by Graham Marks
28
Credulity that remark
Adam was stunned. His parents knew he was in Tokyo? Since when?
Simon Palmer supplied the answer without the question being asked. ‘Interpol sent the information through a couple of days ago.’
‘Interpol? What am I, some kind of gangster on the run?’
‘Just the way things happen, Adam; protocol … it’s what makes the world go round.’
Adam wasn’t really listening, still trying to work out how his parents had found out he was in Japan. Had Suzy dumped him in it? Unlikely. It was always possible the credit card bill had arrived earlier than he thought it would. More than likely. Could Alice have made another phone call and said she’d seen him? He was beginning to wonder if he actually had seen her in that Roppongi back street, or whether it had just been someone who looked like her.
Thinking about Alice brought Charlie into sharp focus, the events of the previous half hour or so having pushed her to the back of his mind. ‘My sister … have they found my sister?’
‘Charlotte? No, I’m afraid not as yet.’ Palmer stood up. ‘The police –’
‘She didn’t leave that club with anyone, you know. Alice was lying.’
‘Sorry?’
‘My sister never left the Bar Belle with any Japanese bloke … if she’s been kidnapped by anyone it’s going to be Alice’s boyfriend, the yakuza type.’
‘Did you realise that the people who took your friend were, how shall I put it, of the same “type”?’
Adam nodded. ‘We phoned the hotel last night,’ he pointed out of the door. ‘it must’ve been that guy who told Aiko about them.’
‘And you still came here?’
‘We didn’t know they were camped outside, and anyway, what would some Japanese crim want with me? Or Aiko?’
‘As I was about to say a moment ago, the police want you to go back to their station with them …’
‘What for? I don’t know anything, I didn’t see anything – I wasn’t here when it happened, right, otherwise they’d’ve taken me, wouldn’t they? Like, doh?’
‘It’s OK, Adam, I understand that you’re upset, but there are formalities.’ Palmer was making ‘calm down’ signals with his hands as he spoke quietly but firmly. ‘At the moment the police have no idea who has been kidnapped – as, apparently, you only know the young woman’s first name – and they have no idea why or by whom. They need all the help they can get, and you are one of the people who can and must give it to them, OK?’
‘Yeah, OK … sure. Sorry, I’m a bit –’
‘I do understand; I’ll come with you to the station – they have interpreters there. Then I’ll come back later to pick you up and take you to the hotel where your parents will be staying when they arrive on Monday.’
‘My what?’
They fly out tomorrow, the 9.00 a.m. flight.’
‘My parents are coming to Tokyo?’
‘That’s what my colleague in the F and C told me.’
‘Effencee?’
‘Foreign and Commonwealth office. They passed the message on.’
‘Jeee-zus …’
‘Adventure over, I suppose.’
‘You condescending bastard.’ Adam’s lip curled. ‘You think I came all the way over here for a stupid adventure? My sister’s missing, she could be dead for all anyone seems to care, and I came out here to find her because fucking nothing was happening and no one was doing anything. I did not come over here for some crap bloody adventure, OK?’
Palmer physically backed off. ‘I think you’ll find that quite a lot has been going on –’
‘And I think you’ll find that whatever whoever has been doing, it hasn’t achieved much. Charlie’s still missing, and that’s all that counts.’
‘Look,’ Palmer glanced over his shoulder at the waiting policemen, ‘I realise you’ve been through a lot, and that that was a slightly insensitive remark – for which I apologise – but can we move on, please? The quicker we get you cooperating with the police here, the quicker your friend’ll be found. And I’ll make some more enquiries about your sister.’
Adam sat on one of a line of interconnected plastic seats in the cold, sterile light cast by banks of fluorescent strips set into the ceiling, the kind of light that illuminated but made people look recently dead. He’d been brought out here, to this bland, characterless corridor in the police station by one of the interpreters; he was supposed to wait for the Simon Palmer bloke to pick him up and take him to the hotel where he was going to have to phone his parents. And wouldn’t that be an interesting conversation.
