Catwoman - Tiger Hunt

Chapter Two

The herd of emergency vehicles was thinning. The ambulances left first, followed quickly by the television crews. Who could blame them? The fire had looked promising for the late news, but there were no innocent victims---just body bags and stretchers filled with drug dealers and gang members. No relatives showed up to grieve photogenically. No neighborhood residents wandered by proclaiming that it was about time somebody put a torch to that place.

The fire trucks coiled their hoses and headed back to their stations. Most of the squad cars peeled off when their radios crackled to life with news of the next crisis. There were only two cars left. A black-and-white from the local precinct, and a Fire Inspector keeping watch a little while longer---just in case there was a pocket of fire left inside the smoldering wreck.

They thought they were alone on the scene. They weren't. Five stories up, on a roof, across the street, a black-shrouded, solitary figure watched, waited, and pondered what had gone wrong.

He'd passed through the neighborhood earlier in the night. He'd spotted the abandoned building for what it was: a drug depot, a gang's fortress. It was quiet enough, if you didn't count the four-wheeled boombox parked outside the front door. The gang wasn't going anywhere. He figured to bust it later on, after midnight. Before midnight he liked to stay loose and outside, ready to go where he was needed.

His parents died before midnight. All the years he'd been Batman, and all the years before he became Batman, Bruce Wayne never forgot how his parents were murdered on the Gotham sidewalks because no one was around to come to their defense. The Batman costume and persona were designed to put fear in the hearts of those who walked on the wrong side of righteousness, but Bruce had become Batman because the innocent had to be protected---especially when they got lost in the dark.

So when he'd heard the woman screaming in the next block, he'd gone immediately, tracking it down without the least suspicion until he beat down the door and saw the deceitful videotape player flickering in the middle of the empty room. Empty---except for the message scrawled on the virgin-white wall:

The body's not here. It's in an alley, up the street.

It's your fault---you on the rooftops---you made him jumpy

Drug gangs---terrorists and scum.

Killing them is no loss at all.

I take their money and put it to a better use.

But you don't understand that.

You won't mind your own business.

So you have to be tricked---for your own good.

While the Bat's at bay

The cat's at play.

Batman had crushed the tape player beneath his heel. He would have gotten rid of the message, too---if there'd been any white paint lying around. Catwoman was wrong. Justice must be served, and the end did not justify the means. Catwoman didn't understand---apparently could not understand---and that, in a tortured way, made her one of the innocents. He suspected she was supporting herself by stealing from the drug gangs, where her crimes disappeared in the statistical rounding. And his own passage through the area had probably forced her hand. It didn't make what she did right, but it did mean he didn't have to hurry.

Then Batman heard gunshots. Neither he nor Catwoman carried guns. He had plenty of other gadgets hung on his belt, but so far as he knew, Catwoman had only her claws and her wits. She might be cornered. She might be outnumbered. And she was innocent---at least more innocent than her prey.

Batman headed for the roof. He was standing there, pinpointing the source of the sounds and planning his rescue assault, when he saw her sleek silhouette leap from an upper-story window of the drug fortress. He'd cased out the area earlier. He'd thought he'd known where she was headed, but when he got there she wasn't. So Catwoman knew this part of Gotham's jungle better than Batman did. That wasn't surprising: he knew she lived somewhere in the East End, and that particular hellhole wasn't more than a quarter mile away as the cat ran, or the bat flew.

He didn't pursue her. He'd spotted the flames by them, and the rigid codes that, for him, separated right and wrong mandated that he search for survivors. Justice wasn't served at a barbecue. He was in the building, counting casualties, when the fire trucks roared up. It was time to find the window Catwoman used for her escape---the hardworking men and women of Gotham's uniformed services had precious little use for a loner like him. Life was less complicated when he stayed out of their sights.

In some ways he and Catwoman weren't all that different.

Batman figured he'd stick around a while longer, until all the uniforms were gone. He hadn't looked for the body in the alley yet. It rankled him to think that she might have lied to him. If she lied, she lost her protective innocence and he'd have no choice except to hunt her down. So he waited on the rooftop while the cops and the inspector joked with each other over cold coffee and stale doughnuts.

