The Mask of Dimitrios

In Smyrna and Athens it had been simply a matter of gaining access to written records. Any competent private inquiry agents could have found out as much. Now, however, things were different. Dimitrios had, to be sure, a police record in Sofia; but, according to Colonel Haki, the Bulgarian police had known little about him. That they had, indeed, thought him of little importance was shown by the fact that it was not until they had received the Colonel’s inquiry that they had troubled to get a description of him from the woman with whom he was known to have associated. Obviously it was what the police had not got in their records, rather than what they had got, which would be interesting. As the Colonel had pointed out, the important thing to know about an assassination was not who had fired the shot but who had paid for the bullet. What information the ordinary police had would no doubt be helpful, but their business would have been with shot-firing rather than bullet-buying. The first thing he had to find out was who had or might have stood to gain by the death of Stambulisky. Until he had that basic information it was idle to speculate as to the part Dimitrios had played. That the information, even if he did obtain it, might turn out to be quite useless as a basis for anything but a Communist pamphlet, was a contingency that he was not for the moment prepared to consider. He was beginning to like his experiment and was unwilling to abandon it easily. If it were to die, he would see that it died hard.

On the afternoon of his arrival he sought out Marukakis at the office of the French news agency and presented his letter of introduction.

The Greek was a dark, lean man of middle age with intelligent, rather bulbous eyes and a way of bringing his lips together at the end of a sentence as though amazed at his own lack of discretion. He greeted Latimer with the watchful courtesy of a negotiator in an armed truce. He spoke in French.

Marukakis raised his eyebrows. ‘So long ago? I shall have to refresh my memory. No, it is no trouble, I will gladly help you. Give me an hour.’

‘If you could have dinner with me at my hotel this evening, I would be delighted.’

‘We can get a better dinner than that at a fraction of the cost. If you like, I will call for you at eight o’clock and take you to the place. Agreed?’

He arrived punctually at eight o’clock and led the way in silence across the Boulevard Maria-Louise and up the Rue Alabinska to a small side-street. Halfway along it there was a grocer’s shop. Marukakis stopped. He looked suddenly self-conscious. ‘It does not look very much,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but the food is sometimes very good. Would you rather go to a better place?’

Marukakis looked relieved. ‘I thought that I had better ask you,’ he said and pushed open the door of the shop. The door bell tinkled musically.

The interior of the shop was so crowded with stock that it seemed little larger than a telephone booth. On all sides rose scrubbed pinewood shelves crammed carelessly with bottles and curious-looking groceries. Festooned about the shelves and hanging in cascades from the ceiling like lush tropical fruits were sausages of almost every conceivable size and colour. In the midst of it all, leaning against a rampart of meal sacks behind the scales, was a stout woman nursing a baby. She grinned and said something to them. Marukakis answered and, motioning Latimer to follow him, skirted some crocks of pickled cucumbers, dived under a string of goats’-milk cheeses and pushed open a door leading into a passage. At the end of the passage was the restaurant.

It was very little larger than the shop but by some extraordinary means five tables had been arranged in it. Two of the tables were occupied by a group of men and women noisily eating soup. They sat down at a third. A moustachioed man in shirt sleeves and a green baize apron lounged over and addressed them in voluble Bulgarian.

Marukakis said something to the waiter who twirled his moustache and lounged away shouting at a dark opening in the wall that looked like the entrance to the cellar. A voice could be heard faintly acknowledging the order. The man returned with a bottle and three glasses.

The waiter filled the three glasses, took one for himself, nodded to Latimer and, throwing back his head, poured the vodka down his throat. Then he walked away.

‘A votre santé,’ said Marukakis politely. ‘Now,’ he went on as they set their glasses down, ‘that we have drunk together and that we are comrades, I can be frank.’ He pressed his lips together and frowned. ‘I cannot stand it,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘when people are not straight-forward with me. I am a Greek and a Greek can smell a lie. That is why Greek businessmen are so successful in France and England. As soon as I read the letter you brought to me I smelt a lie. But more than a lie. It is an insult to the intelligence to suggest that the information for which you are asking could be of any possible use in a roman policier.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Latimer uncomfortably. ‘The real reason why I want this information from you is so peculiar that I hesitated to give it.’

