Catwoman - Tiger Hunt

Chapter Thirteen

The night was warm, with a hint of summer's humidity in the haze. Batman traveled crosstown the hard way---without using the streets or sidewalks, just especially with a heavy wooden box clamped under his arm.

He was careful with the box, but not as careful as he would have been if he hadn't examined it thoroughly and made a few adjustments. Nothing that was visible on the surface---but then, what he'd changed had been well-hidden in the first place. The icon he'd received from the young man in the Russian bakery had been far too ordinary to be the major payment in a bartered-arms deal. The frame wasn't gold, but thinly gilt wood. There had to be something more, so he'd subjected the icon to close scrutiny in the Batcave, and found the real icon, the seventeenth-century masterpiece, sleeping under a removable veneer.

Bruce Wayne, of the Wayne Foundation, patron of a hundred useful causes, summoned the appropriate curator from Gotham's finest art museum to his office. Saying he'd found the object in an old chest in the mansion's attic---where wonders and trash had been found many times before---Bruce flicked the box open as if it were just another flea-market curio.

The woman dropped to her knees in awe and for a closer examination. She was speechless for several moments. She mentioned a name that meant nothing to Wayne and showed him where the artist had concealed it in the goldwork. She hoped the Wayne Foundation wouldn't consider selling it for less than three million dollars or before her museum had an opportunity to make an offer.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

When Bruce Wayne was alone again he studied the delicate, melancholy saint with her hooded eyes and glistening gold headcloth.

Put it back beneath the veneer? Allow it to flow from hand to hand, until the weapons were moving toward Bessarabia and Harry Mattheson disposed of the priceless artwork? If Harry Mattheson were the Connection...

In the end Bruce Wayne locked the icon in the Foundation vault and reinstalled the flexible veneer over another, equally worthless, plank of lacquered wood. This way, no matter what happened, when it was over, the Foundation would make certain that an object of reverence and beauty could not be perverted again. He thought about injecting a short-range transmitter into the frame, but did not. He'd follow the icon in person, until it reached the Connection's hands.

The rendezvous was set for midnight in the warehouse district not too far from the pier where Batman first spotted Tiger. He arrived twenty minutes early, climbing out of an abandoned steam tunnel into a restaurant's basement storeroom. He expected to have time to check out the immediate area, but the ethnic Russian was in another late-night eatery across the street, so he decided to get rid of the box first. They met in a reeking alley.

"You have got it?" The young man asked the obvious, took the box, and found a patch of relative brightness in which to open it. His relief was palpable when he saw what he wanted to see exactly where he expected to see it. "I will speak well of you to my people." He closed the box and glanced nervously at the street. "You will go now. Three men can keep a secret only after one has killed the other two. Benjamin Franklin; citizen class. The Gagauzi and the scar-faced man, they would not keep our secrets."

Especially not the scar-faced man, Batman agreed silently. The young man started toward the street. Batman called him back.

"This is the only time. No matter what happens, there can be no next time. Not if you want to stay in America. Do you understand me?"

The youth nodded and ran. Batman waited until the street, as seen from the alley, was deserted, then looked for a path to the rooftops. He hoped the young Russian did understand.

It was a little after midnight when the dark streets resounded with unintelligible shouts and snippets of conversation. Five men got in each other's way climbing out of a single taxi. They were in high spirits, laughing and waving at the taxi as it made a U-turn and headed back to more-populated territory. From his rooftop perch, Batman watched them take their bearings from a torn scrap of paper. They came up the sidewalk, toward him, toward the doorway some distance below where the Russian waited with the icon. Batman guessed they were the Gagauzi---the Bessarabians looking to outfit themselves for war, the men Commissioner Gordon wanted to catch before the actm rather than during or after it.

The quintet came up the block like tourists, pointing out the sights to each other, carrying on animated conversation as if the Gotham waterfront were Main Street USA. Batman could not measure their effectiveness as rebels or terrorists back in Bessarabia, but here they were innocents, and he worried about them. He considered alternatives while, below, the uneasy allies exchanged greetings in Russian.

Batman was deep in thought when he heard the faintest sound behind him, near the place where he'd climbed onto the roof. The Gagauzi erupted in laughter; if the sound was repeated, Batman couldn't hear it. He took precautions, receding into the shadows and adjusting the mask so his chin did not reflect the light. Listening to the Gagauzi tell jokes he couldn't understand, Batman kept a close eye on the waist-high walls surmounting the rooftop. Even so, he nearly missed the dark shape rise and disappear into the black asphalt covering the roof.