What was he going to say? ‘Don’t bother coming over, I’ve got it all under control’? Hardly. And what were they going to say to him? He didn’t want to think about it; instead, he got up and stretched, wondering how the police were getting on with the Scandinavian couple and the staff from the New Economy. He’d been completely useless, a total waste of space. He knew nothing about Aiko, no addresses where they’d stayed, either with Kenichi and Ayumi or Keiko, no phone numbers, no last names. Even Alice’s yakuza boyfriend was only probably called ‘Yoshi’. It was a joke, and under any other circumstances it would’ve made him laugh, but not now.
Simon Palmer looked at his watch, a brand-new Seiko Arctura he’d bought duty-free down in Akihabara the week before; the sleek, brushed stainless-steel case and strap glinted in the afternoon sun that was streaming through his office window, reminding him there were some perks to being a put-upon very junior member of the embassy staff. Three thirty, time to go back to the police station and get the boy, Adam Grey. Mouthy little bastard, going off on one at him at that backpacker hotel. Except, if his sister had gone missing, he supposed he’d want something done about it, and, he had to admit, from what little he knew not a lot had been done so far.
Why these girls came here and worked in the hostess bars in the first place was beyond him, and while he certainly didn’t think they deserved what they got, it wasn’t as if they didn’t know what was what. Surely. Palmer got up and then sat straight back down again, remembering that he was going to phone the boy’s parents, let them know their son was safe. He checked his watch, a little after three thirty now, about 7:35 a.m. GMT, and a pretty good time to call. He picked up the handset, punched an outside line and then the line of digits written on the pad in front of him. There was a click and then the familiar UK ring tone. Three, four rings later the call was picked up and he heard a drowsy voice answer with the phone number.
‘Mr Grey?’
‘Yes?’
‘My name’s Simon Palmer, from the embassy in Tokyo?’
‘Oh, right …’ The voice instantly lost its sleepy cadence and Simon heard another, female, voice ask who was there. ‘The embassy … Tokyo … is this something to do with Charlie, Mr, um, Parker?’
‘Palmer. No … no, I’m afraid not, Mr Grey.’
‘Oh …’
‘But it is some good news. We’ve found Adam and he’s safe and well. He’ll be waiting for you at the hotel when you arrive on Monday.’
‘Is he with you now – can we speak to him?’ Palmer heard Mr Grey say ‘they’ve found Adam’ to the other person, presumably his wife.
‘I’m just going to pick him up now, Mr Grey, and as soon as he’s at the hotel, I’ll get him to call you.’
‘You say he’s OK – d’you know where he’s been at all, what he’s been up to?’
‘I don’t know any of the details, Mr Grey. I’m sorry.’ Palmer thought that now was probably not the time to explain to Mr Grey that in the few days his son had been in Tokyo he’d somehow managed to get himself mixed up with the kidnapping of a young woman by the local bad guys. Not part of his remit.
‘OK … OK … when d’you think he’ll call?’
‘Oh,’ Palmer glanced at his watch again, ‘I’d say in about an hour.’
All Adam could do now was mooch around, wait and worry about Aiko and what Yoshi was doing; it had to be Y
oshi … who else could it be? What had happened to her was all his fault, he should never have got her involved. But then how was he to know … he stopped pacing up and down, driving himself nuts with what he should have done and started trying to think what he could be doing.
He walked over to his jacket, which was lying in a crumpled heap where he’d thrown it on to one of the chairs. Picking it up he started feeling it to see if there was some chewing gum in any of the pockets; you never knew. Three pockets came up empty, just fluff, and then … he pulled out a cartoon character fob. Attached to the key to Aiko’s scooter.
