chapter twelve august fenwick walked in the main doors of the club mccaw and sighed to himself he really didn't have time for this

leading any sort of double life is complicated enough even if neither of those lives involves wearing a mask and handing out your own brand of two-fisted justice there are are always traces, clues that can be followed by the industrious or the curious.

However skilled you may be at hiding them, and the Red Pander fancied he had done fairly well,

sooner or later someone trips over something that you've swept under the carpet,

and it has to be dealt with.

That was why, with at least two crazed supervillains

terrorizing the city, he was stopping in at his gentlemen's club. The very real problem was

learning just exactly what Captain Clockwork was playing at and why he had chosen to make August

Fenwick the object of suspicion. There certainly were more convincing Captain Clockwork candidates out there,

and a plethora of Fenwick Industries' components were hardly damning proof

that Fenwick himself had a role in the creation of these mechanical monsters.

It was a bad frame, which either meant that he would soon be in the clear,

or that Clockwork wasn't done yet.

Fenwick traipsed up the heavily carpeted steps casually acknowledging those who greeted him

and made his way into the reading room, where a few dozen members sat quietly with various

newspapers from around town and hopelessly out-of-date journals from farther afield.

Really, he had no idea how fellows without hypnotic powers managed it. He really didn't.

Granted, not every mystery man had a large personal staff that came with the August Fenwick identity,

and that would simplify things somewhat, but even if you didn't count the small army of

chauffeurs, butlers, and the like, whose memories he had altered before sending them to another job, it was still complicated.

The President of the Empire Bank had once discovered the network he had used to channel funds to the Red Panda's operations,

but that was a fairly quick, hypnotic modification. The poor little man would much rather have never made such a discovery,

...