Melbourne writer Dean Kyte presents a literary crime ficción from “The Spleen of Melbourne” project.
lyrics
Market Street was quiet at that late hour. He stood casually at the corner of Flinders Lane, waiting for the lights to change. The darkness and the muted rumours of the traffic in Collins and Flinders streets gave this corner of Market Street, between them, a peaceful air, like an isle of repose cleaving the strong current of a river.
The lights changed, but he did not move.
He held himself in readiness to cross, but, like a mannequin, he did not break his pose of relaxed attention, as if he could not hear the staccato chatter of the walk signal beside him.
It cut out abruptly, settling back into its quiet, regular cluck. He hit the call button again and continued to wait, as if he had only just arrived at the pedestrian crossing.
Across the street, the doorway of the Port Apartments was a tall, golden rectangle unblemished by the telltale shadow of human movement. He gave no sign of being aware of this fact as he gazed around, turning his head regularly in both directions, as if cautiously preparing himself to take the negligible risk of stepping off the sidewalk and crossing the empty street. Nevertheless, he was conscious of the flight of marble steps inside the heavy bronze streetdoor leading up to the foyer, across whose regular, foreshortened recession of greyish, horizontal shadows no oblique, concertina’d form passed.
One could also see, from that angle, the left-most margin of the foyer door, a column of translucent squares rendered triangular by the bronze diagonals dividing the lights, smaller versions of the diamond muntins that graced the windows of the old Port Authority Building’s ground floor. Through that dark lattice of crisscrossing lines, as through the organic volutes springing obliquely from a potted fern before it, no movement marred the subdued but warming yellow of the foyer within.
The 58 tram, snaking its way towards West Coburg, passed before the Port Apartments like a curtain drawn across its doorway. Warning the empty night of its turning manœuvre with a double clang of its bell, the tram slithered around the corner into Flinders Lane, trailing a wake of noisy lights.
Like the agitation of a curtain in a window, through the strobing double panes glazing the trailing second carriage as it swung away, he saw the penumbrous edge of a slender silhouette, elegant in its curvature, briefly mar the crisp gold border of the doorway as it slipped away into Market Street, the soupçon of fugitive movement masked by the departing tram. The staccato click of heels rang in rapid report from the opposite sidewalk, making off in the direction of Flinders Street.
He started after it, crossing the street diagonally at something faster than a jog, gathering momentum as he reached the tramtracks. The urgent sound of his footsteps was swallowed in the mounting rumble of a City Loop train charging across the Viaduct in Flinders Street.
The engine of the silver BMW roared to life beside the Immigration Museum and its wheels screeched forward, pawing asphalt. Two lights like crosshairs blinked briefly against the dark granite of the Port Authority Building’s plinth as it passed. Accompanying them, the cough of muffled gunfire.
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