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 Santas 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 moulder 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’?... Yes?”
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, cooleyed 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.
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.
“I think we can talk Japanese,” Peter said pleasantly.
“Ah, s-s-so?” hissed Morita. “But if me rike spek Engrish, ‘Mist Ragran’?”
If you could, fine, Peter was tempted to say. But one is never that impolite in Japan. Instead, he said with a shrug: “Yoroshii, have it your way.”
As for the ‘Mist Ragran’, it was perfectly obvious the police at the jail had lost no time warning of the American’s interest in the case.
Morita Ton turned to Mr. Porter. “You come time just right,” he grinned amiably, and nodded toward his two companions. “These good bizmen, just now we talk. We say, Happy Deright not do good. We say, may be Mist Poter rike sell. We say, we make good offer.”
Mr. Porter shot a glance at Peter. “Sell out, you mean?”
Morita Ton wagged his gigantic head. “Amerika-jin not know Japan way. We make good sing. We say, we keep make toy. Poter P’ay keep sell in U.S.A.”
Mr. Porter, wondering where the catch was, sat down at a desk and eyed Morita with wary speculation. God knew, he’d had little enough stomach for this foreign venture. And so much less, now, with John dead. He rubbed his neck. Funny how it ached at the mere thought of that sinister warning. Reaching for pad and pen, he jotted some figures. For a moment he studied them, then turned back to Morita.
“What d’ya offer?”
Mr. Morita had left off smiling. His heavy lids half-veiled his eyes. “We sink, yes-s-s, two million yen, ne?”
As long as he lived, Peter would never forget Henry Porter’s reaction. Slowly the blood rose in the veins of his thick neck, then spread out to suffuse his entire face. His mouth worked, his eyes bulged. Until finally, a human missile fueled by all of his recent troubles, he shot to his feet.