The scooter was still parked round the corner from the hotel, with the two helmets, one in the top box, the other under the seat. Really shouldn’t be left there, should it … Could he? Could he just up and go off on Aiko’s scooter to search for Alice in Kabukicho, like he’d planned? He looked round. No one to stop him. And the longer he waited the more chance of Mr Embassy appearing to take him off some place or other, probably miles away from anywhere he wanted to be. This police station hadn’t taken long to get to and he was sure he’d seen a subway entrance at the bottom of the street they’d turned into to get here. Adam looked at the key in the palm of his hand. It was either stay here and do nothing useful, or get off his arse and at least try. He stood up. Mad idea, but what the hell …
It had been a crazed journey. Insanity. On top of never having actually ridden a scooter as anything but a passenger, he was in a city he didn’t know and using a tourist map that lacked detail, to put it mildly. He’d only the vaguest notion of where he was going, able only to work out that if he went down this one street until he came to a junction and turned right, he would, eventually and with more than a little luck, end up somewhere near where he wanted to be. The biggest of all the many flaws in his plan was his lack of experience on two wheels. He’d been meaning to get his act together and take his CBT, but other stuff kept on getting in the way. And then there was the fact that he didn’t actually own a scooter.
An hour after setting out from Minowa, a red light stopped Adam at a major junction and, looking at the map, he realised the cross street was the Meiji-dori and that his destination was, finally, only a few hundred metres down the road. It was now five o’clock, he was starving hungry and wondering why the hell he hadn’t simply taken the subway; just because you had a key didn’t mean you had to use it. He really should try and remember that in future.
He eventually found somewhere to park the scooter, locked up his helmet and looked across the wide street at the blitz of neon, behind which the guidebook said lay a maze of low rent bars, clubs and restaurants, with ‘a good chance of spotting members of the yakuza crime syndicates’. Which was all very picturesque, but what he really needed was a good chance of cornering a certain Alice Reardon. He walked down to the nearest set of lights and waited until they turned red.
29
Let’s spend the shining moment on the street
‘He’s not here?’ Simon Palmer frowned, momentarily nonplussed. ‘What d’you mean “not here”? Where’s he gone? He’s supposed to be here so I can pick him up and take him to a hotel.’
It was hard to tell if the plain-clothes officer, one of the two he’d gone to the hotel with to pick up Adam Grey, was embarrassed, couldn’t care less or had no opinion at all about the disappearance of the boy. He could be really torn up about it, for all Palmer knew, because his face never changed. Not a twitch.
‘Aporogy.’ The officer bowed. ‘No person see him walk away. Very aporogy.’
Great! He’d just walked out of the front door! Palmer could feel the tension dragging its sharp, heated knife blades across his shoulders. He was supposed to be driving the bloody boy to the hotel and getting him to call his parents in, he checked, thirty-five sodding minutes. Except the bloody boy wasn’t here, he was out there, somewhere, in this ridiculously huge city of twenty-seven million people.
‘Do you have his description?’
‘Description? Yes.’ The policeman brought a notepad out of his pocket and started flicking through pages.
‘No … no, I don’t want – look will you put out an APB, or whatever you call it here, to all your stations? Get people looking for him?’
‘Moment prease. I come someone better Engrish.’ The officer turned and left Palmer waiting by the front desk. There were days when you wished you’d never woken up and this was very definitely one of those.
It was the smell that drew Adam. Kebabs. It was definitely kebabs. And when he turned the corner he saw a big red van, its side down and with two big lumps of doner spinning slowly like torture victims on their vertical spits. Memories of drunken trawls with his mates through the West End, where a greasy doner, topped with evil chilli sauce, was the obligatory finale, came flooding back.
As homesick as he was hungry, Adam bought a chicken doner wrap and stood near the van as he ate it, half watching the passing street traffic, half trying to work out what the hell he thought he was doing. He should be in some hotel now, having had his ear chewed off by irate, megapissed off parents; instead he was about to start wandering round what looked like Soho on steroids – layer upon layer of strip joints, dive bars and clubs, all touting for business from lurid street-to-sky towers of signs, all with offers of girls and booze and an escape from reality. It was all a sham, like him. Maybe he should do everyone a favour and give up any more stupid attempts to find Aiko, Alice, Yoshi or Charlie. Cos who was he kidding … what chance did he have in a place like this?
He stood, eating his way through the wrap, hardly aware of the taste, just putting fuel into the engine; this time in a few days he’d be back in London – in just over a week, fer-crissake, he be back at college! – and Tokyo would all be over, for him. A dubious act of rank stupidity he’d be able to look back on for the rest of his life. Oh joy.
