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club hosting jazz trios and quartets and catering to Tokyo’s jazz aficionados. Alfie is the real deal: dark, cramped, with a low ceiling and accidentally excellent acoustics, accommodating only twenty-five people or so and specializing in young artists on the cusp of really being discovered. The place is always packed and you need a reservation, a little luxury my life in the shadows doesn’t permit. But I knew Alfie’s mama-san, a roly-poly old woman with thick little fingers and a waddle that had probably once been a swish. She was past the age of flirting but flirted with me anyway, and loved me for flirting back. Alfie would be crowded, but that wouldn’t mean much to Mama if she wanted to make a space for one more person.
    That night I took the subway to Roppongi, Alfie’s home, running a medium-security SDR on the way. As always I waited until the station platform had cleared before exiting. No one was following me, and I walked up the stairs into the Roppongi evening.
    Roppongi is a cocktail composed of Tokyo’s brashest foreign and domestic elements, with sex and money giving the concoction its punch. It’s full of Western hostesses who came to Japan thinking they were going to be models but who found themselves trapped in something else, selling risqué conversation and often more to their sarariman customers, striding along in self-consciously stylish clothes and high heels that accentuate their height, their haughtiness meantto signify success and status but often indicating something closer to desperation; stunning Japanese girls, their skin perfectly salon-tanned, streaked hair worn long and straight down their backs, like the folded wings of some hungry bird of prey, on the make for rich boyfriends who for the promise of sex or simply for the opportunity to be seen with such prizes in public will give them Chanel suits and Vuitton bags and the other objects that they crave; swarthy foreigners selling controlled substances that might or might not be what they claim; preposterously elderly female pimps tugging at the elbows of passersby, trying to get them to choose a “companion” from a photo album; people walking fast, as though they’re going somewhere important, or posing nonchalantly, as though they’re waiting to meet a celebrity; everybody hungry and on the make, a universe of well-adorned predators and prey.
    Alfie was to the left of the station, but I made a right as I hit the street, figuring I’d circle around behind it. The party animals were already out, pushing their leaflets in front of me, trying to get my attention. I ignored them and made a right down Gaienhigashi-dori, just in front of the Almond Cafe, then another right down an alley that took me parallel to Roppongi-dori and deposited me behind Alfie. A red Ferrari growled by, a relic of the bubble years, when trophy hunters gobbled up million-dollar impressionist originals of which they knew nothing and faraway properties like Pebble Beach that they had heard of but never seen; when it was said that the land under Tokyo was worth more than that of the continental United States;when the newly minted rich celebrated their status in Ginza hostess bars by ordering thousand-dollar magnum after magnum of the best champagne, to be ruined with sugar cubes and consumed in flutes sprinkled with flakes of fourteen-karat gold.
    I cut right on the street and took the elevator to the fifth floor, doing a last 180-degree sweep with my eyes before the doors closed.
    Predictably, there was a crowd of people outside the club’s door, which was papered over with posters, some new, some faded, advertising the acts that had appeared here over the years. There was a young guy in a cheap European-cut suit with his hair slicked back standing at the door and checking reservations. “ Onamae wa?” he asked me, as I made my way forward across the short distance from the elevator. Your name? I told him I didn’t have a reservation, and he looked pained.