"Nope." The single word contained all the ambivalence the uniformed police felt toward costumed free-lancers.
"Then I'll stay here. Maybe I can convince the woman to go to the station."
"Yeah, sure. A guy in a cape, a mask, and circus clothes. Maybe she'll think it's Halloween."
Batman stood without comment as the policeman and their prisoners left. He was still standing, hoping the woman would come downstairs, when another young man came down instead. He looked to be in his early twenties, and he didn't look at all surprised to see Batman. He was surprised to see the icon. Very surprised. Very relieved. And very quick to hide what he had revealed.
"My mother would thank you, but America frightens her," he said in accented but confident English. "America is not what nay one of us expected. But home has changed so much, too. Where else can we go?" He glanced around the room, obviously looking for something else. He found it---a velvet-covered box carelessly thrown against the wall. Batman had not noticed it before, nor had the police. The youth retrieved the box and carefully fit the icon into it. He held the closed box tightly against his chest.
Things weren't adding up. Batman's curiosity acquired a razor edge. "You're Russian?" he asked with exaggerated doubt. "From the Soviet Union... Russia?"
"This week, the Commonwealth of Independent States; yes. Last week, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Russian, yes, but Russia, no."
Forearmed as Batman was with his library researches, this made sense. "You come from one of the other republics, then. One of the new Baltic countries? Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia..." If the youth had been here any length of time, he knew how Americans loved to show off their limited knowledge of events on the far side of the world. But Batman hadn't chosen this particular block at random, and when the youth shook his head with a condescending smile, Batman knew he'd chosen correctly.
"Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic," the youth said.
"Last week. This week the Moldovan Sovereign Republic." Batman hoped he'd managed to convey the new spelling of the name.
He had. The youth muttered words not included in any orthodox Russian dictionary, then spat emphatically at the floor. "Stalinist pigs."
Stalin was, after all, Georgian, not Russian, and pigs seemed to be universally reviled.
"And the men who tried to steal the icon?"
"Moldavian pigs," the youth announced, using Russian orthography. "My family did not ask to live in their filthy little country, but we came, we built the factories, and we worked in them. It is ours now, and they would take it from us... for Rumania. Stinking Rumanian gypsies."
The mask helped Batman keep his thoughts to himself. Perhaps Alfred had a point about Balkanization. "The police here don't take kindly to immigrants importing their wars with them... or exporting weapons back home, either."
"We send money back, yes. And food. Much food." The youth's expression had grown wary. "But weapons, no. Already too much guns." He eased a step closer to the stairs.
"Tell me about the icon. To whom does it really belong? Not you, and not the woman upstairs who isn't your mother."
The youth's knuckles whitened as he clutched the box tighter. "It is ours. The family that owned it are all dead. That is true. But they were Russian. It is ours, to do with what we want. To give. To sell. Not theirs. We have rights. Americans understand rights."
The youth was one of millions of ethnic Russians forcibly dispersed through the former Soviet Empire---in his case, the parcel of land Western textbooks called Bessarabia. The Moldavians, or Moldovans, wished to erase the artificial border between their land and Rumania. They had a point: The difference between the Moldovan language and the Rumanian language was less than the difference between American English and English English. Except the Moldovans had been compelled, since 1940, to write it with the alphabet known variously as Soviet, Russian, Cyrillic, or Greek, while the Rumanians used Latin letters, just like English.
Bruce Wayne had, however, found three potential terrorist factions beneath the Bessarabian label.
"What about the Gagauzi?" Batman asked. "What rights do the Gagauzi have?"
Crestfallen, the youth relaxed his grip on the box. His knuckles turned red as the blood flowed back to them. So did his face. He hadn't believed in Batman, not really, not the way the swine Moldavians did---thinking he was an incarnation of their national hero, Vlad Drakul. But Batman knew about the Gagauzi. How many Americans knew about the Gagauzi? There were only about a hundred and fifty thousand of them.
"It is"---the youth groped for the word---"like buying and selling, but without money. The Gagauzi have sheep, they have vineyards, they have tobacco. The sheep are... not so good. The wine, the tobacco, these are better than money. The Moldos will try to crush the Gagauzi first. Already they say: learn our language, do things our way. The Gagauzi see writing on the wall, yes? They do not like us Russians very much: Moscow said, learn our language, do things our way. But in the beginning, we had the army, and the army came from Moscow to protect them. Now Moscow is..." He mimed blowing out a candle. "No army. Just us and the Gagauzi. The Gagauzi and us.
"American patriot, Benjamin Franklin, says: We hang together, or for sure we hang apart."
The sheepherders Tiger mentioned on the dock. It all fit together. There were moments when Batman regretted the mask because there were moments when he wanted to bury his head in his hands. Instead he said: "So the Gagauzi give you---the Russians in Moldavia---wine and tobacco that you barter with other Russians---in Russia itself---for... icons... . ? And you sell the icons here, in America, to get money to buy guns for the Gagauzi to fight the Moldovans?"
The youth shook his head. "No money. We give the icons to the scar-faced man. Two already, this is third and last. After that. Nothing. Not for us. Finished. What the Gagauzi do, we don't see, we don't know. Very simple."
A bell rang inside Batman's head---the scar-faced man? There were undoubtedly thousands of scar-faced men in Gotham City. But lightning did strike in the same place, many times. And Batman's heart warmed with the knowledge that he knew where to find the right scar-faced man. He curbed his enthusiasm. There was still more to be learned here.
"And the icon you're holding? The one the Moldovans would have stolen successfully, if I had not intervened?"
The youth's face was as rigid as Batman's mask.
"They know it's still here. You know that they'll be back for it."
The youth began shaking. "So far, what you call down payment. This---this is payment: the best, the most valuable. Somehow, the swine find out. Without I bring the icon, no payment, no exchange. The Gagauzi, they will blame us. Then it is everyone against everyone else."
Alfred definitely had a point.
Batman needed only a few minutes to persuade the youth to tell him when and where the payment was to be made and to entrust him with the icon until that time.
"They will try to steal it from you," the youth said when the box was out of his hands. "They will stop at nothing. They will hire your enemies and send them after you."
Another light burned in Batman's head. "I'll count on it," he said as he left.
Chapter Twelve