The intruder made no sound and cast no shadow, yet Batman followed its movement along the back wall to the corner, then forward along the side wall toward the street. It stopped in the corner opposite his own. Had he, himself, been spotted? Batman gathered his strength, rising into a crouch, balancing on the balls of his feet, prepared for anything. But nothing happened. The intruder had found a vantage point identical to his own. The intruder was waiting, just as he was.

Without warning, the Gagauzi began to sing. Four of them chanted words and rhythms that sounded remarkably similar to Native American music, but the fifth produced an eerie, droning sound from deep in his throat that sent an involuntary shudder down Batman's back.

Filtered through the almost inhuman chorus rising from the sidewalk, Batman heard what might have been a resigned sigh. He relaxed, no longer expecting an attack. There was only one, inescapable, conclusion: The intruder was here to witness the same transaction. The intruder was virtually invisible, which implied a mask and gloves---in short, a costume not dissimilar from his own. The Russian's words came back to Batman---They will hire your enemies. From this moment on, Batman's attention was divided, and his options were limited.

Catwoman settled. Her teeth were clenched, her fists were tight enough to tremble, that infernal wailing grated painfully in her ears and---not fifty feet away---Batman was hunkered down in the shadows, no doubt ready to play havoc with her plans.

The cape had given him away, although she knew it was mostly luck that had her looking in the right direction when he reacted to the wailing. Whatever the cape was made of, it waivered ever so slightly from the movement beneath it. And how did she know it was Batman? She didn't, but of all the things she could imagine hiding under a cape, Batman was the worst, so she assumed it was he.

And she seethed.

Eddie Lobb belonged to her. She knew that nothing legal was going to happen on the sidewalk below. And she knew Batman well enough to guess that he'd gotten wind of it and that he was here to stop it. Whatever Eddie Lobb had promised his boss, wasn't going to happen---in a big way. But, dammit, Eddie Lobb belonged to her. She didn't intend for him to think that all the costumed fates of Gotham had conspired and united against him. She intended that he look into her masked face, and hers alone, until he recognized his doom. For a moment, no longer, Catwoman wondered what, exactly, she intended to interrupt. Some sort of drug deal? An assassination? It didn't matter. All that mattered was Eddie Lobb.

Batman didn't really matter. Let him do what he wanted, so long as Eddie saw her first.

The seething stopped, her fists unclenched. She opened the unreflecting wool sack and pulled out a coil of nylon rope.

Let him come over and try to stop her, or even, ask what she was doing. She'd tell him. Maybe they could work out a deal.

She crept over to a ventilation pipe rising from the asphalt. After making certain it was well anchored, she knotted one end securely around it, then ran the rope back to the front wall. Her plan called for getting the drop, literally, on Eddie as he arrived, but the roof was much too high for free-fall. She peered over the edge, mentally measuring the distance to the pavement---about sixty feet. Then she carefully recoiled the rope, wrapping it between her elbow and the palm of her hand, counting by two with each revolution. When she reached forty, she knotted a trio of loops into the rope and laid the entire coil carefully atop the wall. Now the rope would get her safely down to dropping height.

Across the roof, Batman shook his head slowly. He'd recognized Catwoman as soon as she moved toward the pipe. He watched her stand in his full sight and fuss with the rope. He had a pretty good idea what she meant to do. Batman didn't count Catwoman among his worst enemies, and he would have liked to know how the Moldavians had managed to contact her, but stealing the icon was her kind of job.

Too bad. Considering what he'd already done to the icon, Batman might have been tempted to let her get away with it, but he wanted to follow the box to the Connection, not back to the Commonwealth of Independent States. He'd have to stop her. He figured he could wait until she started to move---no sense risking the noise of a scuffle, although it was hard to imagine that the Gagauzi could hear anything but their own wailing voices.

Indeed, they couldn't hear anything else, but the two disparate personalities on the roof heard a booming sound that quickly resolved itself into an automobile stereo system with its volume control set for stun. It was not a sound either expected to hear, and they tracked its approach down the avenue. It slowed. It became abruptly silent. Without acknowledgement, they both crept forward. They saw what they wanted to see: a solitary walker headed this way in the next crosstown block, but hadn't made the noise. That had come from a high-riding 4 × 4 rolling blind and mute around the corner.

Catwoman gathered her rope. Batman pressed his hand against the cement capstone on the wall, muffling the sound of the thermite with his gauntlet. This wasn't in anybody's script. Maybe the gregarious Gagauzi had sung the wrong song. Catwoman drew her legs up onto the capstones, then dared a glance over her shoulder. Their eyes met for an instant, and they could no longer pretend to be unaware of each other.