‘The last person to whom I gave information in this way,’ said Marukakis dourly, ‘was writing a popular guide to European politics à l’Americaine. I was ill for a week when I finally read it. Ill you understand, not in the body but in the mind. I have a respect for facts and this book was very painful to me.’

Marukakis smiled. ‘You English are so self-conscious. Look! I will make a bargain with you. I will give you the information and then you shall tell me this peculiar reason of yours. Does that go?’

Soup was put before them. It was thick and highly spiced and mixed with sour cream. As they ate it Marukakis began to talk.

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance. Yet there remains one sort of political prestige that may still be worn with a certain pathetic dignity; it is that given to the liberal-minded leader of a party of conflicting doctrinaire extremists. His dignity is that of all doomed men: for, whether the two extremes proceed to mutual destruction or whether one of them prevails, doomed he is, either to suffer the hatred of the people or to die a martyr.

Thus it was with Monsieur Stambulisky, leader of the Bulgarian Peasant Agrarian Party, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs. The Agrarian Party, faced by organized reaction, was immobilized, rendered powerless by its own internal conflicts. It died without firing a shot in its own defence.

The end began soon after Stambulisky returned to Sofia early in January 1923, from the Lausanne Conference.

On 23rd January, the Yugoslav (then Serbian) Government lodged an official protest in Sofia against a series of armed raids carried out by Bulgarian comitadji over the Yugoslav frontier. A few days later, on 5th February, during a performance celebrating the foundation of the National Theatre in Sofia at which the King and Princesses were present, a bomb was thrown into the box in which sat several government ministers. The bomb exploded. Several persons were injured.

From the start, Stambulisky’s policy towards the Yugoslav Government had been one of appeasement and conciliation. Relations between the two countries had been improving rapidly. But an objection to this improvement came from the Macedonian Autonomists, represented by the notorious Macedonian Revolutionary Committee, which operated both in Yugoslavia and in Bulgaria. Fearing that friendly relations between the two countries might lead to joint action against them, the Macedonians set to work systematically to poison those relations and to destroy their enemy Stambulisky. The attacks of the comitadji and the theatre incident inaugurated a period of organized terrorism.

On 8th March, Stambulisky played his trump card by announcing that the Narodno Sobranie would be dissolved on the thirteenth and that new elections would be held in April.

This was disaster for the reactionary parties. Bulgaria was prospering under the Agrarian Government. The peasants were solidly behind Stambulisky. An election would have established him even more securely. The funds of the Macedonian Revolutionary Committee increased suddenly.

Almost immediately an attempt was made to assassinate Stambulisky and his Minister of Railways, Atanassoff, at Haskovo on the Thracian frontier. It was frustrated only at the last moment. Several police officials responsible for suppressing the activities of the comitadji, including the Prefect of Petrich, were threatened with death. In the face of these menaces, the elections were postponed.

Then, on 4th June, the Sofia police discovered a plot to assassinate not only Stambulisky but also Muravieff, the War Minister, and Stoyanoff, the Minister of the Interior. A young army officer, believed to have been given the job of killing Stoyanoff, was shot dead by the police in a gun fight. Other young officers, also under the orders of the terrorist Committee, were known to have arrived in Sofia, and a search for them was made. The police were beginning to lose control of the situation.

Now was the time for the Agrarian Party to have acted, to have armed their peasant supporters. But they did not do so. Instead, they played politics among themselves. For them, the enemy was the Macedonian Revolutionary Committee, a terrorist gang, a small organization quite incapable of ousting a government entrenched behind hundreds of thousands of peasant votes. They failed to perceive that the activities of the Committee had been merely the smoke-screen behind which the reactionary parties had been steadily making their preparations for an offensive. They very soon paid for this lack of perception.

At midnight on 8 June all was calm. By four o’clock on the morning of the ninth, all the members of the Stambulisky Government, with the exception of Stambulisky himself, were in prison and martial law had been declared. The leaders of this coup d’état were the reactionaries Zankoff and Rouseff, neither of whom had ever been connected with the Macedonian Committee.

Too late, Stambulisky tried to rally his peasants to their own defence. Several weeks later he was surrounded with a few followers in a country house some hundreds of miles from Sofia and captured. Shortly afterwards and in circumstances which are still obscure, he was shot.

