Crema Catalan

Barcelona is one of my favourite cities. I have good friends who live there but I love its colour, life and excitement. In England we would have long-ago knocked down the buildings of Gaudi (personally I prefer those of Josep Puig i Cadafalch

which are more stylish and less psychadelic) as impractical and extravagant and put up an Arndale Centre or Tescos Express. I think that maybe here the proud ‘Epiritu de Catalanes’ or spirit of the Catalans has bred a culture that allows a freedom of thought and expression. Whatever, I’m here to do a job so I should really be getting on with it. It must be a bit of a cheapo as the ticket I was sent was for a budget airline that, like most of its kind, keeps telling you the dire consequences of not following the seemingly arbitrary rules it has designed to make you feel like an unwanted annoyance. I was seated in front of a group of three unwanted annoyances who talked incessant, irrelevant, inconsequential shite for the whole journey. Like all good actors it is important that I remain in character all the time, so as not to arouse suspicion or attract unwanted attention. Naturally I did not turn around and ask them to be quiet but I can tell you now that I would gladly terminate their miserable existence at no charge to the agency. My cover this time is that I am attending a pharmaceutical conference which means that I am now something of an expert on certain physical enhancements for ladies chesticles. I have a contact called Sarah Gledhill in the conference-management company who has supplied me with all the passes and wristbands I might need.

I don’t know what Sarah did that gives the agency a hold over her but she couldn’t have been more helpful. My ‘pack’ even included vouchers for free drinks at a nightclub which might be useful if I need to bribe one of the English delegates. VIP1 (the target) this time is called Victor and he has been staying here with his family for a week or so before the conference in one of the small fisherman’s houses down in the Port that have been converted into a holiday home.

From my notes he has been spending quite a lot of that time meeting-up with Wanda, a rather attractive woman. From my observations Wanda always reports back after these tete-a-tetes to a man who is staying at a nearby hotel called ‘The Arts.’, They originally met up in the entrance foyer but this building is a triumph of style over substance in that it has a constantly running, splashily noisy waterfall from roof to floor.

Whilst great for concealing conversations, it also provoked in Wanda an acute need to visit the toilets, so now they talk in the sea-front café around the corner, which is a lot easier to observe. Some women always manage to look as if they have just got dressed in brand-new clothes and Wanda, despite a name that might suggest she belonged at the back of the sales counter in Zara, is obviously no stranger to the front. Her clothes fit in such a way that they look slightly oversized and never under obvious strain at any point. There is, so far as I can tell, no sexual tension between Victor and Wanda (Women can hide that kind of thing but men never can) so their liaisons must have another aim. These are not the observations of a pervert (Well, not completely) but the result of a lifetime spent studying targets for every helpful detail of body language or habit. We shall see…