Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master

by Gregg Taylor

  “With you?”

  “Who else?”

  “No, thank you,” he laughed.

  “What does that mean?” she said, taking offense in spite of herself.

  “It means I’ve been down here for hours, and you’re fresh,” he said seriously.

  “As a daisy,” she smiled. “You worried I’ll clean your clock?”

  “Not worried,” he said. “Dead certain. Come hold the heavy bag.”

  They moved to the opposite wall and she braced herself against the bag. He landed a pair of solid rights that might have impressed most training partners. Kit had held down this spot too many times. The Red Panda knew more about fighting than most ten men, even if each of those men was a martial arts master. But he was just hitting, throwing hard, wild punches into the heavy bag. His mind was somewhere else entirely.

  “I’m sorry about Richard Granville,” she said at last.

  The punching stopped. He ran his hand over his brow.

  “Did you know him well?” she asked.

  “I used to,” came the reply.

  He began to pull the tape off his hands.

  “Do they think he might recover?” she said quietly.

  “No,” he said. “They’re just waiting.”

  “Aw Boss, that’s terrible.”

  “It is,” he said. “And that’s what’s bothering me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If I’ve learned one thing from the last few years, Kit, it’s that when something is terrible for one person, it is generally excellent news for someone else.” His brow furrowed. “The question is: who?”

  “But Boss, Richard Granville ran his car into a tree. It was an accident.”

  “Richard Granville owns a dozen cars, Kit, but he doesn’t drive them. Not himself… not on a country road far from help in the middle of the night.”

  “You think it was a set-up? Why wouldn’t… if somebody wanted him dead, why wouldn’t they just shoot him? Or… I don’t know… anything else?” Kit came around from behind the heavy bag and crossed her arms.

  “I wondered that,” he nodded slowly, as if he were still in the process of wondering. “What if you had only recently burned Martin Davies’ home to the ground to cover the theft of the wealth in that building? You wouldn’t be so reckless as to strike at another wealthy young man so quickly, would you?”

  “I might,” she nodded, “if I could make it look like a completely different kind of accident. But I’d make darn sure the accident did the trick.”

  “And so you would. Davies’ home was destroyed, and it will be very hard to prove that anything was removed. Much of Granville’s fortune is in bonds. If he had died in the accident, the executor of his estate would immediately have noticed if those bonds were missing.” His eyes narrowed. “But if Richard Granville holds on for weeks, or even longer–”

  “It might give somebody time to strike again,” Kit agreed. “But wouldn’t this all be pretty tough to arrange?”

  “It was chancy at best,” he nodded. “But the police still don’t know who called for the ambulance. There was no one around for miles. Richard would have died for certain without that intervention.”

  Kit whistled. “If you’re right about this, we’re dealing with one very cool customer.”

  “Indeed,” he said, reaching for a towel. “What if it’s all the same cool customer?”

  “All what?” she said, her brow furrowed. “You mean… the Empire Bank job too?”

  “And making a solid attempt at blowing you and I to kingdom come? Yes, that’s more or less the idea.”

  She placed her hands on her hips. “You got anything to go on here?”

  “Just the usual,” he smiled a little.

  “Gettin’ by on looks again?” she said, shaking her head. He obliged with a slight crimson flush about the cheeks. She was satisfied and picked up the thread. “So it plays like this: our boy pulls the deposit boxes at the bank, that’s probably a little start-up change. But he leaves eight guards with the same memory, and he booby-traps their brains in case you get hold of them.”

  “Right,” Fenwick nodded. “Then he finds my radio tracker in with the loot, recognizes it for what it is and arranges the explosion at the warehouse to get rid of us immediately.”

  “So he’s teasing us and trying to kill us dead, both in the same night,” Kit said gravely. “Somebody has problems.”

  Fenwick nodded. “And believing us to be out of the picture, he begins to loot the city’s richest families, killing ruthlessly as he does so.”

  Kit shook her head. “It ain’t bad. But how does what happened to Gregor relate?”