It was in this way that, as Marukakis talked, Latimer sorted out the facts in his own mind. The Greek was a fast talker but liable, if he saw the chance, to turn from fact to revolutionary theory. Latimer was drinking his third glass of tea when the recital ended.

For a moment or two he was silent. At last he said: ‘Do you know who put up the money for the Committee?’

Marukakis grinned. ‘Rumours began to circulate some time after. There were many explanations offered, but, in my opinion, the most reasonable and, incidentally, the only one I was able to find any evidence for, was that the money had been advanced by the bank which held the Committee’s funds. It is called the Eurasian Credit Trust.’

‘No, I don’t. The bank advanced the money on its own behalf. I happened to find out that it had been badly caught owing to the rise in the value of the Lev under the Stambulisky administration. In the early part of 1923 before the trouble started in earnest, the Lev doubled its value in two months. It was about eight hundred to the pound sterling and it rose to about four hundred. I could look up the actual figures if you are interested. Anyone who had been selling the Lev for delivery in three months or more, counting on a fall, would face huge losses. The Eurasian Credit Trust was not, nor is for that matter, the sort of bank to accept a loss like that.’

‘It is registered in Monaco which means not only that it pays no taxes in the countries in which it operates, but also that its balance sheet is not published and that it is impossible to find out anything about it. There are lots more like that in Europe. Its head office is in Paris, but it operates in the Balkans. Amongst other things it finances the clandestine manufacture of heroin in Bulgaria for illicit export.’

‘Possibly. At any rate it financed the conditions that made the coup d’état possible. It was an open secret that the attempt on Stambulisky and Atanassoff at Haskovo was the work of foreign gunmen imported and paid by someone specially for the purpose. A lot of people said, too, that although there was a lot of talking and threatening the trouble would have died down if it had not been for foreign agents provocateurs.’

Marukakis shrugged. ‘It is over fifteen years old. The police might tell you something but I doubt it. If I knew what you wanted to know…’

Latimer made up his mind. ‘Very well, I said I would tell you why I wanted this information and I will.’ He went on hurriedly. ‘When I was in Stambul some weeks ago I had lunch with a man who happened to be the chief of the Turkish Secret Police. He was interested in detective stories and wanted me to use a plot he had thought of. We were discussing the respective merits of real and fictional murderers when, to illustrate his point, he read me the dossier of a man named Dimitrios Makropoulos or Dimitrios Talat. The man had been a scoundrel and a cut-throat of the worst sort. He had murdered a man in Smyrna and arranged to have another man hanged for it. He had been involved in three attempted assassinations including that of Stambulisky. He had been a French spy and he had organized a gang of drug peddlers in Paris. The day before I heard of him he had been found floating dead in the Bosphorus. He had been knifed in the stomach. For some reason or other I was curious to see him and persuaded this man to take me with him to the mortuary. Dimitrios was there on a table with his clothes piled up beside him.

‘It may have been that I had had a good lunch and was feeling stupid, but I suddenly had a curious desire to know more about Dimitrios. As you know, I write detective stories. I told myself that if, for once, I tried doing some detecting myself instead of merely writing about other people doing it, I might get some interesting results. My idea was to try to fill in some of the gaps in the dossier. But that was only an excuse. I did not care to admit to myself then that my interest was nothing to do with detection. It is difficult to explain, but I see now that my curiosity about Dimitrios was that of the biographer rather than of the detective. There was an emotional element in it, too. I wanted to explain Dimitrios, to account for him, to understand his mind. Merely to label him with disapproval was not enough. I saw him not as a corpse in a mortuary, but as a man, not as an isolate, a phenomenon, but as a unit in a disintegrating social system.’

He paused. ‘Well, there you are, Marukakis! That is why I am in Sofia, why I am wasting your time with questions about things that happened fifteen years ago. I am gathering material for a biography that will never be written, when I ought to be producing a detective story. It sounds unlikely enough to me. To you it must sound fantastic. But it is my explanation.’

He sat back feeling very foolish. It would have been better to have told a carefully thought out lie.

‘No. I think not. You deceive yourself. You hope au fond that by rationalizing Dimitrios, by explaining him, you will also explain that disintegrating social system you spoke about.’

