The Mask of Dimitrios

As his taxi crossed the bridge to the Ile de la Cité, he saw for a moment a panorama of low, black clouds moving quickly in the chill, dusty wind. The long façade of the houses on the Quai de Corse was still and secretive. It was as if each window concealed a watcher. There seemed to be few people about. Paris, in that late autumn afternoon, had the macabre formality of a steel engraving.

It depressed him, and as he climbed the stairs of his hotel on the Quai Voltaire he wished fervently that he had gone back to Athens.

His room was cold. It was too early for an aperitif. He had been able to eat enough of his meal on the train to render an early dinner unnecessary. He decided to inspect the outside of number three, Impasse des Huit Anges. With some difficulty he found the Impasse tucked away in a side street off the Rue de Rennes.

It was a wide, cobbled passage shaped like an L and flanked at the entrance by a pair of tall iron gates. They were fastened back against the walls that supported them with heavy staples, and had evidently not been shut for years. A row of spiked railings separated one side of the Impasse from the blank side wall of the adjoining block of houses. Another blank cement wall, unguarded by railings but protected by the words ‘DEFENCE D’AFFICHER, LOI DU 10 AVRIL 1929’ in weatherbeaten black paint, faced it.

There were only three houses in the Impasse. They were grouped out of sight of the road, in the foot of the L, and looked out through the narrow gap between the building on which bill-posting was forbidden and the back of a hotel over which drainpipes writhed like snakes, on to yet another sightless expanse of cement. Life in the Impasse des Huit Anges would, Latimer thought, be rather like a rehearsal for Eternity. That others before him had found it so was suggested by the fact that, of the three houses, two were shuttered and obviously quite empty, while the third, number three, was occupied on the fourth and top floors only.

Feeling as if he were trespassing, Latimer walked slowly across the irregular cobbles to the entrance of number three.

The door was open and he could see along a tiled corridor to a small, dank yard at the back. The concierge’s room, to the right of the door, was empty and showed no signs of having been used recently. Beside it, on the wall, was nailed a dusty board with four brass name slots screwed to it. Three of the slots were empty. In the fourth was a grimy piece of paper with the name ‘CAILLE’ clumsily printed on it in violet ink.

There was nothing to be learned from this but the fact, which Latimer had not doubted, that Mr Peters’ accommodation address existed. He turned and walked back to the street. In the Rue de Rennes he found a post office where he bought a pneumatique letter-card, wrote in it his name and that of his hotel, addressed it to Mr Peters and dropped it down the chute. He also sent a postcard to Marukakis. What happened now depended to a great extent on Mr Peters. But there was something he could and should do: that was to find out what, if anything, the Paris newspapers had had to say about the breaking up in December 1931 of a drug-peddling gang.

At nine o’clock the following morning, being without word from Peters, he decided to spend the morning with newspaper files.

The paper he finally selected for detailed reading had made a number of references to the case. The first was dated 29th November 1931. It was headed: ‘DRUG TRAFFICKERS ARRESTED’, and went on:

A man and a woman engaged in the distribution of drugs to addicts were arrested yesterday in the Alésia quarter. They are said to be members of a notorious foreign gang. The police expect to make further arrests within a few days.

That was all. It read curiously, Latimer thought. Those three bald sentences looked as if they had been lifted out of a longer report. The absence of names, too, was odd. Police censorship, perhaps.

The next reference appeared on 4th December under the heading: ‘DRUG GANG, THREE MORE ARRESTS.’

Three members of a criminal drug-distributing organization were arrested late last night in a café near the Porte d’Orléans. Agents entering the café to make the arrests were compelled to fire on one of the men who was armed and who made a desperate attempt to escape. He was slightly wounded. The other two, one of whom was a foreigner, did not resist.

This brings the number of drug gang arrests to five, for it is believed that the three men arrested last night belonged to the same gang as the man and woman arrested a week ago in the Alésia quarter.

The police state that still more arrests are likely to be made, as the Bureau Général des Stupéfiants has in its possession evidence implicating the actual organizers of the gang.

Monsieur Auguste Lafon, director of the Bureau, said:

‘We have known of this gang for some time and have conducted painstaking investigations into their activities. We could have made arrests but we held our hands. It was the leaders, the big criminals whom we wanted. Without leaders, with their sources of supply cut off, the army of drug pedlars that infest Paris will be powerless to carry on their nefarious trade. We intend to smash this gang and others like it.’

DRUG GANG SMASHED NEW ARRESTS

‘Now we have them all,’ says Lafon.

