Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

by editor Leo Margules

  “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.

  “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 mom
ent 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.

  “Two million yen!” he exploded incredulously. “Two million lousy yen for a brand-new plant that cost eighty? Hell, that’s not even six thousand dollars!” He stepped forward and thrust a pugnacious chin into Mr. Morita’s face. “So that’s your game? A slowdown to soften the old boy up! Blackmail! Two million yen! Get out! Get out of my factory! You hear me? Get the hell out of here! And if I see you around again, I’ll tear you limb from limb!”

  And—not too curiously, perhaps, because never before had they seen a rugged American businessman in action—Mr. Morita and his henchmen decamped.

  For a moment Mr. Porter glared at the door. Then, turning to the admiring Peter, he said glumly: “Well! I guess we close down for good now.”

  Peter Ragland paid two calls that evening: to a toy shop near the inn, and to the home of Tanizaki Hajime. With Mr. Porter, he then dined at the inn on octopus, eels, rice and bean cakes. But, though they are the greatest of delicacies, Mr. Porter firmly rejected the fish eyes. Their accusing stare as they approached his mouth, that adamantine gentleman swore, reminded him too much of Mr. Ko.

  At midnight, alone, Peter returned to the factory. Admitting himself with Mr. Porter’s key, he made his way through the darkened store room. He moved quietly to avoid awakening the night watchman. And if this sounds odd, it must be recorded that such are the happy relations between labor and capital in the Land of the Rising Sun that watchmen are provided with beds instead of watch clocks.

  Reaching the gloom-shrouded assembly shop, Peter was not too surprised to find a rectangle of light falling through the doorway—it was surmounted by the rolling fire door—from the shipping room. Approaching cautiously, he peeked into the room and saw—

  Mr. Ko, busy as a little beaver at a bench populated with dozens of Ko-headed dolls.

  Fascinated at the soundness of his own reasoning, Peter watched for several moments. Then, hearing no other sound, he advanced.

  “Tachi!” he ordered.

  And Ko stood. He stood in an attitude of rigid fright, his queer head slowly turning.

  Peter’s mistake, without doubt, was the same that had doomed John Porter: he stepped into the room for a closer view of the operation. Instantly the rolling door crashed down behind him, blocking retreat. But where John Porter perhaps failed to fix his attention on Ko, Peter did not compound the error. Though tempted to glance back, he kept his gaze on the dwarf’s peculiar eyes.

  They seemed, but only seemed, to stare directly at him. Wheeling to follow their true drift, Peter found—creeping quietly toward him from out of the shadows—the immensity of Morita Ton. He had only time, as Morita sprang in his famous flash attack, to dodge aside.

  Skilled in the art of fall and tumble, Morita scarcely had touched the floor than he bounced, pivoted lightly and, again on all fours, watched warily for a second opening. Peter, orthodox stand-up boxer, wondered how in the devil you countered an attack like that.

  Nor was Morita his only peril. Dancing about him, the pint-sized Ko pulled at his clothes, pushed, scratched, tried to trip him. And always Morita was moving in, teeth bared in a fiend’s grin, ready again to spring and grapple; and Peter, carefully side-stepping, well knowing that once those powerful hands gripped him they would never let go.

  His one hope was to get the man to his feet. Not for a good three years had Morita Ton wrestled professionally; and there was just the chance his great stomach had softened.

  Again Ko rushed at his legs, biting, clawing. As one brushes away a gnat, Peter reached down and fetched the dwarf a cuff that sent him sprawling against the bench. The bench toppled. Dolls cascaded to the floor. A cloud of obscuring yellow dust exploded in Peter’s face.

  Pain whipped at his eyes. In transient blindness, he strove to keep his balance. The dust was stifling, tormenting. He fought to suppress a betraying sneeze, failed, and was aware from somewhere close of an answering curse.

  The dust settled. Swimming, tear-blurred vision revealed that the table had fallen athwart the crouching Morita. Belching, red-eyed, Morita half-rose to thrust the barrier aside. And his ballooning belly formed a perfect target for Peter’s looping right.

  “Umph!” grunted Mr. Morita.

  It was Peter’s solid left that finished him.

  Morita and Ko were in jail, and Tanizaki was free. But urgent messages were still flashing between Tokyo and Washington when a small group gathered next morning about the tired Peter.

