And there's a collection of rather odd paraphernalia arranged on a small table to one side of the room. It looks mechanical but harmless enough until I realise that these are some of the tools of the trade - a car tail bleeper, a pen microphone, a tape-recorder gathering device, a lock pick gun, a tape-recorder voice activator, a room bug and three types of telephone bugs.

Otherwise it could be any other office in the money heart of Sydney. Frank Monte wears it well. He is still in his early 30's and already showing the signs of continuing prosperity in beautifully cut three-piece suits and lots of gold jewelry.

At one stage he admires my small gold bracelet. So delicate, he says, fingering it carefully. Then he takes off the bracelet he is wearing to show me. It's very gold, very thick and by comparison weighs a ton. It was a gift from a sheik for whom Monte did some special work about three years ago. He recruited a group of mercenaries from Australia to fly gunships against mountain revels in the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman. Later he found 36 local girls to act as bodyguards to women and children in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

When I ask what happened to those girls he looks almost surprised by the question. "Oh, a couple of them got married to sheiks, a couple were killed, a couple of them just disappeared....Of course, there's all that white slavery over there. Some people said I should do something about it. But what the hell do they expect me to do?" He stops there. Not avoiding the subject, merely bored by it. After all, a job is a job and when the file is closed it's closed.

By reputation the private detective business is a rather grubby little trade filled with dingy back room offices, incriminating files and seedy men in hats who spend much of their time on divorce raids, busting down doors, flashing cameras. Private eyes generally are an insular little group reluctant to talk to the Press and always wary of revealing trade secrets.

In this respect Frank Monte is a thorn in their side. Most think he talks to reporters far too freely and far too often. Not that he seems to care. "Hell," he says, "why should I? I'm not ashamed of it. I think I'm the best in a country where most so-called investigators are just security guards or process servers. In Sydney alone there are more than 4000 private detectives. All they had to do to get their license was make an application to the police and pay $20 to make sure they had no previous convictions".

Certainly Monte is very much a contemporary investigator. He was among the first to realise the potential in industrial espionage, to use Press and public relations as a means of attracting clients, to streamline his work and turn it into a very big and lucrative business.

He also hit on the idea of recruiting women to work in the field. Inspiration came when he began using representatives to sell his services to insurance companies and solicitors. Then he began using female reps. "While I was getting this group of reps together I came across several girls who were good-looking, well-dressed, pretty intelligent and knew what they were talking about...and I began to wonder, why not use them for intelligence work?"

Well, the idea worked. Over the past 12 years Monte has used more and more women for specialised work. He likes working with them as they can usually do the job without arousing suspicion. And besides, they're loyal and not always after his job. "The men are constantly breathing down my neck thinking they could do it all better than I do."

At the moment he has nine men and about the same number of women working for him, although a couple of the women are what he refers to as "floaters" - girls prepared to sleep around. "They are not pros," he says, "just good looking girls who are prepared to help us out every so often. They earn about $200 a night for picking up a certain guy in a bar and finding out bits of information that might otherwise take us several days to discover, like where he is going to be the next day or the next week.

"I don't say to the girl straight out:'I want you to sleep around and spy for me'. They would run a mile from that. I let them know it's reasonably simple, it pays well, it's clean, and continuing." And he shrugs. Business, after all, is business.

Business or not, most of the girls who work for him aren't prepared to sleep around. They do the job because the work is interesting and varied but most of all they do it for the money. They can usually count on $450 to $500 a week depending on the job. And the implication seems to be that there are other perks as well.

However Monte doesn't like his staff to make decisions. "I only encourage limited initiative and none at first. I want it done in black and white. And done my way. If something goes wrong because of my instructions then it's my money."
BASICALLY THE girls are used for surveillance - watching suspect claimants in insurance or workers' compensation cases or for infiltrating offices and factories - either for the management who wants to know who is stealing merchandise or formulae, or sabotaging equipment or goodwill, or for a rival company which might want to discover new products, sales figures, advertising and marketing strategy, plant and staff problems - and occasionally for body guarding.

The real difficulty lies in finding the right girls for the job. And as Monte points out, "this is an industry where you've got to go a long way to find a good man - and even longer to find a good woman." Advertising this type of work is counter-productive - as he found when he advertised for those 36 female bodyguards "and all sorts of people - ex-nurses, ex-policeman, ex-everything and anything - kept arriving on the door. Anyway, I can't just put in the paper: "Wanted...good looking, well-spoken girl to train as private eye'. So I find them myself. I get around a lot. A lot of girls also come to me through friends. I've got my eye on a couple in this building at the moment...secretaries who are not happy in their jobs. They are almost invariably secretaries, which means that at least they have the basic skills when it comes to getting them employment in an office that has to be infiltrated.

"Usually the girls are between the ages of 25 and 32. They aren't much good any younger than that. Good-looking because you can make an attractive, well-dressed girl look less appealing but it's bloody hard trying to do it in reverse. And tight-mouthed. You've got to be sure that they won't blab to their friends."

Once the right subject has been found she is put through Frank