Latimer felt himself redden. From the condescending professional he had been changed suddenly into the ridiculous amateur. It was a little disconcerting.
‘Well, yes,’ he said slowly. ‘I suppose I am.’
Colonel Haki pursed his lips. ‘You know, Mr Latimer,’ he said, ‘I find the murderer in a roman policier much more sympathetic than a real murderer. In a roman policier there is a corpse, a number of suspects, a detective and a gallows. That is artistic. The real murderer is not artistic. I, who am a sort of policeman, tell you that squarely.’ He tapped the folder on his desk. ‘Here is a real murderer. We have known of his existence for nearly twenty years. This is his dossier. We know of one murder he may have committed. There are doubtless others of which we, at any rate, know nothing. This man is typical. A dirty type, common, cowardly, scum. Murder, espionage, drugs – that is the history. There were also two affairs of assassination.’
‘Assassination! That argues a certain courage, surely?’
The Colonel laughed unpleasantly. ‘My dear friend, Dimitrios would have nothing to do with the actual shooting. No! His kind never risk their skins like that. They stay on the fringe of the plot. They are the professionals, the entrepreneurs, the links between the businessmen, the politicians who desire the end but are afraid of the means, and the fanatics, the idealists who are prepared to die for their convictions. The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet. It is the rats like Dimitrios who can best tell you that. They are always ready to talk to save themselves the inconvenience of a prison cell. Dimitrios would have been the same as any other. Courage!’ He laughed again. ‘Dimitrios was a little cleverer than some of them, I’ll grant you that. As far as I know, no government has ever caught him and there is no photograph in his dossier. But we knew him all right, and so did Sofia and Belgrade and Paris and Athens. He was a great traveller, was Dimitrios.’
‘That sounds as though he’s dead.’
‘Yes, he is dead.’ Colonel Haki turned the corners of his thin mouth down contemptuously. ‘A fisherman pulled his body out of the Bosphorus last night. It is believed that he had been knifed and thrown overboard from a ship. Like the scum he was, he was floating.’
‘At least,’ said Latimer, ‘he died by violence. That is something very like justice.’
‘Ah!’ The Colonel leaned forward. ‘There is the writer speaking. Everything must be tidy, artistic, like a roman policier. Very well!’ He pulled the dossier towards him and opened it. ‘Just listen, Mr Latimer, to this. Then you shall tell me if it is artistic.’
He began to read.
‘Dimitrios Makropoulos.’ He stopped and looked up. ‘We have never been able to find out whether that was the surname of the family that adopted him or an alias. He was known usually as Dimitrios.’ He turned to the dossier again. ‘Dimitrios Makropoulos. Born 1889 in Larissa, Greece. Found abandoned. Parents unknown. Mother believed Roumanian. Registered as Greek subject and adopted by Greek family. Criminal record with Greek authorities. Details unobtainable.’ He looked up at Latimer. ‘That was before he came to our notice. We first heard of him at Izmir1 in 1922, a few days after our troops occupied the town. A deunme2 named Sholem was found in his room with his throat cut: he was a money lender and kept his money under the floorboards. These were ripped up and the money had been taken. There was much violence in Izmir at that time and little notice would have been taken by the military authorities. The thing might have been done by one of our soldiers. Then, another Jew, a relation of Sholem’s, drew the attention of the military to a Negro named Dhris Mohammed, who had been spending money in the cafés and boasting that a Jew had lent him the money without interest. Inquiries were made and Dhris was arrested. His replies to the court martial were unsatisfactory and he was condemned to death. Then he made a confession. He was a fig-packer, and he said that one of his fellow workmen, whom he called Dimitrios, had told him of Sholem’s wealth hidden under the floorboards of his room. They had planned the robbery together and had entered Sholem’s room by night. It had been Dimitrios, he said, who had killed the Jew. He thought that Dimitrios, being registered as a Greek, had escaped and bought a passage on one of the refugee ships that waited at secret places along the coast.’
He shrugged. ‘The authorities did not believe his story. We were at war with Greece, and it was the sort of story a guilty man might invent to save his neck. They found that there had been a fig-packer named Dimitrios, that his fellow workmen had disliked him and that he had disappeared.’ He grinned. ‘Quite a lot of Greeks named Dimitrios disappeared at that time. You could see their bodies in the streets and floating in the harbour. This Negro’s story was unprovable. He was hanged.’
He paused. During this recital he had not once referred to the dossier.
‘You have a very good memory for facts,’ commented Latimer.
