Nine
Hans led Bane to a cell just off the stepwell, two levels below his own cell. Although Bane had walked past these bars countless times, he had never entered. Inside, the space was neat and orderly—a cot, a small table with one chair, a crude piece of furniture with storage drawers against the back wall, and various free weights grouped together opposite the cot. Every day, for as long as Bane could remember, Hans used the battered equipment to maintain his formidable mass.
“Here,” Hans gestured, “sit on the bed and take off your clothes. Wrap yourself in this blanket.”
As Bane obeyed with shivering fingers, Hans started a fire in the nearby earthen brazier. Then he took Bane’s clothes, wrung them out with his powerful hands, and hung them on the bars closest to the brazier. He turned back to Bane, who was now wrapped tightly in the thin blanket and trembling less, and pointed at Osito.
“If you would like, I can set him on top of the brazier so he can dry as well.”
Instinctively wary, Bane hesitated, but when Hans offered a smile of encouragement, Bane allowed himself to relax and nodded his assent. With amazing care, the big man settled Osito face down on the brazier, the toy’s stubby limbs keeping the body from resting directly on the surface of the brazier, a flat area on which food could be cooked. Then Hans sat at the table.
“Did that bastard take something from you?”
“Yes. One of Doctor Assad’s scalpels. He’d loaned it to me.”
Hans nodded, his gray eyes suddenly amused. “For carving the chess pieces.”
“Yes.” Bane scowled slightly, afraid the man was mocking his latest pastime as so many other prisoners had done.
“Assad’s little blade isn’t worth getting killed over. Better off letting them have what they want…for now, until you’re old enough to fight for it.”
Bane drew his bare feet onto the cot, folding his legs and hugging them to his chest under the blanket. He nodded toward the weights. “Maybe you could show me how to use those…so I can be stronger.”
A grin brightened Hans’s chiseled features. “Those are too much for a boy like you. More likely you would hurt yourself.” Just as Bane began to bristle at the remark, Hans continued, “There are other things you can do until you’re big enough to use the weights.”
“What?”
“Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups; I can help you set a bar in the corner of your cell for the pull-ups. Then there are the stairs; run them instead of just sitting on them, staring up at the sky.” He winked.
“When can I use the weights?”
“We shall see.” He raised a warning finger. “But…everything comes with a price here, ja? You use my weights, what do I get in trade?”
Bane frowned. “What would you want?”
Hans pondered, one meaty hand slowly stroking his chin. At last he said, “Maybe your chess set. Not to keep, but just to play a game or two.”
“You play chess?”
Hans nodded. “When I was a boy.”
“But the chess set isn’t mine; it’s the Vulture’s.”
“For now.”
Bane could tell by the sudden stony quality of Hans’s expression that he would not expound upon his intimation, so Bane simply agreed that when the time came for him to use the weights, he would see what he could do to acquire the chess set for his use.
He stayed with Hans for some time, polishing up on some of the German that he had learned a couple of months ago. At some point the warmth from the brazier worked through the blanket and lulled him into a doze. He awoke some time later, lying on the cot, as warm as he could possibly be in this perpetually clammy and chilled place.
“Your clothes are still damp,” Hans said as he handed them back, “so when you get back to your cell, take them off again until they are drier, ja?”
Bane thanked him, gathered up Osito, and trailed back to his cell.
The Vulture was as he had left him, hunched over the nearly-finished chess board. The man was rubbing soot into some of the squares to contrast with the natural wood squares, for the black paint had been claimed by the chess pieces.
“So,” the Vulture grunted, “you done being mad at me?”
“No,” Bane growled, internally blaming the Vulture for the loss of the doctor’s scalpel since it was the Vulture’s cruel behavior that he driven him to the stepwell.
“Heard a ruckus from out there,” he nodded toward the shaft. “Get yourself in trouble, did you?”
“No.”
The Vulture gave a low, wry laugh. “Then why’s your bear all wet?”
True enough, Osito had not dried as quickly as the clothing. Bane did not respond, however, and instead set Osito on top of his impotent brazier. He worried that the doctor might see him punished for losing the blade, perhaps by having his fuel allotment withheld tomorrow.
“Should have stayed here with me, boy. Saved yourself a wet bear and wet clothes. Don’t want to catch your death of cold like your dear mother, eh?”
Bane scowled to himself and began to undress. He hung the garments on the bars joining his cell with Abrams’s, for the man was gone. Never would he dare to hang anything on the front bars, for someone would steal whatever was there, nor he did not want to display any sort of trust to the Vulture by hanging the wet clothes on his side.
When Bane turned toward the bed to gather a blanket, he found the Vulture’s gaze upon him. As if struck by a fist Bane halted, his breath caught in his throat. For a moment he stood frozen, paralyzed by the awful gleam in the Vulture’s eyes, a stare that did not meet his but instead had locked upon Bane’s body, sliding downward, lingering…
Breaking from the awful spell, Bane snatched up a blanket in which to cloak himself. This broke the Vulture’s distracted concentration, and the man quickly avoided Bane’s eyes, a nervous tongue darting across his lips as he bent low over his work again. But when Bane sat on his bed with his back to the Vulture, he swore that the man’s gaze returned to him, and he fought his protective impulse to face him. He shivered within himself, knew it was not from the cold.
In vain he tried to understand the alarm that the Vulture’s perusal had stirred. Why had the man looked at him in such a strange, predatory way? Oddly enough it reminded Bane of the way other prisoners used to look at his mother, that nearly-salivating, debasing way that made Bane want to claw their eyes out. Though just a boy, he had been old enough for his mother to explain the animal act of procreation, but she had stressed the difference between base sexual desire and the desire of the flesh born of love.
“When you’re free of this place,” she had said in her soft London tones, “you must show yourself a better man than what lives down here. In all ways. You must be master of your mind as well as your body.”
Bane kept his back to the Vulture as he curled up beneath his blankets. His cot—like every cot in the prison except those improved by the prisoners themselves through barter and skill—had no mattress but was made of a simple low wooden frame with spaced, crisscrossed webbing of fabric and leather on which to lie. Bane used his oldest blanket across the webbing in a futile attempt to combat the chill rising up from the stone floor. Thinking about the Vulture’s disturbing examination, Bane tightly closed his eyes and tried to see his mother’s eyes instead, but for a long time—until he drifted to sleep—all he could see was the eerie light that had sparked in the Vulture’s eyes.