THE COUNCIL OF SEVEN

Six men and one woman are now under arrest as a result of the attack launched by Monsieur Lafon, director of the Bureau Général des Stupéfiants, on a notorious gang of foreign drug traffickers operating in Paris and Marseilles.

The attack began with the arrest two weeks ago of a woman and her male accomplice in the Alésia quarter. It reached its climax yesterday with the arrest in Marseilles of two men believed to be the remaining members of the gang’s ‘Council of Seven’, which was responsible for the organization of this criminal enterprise.

At the request of the police we have hitherto remained silent as to the names of those arrested as it was desired not to put the others on their guard. Now that restriction has been lifted.

The woman, Lydia Prokofievna, is a Russian who is believed to have come to France from Turkey with a Nansen passport in 1924. She is known in criminal circles as ‘The Grand Duchess’. The man arrested with her was a Dutchman named Manus Visser who, through his association with Prokofievna, was sometimes referred to as ‘Monsieur le Duc’.

The names of the other five under arrest are: Luis Galindo, a naturalized Frenchman of Mexican origin, who now lies in hospital with a bullet wound in the thigh; Jean-Baptiste Lenôtre, a Frenchman from Bordeaux, and Jacob Werner, a Belgian, who were arrested with Galindo; Pierre Lamare or ‘Jo-jo’, a Niçois, and Frederik Petersen, a Dane, who were arrested in Marseilles.

In a statement to the press last night, Monsieur Lafon said: ‘Now we have them all. The gang is smashed. We have cut off the head and with it the brains. The body will now die a speedy death. It is finished.’

Lamare and Petersen are to be questioned by the examining magistrate today. It is expected that there will be a mass-trial of the prisoners.

See the special article, SECRETS OF THE DRUG GANGS, on page 3.

In England, Latimer reflected, Monsieur Lafon would have found himself in serious trouble. It hardly seemed worthwhile trying the accused after he and the press between them had already pronounced the verdict. But then, the accused was always guilty in a French trial. To give him a trial at all was, practically speaking, merely to ask him whether he had anything to say before he was sentenced.

The author, who called himself ‘Veilleur’, revealed that the stuff known as morphine was an opium derivative with the formula C₁₇H₁₉O₃N and that its usual medical form was morphine hydro-chloride, that heroin (diacetylmorphine), another opium derived alkaloid, was preferred to morphine by addicts because it acted more speedily and powerfully and was easier to take, that cocaine was made from the leaves of the coco bush and served up in the form of cocaine hydrochloride (formula C₁₇H₂₁O₄N, HCl) and that the effects of all three drugs were approximately the same, namely: that they were aphrodisiac, that they produced states of mental and physical exhilaration in the early stages and that eventually the addict suffered physical and moral degeneration and mental tortures of the most appalling kind. The traffic in these drugs, declared ‘Veilleur’, was carried on on a gigantic scale and it was possible for anyone to obtain them in Paris and Marseilles. There were illicit factories in every country in Europe. World production of these drugs exceeded legitimate medical consumption many times over. There were millions of addicts in Western Europe. Drug smuggling was a vast well-organized business. There followed a list of recent seizures of illicit drugs: sixteen kilos of heroin found in each of six cases of machinery consigned from Amsterdam to Paris, twenty-five kilos of cocaine found between the false sides of a drum of oil consigned from New York to Cherbourg, ten kilos of morphine found in the false bottom of a cabin trunk landed at Marseilles, two hundred kilos of heroin found in an illicit factory in a garage near Lyons. The gangs that peddled these drugs were controlled by rich and outwardly respectable men. The police were bribed by these vermin. There were bars and dancings in Paris where the drugs were distributed under the very eyes of the police who were laughed at by the pedlars. ‘Veilleur’ choked with indignation. Had he been writing three years later he would certainly have implicated Stavisky and half the Chamber of Deputies. But for once, he went on, the police had taken action. It was to be hoped that they would do so again. Meanwhile, however, there were thousands of Frenchmen – yes, and Frenchwomen! – suffering the tortures of the damned through this diabolical traffic which was sapping the virility of the nation. All of which suggested that, although ‘Veilleur’s’ heart was in the right place, he knew none of the secrets of the drug gangs.