"Jay-sus, will you look at that!" one of them exclaimed, gesturing with his pastry at the sky over Batman's head. "The Commissioner's got a burning gut again."

Batman craned his neck around, already knowing what he'd see: the beam of carbon arc lamp striking the clouds, framing the sign of the bat.

Catwoman could wait. The body in the alley would have to wait. Another servant of justice needed help.

There was no reason Batman couldn't walk through the front doors of City Hall and ride the elevator to Commissioner Gordon's office. The officers on duty here, while no less hardworking than their peers in the precincts, understood that the Commissioner's door was always open for the caped and masked man, and whatever their personal feelings about Batman, they viewed Gordon with a respect that bordered on awe. They knew the signal was beaming. They were watching for him, laying a few bets on who would spot him first.

Batman ignored the front doors, the back doors, and the basement loading docks. He used grapple lines to reach the broad ledge outside the Commissioner's office. After all, serving justice didn't rule out a few surprises. It wouldn't hurt either of them to laugh at a fundamentally harmless prank. Bruce Wayne could almost see his old friend spraying coffee across his desk when he heard his window opening rather than his door.

But Gordon's window opened silently, and he was too engrossed in his paperwork to notice which way Batman had come into the room.

"Ah---you're here. Good. Have a seat and let me fill you in."

A bit abashed, and grateful for the mask, Batman closed the window. Shrugging his shoulders reflexively to keep the cape from choking him while he sat, Batman settled into one of the leather armchairs. "Is this about the fire down below the East End---"

Gordon cut Batman off with a wave of his hand. "No, I don't know about a fire, but it's not at all likely. Our problem isn't in Gotham City yet, but it's coming soon. Interpol and our own Federal security agencies had me in meetings all day; we just got them loaded on their planes and shipped out of here. Seems they've gotten wind of some newfangled terrorist group planning to come here to Gotham City to buy enough arms, ammunition, and ground-to-air Stinger missiles to outfit a small army."

Batman leaned forward in his chair. His concern was clearly visible below the hard shadow of his mask. The Commissioner had his complete attention. "Who? There's no one in Gotham running that kind of arms race. Who's buying?"

"Didn't I ask them those very questions myself, and more than once, I assure you." Gordon tore a sheet of paper to shreds, crumpled it into a crude ball, and lobbed it at the basket. "But these are high-level bureaucrats, diplomats---not cops---and they're not going to tell me anything except that I'm supposed to turn over a hundred of my men to them---not to mention get them offices, computers, and their heart's delight of office supplies."

"Treating you like an errand boy. Coming in here like they're the grown-up and you're still the kid, eh? And talking about your men as if they were cannon fodder?"

Gordon exhaled his anger with a sigh. "That's the truth of it. Too sensitive for us locals. I thought at first they didn't have the facts to back their mouths up, but they showed me enough to make me think they're onto something. A couple wiretaps, a CIA briefing, an Interpol file filled with bad pictures and names I couldn't pronounce if I were drunk. Ever hear of Bessarabia of Bessarabians?"

Batman mouthed the word, making it sticky and tossing it into his memory to see what it caught. Nothing more than the vague sense that he heard the word before. He shook his head in the negative, and Gordon was disappointed.

"Can't remember a thing myself either. Don't think they knew too much either. They all pronounced it exactly the same way---like a word they'd just learned yesterday. You know those types---they find their own way to pronounce Monday, just so you'll know they've got an opinion they can't tell you about."

Smiling wanly, Batman reached for the water pitcher on the corner of Gordon's desk and poured himself a glass. He hadn't expected to be inside tonight---especially not inside City Hall where the flow of political hot air kept the place overheated and stale. "I'll research it," he said after the water cooled his throat.

"I've got a staff of college-educated rookies camped out at the library. By tomorrow morning I'll know what Bessarabian grandmothers eat for breakfast. What I don't know is why they've come to Gotham City, where they're hiding, and what they mean to do before they leave."

"You want me to find out?"

