Between the bank and Ueno is the seediest noodle shop in all of Tokyo. As Tokyo has the seediest noodle shops in Japan, this is probably the seediest noodle shop in the world. It is too seedy even to have a name or a definite colour. Suga told me about it – it is as cheap as it should be and you can drink as much iced water as you want, and they have comic book collections going back twenty years. I park my bike in the alley around the side, smell burnt tar through the fan outlet, and walk in through the strings of beads. Inside is murky and fly-blown. Four builders sit around four greasy bowls in silence. The cook is an old man who died several days ago. The single round light is dappled with the bodies of dead insects, and the walls are decorated with spatters and dribbles of grease. A TV runs an old black-and-white Yakuza movie, but nobody watches it. A gangster is chucked into a concrete mixer. Fans turn their heads, this way and that. With a shudder, the cook reanimates his corpse and sits up. ‘What can I do for you, son?’ I order a tempura-egg-onion soba, and take a stool at the counter. Today, the message said. This time tomorrow I will know everything – whether this Plan E is the true lead, or whether it is yet another dud. I must keep a lid firmly on my hopes. My hopes boil over. Who else could it be, but my father? My noodles come. I sprinkle on some chilli pepper and watch it spread among the jellyfish of grease. Tasted better, tasted worse.
Outside in the glare, the bike is missing. A black Cadillac takes up the side alley, the sort that the FBI use for presidential missions. The passenger door inches open and a lizard pokes his head out – short, spiky, white hair, eyes too far apart that can do 270-degree vision. ‘Looking for anything?’ I turn my baseball cap around to shade my eyes. Lizard leans on the Cadillac roof. He is about my age. A dragon tail disappears up one arm of his short-sleeved snakeskin shirt, and a dragon head twists out of the other.
‘My bike.’
Lizard says something to somebody in the Cadillac. The driver’s door opens, and a man in sunglasses with a Frankenstein scar down the side of his face gets out, walks around the back of the Cadillac and picks up a mangle of metal. He brings it around to me and hands it to me. ‘Is this your bike?’ His forearms are more thickly muscled than my legs and his knuckles are chunky with gold. He is so big he blocks out the sun. In shock, I hold the metal for a moment before dropping it.
‘It was, yeah.’
Lizard tuts. ‘People are such mindless vandals, ain’t they?’ Frankenstein shunts my ex-bike aside with his foot. ‘Get in.’ He jerks his thumb at the Cadillac. ‘Father sent us to pick you up.’
‘You came from my father?’
Frankenstein and Lizard find this funny. ‘Who else?’
‘And did my father tell you to trash my bike?’
Lizard hoicks and spits. ‘Get in the car, yer lippy cock-wart, or I’ll break both yer fucking arms right here, right now.’ Traffic drags its heat and din to the next red light. What choice do I have?
The Cadillac purrs over the Sumida river bridge on air cushions. The tinted windows retune the bright afternoon, and the air-con chills the inside to fridge-beer temperature. I get goose bumps. Frankenstein drives, Lizard is in the back with me, sprawled pop star fashion. I could almost enjoy the ride if I weren’t being abducted by Yakuza and if I weren’t going to lose my job. Maybe I could find a phone and call Mrs Sasaki to say . . . what? The last thing I want to do is lie to her. Mrs Sasaki is okay. I tell myself these things are trifles – my father has sent for me. This is it. Why am I unable to get excited? Northside Tokyo slides by, block after block after block. Better to be a car than a human. Highways, flyovers, slip roads. A petrochemical plant runs pipes for kilometres, lined by those corkscrewing conifers. A massive car plant. Acre upon acre of white body shells. So my father is some kind of Yakuza man. Makes sense, sort of. Money, power and influence. The white lines and billowing