  “We won’t know for certain until he wakes up,” came the reply. “But he was on the trail of the fence from the Empire Bank caper.”

  “Which would be enough to get him beaten and roasted all on its own,” she said. “We aren’t even sure that Davies’ fire and Granville’s accident are anything other than they look to be, much less related. You got anything else to go on?”

  “Two things,” he said. “One: a man at my club, Wallace Blake. He was profoundly uncomfortable when Davies’ connection to a certain oriental visitor was mentioned. He couldn’t leave quickly enough.”

  “This would be the mysterious Ajay Shah,” Kit said.

  “It would.”

  “Then maybe we should turn Wallace Blake upside down and see what drops out of his pockets,” Kit suggested helpfully.

  “That would be difficult,” he said grimly. “Blake hung himself last night.”

  “Boss?”

  “It was buried in the papers. And they didn’t come right out and say it, but I know my journalistic euphemisms. It happened.”

  “Was Blake rich too?”

  The Red Panda shook his head. “The money was long gone. No one was supposed to know.”

  “Then what’s the connection?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But Wallace Blake was too much of a coward to commit suicide. And I’m aware of the irony. Suicide may be the death of a coward, but it requires at least a single moment of iron resolve.”

  “And you don’t think Blake had it in him?”

  The Red Panda shook his head.

  Kit thought for a moment. “What’s the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “You said there were two–”

  “Ah,” he said, catching up. “Yes. The other thing.”

  “Well?” she said, her head cocked to one side.

  He gave her a crooked, half smile. “The inescapable feeling that I’m looking right at the answer and just can’t see it.”

  Twenty-Five

  “Am I interrupting something?” Ajay Shah’s voice was quiet, but it carried like thunder across the study of Joshua Cain. Cain himself was not in his usual place, comfortably ensconced behind the great mahogany desk, but stood by a bookcase at the far wall. The third shelf of books was revealed now to be a false front that had concealed a small wall safe, which Joshua Cain was hurriedly emptying into a valise already nearly crammed with papers. He barely paused when he heard Shah enter. Cain was a man in the depths of terror, and something clearly scared him more than Ajay Shah.

  “Forgive me if I don’t stop, Shah,” he said over his shoulder. “Help yourself to a drink if you like.”

  “Help myself?” Shah smiled. “How quaint. I noticed your household was a little… light when I arrived. There was no one to show me up.”

  “Good help is hard to find,” Cain quipped, only half-listening, trying to judge which of the remaining papers would be most damning in the hands of the law should he be forced to leave some behind.

  “Are you going somewhere, Joshua?”

  Cain flashed anger, just for a moment. “Good God, man, what does it look like?” He quickly regained his composure, but realized it had come too late as his guest drew himself up to his full height.

  “It looks like,” Shah began with a smile, �
�the little man to whom I so recently entrusted three-quarters of a million dollars in bonds is in something of a hurry to leave town. Imagine my disappointment.”

  Cain nodded quietly without looking back. “I grant you, this doesn’t look good.”

  “You have a great gift for understatement, Joshua.” The predatory mouth spread into something resembling warmth. “I pray that you also have my money.”

  “I told you, Shah, this would take time. The Granville bonds have been split up and sent to three different cities. It will be two weeks, at least, before they can be divested and the money wired back. To move any more quickly would be to invite disaster.”

  Shah nodded sagely as he regarded the study. “It would seem that disaster has struck in spite of these preparations. Or am I wrong?”

  Cain paused a moment before turning back to the wall safe. “Hopefully not. But it is wise to be prepared.”

  “Ah,” Shah hissed. “To have traveled so far and seen so much, only to have one such as you explain wisdom to me. Delightful. What happened?”

  “Miles Grant happened,” Cain said seriously.

  “Grant? The one who inquired after the goods from the Empire Bank?” Shah scowled.

  “And after a certain mysterious traveler from the Orient? Yes. I sent my men to make some inquiries of their own.”