‘That is very ingenious; but, if you will forgive my saying so, a little over-simplified. I don’t think that I can accept it.’

‘Why should I not believe you? It is too absurd for disbelief. What do you know of Dimitrios in Bulgaria?’

‘Very little. He was, I am told, an intermediary in an attempt to assassinate Stambulisky. That is to say there is no evidence to show that he was going to do any shooting himself. He left Athens, wanted by the police for robbery and attempted murder, towards the end of November 1922. I found that out myself. I also believe that he came to Bulgaria by sea. He was known to the Sofia police. I know that because in 1924 the Turkish secret police made enquiries about him in connection with another matter. The police here questioned a woman with whom he was known to have associated.’

‘It would. I’ve traced Dimitrios in Smyrna and in Athens, where he called himself Taladis, but so far I have not talked to anyone who ever saw him alive. Unfortunately, I do not even know the woman’s name.’

‘I cannot ask you to take the trouble. If I like to waste my time reading police records there is nothing to prevent my doing so, but there is no reason why I should waste your time too.’

‘There is plenty to prevent your wasting your time reading police records. In the first place, you cannot read Bulgarian and in the second place, the police would make difficulties. I am, God help me, an accredited journalist working for a French news agency. I have certain privileges. Besides –’ he grinned – ‘absurd as it is, your detecting intrigues me. The baroque in human affairs is always interesting, don’t you think?’ He looked round. The restaurant had emptied. The waiter was sitting asleep with his feet on one of the tables. Marukakis sighed. ‘We shall have to wake the poor devil to pay him.’

The time had passed agreeably enough. He had looked at pictures and at the statue of Alexander the Second, he had sat in cafés and wandered through the streets, he had climbed Sofia’s mountain, Vitocha, he had been to the theatre and to a cinema where he had seen a German film with Bulgarian subtitles. Intentionally, he had thought very little about Dimitrios and a great deal about the new book he had to write. It had irritated him only mildly to find that the former intention had proved more difficult to carry out than the latter.

My dear Mr Latimer, [he wrote in French]

Here, as I promised, is a précis of all the information about Dimitrios Makropoulos which I have been able to obtain from the police. It is not, as you will see, complete. That is interesting, don’t you think! Whether the woman can be found or not, I cannot say until I have made friends with a few more policemen. Perhaps we could meet tomorrow.

Assuring you of my most distinguished sentiments.

N. Marukakis.

POLICE ARCHIVES, SOFIA 1922–4

Dimitrios Makropoulos. Citizenship: Greek. Place of birth: Salonika. Date: 1889. Trade: Described as fig-packer. Entry: Varna, 22nd December 1922, off Italian steamer Isola Bella. Passport or Identity Card: Relief Commission Identity Card No. T53462.

At police inspection of papers in Café Spetzi, rue Perotska. Sofia, 6th June 1923, was in company of woman named Irana Preveza, Greek-born Bulgar. D. M. known associate of foreign criminals. Proscribed for deportation, 7th June 1923. Released at request and on assurances of A. Vazoff, 7th June 1923.

In September 1924 request received from Turkish Government for information relating to a fig-packer named ‘Dimitrios’ wanted on a charge of murder. Above information supplied a month later. Irana Preveza when questioned reported receiving letter from Makropoulos at Adrianople. She gave following description:

Height: 182 centimetres. Eyes: brown. Complexion: dark, clean-shaven. Hair: dark and straight. Distinguishing marks: none.

N.B. This is an ordinary police dossier only. Reference is made to a second dossier on the secret file, but it is forbidden to inspect this.

Latimer sighed. The second dossier contained no doubt, the details of the part played by Dimitrios in the events of 1923. The Bulgarian authorities had evidently known more about Dimitrios than they had been prepared to confide to the Turkish police. To know that the information was in existence, yet to be unable to get at it was really most irritating.

However, there was much food for thought in what information was available. The most obvious titbit was that on board the Italian steamer Isola Bella in December 1922, between the Piraeus and Varna in the Black Sea, the Relief Commission Identity Card number T53462 had suffered an alteration. ‘Dimitrios Taladis’ had become ‘Dimitrios Makropoulos’. Either Dimitrios had discovered a talent for forgery or he had met and employed someone with such a talent.