The Colonel grinned again. ‘I was the president of the court martial. It was through that that I was able to mark down Dimitrios later on. I was transferred a year later to the secret police. In 1924 a plot to assassinate the Gazi was discovered. It was the year he abolished the Caliphate and the plot was outwardly the work of a group of religious fanatics. Actually the men behind it were agents of some people in the good graces of a neighbouring friendly government. They had good reasons for wishing the Gazi out of the way. The plot was discovered. The details are unimportant. But one of the agents who escaped was a man known as Dimitrios.’ He pushed the cigarettes towards Latimer. ‘Please smoke.’
Latimer shook his head. ‘Was it the same Dimitrios?’
‘It was. Now, tell me frankly, Mr Latimer. Do you find anything artistic there? Could you make a good roman policier out of that? Is there anything there that could be of the slightest interest to a writer?’
‘Police work interests me a great deal – naturally. But what happened to Dimitrios? How did the story end?’
Colonel Haki snapped his fingers. ‘Ah! I was waiting for you to ask that. I knew you would ask it. And my answer is this: it didn’t end!’
‘Then what happened?’
‘I will tell you. The first problem was to identify Dimitrios of Izmir with Dimitrios of Edirné1 Accordingly we revived the affair of Sholem, issued a warrant for the arrest of a Greek fig-packer named Dimitrios on a charge of murder and, with that excuse, asked foreign police authorities for assistance. We did not learn much, but what we did learn was sufficient. Dimitrios had been concerned with the attempted assassination of Stambulisky in Bulgaria which had preceded the Macedonian officers’ putsch in 1923. The Sofia police know very little but that he was known there to be a Greek from Izmir. A woman with whom he had associated in Sofia was questioned. She stated that she had had a letter from him a short time before. He had given no address, but as she had had very urgent reasons for wishing to get in touch with him she had looked at the postmark. It was from Edirné. The Sofia police obtained a rough description of him that agreed with that given by the Negro in Izmir. The Greek police stated that he had had a criminal record prior to 1922 and gave those particulars of his origin. The warrant is probably still in existence, but we did not find Dimitrios with it.
‘It was not until two years later that we heard of him again. We received an inquiry from the Yugoslav Government concerning a Turkish subject named Dimitrios Talat. He was wanted, they said, for robbery, but an agent of ours in Belgrade reported that the robbery was the theft of some secret naval documents and that the charge the Yugoslavs hoped to bring against him was one of espionage on behalf of France. By the first name and the description issued by the Belgrade police we guessed that Talat was probably Dimitrios of Izmir. About the same time our Consul in Switzerland renewed the passport, issued apparently at Ankara, of a man named Talat. It is a common Turkish name, but when it came to entering the record of the renewal it was found from the number that no such passport had been issued. The passport had been forged.’ He spread out his hands. ‘You see, Mr Latimer? There is your story. Incomplete. Inartistic. No detection, no suspects, no hidden motives, merely sordid.’
‘But interesting, nevertheless,’ objected Latimer. ‘What happened over the Talat business?’
‘Still looking for the end of your story, Mr Latimer? All right, then. Nothing happened about Talat. It is just a name. We never heard it again. If he used the passport we don’t know. It does not matter. We have Dimitrios. A corpse, it is true, but we have him. We shall probably never know who killed him. The ordinary police will doubtless make their inquiries and report to us that they have no hope of discovering the murderer. This dossier will go into the archives. It is just one of many similar cases.’
‘You said something about drugs.’
Colonel Haki began to look bored. ‘Oh, yes. Dimitrios made a lot of money once I should think. Another unfinished story. About three years after the Belgrade affair we heard of him again. Nothing to do with us but the available information was added to the dossier as a routine matter.’ He referred to the dossier. ‘In 1929, the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the illicit traffic of drugs received a report from the French government concerning the seizure of a large quantity of heroin at the Swiss frontier. It was concealed in a mattress in a sleeping car coming from Sofia. One of the car attendants was found to be responsible for the smuggling, but all he could, or would, tell the police was that the drug was to have been collected in Paris by a man who worked at the rail terminus. He did not know the man’s name and had never spoken to him, but he described him. The man in question was later arrested. Questioned, he admitted the charge but claimed that he knew nothing of the destination of the drug. He received one consignment a month which was collected by a third man. The police set a trap for this third man and caught him only to find there was a fourth intermediary. They arrested six men in all in connection with that affair and only obtained one real clue. It was that the man at the head of this peddling organization was a man known as Dimitrios. Through the medium of the Committee, the Bulgarian government then revealed that they had found a clandestine heroin laboratory at Radomir and had seized two hundred and thirty kilos of heroin ready for delivery. The consignee’s name was Dimitrios. During the next year the French succeeded in discovering one or two other large heroin consignments bound for Dimitrios. But they did not get very much nearer to Dimitrios himself. There were difficulties. The stuff never seemed to come in the same way twice and by the end of the year, 1930, all they had to show in the way of arrests were a number of smugglers and some insignificant pedlars. Judging by the amounts of heroin they did find, Dimitrios must have been making huge sums for himself. Then, quite suddenly, about a year after that, Dimitrios went out of the drug business. The first news the police had of this was an anonymous letter which gave the names of all the principal members of the gang, their life histories and details of how evidence against every one of them might be obtained. The French police had a theory at the time. They said that Dimitrios himself had become a heroin addict. Whether that is true or not, the fact is that by December, the gang was rounded up. One of them, a woman, was already wanted for fraud. Some of them threatened to kill Dimitrios when they were released from prison, but the most any of them could tell the police about him was that his surname was Makropoulos and that he had a flat in the seventeenth arrondissement. They never found the flat and they never found Dimitrios.’