  “Your men? The men of your own household?”

  There was a small pause. “Yes,” came the irritated reply.

  “Very careless, Joshua. I take it from the fact that I had to show myself in and pour my own drink that these inquiries did not go that well?”

  There was no reply. Cain continued his packing.

  “Your men are in the hands of the police?”

  Cain snorted derisively. “The police? If the police had them, I wouldn’t be packing. I’d have made three telephone calls, and not only would they be back on the street, but there would be no record that anything had ever happened.”

  Shah regarded his fingernails calmly. “You say this with confidence. And yet here we are. What happened, then?”

  “The Red Panda happened, that’s what!” Cain snapped. “God knows why, but he happened. And that crazy girlfriend of his. If they had recognized my men, he’d have come after me by now.”

  “Then why do you flee?”

  “You don’t know the Red Panda.”

  “Oh, but I do. I have made a careful study from afar, you see. I listened and I watched as tales of these new ‘mystery men’ spread around the globe. I waited until I could be sure which one was him.”

  “Him who?” Cain said, staring in disbelief.

  “This Red Panda, of course,” Shah sneered.

  “You- you know him? You know who he is?”

  “Not exactly,” Shah smiled, stroking his mustache.

  “That’s not exactly helpful,” Cain said, returning to his packing. “If you’re telling me you came to Toronto to pick a fight with that masked menace, you’re welcome to it, and leave me out of it.”

  “Alas, my dear Joshua, you are well and truly in the middle of it now. You know this. That is why you plan to flee.”

  “I’m just moving into seclusion. For a few days, until I’m certain that he hasn’t got my trail. It’s for your own protection as well as mine.”

  Shah nodded. “I am honored that you hold my interests so close to your heart.”

  “As I would the goose that lays the golden egg,” Cain said, choosing to ignore the sarcasm. “I’ll be in touch about the Granville bonds. In the meantime, my advice is to lay low.”

  “A futile precaution, Cain,” Shah said, his eyes flashing in excitement. “He has your men. By now they will have told him everything.”

  “My men are dead,” Cain snapped.

  There was a moment of shocked silence.

  “He has killed them?” Shah hissed.

  “There was a fire,” Cain explained. “They didn’t make it out. I’ve arranged for the coroner’s office to be unable to identify their remains. That should be enough to keep him off the trail, but we mustn’t tempt fate any further.”

  Shah began to laugh and Cain shivered in spite of himself. There was relief in his laughter to be sure, but also a cruel superiority. At last he spoke. “I should have known that this leopard could not change his spots so much. That will be his undoing.”

  “Listen, Shah… you’re an impressive character. You’ve got moxie, and a real gift for this. You can go far. But every single guy I know who’s gone up against the Red Panda has lost, and lost hard. This is not a fight you want.”

  “You are incorrect, Joshua. This is a fight I want above all things. You see, I have a destiny, and it is far greater than you could possibly imagine. Far more grand than the life of petty crime you envision.”

  “Petty?” Cain protested. Shah held up a hand to silence him.

  “Petty it shall seem when entire nations bow before me. When armies willingly fight and die in my name. When the weak-willed fools of this country, and the next, and the next–”

  “You’re mad!” Cain cried.

  “I think you already know that isn’t true,” Shah smiled. “This is simply the first stop on my march to glory. I need two things from Toronto. Some capital, to smooth the waters and make the next steps ever so much simpler; and to destroy the one man yet living who might have had a chance to stop me, if only I had given it to him.”

  “Fine,” Cain said, snapping the valise shut. “Best of luck with that. But since I can’t see how my being captured helps you with that–”

  “Helps me?” Shah said, beaming at Joshua Cain with something like joy. “Cain, I am absolutely counting on it!”

  Twenty-Six

  A tall, lanky man pushed open the door of a small office on the tenth floor of the Chronicle building. Outside the window, the last traces of deep red were fading from view, leaving only the deepening purples that rolled over the city in preparation for the black carpet of night. But for Jack Peters, intrepid Chronicle reporter and sometimes agent of justice, the workday was far from over.