With the arrest of the ‘Council of Seven’, interest in the case seemed to wane. The fact that ‘The Grand Duchess’ had been transferred to Nice to stand trial there for a fraud committed three years previously may have been responsible for this. The trial of the men was dealt with briefly. All were sentenced: Galindo, Lenôtre and Werner to fines of five thousand francs and three months’ imprisonment, Lamare, Petersen and Visser to fines of two thousand francs and one month’s imprisonment.

Latimer was amazed by the lightness of the sentences. ‘Veilleur’, who bobbed up again to comment on the affair, was outraged but not amazed. But for the existence of a set of obsolete and wholly ridiculous laws, he thundered, the whole six would have been imprisoned for life. And which of them was the leader of the gang? Ah! Did the police suppose that these alley rats had financed an organization which, on the evidence given in court, had in one month taken delivery of and distributed heroin and morphine to the value of two and a half million francs? It was absurd. The police…

It was the nearest the newspaper got to the fact that the police had failed to find Dimitrios. That was not surprising. The police were not going to tell the press that the arrests were made possible only by a dossier obligingly supplied by some anonymous well-wisher whom they suspected of being the leader of the gang. All the same, it was irritating to find that he knew more than the newspaper he had relied upon to clarify the affair for him.

He was about to shut the file in disgust when his attention was caught by an illustration. It was a smudgy reproduction of a photograph of three of the prisoners being led from the court by detectives to whom they were handcuffed. All three had turned their faces away from the camera but the fact of their being handcuffed had prevented them from concealing themselves effectively.

Latimer left the newspaper office in better spirits than those in which he had entered it.

At his hotel a message awaited him. Unless he sent a pneumatique making other arrangements, Mr Peters would call upon him at six o’clock that evening.

‘My dear Mr Latimer! I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you. Our last meeting took place under such inauspicious circumstances that I hardly dared hope… But let us talk of pleasanter things. Welcome to Paris! Have you had a good journey? You are looking well. Tell me, what did you think of Grodek? He wrote telling me how charming and sympathetic you were. A good fellow, isn’t he? Those cats of his! He worships them.’

For Latimer, Mr Peters’ sweet smile was like the greeting of an old and detested acquaintance. ‘He was also mysterious. He urged me to come to Paris to see you.’

‘Did he?’ Mr Peters did not seem pleased. His smile faded a little. ‘And what else did he say, Mr Latimer?’

‘He said that you were a clever man. He seemed to find something I said about you amusing.’

Mr Peters sat down carefully on the bed. His smile had quite gone. ‘And what was it you said?’

‘He insisted upon knowing what business I had with you. I told him all I could. As I knew nothing,’ went on Latimer spitefully, ‘I felt that I could safely confide in him. If you do not like that, I am sorry. You must remember that I am still in complete ignorance concerning this precious scheme of yours.’

The smile once more tightened his soft lips. It was as if some obscene plant had turned its face to the sun. ‘Yes, Mr Latimer, he could have done so. What you have told me explains the flippant tone of his letter to me. I am glad you satisfied his curiosity. The rich are so often covetous of others’ goods in this world of ours. Grodek is a dear friend of mine, but it is just as well that he knows that we stand in no need of assistance. He might otherwise be tempted by the prospect of gain.’

The fat man looked horrified. ‘Dear me no, Mr Latimer. Why should I bring such a thing on a friendly visit to you?’

‘Good,’ said Latimer curtly. He backed towards the door and turned the key in the lock. The key he put in his pocket. ‘Now then,’ he went on grimly, ‘I don’t want to seem a bad host, but there are limits to my patience. I have come a long way to see you and I still don’t know why. I want to know why.’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ answered Latimer rudely. ‘Now before you start beating about the bush again there are one or two things you should know. I am not a violent man, Mr Peters. To be honest with you, I dread violence. But there are times when the most peace-loving among us must use it. This may be one of them. I am younger than you and, I should say, in better condition. If you persist in being mysterious I shall attack you. That is the first thing.

‘The second is that I know who you are. Your name is not Peters but Petersen, Frederik Petersen. You were a member of the drug-peddling gang organized by Dimitrios and you were arrested in December 1931, fined two thousand francs and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment.’

Mr Peters’ smile was tortured. ‘Did Grodek tell you this?’ He asked the question gently and sorrowfully. The word ‘Grodek’ might have been another way of saying ‘Judas’.

‘All right then – Peters. We come to my third point. When I was in Istanbul I heard some interesting things about the end of that gang. It was said that Dimitrios betrayed the lot of you by sending to the police, anonymously, a dossier convicting the seven of you. Is that true?’

‘It was also said that Dimitrios had become an addict himself. Is that true?’

