Hard Rain

move. A few meters down the street I
    ducked into the Monsoon Restaurant, where I could enjoy the Southeast
    Asian-derived cuisine and the anodyne sounds of other people's
    conversation.
    I chose a seat set slightly back from the restaurant's open-air facade,
    facing the street and the entrance, and ordered a simple meal of rice
    noodles with vegetables. Although it was late for dinner, the tables
    were mostly occupied. To my left were the remnants of a small office
    party: a few young men with loosened ties and identical navy suits, two
    women with them, pretty and more stylishly dressed than their
    companions, at ease with the traditional Japanese female role of
    serving food, pouring drinks, and fostering conversation. Behind them,
    a solitary couple, high school or college kids, leaning toward each
    other and holding hands across the table, the boy talking with his
    eyebrows raised as though suggesting something, the girl laughing and
    shaking her head no. To the other side, a group of older American men,
    dressed more casually than the other patrons, their voices
    appropriately low, their skin shining slightly in the light of the
    table lamps.
    It was almost surreal, finding myself back in a restaurant or bar after
    finishing a job, my mind starting to drift, relief settling in after
    the adrenaline rush had ended. The sensations weren't new, but the
    context rendered them strange, like the feel of a familiar business
    suit donned to attend a funeral.
    I had thought I was out of all this after finishing things with
    Holtzer, the late chief of the CIA's Tokyo Station. My cover had been
    blown, and it was time to reinvent myself, not for the first time. I
    had thought about the States, maybe the west coast, San Francisco,
    someplace with a large Asian population. But establishing a new
    identity in America, without the sort of groundwork that I had long
    since prepared in Japan, would have been difficult. Besides, if the
    CIA had been looking for payback for Holtzer, they might have had an
    easier time coming after me on their home turf. Staying in Japan left
    Tatsu to contend with, of course, but Tatsu's interest in me had
    nothing to do with revenge, so I had judged him the lesser of the
    risks.
    I had to smile at that. I had learned that the danger Tatsu posed to
    me, while certainly less acute than the straightforward possibility of
    getting put to sleep by some lucky CIA contractor, was far more
    insidious.
    He had tracked me down in Osaka, Japan's second largest metropolis,
    where I had gone after disappearing from Tokyo. I had moved into a
    high-rise community called Belfa in Miyakojima, the northwest of the
    city. Belfa was inhabited by sufficient numbers of corporate
    transferees so that a recent arrival wouldn't provoke undue attention.
    It was also home primarily to families with small children, the kind of
    people who stay aware of the composition of their neighborhood, whose
    presence makes it difficult to mount effective surveillance or a
    successful ambush.
    At first I had missed Tokyo, where I had lived for two decades, and was
    disappointed to find myself in a city that the average Tokyoite would
    reflexively dismiss as a backwater in every category save brute
    geographical sprawl. But Osaka had grown on me. Its atmosphere,
    though arguably less sophisticated and cosmopolitan than Tokyo's, is
    also lacking in pretense. Unlike Tokyo, whose financial, cultural, and
    political center of gravity is so strong that at times the city can
    feel self-satisfied, even solipsistic, Osaka compares itself
    ceaselessly to other places, its cousin to the northeast chief among
    them, emerging victorious, of course, in matters of cuisine, financial
    acumen, and general human goodness. I found something endearing in
    this scrappy, self-declared contest for supremacy. Maybe we don't have
    the refined read effete manners, or the most powerful
    read corrupt political establishment, Osaka seems to declare to a Tokyo
    that isn't even listening, but we've got a bigger heart. Over time, I
    began to wonder if the city didn't have a point.
    I had spotted Tatsu behind me one night as I was making my way to
    Overseas, a jazz club in Honmachi that I had come to like. Although I
    gave no sign, I had recognized him immediately. Tatsu has a squat
    build and a way of rolling his shoulders from side to side when he
    walks that makes him hard to miss. If the tail had been someone else,
    I would have doubled back and questioned him,