Still, he did have choices. He could phone the embassy, apologise to that Palmer bloke and arrange to go to the hotel. Or … ? Well, he could do what he’d come here to Kabukicho to do, which was give it one last go, and then call the embassy. Adam finished the doner. In London he’d probably have screwed up the paper and dropped it; here in Tokyo there were rubbish bins everywhere, he’d even noticed recycling points built into some of the vending machines, and the streets were clean. He looked for a bin, used it – when in Japan, etc. – and wiped his hands on his jeans. If he was going to get anywhere, he’d better make a move.
As he walked past the ground-floor Penthouse Gentlemen’s Club, past the stairway down to the Carol House, the sign for the Ritz Club and the electric pink background with a life-size naked blonde (much too like Charlie for comfort) advertising the Broadway Gentlemen’s Club, it occurred to him that maybe working in ‘fancy dress’ in some bar in Roppongi wasn’t such a bad deal. Better than being here.
So many thoughts were jumping to the front of his head Adam was finding it hard to concentrate on one for more than a few seconds … Aiko was probably here, in some basement room or six floors up where he’d never find her – and never put a last name to her first. How were the police ever going to discover her whereabouts – tell her parents – without that information? Adam stopped next to a sign that told him Lady Club Bugsy was five floors up above him, should he wish to visit. Another thought had just occurred … the only person he knew who knew all about Aiko, and the only person whose address he had more than a vague idea about, was Keiko. He looked at his watch. She’d still be working, probably wouldn’t get back to her apartment for another hour or two, so no point trying to get there yet.
He’d carry on searching and then take another nerve-wracking scooter ride. This time he’d kind of know where he was going as Aiko had marked the approximate place where Keiko lived on his map when she’d been showing him the route they’d taken the night before. What would this scuzball Yoshi do when he found Aiko didn’t know anything about him – if he believed her? Beat her up, then throw her out? Worse? Adam felt his stomach clench at the thought of how bad
worse could be.
Pushing the unwanted images and scenarios out of his head, he carried on walking, concentrating on looking for any signs of Alice or sightings of men with their little fingers cut off. He had a fair idea of what he’d do if he saw Alice, but no notion of what might happen if he bumped into some actual neighbourhood yakuza. The guidebook said they had big hair and flashy, retro suits, so they were obviously quite upfront about who they were and what they did and hopefully wouldn’t be too difficult to spot.
With no idea of where he was going, no plan, like when he’d quartered the map of Roppongi, Adam just walked. And walked and walked. He went down little streets crowded with bars, some decorated like log cabins, others like miniature medieval castles, one place coming complete with a ‘Welcome’ mat outside it. He passed flashy neon-lit hotels and wandered down streets which were completely made up of micro-restaurants, often just simple benches at a stall, others only doing take-away. At most of these places the food was being cooked on charcoal right in front of you and the air was filled with smells of grilled squid and king prawns. But no sign anywhere of Alice.
It was still light, but the sun was going down, more neon going on and the human traffic in the streets was picking up as the evening’s punters began to arrive. He came to a crossroads and opposite him he saw a familiar sign amongst the alien mass of adverts and shop fronts: Häagen-Dazs. He joined the small queue and bought a double-scoop cone of mint-chocolate chip and pistachio. Another reminder of home and nights out with Suzy at the flicks. He was cursing his memory bank for reminding him of one more thing he had piled up to deal with, when he thought he saw a dark-haired European girl, wearing a red top, in the kind of amusement arcade place across the road.
The girl – could he be lucky enough for it to be Alice? – moved out of his line of sight and he sprinted across the road and in through open doors of the arcade. The noise inside was extreme – not the chaos of electronic gunfire, space attack and road rage, like in London arcades, but the shattering din of hundreds and thousands of humungous ball bearings being poured continuously from the ceiling, down chutes and into ranks of machines. It was like being physically assaulted by sound and for a moment Adam couldn’t think what he was supposed to be doing, then he remembered. The girl.