Feeney is clearly overstepping—Baumgartner was never so bold—but it cheers Harris to have someone battling at his side, the way he and Everett used to throw their fists while standing back to back in the schoolyard when the other boys teased them for being orphans.
“Look, can someone please explain to me what it is we’re doing here?” Harris asks the room. “My lumber crews are at the ready. The saws of my mills are spinning. I’m fixed to deliver you these sleepers. And all you want to do is hide behind your translators and ring your bells. Why don’t you go cut down your own trees and save us all this trouble? You have a garden outside that is full of them!”
“Our trees are sacred to us, Mr. Greenwood,” the Chairman says.
“Our trees are sacred to us, too, sir,” Harris replies. “We just have a billion more of them than you do. So all I need is your fucking per-foot price.”
“Mr. Greenwood,” the Chairman says in a flustered tone, “perhaps in your rough country it is customary to speak this way to—”
“Gentlemen! It’s nearly lunch, and you all look famished,” Feeney interrupts, before dragging Harris from the room, past the dining area, out through the main palace doors, and into the ornamental garden.
“I’m sorry for losing my cool in there, Harris, but I hate the belittling tone they take with you,” Feeney says as they walk. Sometime after Baumgartner’s departure, Feeney started calling Harris by his Christian name, and Harris has yet to correct him.
“And I’m still unsure if it’s in our best interests to go through with this deal,” Feeney continues. “Japan has invaded Manchuria and withdrawn from the League of Nations. They talk about this Hirohito as though he’s Jesus Christ’s older brother, and you couldn’t throw a baseball into the harbour right now without hitting a warship. Looks to me like they’re itching for a fight. Guess who with?”
Harris shakes his head. “We can’t walk away now, Liam. This is too important. If they buy our lumber, they can do whatever the hell they like.”
That evening, at the bar of the Imperial Hotel, Harris strikes up a conversation with a man from the Ford Motor Company. When Harris relates his negotiating troubles, the man says: “They gave you the whole guest house-and-translator routine, huh? You just need to shove a hot poker up their asses. It’s the only play they respect.”
The following morning Harris cables the Imperial Railway Purchasing Group, claiming that the Indian government has ordered a significant number of railway sleepers and he needs Japan’s answer by noon or he’ll sell his timber to India instead. An hour later, an agent arrives at their hotel with a draft purchase agreement for three shiploads of sleepers, at a board-foot price better than expected. The Imperial Railway Purchasing Group will pay ten per cent up front, and the remaining ninety upon delivery.
To celebrate, Harris and Feeney share an opulent meal of various creatures plucked from the sea, a cuisine which both have come to enjoy. “It’s zippy, tastes of licorice and camphor,” Harris says of the warmed liquor they bring to the table. Amid the afterglow of their monumental agreement, one that will cement Greenwood Timber’s long-term prosperity, this sake tastes to Harris like the distilled nectar of victory.
Following dinner, partly out of the silliness imparted by the drink and partly out of his compulsion to test Feeney’s skills of description, Harris expresses his desire to “view” a Japanese film. They find a theatre and sit elbow-to-elbow in the dark to the clatter of the projector. Even after weeks abroad, the scent of the forest—fir sap and cedar tannin—still clings to Feeney, and suddenly, sorrowfully, Harris yearns for the early days of his career when he oversaw his sawmills personally, cruising the woodlands of North America for new timber. How did he wind up craving his office routine and the confinement of a desk, he wonders, caged there like one of his birds?
Despite his scant grasp of Japanese, Feeney does his best to describe the samurai story, a talkie, paying particular attention to the lead actor’s face: “Like the expressions of an entire troupe of actors,” he says, “melted down then re-formed into one man.” As the film nears completion, amid the blare of trumpets, the deafening clash of swords, and the guttural battlefield grunts, Feeney’s mouth draws nearer and nearer to Harris’s ear.
“You never said whether he’s handsome,” Harris says in a low voice.
“Who?” Feeney asks.
“This samurai fellow. The lead man. The one you mentioned.” Harris clears his throat. “In a universal way, of course?”
A pause. Harris worries Feeney didn’t hear him and decides he won’t repeat himself if he didn’t.
“Well, yes,” Feeney says. “He is. Quite.”
“And me?” Harris says, nearly inaudibly, keenly aware of his inebriation yet allowing its belligerent momentum to carry him.
“Sorry?”
“Handsome, would you say? In the same fashion? If I were up on the same screen?”
“Of course, these things are subjective,” Feeney answers.
“Of course. Quite correct. A silly question,” Harris says, his face heating like a woodstove. “Disregard it.”
“And besides, I’m unsure you want me to say.”
“Think no more of it. A misfired joke.”
Suddenly, Harris feels his breath in his ear. “Yes,” Feeney says. “You are. Profoundly so.”
Without turning from the screen, Harris reaches over to feel Feeney’s unshaven cheek with his palm, finally allowing himself to take the measure of its shape—though he’s instantly petrified by how improper this gesture may appear to those in the theatre, even after he reminds himself that they’re all foreigners, with no power to wield over him.
“You as well,” Harris says, drawing his hand back. “Universally so.”
“If you must know,” Feeney says. “Like all true poets, I’m ugly as a pug. But thank you.”
“I apologize for the intrusion,” Harris blurts, horrified as much by his impulsivity as by the odd riptide of sensations crashing around inside him. “I have a hell in me. A little hell. I hide it. But when I take alcohol, it rises up.”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on it,” Feeney says, patting Harris’s trembling knee. “Your little hell.” Then he collects Harris’s damp hand in his own. “We may need it.”
THE BIG MAN
WHEN EVERETT HAD returned to the rooming house to fetch his horsehide gloves, he’d noticed the unfamiliar lodger smoking on one of the mattresses. Initially, he thought against collecting the flannel with the stranger present; but it was threatening rain, and the big man’s clothes were sheened with filth and he seemed too haggard for a Mountie. But he was Holt’s man, no question. Though he’d remained polite, there was a dangerous note in his voice, and a grim menace coiled in his colossal body, his hands like sledges riveted to his arms, surely enough to ragdoll Everett around if he ever caught ahold of him. Just the way he spoke of the child and the journal was chilling. And his pinpricked pupils—as though the man had spent the past week staring into the sun—and his burnt voice. Demonic. There’s no other word for it. He intends her harm, Everett can feel it.