Portalprivado.com – Mayhem in London

It was January 2013, the cell phone rang in the PortalPrivado.com office and on the other end, a man's voice asked, "Can you come to London to photograph?"
Portal's London studio had been closed in 2009 so it had been a long time since you last heard photos and London in the same sentence.
The man, who introduced himself as Pedro, said that he had several massage parlors in London with dozens of escorts and that some of them had told him about a João who worked for PortalPrivado.com in Portugal. They told him that he came to photograph in London from time to time.
- We want to do four books. I hope they turn out well, I've been told it's the best!
We told him that yes, it's possible, but that he would always have to pay 50% in advance.
- No problem, just send me the IBAN! - he said, not disguising the slightly overbearing exclamation that is so common in this world of escort massage parlors.

The day was agreed and, after receiving the 50% in our account, we booked the trip.
It was easy to arrange, as my brother was working in investment banking in London at the time.
He lived in Borough Market with his girlfriend, who is now his wife and the mother of his son, my sister-in-law.
It would be a 24-hour trip. Go in one day, photograph, land at my brother's house to sleep and fly back to Portugal on one of the first flights of the morning.
Everything was fine. We warned that the remaining 50% would have to be paid before the first of the 4 books.

I landed at Gatwick and after some communication difficulties because I didn't want to give out my personal cell phone, I managed to meet Pedro. A young man in his late twenties, early thirties. Younger than me, who was 36 at the time.
We greeted each other and got into his huge SUV on our way to one of his "luxury" escort centers. Along the way, the usual chatter: I'm very good, I'm very bad, my houses are luxury, I have hundreds, thousands, millions... I'm not like the others! The usual. It's the same anywhere in the world.
We arrived at an apartment somewhere in central London, I can't remember the location.
It was a huge apartment, new, very nice looking.
Inside there was a bustle.
A friend of "Pedro" (the security guard) looked me up and down, a lady ("manager" of the spa) was typing frantically on a laptop on the table, updating ads on one of those free websites with thousands of ads. At the back of the room, my first model of the day. She was a pretty, blonde escort in her early twenties. She was already wearing lingerie.
I realized I wasn't in a spa, I was simply in an apartment that would be my studio that day.
Unlike the calm and privacy of the portal studio in Lisbon, the chaos was such that you could feel the tension in the air....

To be continued...