‘Unhappily, it is. Otherwise I do not think he would have betrayed us. We were making so much money for him.’

‘I was also told there was talk of vengeance, that you all threatened to kill Dimitrios as soon as you were free.’

‘I did not threaten,’ Mr Peters corrected him. ‘Some of the others did so. Galindo, for example, was always a hothead.’

‘I don’t understand you, Mr Latimer.’ And he looked as if he really did not understand.

‘No? Let me put it to you this way. Dimitrios was murdered near Istanbul roughly two months ago. Very shortly after the time when the murder could have taken place, you were in Athens. That is not very far from Istanbul, is it? Dimitrios, it is said, died a poor man. Now is that likely? As you have just pointed out, his gang made a lot of money for him in 1931. From what I have heard of him, he was not the man to lose money he had made. Do you know what is in my mind, Mr Peters? I am wondering whether it would not be reasonable to suppose that you killed Dimitrios for his money. What have you to say to that?’

Mr Peters did not answer for a moment but contemplated Latimer unhappily in the manner of a good shepherd about to admonish an erring lamb.

‘And also very fortunate. Just suppose that I had, as you suggest, killed Dimitrios. Think what I would be forced to do. I would be forced to kill you also, now wouldn’t I?’ He put his hand in his breast pocket. It emerged holding the Lüger pistol. ‘You see, I lied to you just now. I admit it. I was so curious to know what you were going to do if you thought I was unarmed. Besides, it seemed so impolite to come here carrying a pistol. The fact that I did not bring the pistol with me because of you would be a difficult one to prove. So I lied. Do you understand my feelings a little? I am so anxious to have your confidence.’

‘All of which is as skilful a reply to an accusation of murder as one could wish for.’

Mr Peters put away his pistol wearily. ‘Mr Latimer, this is not a detective story. There is no need to be so stupid. Even if you cannot be discreet, at least use your imagination. Is it likely that Dimitrios would make a will in my favour? No. Then how do you suppose that I could kill him for his money? People in these days do not keep their wealth in treasure chests. Come now, Mr Latimer, let us please be sensible. Let us eat dinner together and then talk business. I suggest that after dinner we drink coffee in my apartment – it is a little more comfortable than this room – though if you would prefer to go to a café I shall understand. You probably disapprove of me. I really cannot blame you. But at least let us cultivate the illusion of friendship.’

For a moment Latimer felt himself warming to Mr Peters. True, the last part of his appeal had been accompanied by an almost visible accretion of self-pity, but he had not smiled. Besides, the man had already made him feel a fool: it would be too much if he made him feel a prig as well. At the same time…

‘I am as hungry as you,’ he said, ‘and I can see no reason why I should prefer a café to your apartment. At the same time, Mr Peters, anxious though I am to be friendly, I feel that I should warn you now that unless I have, this evening, a satisfactory explanation of your asking me to meet you here in Paris, I shall – half a million francs or no half a million francs – leave by the first available train. Is that clear?’

Mr Peters’ smile returned. ‘It could not be clearer, Mr Latimer. And may I say how much I appreciate your frankness?’ The smile became rancid. ‘How much better if we could always be so frank, if we could always open our hearts to our fellow men without fear, fear of being misunderstood, misinterpreted! How much easier this life of ours would be! But we are so blind, so very blind. If the Great One chooses that we should do things of which the world may disapprove, let us not be ashamed of those things. For we are, after all, merely doing His will and how can we understand His purposes? How?’

‘Ah! None of us knows, Mr Latimer. None of us knows – until he reaches the Other Side.’

‘Quite so. Where shall we dine? There is a Danish place near here, isn’t there?’

Mr Peters struggled into his overcoat. ‘No, Mr Latimer, as you are doubtless well aware, there is not.’ He sighed unhappily. ‘It is unkind of you to make fun of me. And in any case I prefer French cooking.’

Mr Peters’ capacity for making him feel a fool was, Latimer reflected as they descended the stairs, remarkable.

At Mr Peters’ suggestion and expense they ate in a cheap restaurant in the Rue Jacob. Afterwards they went to the Impasse des Huit Anges.

Mr Peters, who was breathing heavily by the time they had reached the second landing, paused for a moment. ‘You have concluded, I suppose, that I am Caillé.’

Mr Peters began to climb again. The stairs creaked under his weight. Latimer, following two or three stairs behind, was reminded of a circus elephant picking its way unwillingly up a pyramid of coloured blocks to perform a balancing trick. They reached the fourth floor. Mr Peters stopped and, standing panting before a battered door, hauled out a bunch of keys. A moment later he pushed open the door, pressed a switch and waved Latimer in.

