Though several weeks had passed, I’d been summoned to the Colby firm, retaining enough curiosity about that hit-and-run I’d witnessed to accept the invitation with neither hesitation nor query.

After taking a cab from the Hackard Building, I signed in at the Liberty Exchange lobby with a uniformed guy about my age who seemed even more surprised than I did to find my name on the approved list.

I went on up.

Soon I was strolling down one of several aisles that separated rows of jammed-together desks, making my way through this many-windowed Yuppie warren as unnoticed as a towel attendant at a Turkish bath. Computer monitors cast their aquarium-green glow on at least one hundred brokers and sales assistants (almost exclusively male, in phone headsets and suspenders and no jacket), nobody ever seeming to pause to take in a panoramic harbor view that started at the Brooklyn Bridge and extended to Governors Island.

They were working the phones, making cold call after cold call, colder than the gray sky they were ignoring out all those windows as they projected confidence and success in this vast, soulless, drop-ceilinged boiler room, worker bees basking in the same kind of fluorescent lighting that Bellevue dispensed to its patients.

On the west side of the floor was a row of glassed-in offices penning up slightly older individuals with designer suspenders and two-hundred-buck haircuts.

These offices had Danish modern furniture and a couple of green-glow monitors on separate low-slung tables behind desks the size of knocked-over refrigerators with surfaces that somehow managed to be cluttered and orderly at the same time. I wandered in that direction, all the phone chatter around me like the buzzing of stirred-up hornets.

As I neared the row of window-walled workstations, a familiar face behind the glass of the larger central office landed on mine. Vincent (for heaven’s sake, don’t call him Vince) was on the phone, not surprisingly, and—in addition to the two behind him—he had an extra computer monitor right on his desk. Like his minions, he was in shirt sleeves and suspenders, but his probably cost plenty more.

That was the world we lived in now. Designer suspenders.

Young Colby frowned at me. It was damn near a scowl.

I smiled a little, put a touch of smirk in it. Gave him a tiny tickle-the-air wave, like I’d spotted a child I knew playing in a park. Well, hadn’t I?

I took a right to go down a short hallway tucked behind a wall of photocopy machines. Here were offices you couldn’t see into, with various executive vice presidents in them, assuming their doors weren’t lying – the older breed of execs like those who’d accompanied young Colby to Pete’s Chophouse. The hall led to a receptionist—a forty-something, severe but beautiful brunette in a gray tailored suit, cream-color silk blouse, and black-framed mannish glasses. She had cheekbones that could cut glass.

Despite Velda’s attempts to make a respectable-looking man of business out of me, my non-cashmere Burberry, Dobbs hat-in-hand, and Today’s Man threads failed to impress.