Batman 3 - Batman Forever Read Free Page B

picked up the paper and started flipping through it. He didn’t have to read it. Not immediately, in any event. His mind would snap pictures of each page, to be digested at a convenient time later on.
    The paper was in sections. He went through the sports section in a heartbeat, moved to the science section. This he took marginally longer with, but moved rapidly past that and picked up the news section.
    And stopped dead at the front page.
    The headline was somewhat sordid. THOMAS WAYNE MURDERED. ONLY CHILD SURVIVES. Subheadings above the article read, PROMINENT DOCTOR AND WIFE SLAIN IN ROBBERY. UNIDENTIFIED GUNMAN LEAVES ONLY CHILD UNHARMED.
    It was the child who had caught Edward’s eye. The boy seemed roughly Edward’s age. There was a huge picture of the crime scene plastered all over the front page, and on the right-hand side of the picture, the “Only Child” was staring straight into the camera.
    Edward’s gaze flicked to the caption, which described the photo’s subject as “the grief-stricken Bruce Wayne.”
    “No,” whispered Edward. “No . . . they got it wrong. He’s not stricken with anything. Look at that. Look at that.”
    He saw, there in Bruce Wayne’s face, an intensity that mirrored his own. An anger, a frustration at the hand that fate had dealt him. There were no tears on Bruce’s face. Instead there was a smoldering intelligence that Edward intuitively sensed was on a par with his own.
    There was something in Bruce’s eyes, something in that gaze. There was Bruce, in a moment of raw emotion, his parents just having been cruelly taken from him. And there was no self-pity. Just cold, hard anger.
    It was the sort of anger that Edward himself felt virtually every hour of the day, trapped in public school, imprisoned in classes where he was bored out of his mind because he was light-years ahead of the other kids. But his anger was free-floating, nebulous, indulging itself in games, riddles, and parlor tricks. Bruce Wayne was focussed. Bruce Wayne was not intimidated.
    Bruce Wayne, in Edward’s snap opinion, was one hell of a guy.
    Ed still had the newspaper with him when he was walking home from school. Not that he needed it to read; the contents were safely locked away in his skull, thanks to his photographic memory. But he wanted to clip out the articles and pictures about Bruce Wayne. He found the young man fascinating, as if he had discovered a soul mate of sorts.
    They were very different, of course. Wayne, born to the purple, as it were. Rich boy, all the breaks. Best schools. Best education. Best everything.
    Edward Nygma was born to a lower-middle-class family. No breaks. Inadequate schools. Least of everything. By all rights, he should have been wildly envious of Wayne’s financial and social situation. But the circumstances surrounding Wayne’s newly orphaned status placed him, for once, in an unenviable predicament. And the equanimity with which he was reacting to the stress garnered Edward’s admiration.
    Suddenly the newspaper was yanked out of Edward’s hand. He spun to find himself facing Raymond and one of Raymond’s main henchmen, a pasty-skinned fool named Gil.
    “What’s the answer to the riddle?” demanded Raymond without preamble.
    “What, can’t you figure it out for your—”
    Raymond grabbed him by the front of the shirt. “I was try in’ t’be nice and I still don’t like you jerkin’ me around. There’s no teacher around now. You better tell me.”
    “Why? So you can tell other people and feel smart?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Awright, awright! The answer is . . . man.”
    “Man?” said Raymond in confusion.
    “Yeah. In the morning of his life, man crawls on all fours. In the afternoon of his life, man walks on two legs. And in the evening of his life, he walks on two legs, with a cane for his third leg. It’s the riddle of the Sphinx.”
    “It’s stupid,” Raymond said.
    “It’s not stupid.”
    “Yes it is. What’s babies and old man have to do