IT’S 2:45 p.m. on a February afternoon and I’m sitting in the back of a chauffeur-driven car. The driver and I are parked in awkward silence while the late-afternoon sun reflects light from the windshield into my eyes. The glare makes it hard to see my phone, to confirm what I already know: that the person I’m supposed to be traveling with, the person I should be at the airport with right now, has gone AWOL.
I watch people come in and out of the Indian restaurant we’re parked in front of in the East 20s, but I’m not here for the curry. I’m here to get our star market analyst, Rudolph Gibbs, out of what I’m told is a whorehouse. I need him out within the next five minutes if we’re ever to catch our 4 p.m. flight.
Shuttling adults from point to point puts me in a continual state of anxiousness. I can’t strap a grown man into a car seat and plug him with Pirate’s Booty to get him to where I need him to be. I confirm and reconfirm plans with assistants, have double-booked flights so we have a backup plan, and despite all this, the trip can still explode into nail-biting drama. If Gibbs and I miss today’s flight, we’ll miss a dinner with one of my biggest clients.
According to my snoops in the Glass Ceiling Club, Gibbs is presumably in one of the apartments over the restaurant, which is in a circa-1970s nondescript white brick building on a block of nail salons and photo shops. Gibbs is a Gatsbyesque character who always wears English hand-sewn suits and a cravat instead of a tie. A married, brilliant, king-of-the-sound-bite guy, he is often an accurate predictor of movement in the U.S. financial markets, which lets him get away with being such a fop. Business news channels can never get enough of Rudolph Gibbs. My largest client in the South, Raymond James, is bringing ten people to meet Gibbs at this dinner tonight. If he doesn’t disentangle himself from whatever matter of business is going on in this building fast, if he doesn’t get into this car very soon, tonight will fall apart. I can handle the plane reservations, the car service, the dinner reservations, the handouts depicting graphs of dollar/euro relationships, but I can’t control Rudolph Gibbs himself.
“So who is his lunch meeting with?” I had asked his secretive assistant an hour ago. She told me it was with a client from Warburg Pincus. She wouldn’t tell me the exact who, but I knew enough people at Warburg to sniff around there. My sources came up with nothing. I went back to his assistant.
“Does he have a love shack?” I asked her. I’d be surprised if he did. It’s usually the suburban husbands who keep a small apartment in the city and Gibbs is a New Yorker. After a late night at work, the idea is to crash there instead of going home. But these apartments are referred to as love shacks not because the owner loves to work.
“He does not,” his loyal assistant had said almost proudly.
“Maybe I’ll try the Indian restaurant I hear he likes.” I could tell by the snip in her voice she just wanted to keep her job and to keep his secrets. She wanted me to just go away.
“You know about that place?” she asked me cautiously.
“Some other women told me about it,” I said. “I’ll find him.”
I called Amanda on my desk. “Where exactly is this place?” I had asked her.
“Please hold for brothel listing,” she said sarcastically. “King is off the desk. Let me try Ballsbridge.”
That’s how I’ve come to be outside this supposed whorehouse. Except what do I do now? Is there a secret knock on the door? The restaurant sure looks legitimate. I get out of the car to take a look inside and even pretend to read the menu posted prominently over the counter. Bollywood posters adorn the walls, the obligatory fake potted plants are in the corner, and the smell of turmeric is in the air. But when I wander over to an inside door to the left of the counter, I notice it’s slightly more handsome than its surroundings. It contains a panel of buzzers outlined in polished brass. Each buzzer seems to indicate a connection to either an apartment or maybe a room, and one has the name Unique Interiors. Could that be it? I hesitate to begin pushing random buzzers, but Unique Interiors seems like a promising name. The Indian cook behind the counter watches me.
“You want bathroom, you must buy food,” he says. He’s about to say something further but then doesn’t.