  Peters balanced a sheaf of papers in the crook of one arm and a cup of coffee in the other as he felt for the lights. He flipped the switch up with a click. Nothing. Peters sighed as the door closed behind him, plunging the room into darkness. Using the grey tones cast by the last traces of sunset, he groped his way to his desk and set down his cup. He felt for the switch on the small lamp on his desk and turned it on. A soft glow appeared through the green glass of the desk lamp, and its beam clearly illuminated the desktop, with a typewriter front and center, surrounded by a small pile of papers.

  Peters circled the desk and flopped into the old chair. He took a sip of the coffee and rubbed his eyes. His focus shifted to the typewriter, and he fed a sheet of paper into the machine with an absent-minded efficiency born of routine. He cupped his chin in his hands a moment and glanced over to the telephone. He seemed to consider both devices for almost a minute, then made up his mind and reached for the receiver.

  As he dialed the number, there was an immediate click and a strange tone, as if the call was no longer being routed by the normal service. Peters was far from surprised by this. A moment later the line connected with a sharp click.

  “Mother Hen speaking,” a soft, female voice said.

  “Oh, hello, Mother dear,” Peters smiled into the mouthpiece. “It’s Jackie-boy.”

  There was a small pause on the line and the voice tried hard to chastise him. “Mister Peters,” it began, “what exactly is wrong with protocol?”

  “How much time do you have?” Jack smiled. “Listen, is he on his way?”

  “You know I can’t answer that question, Mister Peters.”

  “Yeah, yeah. See, the thing is, I’ve got a deadline. And I can’t finish if I can’t start, and since I’ve got a whole pile of not much to fill my column inches tomorrow, it takes a little concentration. It’s tough to pull off if I’m waiting to be interrupted. You understand I’m in ‘loaves and fish
es’ territory here, right Mother dear?”

  “You never seemed to let that trouble you before, Mister Peters.”

  “I admit to sometimes being the author of my own misfortune,” Peters said, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “But on this occasion I have no story because I spent the day chasing rainbows for a certain big, spooky masked man, and I was wonderin’ when he was planning on puttin’ in an appearance.”

  “Mister Peters,” came a voice from the shadows.

  It was a moment before Jack Peters realized that the girlish scream he heard in response to this interjection had in fact come from his own mouth. In the end it was the sound of Mother Hen’s laughter on the other end of the line that brought him back.

  “He checked in from your phone ten minutes ago, Jack,” she said.

  “Thank you, Mother dear. You’ve been a great help. Send my love to Father Hen,” and he hung up the telephone.

  “You like to make me jump, don’t you?” he said crossly. He could just make out the shape of the Red Panda against the wall, and the faint glow of the blank eyes of the mask. He reached his hand out to lift the cup again, and found it gone. He looked up to his left quickly and saw the heart-stopping shape of the girl in grey standing beside his desk, drinking his coffee.

  “Hiya Petey,” the Flying Squirrel smiled.

  “Help yourself,” Peters nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure I just did,” she said, batting her eyelashes.

  “You two do a lot of looming,” Peters said, leaning back in his chair. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

  The Squirrel shrugged. “It’s our bit.”

  Peters squinted to make out the shape of the Red Panda, who had not moved from the shadows. He nodded to the Squirrel. “He seems serious tonight. Even by his standards.”

  “All the more reason to make him happy, Petey,” she beamed.

  “You have news, Mister Peters,” the voice from the shadows intoned.

  Peters sat upright, still playing with an unlit cigarette between his fingers. “Right… right,” he nodded, trying hard to remember that the spectre in the corner was on his side. “Ajay Shah. The mysterious man from the Orient. He’s all the rage in high society. I had to make inquiries through our gossip columnist. And if you had any idea how little I like asking Lulu Lalonde for a favor, you’d have a general idea of the size of the one you owe me. To say nothing of the fact I’ve got no story for the morning edition.”