  “There’s nothing worse than a dirty cop,” he told her. “My job—prosecuting them—doesn’t win me any popularity contests, but it’s necessary, and I love it.”

  “Love it?” Rachel asked, raising her brows.

  “Funny way to put it, huh? But yeah, ‘love’ is the word. Guess that makes me pretty weird.”

  They sat and sipped in silence, watching pedestrians scurry past the window. After Dent’s declaration, there seemed to be nothing more to say, but Rachel didn’t want the conversation to end. That was when Rachel told Dent she was impressed with his looks after all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Bruce Wayne saw them together in Gotham Park, in one of the horse-drawn buggies tourists liked to rent. They were sitting close together, deep in conversation, oblivious to the coachman sitting just in front of them, or the families out for a day’s recreation, or the tourists snapping pictures, or Bruce Wayne, in his Lamborghini with a tall, sunglassed blonde in the next seat.

  A few hours later, Bruce became Batman, and Batman delivered a pair of holdup men to police headquarters and arrived back at the penthouse early—just a bit after one.

  Alfred, wearing pajamas and a robe, greeted him, and asked, “No need for needlework tonight?”

  “No, not a single drop of blood shed—mine or theirs. Alfred, what do you think of Harvey Dent?”

  “Where did that come from, Master Bruce?”

  “You know who I’m talking about?”

/>   “The new fellow in the District Attorney’s Office?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I can’t say I have an opinion. As the great Will Rogers said, ‘All I know is what I read in the papers.’ What is your opinion of Mr. Dent, Master Bruce?”

  “He’s too good to be true. His bio reads like . . . I don’t know—like something a press office made up.”

  “That worries you?”

  “Yes, it does. He’s in a position where he could do a lot of harm.”

  “Miss Dawes works with him, doesn’t she? Perhaps she could offer insight.”

  “I don’t want to bother Rachel with it. She’s got enough on her mind. I’ll look into it myself.”

  Bruce Wayne had acquired a lot of skills, including superior detective skills. Some he’d gotten during the years he had bounced from university to university, preparing himself for a mission he had not yet defined for himself, some from his years with Rā’s al Ghūl. “It’s always useful to know as much as possible about your enemy,” Rā’s had once told him. Now, Bruce put everything he had learned to the task of getting to know Harvey Dent. What he got from hacking into computers was next to useless, but not quite: he didn’t care about Dent’s university grades, or the apartments he’d rented, but Bruce was glad to see the financial stuff—glad, but disappointed. Dent’s bank accounts and credit-card activity were impeccable. He had neither spent nor received a single dollar that couldn’t be accounted for. His police record was not quite as impeccable, he’d actually had a speeding ticket and three parking violations, none of which he’d questioned, all of which he’d settled promptly.

  “Nobody is this virtuous,” Bruce told Alfred.

  “Perhaps you might consider speaking for yourself, Master Bruce.”

  “Point taken. You are a saint.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But you can.”

  Next, Bruce investigated the deaths of Dent’s parents. At first, he had great difficulty concentrating on this task, and he didn’t know why. Finally, he realized that Dent’s tragedy paralleled his own: the loss of both mother and father, simultaneously, to violence. There were differences, of course. Bruce had been a child when he watched a man with a gun shoot Thomas and Martha Wayne, scattering Martha’s pearls into the gutter, and vanish into the night. Dent had been well into his teens . . .