The answer was obvious, but the Commissioner hesitated before nodding his head. There wasn't a law-enforcement agency in the world that didn't own a debt to one or another of the eccentric, sometimes inhuman, champions of justice. Gordon was privately grateful that Batman was simply eccentric---a human being beneath the polymer and dedication, who could still play a practical joke like coming through the window instead of the door. Even so, a few of Gordon's muscles always resisted admitting that a man in a costume could do things a man in a policeman's blue uniform could not.

"Track them down. Tell me where they are---then I'm going to put some of my best men on the job. I want this thing busted by Gotham's own." He stared intently at his fingertips. "You understand, don't you? Having you pull our bacon out of the fire time and time again... It's bad for morale. It's bad in the media---and this is going to get a lot of media. I can feel it in my gut."

The phone rang conveniently, sparing Batman the need to reply, giving him another few moments to organize his thoughts and lay the groundwork of a comprehensive plan. If these Bessarabians were real, and he had no reason to believe they weren't, the combination of his computers and a little legwork would find them. He'd do that much for Gordon, and let the police force have the glory; he understood what Gordon said about morale. But the Bessarabians, as the buyers, were small potatoes on a larger plate.

He waited until Gordon hung up the phone and completed a notation in his daybook.

"Did your visitors drop any hints about the suppliers and sellers?"

Gordon closed the book slowly. Had he really thought he could invite his old friend here and not tell him the whole story?

"They mentioned a name: The Connection."

Batman slouched back in the chair, steepling his fingers against the exposed portions of his face, rendering his expression completely unreadable. The Connection... that was a name that made, well---connections. He was the ultimate middleman---whenever a buyer needed a seller, or vice versa, the Connection could make the market. The operation started up after the war---the big one, WWII---and for decades intelligence considered it a "what" rather than a "who": a loose association of wartime quartermasters, procurers, and scroungers doing what they did best.

There were files in the Batcave computer that continued to refer to the Connection as "it" or "they" in the stubborn belief that no man could move so much matérial. Those documents also supposed that if the Connection were a man, he'd have come forward by now to claim his honors. Easily ninety-five percent of his activities were legitimate; some were downright heroic. The world had cheered when three bulging freighters steamed into Ethiopia with enough grain to feed the country's war-weary refugees for a month. The world, of course, had not known that buried deep in the wheat and corn was enough ammunition to feed the civil war for two years.

Bruce Wayne knew, just as he knew there could only be one mind behind it all. Maybe forty-five years ago it was a group; not anymore. No committee could generate the subtle elegance of the Connection's world-ringing transactions. But not even Bruce Wayne had a clue about the body or personality that went with the name. Other monikered individuals, including himself, had public faces and private faces, but the Connection---so far as anyone knew---had no face at all. A complete recluse, he'd never been fingered, not even when one of his operations went sour. If a description did emerge, it contradicted all previous ones---fueling the case of the committee-ists. Bruce Wayne was guiltily grateful that the Connection---though widely believed to be an American operation---scrupulously avoided washing its dirty laundry in the USA.

"They weren't positive," Gordon said when the silence became uncomfortably prolonged. "It's not the Connection's style to make a swap where our side has jurisdiction. They're leaping at the chance, I think, but they admit it might all be smoke and mirrors."

Massaging his cheeks, Batman shook his head. "The world's changing; it's already changed so much the sides are smudged. The Connection's got to change with it. I don't wonder that the Feds and Interpol are jumpy. There's a first time for everything---he's testing the waters."

Gordon took note of the singular pronoun. "You think it's one man, then?"

"I'm sure of it. One genius. He doesn't leave many traces, and when I find them, I'm always chin-deep in something else. But this time he's steaming right across my bows, and I'm going to find him." Batman's voice was calm and even, leaving no room for doubt.

The Commissioner drew a ring of arrows on his blotter, all pointing inward. "Remember," he said without looking up, "when the time comes, my men close the trap, not the Feds, not Interpol, and not you---"

Batman wasn't listening. A cool breeze was stirring the papers on Gordon's desk. Batman was gone.