The clerk had come in and was standing by the desk.
‘Ah,’ said the Colonel, ‘here is your copy.’
Latimer took it and thanked him rather absently.
‘And that was the last you heard of Dimitrios?’ he asked.
‘Oh, no. The last we heard of him was about a year later. A Croat attempted to assassinate a Yugoslav politician in Zagreb. In the confession he made to the police, he said that friends had obtained the pistol he used from a man named Dimitrios in Rome. If it was Dimitrios of Izmir he must have returned to his old profession. A dirty type. There are a few more like him who should float in the Bosphorus.’
‘You say you never had a photograph of him. How did you identify him?’
‘There was a French carte d’identité sewn inside the lining of his coat. It was issued about a year ago at Lyons to Dimitrios Makropoulos. It is a visitor’s carte and he is described as being without occupation. That might mean anything. There was, of course, a photograph in it. We’ve turned it over to the French. They say that it is quite genuine.’ He pushed the dossier aside and stood up. ‘There’s an inquest tomorrow. I have to go and have a look at the body in the police mortuary. That is a thing you do not have to contend with in books, Mr Latimer – a list of regulations. A man is found floating in the Bosphorus. A police matter, clearly. But because this man happens to be on my files, my organization has to deal with it also. I have my car waiting. Can I take you anywhere?’
‘If my hotel isn’t too much out of your way, I should like to be taken there.’
‘Of course. You have the plot of your new book safely? Good. Then we are ready.’
In the car, the Colonel elaborated on the virtues of The Clue of the Bloodstained Will. Latimer promised to keep in touch with him and let him know how the book progressed. The car pulled up outside his hotel. They had exchanged farewells and Latimer was about to get out when he hesitated and then dropped back into his seat.
‘Look here, Colonel,’ he said, ‘I want to make what will seem to you a rather strange request.’
The Colonel gestured expansively. ‘Anything.’
‘I have a fancy to see the body of this man Dimitrios. I wonder if it would be impossible for you to take me with you.’
The Colonel frowned and then shrugged. ‘If you wish to come, by all means do so. But I do not see…’
‘I have never,’ lied Latimer quickly, ‘seen either a dead man or a mortuary. I think that every detective story writer should see those things.’
The Colonel’s face cleared, ‘My dear fellow, of course he should. One cannot write about that which one has never seen.’ He signalled the chauffeur on. ‘Perhaps,’ he added as they drove off again, ‘we can incorporate a scene in a mortuary in your new book. I will think about it.’
The mortuary was a small, corrugated-iron building in the precincts of a police station near the mosque of Nouri Osmanieh. A police official, collected en route by the Colonel, led them across the yard which separated it from the main building. The afternoon heat had set the air above the concrete quivering and Latimer began to wish that he had not come. It was not the weather for visiting corrugated-iron mortuaries.
The official unlocked the door and opened it. A blast of hot, carbolic-laden air came out, as from an oven, to meet them. Latimer took off his hat and followed the Colonel in.
There were no windows and light was supplied by a single high-powered electric lamp in an enamel reflector. On each side of a gangway which ran down the centre, there were four high, wooden trestle tables. All but three were bare. The three were draped with stiff, heavy tarpaulins which bulged slightly above the level of the other trestles. The heat was overpowering and Latimer felt the sweat begin to soak into his shirt and trickle down his legs.
‘It’s very hot,’ he said.
The Colonel shrugged and nodded towards the trestles. ‘They don’t complain.’
The official went to the nearest of the three trestles, leaned over it and dragged the tarpaulin back. The Colonel walked over and looked down. Latimer forced himself to follow.
