Tales of the Red Panda: The Crime Cabal (10 page)

The crowd at the Golden Goose was, as always, well-dressed and bubbling
with enthusiasm. It wasn’t hard to see why, since the Goose was one of the
city’s most fashionable nightspots, and the clientèle was carefully screened to
ensure that only those well-off enough to ensure that they had no cause to be
anything other than gay were admitted. Here, the Depression checked its hat at
the door and was soon lost in the flowing rivers of champagne and cocktails.

A short, stocky man with a carefully trimmed van Dyke beard moved
easily and confidently through the crowd. He reached the back of the room and
turned down the hall that led to the kitchen. At the far end, he nodded with
curt familiarity towards a pair of well-heeled toughs who stood by the doorway
at the end of the hall, failing utterly in their attempts to look casual.

The stocky man rapped three times in quick succession on the
well-guarded door, and took a moment to straighten his handsome white dinner
jacket. A small panel slid open in the door and a pair of eyes peered out
momentarily. The door was flung open at once.

“Good evening, Mister Grant,” the doorman said.

The man with the beard smiled at the young man on the door. He had seen
him elsewhere, in other clubs of a similar vein. He passed through the door and
pressed a bill into the hand of the doorman, who thanked him sincerely. The man
with the beard hardly heard a word of what the young man said. He was regarding
the swelling scene before him. The main room of the Golden Goose held the cream
of the Toronto society, but this room would leave those celebrants blinking in
wonder. The room was richly appointed from top to bottom, and in every corner,
gambling tables and roulette wheels raked in a steady business from those who
could afford to lose fortunes, all in the name of good fun.

Many of the patrons of the room were basically honest. Some were much
less so. Others were downright shady, though unaffiliated with the new club. It
was from those men that the man called Grant received the most nods of
acknowledgment. To them he was Miles Grant, a numbers man and occasional
confidence racketeer. A trustworthy sort of crook, and well thought of. Word
round the campfire was that Grant had pulled some very profitable out-of-town
jobs over the last few years and had returned to the city flush and ready for
new enterprise. It was only natural that he would seek out the city’s newest
gambling spot.

Grant smiled and chewed lightly on the end of his unlit cigar. There
had been an illegal gambling house in the back room of the Golden Goose off and
on for years. When the club was in the hands of the Ryder mob, it was rough and
tumble, but very profitable. It took no less a hand than Big Joe Tennutti to
give the place some class, but it had fallen in raids led by the city’s masked
crime-fighters months ago. The back room had been shut down; the Goose itself
was under new and supposedly legitimate ownership. To re-open the club and do
it this publicly was either very stupid…

“Or a challenge…,”
thought the man, surveying the room quietly
from a tactical standpoint. The usual gorillas in evening wear were easily
spotted throughout the room, but it didn’t appear to be anything out of the
ordinary. As he stepped into the room and ordered a drink, his keen eyes
spotted what appeared to be a sliding panel, no more than twelve inches wide,
high above the room with a vantage facing the door. If it was what it appeared
to be, it would be the perfect spot for an unseen sentinel to pepper the room
with machine-gun fire from the upper offices. He would have to deal with that.

For the man with the van Dyke beard was not Miles Grant at all. The
real Miles Grant had died months ago in a plane crash while on a caper. Pains
had been taken that his body would never be found, and the man in the white
dinner jacket had assumed his identity, giving him access to the inner sphere
of the underworld. He had engineered Grant’s supposed return to Toronto,
assumed his old connections and awaited orders.

Grant took one more look around, then took pains to blend in to the
happy crowd of gamblers. At last he lit his cigar and steeled himself for the
task ahead. For this was Gregor Sampson, Agent of the Red Panda. He had taken
on the dangerous task of being his chief’s eyes and ears inside the city’s
underworld. Sometimes he served by gathering intelligence… names, dates,
targets. Sometimes he played a more active role. Tonight was one of those
times.

