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.