We were finally able to get out of the house and enjoy an evening out and some time to ourselves.
We walked into a shopping mall and began perusing the restaurants in the foodcourt which was decorated to resemble an Italian piazza.
We went to look inside of a restaurant window and noticing it was closed, we observed some photos in the window, both recognizing a restaurant in the northern Dutch city of Groningen.
Pointing at the photograph, my wife mentioned that she and her ex-husband had eaten at that restaurant some years ago and pointed again at the exact table they sat at.
Then I mentioned that I too had eaten at the same restaurant just a few summers earlier with my son and pointed at the exact table on the deck just outside and to the left of the restaurant door.
We decided to continue looking for a place to eat and decided on the bistro next door.
The maitre'd told us there would be a long wait as the restaurants had just opened following the COVID-19 lockdown and said he would call us when our table was ready and suggested we take a walk around until then.
I sat down on a bench in front a bustling establishment with a crowd of well-dressed young people out front and seated at café tables drinking what appeared to be a variety of juices and smoothies.
Realizing it was a smoothie bar, I told my wife that since it would be a while before dinner I felt like a smoothie and wanted one with orange juice and ice cream, like the Orange Julius' I used to drink when I was a kid visiting my cousins in Los Angeles on summer holidays.
Just then I noticed two men, an Indian man dressed in a dark pinstripe suit with a dark shirt and black tie and another nondescript man.
The two men walked over to me and the Indian man sat beside me on the bench and asked me if I was from Hollywood, that they had taken my picture and compared it to a face-tracking device on their laptop and it recognized me as a Hollywood movie star but the software was unable to make an exact match as to who I was.
I told the man he was mistaken and just then two other men came up on my left side and nodded to the Indian man who acknowledged the two new men with a nod of his own, stood up and walked away.
I now understood that I had been followed surveilled and set up.
One of the two new men spoke to me in Dutch, while the other discretely revealed the butt of his automatic pistol sticking out from his trouser front.
While I didn't understand what the other man said, I got the gist that they wanted to see my identification card, convinced, perhaps, that they had caught an illegal alien.
Fearing nothing, I stood up and handed the man with the gun my resident's permit.
Then I woke up.
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