His right arm traced a descending arc as he brought the mobile phone down from his ear and inclined himself intently over the effulgent screen. In the next instant, the greenish glow reflected on his profile changed abruptly to livid orange, signalling the termination of the call.

The cool white boules of the brassbranched chandelier flowering from the ceiling above the desk splashed a gleaming comma of light on his broad pink crown as he considered this intelligence. As he thought, his profile turned an eighth of a revolution, until he was halffacing the bay window to his right, the ecliptic motion of the light overhead causing the planes of shadow to rouse and resettle themselves upon the peachcoloured hemisphere of his broad, bald skull, casting his features into deep shade. His chin sunk deeply upon the white collar of his open shirt, all but embedded in the dark V formed by the tootight, dappledgrey jacket, his taurean stockiness gave him a bullish aspect as he stood, motionless in that pose, the gleaming arc of collar under his chin completing the backlit corona which aureoled his round head.

He stood that way for fully a minute, only his deeply shadowed eyes appearing to dimly work beneath the ridge of knitted brow, highlit by an oblique lamp in the street casting a mossy, verdigriginous glow over the bay window, the whites of his eyes greyly flashing as they read the corollaries of this news sketched and schematized on the window as upon a blackboard.

Outside, the chill May dusk had descended with rapidity, and Collins street was now as dark at 6:00 p.m. as it would be at midnight. Like an altarpiece, the canted bay window surmounted with the octagonal, rubyleaded insets framed in faceted triptych the palladian, palazzesque uniformity of 271 Collins’ granite and sandstone façade trebly repeated. Regarding from their recesses the variegated vectors traced by the evening traffic—footed, wheeled, flanged—with Olympian aloofness, the saturnine granite mascarons who crowned the arched openings on the ground floor frowned on Collins street, mirroring the attitude of the bald, stocky man who stood opposite them on the first floor of Block Court.

His lowered head turned bullishly towards the dark mirror of the window, he appeared to gaze vacantly at his milky, indistinct portrait, crowded into the leftmost corner of the central bay, framed in baizeish light.

The jolly hail of two trams exchanging salutations as they passed each other in Elizabeth street seemed to bring him back to himself with a spurt of determined animation. He turned and charged around the desk towards a framed reproduction of Brack’s Collins St, 5 p.m. hanging over on the northern wall in the corner beside the door.

The crown of the gleaming hemisphere winked in the baizey pier over the arcade as he tickled an occult catch beneath the edge of the simple black frame. The picture subtly unhinged itself from the wall by an acute degree. The bald, stocky man folded back the Brack and fiddled briefly before the wallsafe set behind it. Then he closed the steelgrey door and set the dissimulating panorama which mirrored the street below the window once more over the safe.

He rapidly retraced his steps to the desk and set a thick file down on it while he reached below the velourous edge of the windowframe. With little ceremony, he shoveled laptop and file into a cheap, formless laptop bag. Then he hurriedly loaded pratt and tail pits with wallet, keys and mobile phone, hastily grabbed the laptop bag up off the desk and slung it over his right shoulder as he padded quickly to the door.

The white boules of the chandelier and the downlights recessed in the ceiling extinguished themselves, and the windows of the office fell into darkness.

A minute later, the bald, stocky man emerged into the darkened cul de sac formed by the Bendigo Bank branch on the ground floor of Block Court. He fobbed his way through the glass security doors which defended the sanctity of the ATMs in rear and passed through the déco arcade. The coffered, downlit ceiling, its vaults seemingly inlaid with nacreous, liquid light, rained an ominous, luminous penumbra about his stocky silhouette as it rapidly enlarged and emerged from the arcade, turning hurriedly left into Collins street.

In the urgency of his mission, he didn’t notice the man in brown standing beside the payphone opposite.