Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty-two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound made cecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humorlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Koenig’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-story wall made almost entirely of beveled, glare-reducing gray glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty-six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

From the Horse’s Mouth