THE SOUND OF happy people chatter filled the air when he entered the bar lounge on the ground level. All Montey wanted was to get his passport from Alejandra and be out, though he wasn't really in any hurry to get back to his apartment. He had enough money on him to stay in a hotel if need be and filed that in his mental rolodex as one of his options as he pushed through the crowd.
He walked the ground level lounge twice. Squeezed past folks and peeked in on intimate conversations, still, he saw no signs of Alejandra.
Now he cursed himself for not making a photocopy of his passport and carrying that for identification purposes, and putting his original up for safe keeping like they tell you in all those travel magazines. Hindsight is always a bitch, and when you're prowling a restaurant in a foreign country, at night, with a loaded gun in your pocket looking for a woman who may or may not have set you up, your common sense tells you to do what Montey was about to do—leave.
That's when his cellphone buzzed. He checked the Caller ID and saw a text message—
Alejandra: We are waiting for you upstairs. How close are you?
—"How close am I?" Montey asked himself under his breath. 'And who the hell is we?' he wondered.
He now questioned his own awareness, he had no idea there were two floors in the restaurant. Why had he not noticed the stairs he now saw through one of the pane glass windows prior to walking into what he now realized was just a bar-lounge? Either he was too paranoid or too mentally drained. At this state he figured a little bit of both. Montey searched out the stairs and made his way to the restaurant floor.
"Konbanwa. Welcome to Armani-Nobu. How many in your party?" the hostess rambled off in a sing-songy tone when Montey entered the orange hue of the restaurant.
The attractive hostesses, who not unlike the hostesses at the Nobu spots back in New York looked like she tasted better than the food, momentarily took her eyes off the flat screen monitor behind the host-stand.
When the illumination from the screen reflected off her face in the dim lighting Montey felt as if he were staring into the abyss called Noi Juntasa. It's said that every person has a twin. But the hostess' resemblance to Montey's long lost love was so uncanny it rendered him speechless for a few seconds.
It was the waving hand that his eyes picked up as they sifted through the waif like models and fashion types that finally snapped him out it. "She's already here," Montey told the hostess.
He moved past the hostess stand. Walked over to where Alejandra was seated. Noticed two glasses of water already on the table.
"Glad you could come on such short notice," she said as she scooted over.
Montey took a seat opposite her instead.
A waitress placed another glass of water on the table to make it a threesome.
"Didn't realize it was two floors. Your text said we—"
He stopped short when the man in the suit and black wavy hair walked up and sat down next to Alejandra. Montey now found himself face to face with the man who favored expensive reptile skinned shoes, to go along with his custom fitted suits like the one he was wearing again, today. The man Montey knew liked to cross draw the sidearm packed on his right hip with the handle grip facing forward.
"Montey, this is Paolo. Paolo, this is Montey," were Alejandra's words of introduction.
"Your boyfriend?"
"Her fiancé," Paolo stated with assurance simultaneously.
An awkward moment to say the least. But the man raised in a notorious Brooklyn public housing project was just fine with awkward.