The Gagauzi sang. The 4 × 4 cruised closer. Finally someone, Batman guessed the young Russian, spotted trouble coming toward them. Then all hell broke loose as the windows of the 4 × 4 came down and shotgun muzzles pointed outward. From the roof it was possible to see the flash as the shots were fired, but not to know where they struck. But someone screamed. The 4 × 4 stopped, and a trio of lanky youths in red satin jackets got out on the far side. They were firing their guns as they came around toward the sidewalk.

Batman's options had been reduced to a single imperative innocents were being slaughtered. It was time to go below. Snapping the filament into a pliable steel groove in his gauntlet, he vaulted over the capstone. The last thing he saw was Catwoman glowering at him.

Despite the billowing cape and the dragline, Batman dropped like a stone, as he'd expected. He was ready when his feet touched the pavement and the dragline began to recoil. For an instant---less than a second, less than a heartbeat---his body was going in two different directions; then the dragline whipped out of his hand and his knees bent to absorb his excess momentum. No gymnast dismounting from the high bar or rings could have stuck the landing better. The cape was still furling around his shoulders when Batman took his first defiant stride toward the gunmen. In his peripheral vision he could see that two of six ex-citizens of the former Soviet Union were lying on the pavement. Two more had panicked and run, but the last pair was fighting back, no quarter asked or given, bare hands and a particularly nasty-looking knife against modern firearms.

The Gagauzi would be a force to be reckoned with if they managed to arm themselves into the twentieth century, although it was Batman's self-appointed task to see that didn't happen. He advanced on the nearest satin jacket. The kid---he couldn't have been more than fourteen---pumped to the gun and fired, aiming right where he was supposed to: at the yellow-and-black emblem on Batman's chest where the thin polymer armor was bonded to a sturdy layer of Kevlar. Batman didn't blink. The kid threw away his gun with a scream and headed for the 4 × 4. Batman let him go.

The kid's scream brought a momentary halt to the skirmishing. All eyes focused on Batman, then the remaining guns. The two Gagauzi were slack-jawed. They believed in ghosts and devils; they believed they were looking at one.

"Get out of here!" Batman yelled. He had to believe this was all an accident, a twist of fate. A culture clash between the sheep-herding Bessarabians and the drug-dealing Gothamites. If the police came now, Gordon would be ecstatic, but Batman would be as far away from the Connection as ever. He surged forward. The cape billowed as if he were chasing pigeons. In a way, he was.

"Scram!"

The combatants separated. Everything was going well, then one of the Gagauzi looked over at his fallen comrade, at the velvet-covered box lying unattended on the concrete. He veered, and the satin jackets moved faster. Batman knew the contents of the box weren't worth risking anything for, and it slowed his reactions. He got his hands on the satin jacket after the jacket's wearer got his hands on the box. The youth thought fast; he heaved the box to another member of his team, who, in turn, tossed it to the kid in the 4 × 4. Everyone still on their feet moved toward the vehicle, which revved its engine and flash-flooded the street with its full panoply of lights. Batman felt the satin go limp in his hands.

The 4 × 4's wheels screeched as it roared down the street toward the piers with the Gagauzi in hot, but futile, pursuit. Batman threw the jacket aside. He checked on the downed men. It was already too late for the Gagauzi. It might be too late for the Russian by the time Batman carried him to the nearest hospital, but he had to try.

Across the avenue, shielding himself instinctively in shadow, Eddie Lobb---Tiger to himself and his professional associates---surveyed the scene with a heartfelt curse. He hadn't been happy from the moment he heard the Bess-arabs singing. The goddamned sheepherders didn't belong anywhere near Gotham City; they didn't belong in this century. But his boss wanted that painting bad enough to do the deal right here because all the principals wanted to visit America. His heart had skipped a beat when the dark 4 × 4 whisked by. He thought it was as bad as it could get when the first shot was fired. Then, insult to injury, Batman dropped in out of nowhere to mix things up beyond all hope.

When he saw the wooden box---the wooden box---sail into the 4 × 4, Tiger wanted to throw up. None of this was his fault, but the boss wouldn't see it that way when he found out. The boss would ream him out six ways from Sunday and he'd still have to try to track down that priceless, ugly painting.

Nothing was going right. Not since he gave Rose the tigerhead box. Maybe he shouldn't have given a talisman away like that. She hadn't liked it anyway. Shit, she wouldn't touch it until he made her. Maybe the tiger spirit was testing him. Maybe if he passed the test, everything would start going right again. He better pass soon. There were headlights in the street again. The van was coming. He'd have to put his story together in a hurry.

Eddie looked around, making sure the Batman was gone, then started walking toward the lights.

Catwoman watched him get into the van. She pounded her fist against the cement until it was numb.