Kingdom Come by Elliot S. Maggin

Author:Elliot S. Maggin [Maggin, Elliot S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0446522341
Publisher: Warner Books
Published: 1998-03-16T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Citizen Wayne

“If I hadn’t been so rich, I might’ve been a great man,” the character in the old movie said.

As he always did, Bruce Wayne doubled over on his seat and rolled to the left. He used his titanium framing as a rocking pontoon on the couch, and he laughed. Slowly, in what spare time he afforded himself, he was restoring parts of the old manor house with his own hands. The living room with his beloved grandfather clock where his mom once had read to him from Dr. Seuss and from Hans and Margaret Rey, where his dad used to smoke his pipe until dawn, sometimes over a mystery novel, was nearly done. It was done enough to be watertight, done enough for a couch and a monitor. Wayne had not laughed so hard and so long from the age of eight to age fifty. Then the line about being a great man had begun to strike him funny.

He laughed so loudly that he missed the next line. It had been so long since he had not laughed that Bruce Wayne forgot what the line was.

In the years after Superman dropped from the world’s stage, especially once knowledge of the Batman’s identity had entered the collective consciousness, with some of his surviving enemies trashing the most visible trappings of his enormous wealth, something strange had happened to Bruce Wayne. Gradually, without reason or explanation, he’d become happy. There was no denying it, and it had puzzled him at first.

*

There were two things in this life with which Bruce Wayne had to come to terms: First, his parents were not coming back; and second, no matter how much and how painfully he taught himself to be better at sharing his soul and his life, there would never be a woman able to handle him properly. Even setting aside his incalculable wealth, Bruce Wayne was undeniably a high-maintenance guy.

His parents had been taken from him when he was eight. Dr. Thomas and Martha Wayne had died at the hands of a petty thief. It’d happened when social taboos against killing a child obtained even among the dregs of the community, probably the last time such a gunman would leave behind even an innocent-eyed witness to robbery and murder.

If the gunman had simply asked for the necklace, if he had not resolved even before he met them to kill his victims, then Thomas and Martha probably would have found a way to break the natural laws of engagement and solve the problem. Martha might have looked at the robber—a boy himself, really—with that tilted head and that piercing temperament and the can-do attitude that had brought her through four years of Army intelligence work. He would have relented—just enough—when she asked him what the problem was, or what drove him to thievery, or how she might make it all better with a few phone calls and a chance for honest work. Even if he was not interested in honest work, she had that way of convincing folks that they wanted what she thought they ought to want.

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