He moved casually towards the corner of the room, stopping to chat with
those he knew in the crowd. Halfway to his goal he glanced over to make sure
that the nearest security men had not taken an interest in him. Sure enough,
their eyes were elsewhere, though with an intensity that caught Sampson’s eye.
They seemed to be focused rather intently on one of the waiters. Sampson
glanced over at the men near the door. They, too, were focused on the same
waiter as he moved through the crowd. Sampson did not want to be associated
with whatever was attracting so much casual attention, but he could not resist
a glance. The waiter in question was a big man, maybe twenty-five. His hair was
close-cropped and sandy-blond, and he carried his tray awkwardly, as if he had
never held one before in his life.

“That,”
thought Gregor Sampson at once,
“is the single worst piece of undercover
work I have ever seen.”

He wondered if the man was a policeman, a private detective or if he
simply had some private agenda worth dying for. He made a mental note to ask
the man’s widow later. For the moment, he made an excellent distraction.

Sampson slipped down a service hallway without being seen. He could
hear the muffled sounds of the casino nearby. The voices, the music… It was
loud enough that he almost certainly wouldn’t hear someone coming up behind him
until it was far too late. He would have to work quickly.

At last he spotted what he was looking for: the main power box. From
here the electricity branched off for every part of the Golden Goose, including
the back room and, by the look of it, the offices above. He attached a small
device to the base of the relay box and pressed a series of three buttons on it
in a rapid pattern. There was a barely audible whirring sound, and then
nothing.

Sampson looked around quickly. The way was clear. He moved swiftly back
up the hall, all the while pressing the jewel in his ring in what appeared to
be an absent-minded fashion. In fact, the motion was anything but random. The
jewel in Gregor Sampson’s ring was the switch of a miniature radio sending
device, transmitting a short-range signal on a very special frequency. As he
passed back into the room he finished sending the message in the dots and
dashes of Morse Code:

“Agent Thirty-Three in place.
Ready. Counting down now.”

And as he sent the last dash of his message, Sampson pressed a switch
in his pocket and the carefully trimmed van Dyke beard began to move, just a
little, as Gregor Sampson began slowly and evenly counting down from thirty. As
he kept careful, even count, he moved into a position directly across from the
sliding panel he had spotted earlier. When he reached five he fixed his eyes
directly to the panel, in spite of the risk of being spotted. Out of the corner
of his eye, he could just see two security men moving from opposite ends of the
hall, each on their way to intercept the mysterious waiter. Sampson nodded to
himself. They would be out of position and away from their partners. Whoever
this fool was, he had done them another good turn.

At the moment that the count reached zero, the remote timer triggered
the device he had planted, and with a sound like thunder, the back room of the
Golden Goose was plunged into darkness.

The effect on the crowd was instantaneous. They might not have known
what was coming, but they had a general idea that it was nothing they wanted to
be near. They wanted out and they wanted out now. Unfortunately, they each had
a different idea of which direction “out” was, and they made little progress in
the windowless black of the gambling room.

The noise was great, and Sampson could hear nothing from the spot on
which he continued to focus his eyes despite the blackness, but after just a
few seconds the panel must have slid open, as the beam of a powerful torch
appeared and began to sweep the crowd. Sampson knew from that angle they were
perfectly positioned to rain down hot, leaden death on the room and anyone in
it, but he held his hand another moment. As the beam swept past him and over
the room, Sampson could just spy clearly the silhouette of a machine-gun
barrel. He had been right after all.

As he reached into a hidden pocket in the lining of his jacket, his
fingers brushed against the powerful .45 he carried, hidden from prying eyes,
but not unexpected in one with his supposedly criminal tendencies. In an
instant it would be child’s play to bring down the watcher with the gun, but
another might be nearby to take his place. Besides, he noted grimly as he
pulled the pin on the gas grenade in his pocket, if he shot anyone, he’d have
to explain himself to the Red Panda.

