Hawaii - James Michener [584]
There was a ghastly silence, and Hewlett Janders, completely shaken, put down the phone. There was no cause to ask him what had happened; the news stood out from his sagging round face. "God damn!" Hoxworth Hale shouted, banging the table. "We've been outsmarted. Who did this?" he raged. "Hewlett, who leased that store?"
Big Hewlett Janders kept his head down, staring at the table. "I'm ashamed to say. Kamejiro Sakagawa."
"We'll break him!" Hoxworth stormed. "We'll not bring a single cargo of his into Honolulu. That man will starve on . . ."
Icy John Whipple Hoxworth was speaking: "The problem is twofold. Who engineered this damnable thing? And for whom?"
There was long discussion as to who could have accumulated enough capital and wisdom to have effected such a coup, and by a slow process of elimination all came to agree that only Hong Kong Kee could have swung it. "Ill challenge him right now," Hoxworth cried, and in a forthright manner he phoned Hong Kong and asked, "Did you buy up all the leases?" When the Chinese banker replied, Hoxworth nodded his head to his associates. "Whom were you representing, Hong Kong?" This time Hoxworth did not move his head, but listened in stunned silence. "Thank you, Hong Kong," he said, and put down the phone.
"California Fruit?" Janders asked.
"Gregory's," Hale replied.
There was an aching, dumb silence as an era came to an end. Finally one of the Hoxworths asked, "Can't we fight this in the courts?"
"I don't think so," Hale answered.
"Surely we could get Judge Harper to issue an injunction on one of these leases. He's married to my cousin and I could explain..."
"If Hong Kong Kee arranged those leases . . ." Hale could not go on. He dropped his head into his hands, thought for a long time and then asked his associates, "How could these people do this to us? Your family, Whipple, why they looked after the Kees. Damn it, the whole Kee hui got its start with that land Old Doc gave them. And those damned Sakagawas. Imagine Kamejiro showing such ingratitude! Buying leases behind our backs. How do you explain it? You'd think they'd feel some kind of loyalty to us. We brought them here, gave them land, looked after them when they were so damned poor they couldn't read or write. What's happening in the world when such people turn against you?"
"That's what McLafferty's been doing!” Janders shouted. "He threw us off the track, talking about that hotel."
Hale now had control of himself and said, "Gentlemen, this is the beginning of an endless fight. I personally am going to obstruct Gregory's and McLafferty at every turn. Not to keep them out of the islands, because if Hong Kong arranged these leases, they'll stand up in court . . ."
One of the Hoxworths interrupted: "You'd think that in view of all we've done for Judge Harper, we could at least rely on him to void one of the leases."
Hale ignored this stupid and unworthy observation, continuing: "We must fight for time. We'll establish branches of our own stores in Waikiki, in Waialua and across the Pali. Every one of you who controls a going concern, move a branch out into the suburbs. Multiply and tie everything up. By the time Gregory's get here, we'll have our stores so prosperous they'll die on the vine."
So, in the curious way by which a deadly catfish, when thrown into a pool of trout, eats a few of the lazy fish but inspires the others to greater exertion, so that in the end there are more trout, and better, and all because of the evil catfish, the arrival of Gregory's into Hawaii, followed by California Fruit and Shea and Horner, drove the Hawaiian economy ahead by such spurts that soon The Fort was much better off than it had been before. In the same obtuse way, the increased wages that Goro Sakagawa's union had chiseled out of The Fort really made that establishment richer than ever, because much of the money filtered back into its enterprises, and the general prosperity of the