The Last Assassin

mind seemed not to understand the difference.
    Still, in alien circumstances, we tend to cling to habit, and so I found myself defaulting to my usual approach. I should have known better. Barcelona was unfamiliar, but the real territory I was trying to navigate isn’t marked on any map.
    I flew JAL from Tokyo via Amsterdam and arrived at Barcelona El Prat on a mild winter evening with nothing more than the plain carry-on bag in my hand and the cheap business suit on my back. On my feet were a pair of plain brown leather loafers, purchased in a mass market Aoyama men’s store; on my nose, nonprescription steel-framed eyeglasses, calculated to obscure my features; in my pocket, a guidebook in Japanese. For my first days in the city, I would be an anonymous salaryman, recently divorced, his children grown and out of the house, seeking distraction through travel slightly more intrepid than last year’s jaunt to Hawaii or Saipan. When Delilah arrived I would morph into something else.
    The staff at Le Meridien hotel on Las Ramblas spoke their delightfully Catalan-accented English slowly, as my own halting, heavily Japanese-accented attempts indicated I would need. I certainly looked the part. My face is courtesy mostly of my Japanese father, and what vestiges my American mother contributed to the mix were diminished by surgery many years ago. The act came easily, too. I’ve had a lifetime to practice playing roles: no drama school training, true, but if you’ve lasted as long as I have in a business as literally cutthroat as mine, you learn a thing or two.
    I was tired. Jet lag had been a nonissue in my thirties, a nuisance in my forties, and now it was more noticeable than ever. I went straight to my room, ate a room service meal, took a hot bath, and slept fitfully through the night.
    I got up at dawn. I’d never been to Barcelona before, and wanted to see the city at first light, not yet on its feet, not yet wearing its makeup. I showered quickly and went out just as the sun was cresting the horizon. I scanned the street as I moved past the lobby window, then checked ambush positions from in front of the hotel. Everything looked fine.
    I walked out to Las Ramblas, my breath fogging just slightly in the morning-chilled sea air, and paused. Ten meters down, three men in sanitation overalls and rubber boots were rolling up a dripping hose; the cobblestones were still slick from their work. I stood silently and didn’t let them notice me. They finished with the hose, got in a truck, and drove off. When the sound of the engine had faded, it was followed only by silence, and I smiled, pleased to have the city to myself for a while.
    I strolled east into the Barri Gòtic, the gothic quarter. I sensed I had arrived during a tenuous interlude between the departure of the night’s last revelers and the morning’s first arrivals, and I paused, enjoying the feeling that I was privy to some secret transition. I wandered for a long time, listening to my footfalls on the narrow stone streets, enjoying the aroma of fresh bread and ground coffee, watching as the area’s residents gradually emerged from behind the centuries-old façades of scarred but stalwart dwellings to start another day.
    After a breakfast of croissants and coffee cortado, I paid a visit to Ganivetería Roca, a famous cutlery store I’d read about while preparing for the trip. There, among the pewter razors and steel scissors and related items, I selected a Benchmade folder with a three-inch blade. I’d gotten used to carrying a knife in the last year or so, and no longer felt comfortable without something sharp close at hand.
    Now properly outfitted, I started my customary systematic exploration of the city. I wouldn’t feel at ease here until I had learned how best to blend, or how to escape, should my attempts at blending fail. So I went everywhere, that day and for the five days and nights after, at all times, by all means of transit. I absorbed the layout of the streets and alleys; the location of police stations and security cameras; the rhythms and rituals of pedestrians and tourists and shopkeepers.
    But there were so many distractions: the mingled smell of tapas and shawarma among the winding alleyways of El Raval; the sounds of music and laughter echoing in the public squares of Gràcia; the feel of the sea breeze on my face and in my hair on the peaks of Montjuic and Tibidabo. I liked that the locals took for granted morning mass in