Finally a panel swung down from above them and then a rickety ladder. Khalki and the three other remaining Gagauzi were hiding in the crawl space beneath the original roof. Bruce didn't want to guess how much they were paying for the privilege. He tucked his head and allowed himself to be guided to what he realized with some horror was a charcoal grill slung from ancient electric wires. Khalki, a clean-shaven man in his early thirties, offered him coffee and, without thinking, Bruce accepted. The other Gagauzi huddled close together on the far side of the swaying fire. One was a boy not yet out of his teens, the second was as old as Bruce was pretending to be, while the third was about his true age. At first he thought they were three generations of one family; then he realized that the resemblance was purely superficial, created by fear and strangeness. They stared at him while Khalki and Tiger conducted an animated conversation.
Bruce Wayne filled his mouth with coffee. It tasted burnt and sweet, with the texture of crankcase oil mixed with sand. The youngest Gagauzi stifled a smirk. And Bruce remembered the Gagauzi were ethnic Turks with whom coffee was an art, not a wake-up beverage. He gulped heroically and set the cup on the floor to precipitate.
"He wants to talk to you," Tiger said to Bruce after several minutes of apparently futile discussion. "Tell him he's got to do it my way."
"What is your way?" Bruce asked, getting cautiously to his feet.
"We meet day after tomorrow, midnight, Pier 23. We go out to sea. I give 'em what their pictures bought, we radio the freighter and put them and the merchandise on board. An' I never see their friggin' faces again."
Bruce nodded and began lobbying Khalki with words and gestures, just as Tiger had. The Gagauzi relented; he wanted to go home with whatever he could salvage from his nightmare. But before he led Tiger and Bruce Wayne back to the ladder, he rooted through his meager possessions and came up with a small enamel pin of a gray wolf on a red field.
"Gagauz flag," he said proudly as he affixed it to Bruce Wayne's shirt. Then he executed a military salute. "Hero."
All the way out of the firetrap, Bruce Wayne reminded himself what the Connection was doing was not right and what he was about to do was not betrayal.
It wasn't hard for Bruce to get away from Tiger for a few minutes. He crouched in a doorway and wrote a message to Alfred. He told the butler to contact Commissioner Gordon with the where and when of the arms. He paused and looked around; Tiger was nowhere to be seen. He turned the paper over and added a second message:
Catwoman showed up at the museum. At least I think she did. Whatever her involvement with the icon has been, I don't want her showing up at the pier. I think you can lure her back to the museum. Try to intercept her and get her to go to---
Bruce paused. The possibilities were endless, but he could hear Tiger crunching through the rubble at the end of the alley. He took the location at the top of his mind---the place where Catwoman had left a message for him---and wrote it down. Then he scrolled the paper swiftly into a capsule the size of a disposable cigarette lighter. He sealed it and dropped it before Tiger got into hailing distance. In fifteen minutes it would send up a homing beacon.
Tiger was feeling much relieved. "How are your sea legs, old man?" he said, clapping Bruce roundly on the shoulder. "Hope they're good ones, 'cause we got a bit of sea work to do."
Chapter Seventeen
Bonnie coiled her feet around the legs of her folding chair. She was determined that she would not bounce, or leap to her feet, or do any of the other celebratory things popping in her head like soap bubbles. She would sit calmly in her uncomfortable chair with the serious look pasted on her face that she saw on the faces of the other Wilderness Warriors seated around her. After all, Tim's friend---who, it turned out, belonged to the Gotham City Federal Prosecutor's office---had made a special trip uptown with his charts and yellow notepads to tell them what he was going to do with the information the Warriors had provided.
It had already become apparent to Bonnie that she was not going to get her fair share of credit. At that moment, however, she was in sufficiently high spirits that the snub cast no shadow across her happiness.
"We're going to put the squeeze on Edward Lobb until he sings the right song," the extremely clean-cut lawyer said with a wolfish grin.
Edward Lobb was not a nice man. Bonnie had known this from the beginning, but the lawyer made it clear that Eddie's habit of collecting the bodily remains of endangered species paled beside his many other illegal activities. On the other hand, until Bonnie's photographs arrived in the Federal Prosecutor's hands, they'd been unaware of it.
"We like to target midlevel sleazeballs like Eddie. They take us up and down the ladder of their organizations," the lawyer explained. "We look for their Achilles' heels. Your pictures gave it to us for Eddie Lobb. We went to our judge; she gave us the search warrants. We'll execute those warrants tomorrow morning at eight A.M. We'll clean that place out. We're going to prove that every item in that room was illegally brought into this country, and we're going to throw the book at him for each and every piece. If Eddie's sleeping in, we'll have him, too. If he isn't, by noon we'll have arrest warrants printed with his name on them in letters two inches high. He's looking at death from a thousand cuts, until he cuts a deal with us."
Bonnie clamped her teeth together. She understood that this was the way American justice worked and that getting Eddie to rat on his associates from a witness protection program was more useful than simply throwing him into jail. She suspected that Selina, and Catwoman, were going to see things differently. She could, in fact, imagine the questions Selina was going to ask, and decided she better have the answers. She raised her hand and waved it.
"Do you have a question?" the lawyer asked wearily.
"What happens to the stuff in the photographs? Does Eddie get to keep that collection if he does what you want him to do? I mean, that doesn't seem right."
"No, ma'am, it wouldn't be right and we won't let it happen." The lawyer looked at Tim, then smiled. "I guess we can jump the gun here a bit, can't we?"
"You're in charge," Tim confirmed.
The lawyer rearranged his charts; a large blank sheet of paper faced outward. With courtroom dramatics, he tore off the blank sheet. Bonnie and the others beheld a mock-up of an announcement of a special exhibit at a major national museum: The Silent Victims of International Poaching, sponsored by Wilderness Warriors, Inc.
Tim got to his feet. "The museum's been looking for a way to make a statement about consumer responsibility in the whole illegal trafficking issue. We faxed them copies of the wide-angle photographs and they saw the statement they wanted to make. No matter what happens to Edward Lobb, that room's going to Washington. Visitors will see how much damage just one sick individual can cause. And, of course, they'll see our name and what we're trying to do to prevent it from happening again."
The news was too good for Bonnie to bear in polite silence. She leapt to her feet, clapping her hands.
"We won! We won!"
The others stared at her mercilessly, but Bonnie didn't care, even though she blushed furiously before she sat down. A little embarrassment couldn't hurt her, not when in her mind's eye she could see Selina's face when she told her the good news.
She was meeting Selina for lunch. Now that Selina had finally gotten her phone fixed, it was possible to call her. Inwardly Bonnie was waiting for the magic moment when Selina invited her home, but so far, although Selina had reluctantly parted with her telephone number, she would reveal nothing at all about where she lived. Bonnie thought about following Selina. It wasn't as if she knew nothing about stalking. Once she'd stalked a mother bear back to her den and gotten a whole roll of pictures of the cubs. Of course, she'd also gotten sent home from summer camp. The consequences of meeting Catwoman when she didn't want to be met might be a whole lot worse.