  “A lot of things,” he was saying, “didn’t quite add up. John Porter was dead, Tanizaki in jail. So if there’d been a mere personal grudge, as the police seemed to think, everything should have been fine at the plant. Which it wasn’t.”

  Inspector Watanabe of the National Rural Police put his hand to his mouth to suppress an embarrassed giggle. But Peter was addressing Garner, the American undercover agent from Yokohama.

  “There was the slowdown, the warning to Porter to go home. And yet”—he picked up a doll—“there was no slowdown in this. Why not? Obviously, the same people who were trying to freeze Porter out had a special stake in this one item.”

  From his pocket Peter produced another doll, a Danjuro with the traditional actor’s head.

  “But that’s not ours!” Mr. Porter protested.

  “No, as they say in the trade I did some comparison buying last night. You see, here the two halves are sealed at the stomach. But Porter Play’s are screwed together. So another big question was: why design ’em to open at all? Well, you’ve got your answer right there.”

  He nodded toward the work bench where a police assistant was still unloading the dolls: removing first the weights and the small cellophane sachets beneath them; emptying the sachets, and pouring the pure, rough-textured heroin into a container. The stuff was light tan in color.

  “Practically China’s trademark,” Gamer said. “They smuggle it in by fishing boat. But Japan’s only a flag stop. There’s damn little market here and the comrades need the hard currency. The trick’s to get it past customs into the States.” He selected a sachet. “About half an ounce in each, I’d say.”

  “Worth?—”

  Garner shrugged. “Not really much in Japan. Five bucks maybe just now. But when you get it Stateside and cut it with milk sugar and it gets to your junkie at three bucks a capsule—” His hand made a soaring gesture. “Three or four thousand at least!”

  Henry Porter sat down heavily. “My God, my God! No wonder our sales kept increasing!”

  Peter regarded him soberly. Such a rotten thing, using a child’s toy. And what a black eye for Mr. Porter’s firm. He could wish now he’d torn Morita apart. Still, there were others above Morita—Stateside—the big shots who’d moved in remorselessly on Porter Play’s distribution setup; men whom Federal agents just as remorselessly were already tracking down through orders, invoices, bills of lading. Not until they’d nabbed every last man could Peter file his story.

  “Do you think,” Mr. Porter asked, “that John suspected?”

  “Something at least. And nosing around, he must have walked in on Ko and Morita just as I did. Which was why he was killed. But it was all planned from the start, of course: Nogami modeling and planting the doll with John, to ease Ko into the shipping job. So Ko could load the dolls nights and code the cartons for their men in your home factory. It all fits.”

  Mr. Porter smiled wanly. “All but one thing,” he said. “On.”

  Peter grinned. “Even that, if a bit in reverse. Certainly the police were right in thinking Tanizaki was worried about his deb
t to John. But not to the point of murder. His big worry was about something else. Where the local police were blind—if they really were—was in not seeing that Ko and Morita were the real backsliders. The moment I met them, I knew they were deep in some racket.”

  Mr. Porter looked puzzled.

  Peter explained: “Or Ko never would have submitted to such shame, and Morita would never have changed stations.”

  “Umm,” said Mr. Porter. “Good lord, I could really use Tanizaki now.”

  “I’ve talked to him,” Peter said. “I think he’ll come back. I think he sees it’s the only way he can ever repay his on to you. But you must never embarrass him by letting him know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That you know,” Peter chuckled, “where he was that night.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “He was at a wedding.”

  “A wedding? Why the devil couldn’t he say so?”

  “It was his own. And the girl was a geisha. There are geishas and geishas, and this one happens to be a nice one. But you’ll never convince Tanizaki’s straitlaced old papa of that.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Porter. And he did comprehend. Only a father could, who’d had such great hopes for a son.

  THE FIFTH ONE

  by D. E. FORBES

  There were four bodies at the bottom of the old well now. Alfred peered down into the brackish water. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there, lying sightless and silent in their cool, wet grave.

  He counted them off on long fingers. Angela, Lucille, Susan and Tessie. It had been a long time since Tessie. He drew back from the well wall and a loose stone fell, making circles in the dark water.

  It had been much too long since Tessie.

  He sat, his back against the enclosure, and looked up at the hot yellow sky. He hoped he wouldn’t have to wait much longer. It had been so necessary. Each time he had placed their limp forms on the edge and pushed, each time he had heard the splash and looked down to see them slowly sinking beneath the surface, he had found a part of himself. A missing part.