The room ran from front to back of the house and was divided into two by a curtain to the left of the door. The half beyond the curtain was of a different shape from that which contained the door as it included the space between the end of the landing, the rear wall and the next house. The space formed an alcove. At each end of the room was a tall French window.

But if it was, architecturally speaking, the sort of room that one would expect to find in a French house of that type and age, it was in every other respect fantastic.

The first thing that Latimer saw was the dividing curtain. It was of imitation cloth of gold. The walls and ceiling were distempered an angry blue and bespattered with gold five-pointed stars. Scattered all over the floor, so that not a square inch of it showed, were cheap Moroccan rugs. They overlapped a good deal so that in places there were humps of three and even four thicknesses of rug. There were three huge divans piled high with cushions, some tooled leather ottoman seats and a Moroccan table with a brass tray upon it. In one corner stood an enormous brass gong. The light came from fretted oak lanterns. In the centre of it all stood a small chromium-plated electric radiator. There was a choking smell of upholstery dust.

‘Home!’ said Mr Peters. ‘Take your things off, Mr Latimer. Would you like to see the rest of the place?’

‘Outwardly, just another uncomfortable French house,’ commented Mr Peters as he toiled up the stairs again. ‘Actually an oasis in a desert of discomfort. This is my bedroom.’

Latimer had another glimpse of French Morocco. This time it was adorned by a pair of crumpled flannel pyjamas.

Latimer looked at the toilet and learned that his host had a spare set of false teeth.

He led the way out on to the landing. Facing them was a large clothes cupboard. He opened the door and struck a match. Along the back of the cupboard was a row of metal clothes pegs. Grasping the centre one, he turned it like a latch and pulled. The back of the cupboard swung towards them and Latimer felt the night air on his face and heard the noises of the city.

‘There is a narrow iron platform running along the outside wall to the next house,’ explained Mr Peters. ‘There is another cupboard there like this one. You can see nothing because there are only blank walls facing us. Equally, no one could see us should we choose to leave that way. It was Dimitrios who had this done.’

‘Dimitrios owned all three of these houses. They were kept empty for reasons of privacy. Sometimes, they were used as stores. These two floors were used for meetings. Morally, no doubt, the houses still belong to Dimitrios. Fortunately for me, he took the precaution of buying them in my name. I also conducted the negotiations. The police never found out about them. I was able, therefore, to move in when I came out of prison. In case Dimitrios should ever wonder what had happened to his property, I took the precaution of buying them from myself in the name of Caillé. Do you like Algerian coffee?’

‘It takes a little longer to prepare than French, but I prefer it. Shall we go downstairs again?’

They went downstairs. Having seen Latimer uncomfortably ensconced amid a sea of cushions, Mr Peters disappeared into the alcove.

Latimer got rid of some of the cushions and looked about him. It was odd to feel that the house had once belonged to Dimitrios. Yet the evidence around him of the tenancy of the preposterous Mr Peters was a good deal odder. There was a small (fretted) shelf above his head. On it were paperbound books. There was Pearls of Everyday Wisdom. That was the one he had been reading in the train from Athens. There was, besides, Plato’s Symposium, in French and uncut, an anthology called Poèmes Erotiques, which had no author’s name on it and had been cut, Aesop’s Fables in English, Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsemere in French, a German Gazetteer, and several books by Dr Frank Crane in a language which Latimer took to be Danish.

Mr Peters came back carrying a Moroccan tray on which were a curious looking coffee percolator, a spirit lamp, two cups and a Moroccan cigarette box. The spirit lamp he lit and put under the percolator. The cigarettes he placed beside Latimer on the divan. Then he reached up above Latimer’s head, brought down one of the Danish books and flicked over one or two of the pages. A small photograph fluttered to the floor. He picked it up and handed it to Latimer.

Latimer looked up. ‘It’s Dimitrios!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where did you get it?’

Mr Peters took the photograph from Latimer’s fingers. ‘You recognize it? Good.’ He sat down on one of the ottoman seats and adjusted the spirit lamp. Then he looked up. If it had been possible for Mr Peters’ wet, lustreless eyes to gleam, Latimer would have said that they were gleaming with pleasure.

‘Help yourself to cigarettes, Mr Latimer,’ he said. ‘I am going to tell you a story.’

10

The Eight Angels