Irana Preveza! A real clue that and one that would have to be followed up very carefully. If she were still alive there must surely be some way of finding her. For the moment, however, that task would have to be left to Marukakis. Incidentally, the fact that she was of Greek extraction was suggestive Dimitrios would probably not have spoken Bulgar.

‘Known associate of foreign criminals,’ was distinctly vague. What sort of criminals? Of what foreign nationality? And to what extent had he associated with them? And why had attempts been made to deport him just two days before the Zankoff coup d’état? Had Dimitrios been one of the suspected assassins for whom the Sofia police had been searching during that critical week? Colonel Haki had pooh-poohed the idea of his being an assassin at all. ‘His kind never risk their skins like that.’ But Colonel Haki had not known everything about Dimitrios. And who on earth was the obliging A. Vazoff who had so promptly and effectively intervened on behalf of Dimitrios? The answers to those questions were, no doubt, in that secret second dossier. Most irritating!

As for the description, it might, like most other tabulated descriptions, have fitted tens of thousands of men. With most persons, recognition, even of an intimate, was based on the perception of vague, half-observed quantities which together formed a caricature significant more in its relation to the observer than to the observed. A short man, conscious of his lack of height, would describe a man of medium height as tall. For the ordinary business of hating and loving and getting from the cradle to the deathbed with the least possible discomfort, such caricatures were, no doubt, satisfactory. But he, Latimer, needed more. He needed a portrait of Dimitrios, a portrait by an artist, an arrangement of accented lines infused by some alchemy with the spirit of the sitter. And if that were not available he must make his own portrait of Dimitrios from what crude daubs he could find in police dossiers, superimposing them on one another in the hope that two dimensions might eventually become three. The Negro, for instance, out of his fear, had given a description not wholly without significance. But there was nothing in the woman’s description to add to his few vague brush strokes. Probably the police had bullied her. ‘No lies now! Describe him. How tall was he? What was the colour of his eyes? His hair? You knew him well enough. We know that. You’d better be honest with us…’ And so on.

Yet it was odd that, with that second dossier on file, police had neither description nor photograph of their own. Dimitrios had been in custody, possibly for several hours, before A. Vazoff had come to the rescue.

And there was another thing that was odd. How could the woman have known his exact height to a centimetre? It was not the sort of thing you knew about even the most intimate friends. Often you did not know it about yourself.

An idea began to develop in Latimer’s mind. Supposing Colonel Haki’s little trick to secure information about Dimitrios (and the plot to assassinate Kemal) without seeming to be doing so, had not been as successful as he had thought. Supposing the Bulgarian authorities had seen through it. According to the Colonel, the Sofia police had known very little about Dimitrios. Yet the existence of the second dossier suggested that they had known a great deal that they had not been anxious to communicate to the Colonel.

Then why let him know anything at all? There had been a dozen ways of disposing of his circulated request for information. A regretful declaration that Dimitrios was unknown would have been the simplest. Then, Latimer remembered a phrase Colonel Haki had used: ‘Some people in the good graces of a neighbouring friendly government’ were behind it. Might not ‘a neighbouring friendly government’ have been anxious to appear helpful in the circumstances? It was not unreasonable to suppose so. And if for ‘some people in the good graces of ’ you wrote ‘Eurasian Credit Trust and A. Vazoff ’, the thing began to look interesting. Perhaps the same people who had wanted Stambulisky killed had also the ‘good reasons for wishing the Gazi out of the way’. Perhaps Dimitrios…

Latimer shrugged. It was all the wildest supposition. There was no way, there could be no way, of substantiating any of it without access to the inaccessible second dossier. He returned reluctantly to his new book.

He had sent a note to Marukakis, and on the following morning received a telephone call from him. They arranged to meet again for dinner that evening.

By the time the evening came, Latimer was feeling very much as he had once used to feel while waiting for examination results: a little excited, a little apprehensive and very much irritated at the decorous delay in publishing information which had been in existence for several days. He smiled rather sourly at Marukakis.

Marukakis flourished a hand. ‘Nonsense, my dear friend. I told you I was interested. Shall we go to the grocer’s shop again? We can talk there quietly.’