Sampson drew his arm back to throw. The light presented a target, but
in the pitch darkness, it was difficult to judge the distance. This would have
to be perfect. The roar of the crowd muffled the release of the gas bomb’s
charge an instant later, but the beam of light vanished all at once and did not
return. The upper level was clear. It had been a full fifteen seconds since the
room was plunged into darkness. Sampson could not understand the delay. If the
Red Panda was giving the crowd time to escape, he was also giving his enemies
time to prepare a reception. It made little sense.

“Unless that’s the whole
point…,”
Sampson thought.

He could feel the crowd pushing past him on the stairs now, charging
through the darkness for the hidden doors. He held on to the rail to avoid
being swept along. The chief may need him yet.

Suddenly, a dozen red flares burst forth from every part of the room,
bathing the gambling hall in an eerie glow. Sampson looked around the room. In
those few seconds of panic, the crowd had done the work of a wrecking crew on
the fashionable hall. Everywhere tables were overturned and gambling apparatus’
were smashed. Sampson wondered who had planted the flares. Was one of his
fellow agents in the room? Or was it…

A mocking, joyous laugh rang from high above, and at once Sampson had
his answer. From the inky blackness that still prevailed near the high ceiling
of the club, the Red Panda swooped like some great nameless creature. He landed
on a massive table that somehow remained intact and called to the room in a
voice like thunder.

“I have closed this den of inequity once! Must I do it again?” he
roared. Sampson knew there was more at work than a human voice. The voice was
so clear, echoing over the din. It was a force of will, carrying his message to
every member of the panicked crowd, now racing for the illuminated exit. The
words burned themselves into the minds of all who heard.

“Leave this place! Leave and never return!”

It took every ounce of strength Sampson possessed not to obey that
mighty charge, to hold his position on the stairs. Clearly several members of
the security teams were less strong, as they abandoned their posts and ran.

Three burly security men were more determined. Their hands shaking with
fear, they closed on the figure of the man in the mask who taunted them with
his laughter. Weapons drawn, they began to fire. Even from his vantage point on
the stairs, Sampson could see the terror in their eyes, the incomprehension as
their bullets failed to find their mark. The masked man still towered above
them as they fired into him at point blank range.

Sampson doubted that they ever understood the truth. Their eyes were
wide with fear, and focused only on the image before them. Sampson could see it
too, but he knew it must be a hypnotic projection. That the Red Panda was
somewhere else entirely. One by one the guards began to fall, disarmed by
boomerangs and wrapped up in boleros thrown from behind them. He knew he was
right. Still, the image standing on the table was clear as day. With his
enemies fled or fallen, Sampson could not help but wonder why the chief
maintained the illusion.

An instant later he had his answer, as a panel door he had not detected
slid open and four of the largest men he had ever seen burst forth into the
room. They were unarmed, but their bodies coiled like caged tigers released at
last onto terrified prey. They swept the path clear of debris as they raced
forward, hurling smashed equipment weighing hundreds of pounds aside like a
child’s toys.

But to Sampson’s amazement, they did not move for the form of the Red
Panda that he still could see in the centre of the room. As one, they raced to
Sampson’s right and charged in the direction that the thrown weapons had come
from. But these men did not flail blindly, searching for a target they could
not see. They ran directly for the same spot, their massive arms ready to
strike. Sampson gasped. Whoever these monstrosities were, they could do what
even he, trusted agent that he was, could not do. They could see past the
hypnotic illusions – they could see the Red Panda!

The last members of the crowd fled past Sampson and up the stairs. He
broke down the steps and to the right, wondering if the chief had come to the
same conclusion. He did not have to wonder long. He could see the massive forms
of the new intruders flailing at the air above their heads, throwing chairs and
tables, all apparently in vain. It wasn’t hard to imagine the Red Panda’s form
dodging those blows. It also wasn’t hard to see that he couldn’t possibly keep
it up forever. Sampson knew the chief was a master fighter, trained in a dozen
martial arts, but he also knew that with his hypnotic powers defeated somehow,
and without backup…