Tokyo Zero | Page 2

followed a long line of people to a place where many things got stamped. It was the
1970s in Narita, but I could have sworn my watch said 2000. Maybe it was just 8 o'clock.
What time was it anyway?
Stamped, pulling round in a bar with a $32 beer in front of me, I congratulated myself on
my deep cover. For half an hour I had even fooled myself into thinking I was some
harmless idiot, instead of a member of an international conspiracy.
I took in my surroundings a little: I was in the most Western of the discreetly hidden
dining facilities at the airport. Believe it or not, there is no McDonald's in Narita Airport.
On arrival I had been brought to this table with no words and very few and subtle
gestures. There was some magnetism employed, the waitress influenced me in. Everyone
was smoking Marlboro or Lark, a local brand that mapped its county in the wrinkles of
aging tough-guy actors from here or from there. All of the American men had thick
sideburns and glossy tan leather jackets. They were strangely quiet, by American
standards. Did they feel out of place or too acutely in place? When you are too much in
place, people don't even have to look at you to know you and judge you.
Outside the planes continued to crash gently into the earth, harming nobody.
Narita Airport is, by the way, the dimmest airport in the civilized world. Other airports
have some kind of slow x-ray going on with their harsh lighting but Narita is the
smoking-room of the jet set. The basic color scheme is brown and black. The slick floors
lead you off into many dim dead ends. There is a cleaner, or someone else to stare at you,
at the end of each of these. The level of the floor there changes abruptly by a few feet
every few feet. Cattle could never stampede through Narita Airport.
So, the man I was waiting for could well appear from nowhere. In addition, the
description I had of him would be quite useful in Abu Dabi but not in the Tokyo
Tectoplex.
I thought it might be good to eat. I unfolded a large illustrated menu. 20 illustrations of
the top of some steaming bowl of noodles and one of crab and chips. I took a few
moments to try and distinguish something uniquely appetizing about at least one of the

noodle bowls, but it was escaping me... white noise food.
Then he came into the room: Sato Yosuke. Killer. Ugly fucker.
He had a haircut that everyone would describe differently when describing it to the police
some months later. For my part, I would compare it to a helmet made from a lacquered
tree trunk. Then beneath it was something like Roy Orbison just as the obituaries came
out. The enormous dark glasses looked like a disguise, but may have been a concession to
the shallow aesthetic judgments of society. In addition he was wearing a "Carlos the
Jackal" style safari jacket.
I had briefly met Carlos the Jackal in my youth. He was passing through London for the
first of one of his interminable arse-related operations and my father's good friend was
taking care of it. I was 9 at the time and had not yet fully worked out what was driving
Dad. It was three years after Mum had died and the only thing you could really say about
Dad at that time was that he had too many friends and too many of them were famous for
too much of something. Dad's friend was famous for the extremity of his views on
children's human rights. He basically felt that the words human and child had strong
internal contradictions. He was the brother of cosmetic surgeon and would-be computer
scientist Dr Cranwell Blythe and hence uncle of Claire Blythe, whom I would fall in love
with and learn much from.
So my father headed down to London and had to take me with him. I was sleeping in a
small room from too early till too late the next day as the talking went on.
I briefly met the Jackal (my Father had not been above entertaining me with this name on
the train down) as he was leaving the next day. His fat face was lined with pain, but I
should say 'grooved', and he didn't say much but he did tell me that my father was crazy.
Sato sat down at my table. In the twenty seconds preceding his arrival, he had caught my
eye by walking toward my table while looking fixedly out of the window. My first
assumption, a blind man about to present a very real problem, lasted only a split second