From then until the end of the meal he talked incessantly about the position of the Scandinavian countries in the event of a major European war. Latimer began to feel as baleful as one of his own murderers.

‘And now,’ said the Greek at last, ‘as to this question of your Dimitrios, we are going on a little trip tonight.’

‘I said that I would make friends with some policeman and I have done so. As a result I have found out where Irana Preveza is now. It was not very difficult. She turns out to be very well known – to the police.’

Latimer felt his heart begin to beat a little faster. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded.

‘About five minutes’ walk away from here. She is the proprietress of a Nachtlokal called La Vièrge St Marie.’

‘She has not always had her own place. For many years she worked either on her own or for other houses. But she grew too old. She had money saved, and so she started her own place. About fifty years of age, but looks younger. The police have quite an affection for her. She does not get up until ten in the evening, so we must wait a little before we try our luck at talking to her. Did you read her description of Dimitrios? No distinguishing marks! That made me laugh.’

‘Did it occur to you to wonder how she knew that his height was exactly one hundred and eighty-two centimetres?’

‘I think that that description came from the second dossier you mentioned, and not from the woman.’

‘He died three years ago. He left much money. It was claimed by a nephew living in Bucaresti. He had no relations living here. What are you thinking of?’

Marukakis frowned over it. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he said when Latimer had finished. ‘I do not know. There is, as you say, no way of proving it. Kemal was always against the financiers, especially the international variety. He mistrusted them, and with reason. For years he would accept no foreign loans, and to a financier that is a blow in the face. You need not be so nervous of your idea, my friend. It is good. International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them, as Necker made the French Revolution, in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination. Not in Paris, of course, nor in London or New York. Oh, dear me, no! And the assassin will not steal forth from a board meeting. The method is simple. “How nice,” someone will say, “if that man so-and-so, that scoundrel, that disruptive influence, that menace to peace and prosperity, were to go.” That is all. A wish expressed. But, my friend, it is expressed in the hearing of a man whose business it is to hear such things and to take note of them, to issue instructions and to take the responsibility for them, to procure the ends yet never speak of the means. Your international financier needs good luck, and if Fate is a little forgetful, then Fate’s elbow must be jogged.’

‘Oh, no. I think not. The elbow-jogger-in-chief is an important man. He knows the very best people. He is a polite fellow with a beautiful wife and an income reported to come from the choicest securities. He is away from time to time in connection with vague business deals about which his friends are far too well-bred to question him. He has a foreign decoration or two which he wears at the more useful diplomatic receptions.’ The Greek’s voice grated suddenly. ‘But he also knows men like Dimitrios, the dangerous class, the political hangers-on, the grafters and the undercover men, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of an old society. He himself has no political convictions. For him there is no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. He believes in the survival of the fittest and the gospel of tooth and claw because he makes money by seeing that the weak die before they can become strong and that the law of the jungle remains the governing force in the affairs of the world. And he is all about us. Every city in the world knows him. He exists because big business, his master, needs him. International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood!’

He brought his fist down with a bang on the table as he uttered the last word. Latimer, who, as an Englishman, could never quite overcome his distaste for other people’s rhetoric, had been staring at his plate. Now he raised his head. For a moment he considered mentioning the fact that he had recognized one or two phrases as coming from the Communist Manifesto, but decided not to do so. The Greek, after all, was being very helpful.

‘That’s a very purple patch,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t you think you may be exaggerating a little?’

For a moment Marukakis glared at him, then suddenly he grinned. ‘Of course I was exaggerating. But it is agreeable sometimes to talk in primary colours even if you have to think in greys. But, you know, I was not exaggerating as much as you might think. There are such men about.’

‘One of them used to be on the board of directors of the Eurasian Credit Trust. His name was Anton Vazoff.’

The Greek chuckled delightedly. ‘I was keeping that as a little surprise for you later, but you may have it now. I found out from the files. Eurasian Credit Trust was not registered in Monaco until 1926. The list of directors prior to that date is still in existence and open to inspection if you know where to find it.’

‘But,’ spluttered Latimer, ‘this is most important. Don’t you see what…’

Marukakis interrupted him by calling for the bill. Then he glanced at Latimer slyly. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you English are sublime. You are the only nation in the world that believes that it has a monopoly of ordinary common sense.’