The body lying on the trestle was that of a short, broad-shouldered man of about fifty. From where he stood near the foot of the table, Latimer could see very little of the face, only a section of putty-coloured flesh and a fringe of tousled grey hair. The body was wrapped in a mackintosh sheet. By the feet was a neat pile of crumpled clothing: some underwear, a shirt, socks, a flowered tie and a blue serge suit stained nearly grey by sea water. Beside this pile was a pair of narrow, pointed shoes, the soles of which had warped as they had dried.
Latimer took a step nearer so that he could see the face.
No one had troubled to close the eyes and the whites of them stared upwards at the light. The lower jaw had dropped slightly. It was not quite the face that Latimer had pictured; rather rounder, and with thick lips instead of thin, a face that would work and quiver under the stress of emotion. The cheeks were loose and deeply lined. But it was too late now to form any judgement of the mind that had once been behind the face. The mind had gone.
The official had been speaking to the Colonel. Now he stopped.
‘Killed by a knife wound in the stomach, according to the doctor,’ translated the Colonel. ‘Already dead when he got into the water.’
‘Where did the clothes come from?’
‘Lyons, all except the suit and shoes which are Greek. Poor stuff.’
He renewed his conversation with the official.
Latimer stared at the corpse. So this was Dimitrios. This was the man who had, perhaps, slit the throat of Sholem, the Jew turned Moslem. This was the man who had connived at assassinations, who had spied for France. This was the man who had trafficked in drugs, who had given a gun to a Croat terrorist and who, in the end, had himself died by violence. This putty-coloured bulk was the end of an odyssey. Dimitrios had returned at last to the country whence he had set out so many years before.
So many years. Europe in labour had through its pain seen for an instant a new glory, and then had collapsed to welter again in the agonies of war and fear. Governments had risen and fallen; men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had fought, had been tortured, had died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion. Men had learned to sniff the heady dreamstuff of the soul and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction. And through those years, Dimitrios had lived and breathed and come to terms with his strange gods. He had been a dangerous man. Now, in the loneliness of death, beside the squalid pile of clothes that was his estate, he was pitiable.
Latimer watched the two men as they discussed the filling-in of a printed form the official had produced. They turned to the clothes and began making an inventory of them.
Yet at some time Dimitrios had made money, much money. What had happened to it? Had he spent it or lost it? ‘Easy come, easy go,’ they said. But had Dimitrios been the sort of man to let money go easily, howsoever he had acquired it? They knew so little about him! A few odd facts about a few odd incidents in his life, that was all the dossier amounted to! No more. It told you something. It told you that he had been unscrupulous, ruthless and treacherous. It told you that his way of life had been consistently criminal. But it did not tell you anything that enabled you to see the living man who had slit Sholem’s throat, who had lived in a flat in Paris 17. And for every one of the crimes recorded in the dossier there must have been others, perhaps even more serious. What had happened in those two- and three-year intervals which the dossier bridged so casually? And what had happened since he had been in Lyons a year ago? By what route had he travelled to keep his appointment with Nemesis?
They were not questions that Colonel Haki would bother even to ask, much less to answer. He was the professional, concerned only with the unfanciful business of disposing of a decomposing body. But there must be people who knew of Dimitrios, his friends (if he had had any), and his enemies, people in Smyrna, people in Sofia, people in Belgrade, in Adrianople, in Paris, in Lyons, people all over Europe, who could answer them. If you could find those people and get the answers you would have the material for what would surely be the strangest of biographies.
Latimer’s heart missed a beat. It would be an absurd thing to attempt, of course. Unthinkably foolish. If one did it one would begin with, say, Smyrna and try to follow one’s man step by step from there, using the dossier as a rough guide. It would be an experiment in detection really. One would, no doubt, fail to discover anything new; but there would be valuable data to be gained even from failure. All the routine enquiries over which one skated so easily in one’s novels one would have to make oneself. Not that any man in his senses would dream of going on such a wild goose chase – heavens no! But it was amusing to play with the idea and if one were a little tired of Istanbul…
He looked up and caught the Colonel’s eye.
The Colonel grimaced a reference to the heat of the place. He had finished his business with the official. ‘Have you seen all you wanted to see?’
Latimer nodded.
Colonel Haki turned and looked at the body as if it were a piece of his own handiwork of which he was taking leave. For a moment or two he remained motionless. Then his right arm went out, and, grasping the dead man’s hair, he lifted the head so that the sightless eyes stared into his.
‘Ugly devil, isn’t he?’ he said. ‘Life is very strange. I’ve known about him for nearly twenty years and this is the first time I’ve met him face to face. Those eyes have seen some things I should like to see. It is a pity that the mouth can never speak about them.’
He let the head go and it dropped back with a thud on to the table. Then, he drew out his silk handkerchief and wiped his fingers carefully. ‘The sooner he’s in a coffin the better,’ he added as they walked away.