Peter knew that the solemn-faced Tanizaki also must be desperately ashamed of being under arrest. Haji, this shame was, a far greater punishment than death itself. For in death, there was nothing; finis, no hell, no heaven. But the shame was now and lay heavily on his honor.
Which was why Tanizaki’s reaction surprised Peter when he urged: “But why not say where you were that night?”
Six unaccounted hours, for from the factory Tanizaki had not reached home till midnight.
“Odawara?” suggested Peter. “Maybe you have a geisha in Odawara?”
After all, if a prosperous young Japanese wanted to keep a geisha, who cared? But Tanizaki merely stared at the cell wall.
“Don’t you know,” Peter persisted, “that it would be so much easier if you explained where you were?”
“Then I would be let free,” Tanizaki said.
“Certainly, if you proved you were somewhere else.”
“In such case, no, I stay here,” Tanizaki said flatly. Was there a glint of fear in those dark, slanted eyes? Fear of something on the outside so strong that it compelled him to accept the shame of arrest? Unable to penetrate the expressionless mask of this young Oriental face, Peter — quite in Japanese fashion — approached the problem sideways.
“You don’t think for a moment I believe that you, a modern Japanese, would kill John-san just because he was your on-man?”
For the first time, Tanizaki showed interest. “Ah, so?” he said in English. “You know on?”
“Of course I know on,” Peter replied. “I’m no dumb Amerika-jin. And I know you’re an honorable man. And of course you were upset because you didn’t think you could ever repay John-san. But listen! There are other ways of repaying.”
Tanizaki’s mood seemed to alter with establishment of this first suggestion of rapport.
“Ah, so?” Tanizaki said again. What he was really asking, and what he was too proud to utter, was: “How?”
“By telling what you know.”
This was a new concept to Tanizaki, repaying gifts of substance with something so insubstantial as information. And yet this American who seemed to understand Japan said it was true. There was relief in his voice when he said: “John-san insult me.”
Thunder! Was he really trying to cook his goose?
“John-san refuse my advice,” Tanizaki went on. “I say no, not hire the man. But there was strike, and he hire him.”
“What man?”
Tanizaki put his fist to his mouth.
“I say too much. No more, thank you, please.” Again the glint of fear in his eyes, and nothing Peter could say would move him. Still, as he was leaving the cell, Tanizaki spoke once more.
“I think,” he said, “the devil get in after all.”
Not till they reached the factory and passed through the gate did Peter catch the significance of Tanizaki’s remark.
“What a confounded time John had building it!” Mr. Porter growled, glaring at the long, one-story building. “You see where the well house is? On the south, though the American engineer insisted there was a better water supply to the west.”
“Oh, yes,” smiled Peter, “the south is the Prosperity side.”
“So John wrote. But what’s worse, the building itself should face northeast for easier access to the road. But when John objected, the contractor refused. Said if a building fronts northeast, it lets in the devil. If you ask me—”
Peter chuckled. “Just what Tanizaki meant.”
They entered the plant by a wide door at the receiving platform and came into a room stocked with metal and plywood, fabric and paint — the raw stuff of the Santa Claus business. But it was a queer collection of Santa’s helpers they found in the assembly shop farther on where some three hundred plump, round-faced girls in Hollywood slacks stood sullenly at long benches.
Stalled completely was a production line of toy bulldozers and fire trucks; while no battle of childish imagination would ever have gotten won were it forced to depend on the flagging output of Porter Play’s jet fighters and tanks. Only the line producing the Danjuro dolls was keeping a normal pace. But even with the two dozen nimble-fingered girls at this work, the black mood prevailed, so abnormal, Peter knew, among Japanese workers. Happy Delight was not a happy factory.
From a compression molder in one corner, a conveyor slowly delivered to the girls’ benches plastic half-eggs — the dolls a-borning. Deftly the girls painted them, sent them through fast-dryers, inserted small rounded weights in the base, screwed the halves together, and attached the ridiculous leering heads. Finally, listing and tilting like so many drunken clowns, the dolls rode a terminal belt past inspectors and into the shipping room.
“Never had an item sell so fast,” said Mr. Porter. “Why, the demand kept right on even after Christmas.”
“Who designed it?” Peter inquired.
Mr. Porter’s mouth set. Without a word he led Peter beneath a hanging fire door of steel slats into the shipping room. At a desk, and glancing up as they entered, sat a little, hunch backed man — his neck supporting, but of human dimensions now, the same grotesque doll’s head with squint eyes and lopsided leer. “I guess,” Mr. Porter said quietly, “that Nature did.”
Peter got the story as they walked through the plant to the main office. A puppet-maker from Kobe, one Nogami, had turned up at the factory soon after it had opened to show John Porter a model of the doll. Sensing its possibilities, John snapped up the production rights.
No thought then, of course, that the queerly appealing face was spit and image of a living human being. That little bombshell exploded some months later — after the showing of samples at the American trade shows and when it was too late to recall shipments — with the appearance of Mr. Ko.
Mr. Ko was the toy-head man.
“Libel,” murmured Peter.
“Libelous as hell,” rumbled Mr. Porter. “He had Morita with him, claiming the doll made him a laughing stock. Insult to his name, how’d you say it? Something like that, John wrote. And of course they were dead right. But when it came to settling, Ko wouldn’t take cash. Instead, he demanded the job of shipping foreman.”
“Why shipping foreman?”
“Oh, God, I don’t try to understand. John thought the fellow got some sort of masochistic pleasure just being around the dolls. Of course John balked. What? Put a totally inexperienced man in charge of an entire department? So Morita pulled the strike and John gave in.”
They had reached a room where girls in American dress listlessly pecked at American typewriters. As Mr. Porter pushed at a door labeled Private, Peter was saying: “I’d like to meet this Morita Ton.”
It was not Mr. Porter who answered. “Ah, s-s-so?” The sibilance of a Japanese having the usual trouble with s’s. “Him meet now, ne… Mist Ragran’?”
Peter turned quickly to confront, flanked by two diminutive Japanese, a great ox of a human, his breadth just short of his height. And at once he knew where in time past he’d come across not only the name, but the man himself.
They regarded each other, this monster with a sleepy grin on his full-moon face, and the tall, cool-eyed American. It was the same deceptive grin Peter remembered when last he’d seen the man as runner-up in the National Sumo Wrestling Championships at Tokyo. He had seemed like a beast then, crouching on all fours, circling and being circled by another wary gorilla before tangling in the flash match which is like no other wrestling on earth.
Reared from infancy for the sport, fattened like a steer, hardened by exercise until the muscles were corded iron — that was the life of these brutes. And now Morita Ton was an oyabun; so much more, really, than the labor leader Mr. Porter supposed him. More gangster and strong-arm man, more the padrone, recruiting the workers and selling their labor to the factory, handling their money himself. And with all this, always a power in the local politics. That was the oyabun, and the mere fact of Morita’s presence testified to John Porter’s acceptance of this still common feudal system.