Rear Window

The crescent moon hides more than it reveals. Above the glistening arc lies a veil of secrecy. The arc stretched one corner of his eye to the other as he peered at it through the telescope. As promised, the last of the month had brought with it clear skies. It was balancing the books, making up for the obfuscations that cloud covers brought, often hiding the source of lightning as it struck from up above.

A chance encounter had got him invited to this party. His offer of help to shift a sofa two flights up in a building across him had landed him a bottle of beer in his hand and five introductions as he sifted through the kitschy music blaring out of a refurbished CD player. It was a world away from his plush penthouse just across the road, and he wondered again why he was there. It wasn’t his scene, it wasn’t, he guiltily thought, in his class. But the novelty of it all had been too much to resist, as was the faux-urbane charm of the couple he was helping. Why, they were also into astronomy, those geeks.

Bored with the luminescence of the moon, he drifted across the sky identifying the few constellations he could name. Just then, a drunk reveler stumbled into him pushing his elbow and shaking the telescope. He spent some time wiping the spilt beer of his coat and decided to assess the displacement of the fine-tuned instrument. His eyes met a strange sight at the other end of that lens. A building that looked familiar. His own. A terrace that he recognized. His own. Two figures clad in black climbing down the pipes from that terrace with contents of a broken safe. His own. A sickening feeling overwhelmed him as the CIO of a Fortune 500 company stared at his company secrets going down the drain, literally. Beware of strangers bearing gifts of free beer!