ntage which offered. Outwardly he was the head of three trading
corporations which complied with the laws, paid small but respectable
dividends and cloaked other operations which never appeared in the
official records of the companies.

The sidelines of the gang came through force of circumstances.
Men--good, bad and indifferent--were drawn into the orbit of its
activities, as extraordinary circumstances arose or dire necessities
dictated. Throughout the length and breadth of Britain, through France,
Italy, and in the days before the war, and even during the war, in
Germany, in Russia and in the United States, were men who, if they could
not be described as agents, were at least ready tools.

He had a finger in every unsavoury pie. The bank robber discharged from
gaol did not ask Colonel Boundary to finance him in the purchase of a
new kit of tools--an up-to date burglar's kit costs something over two
hundred pounds--but there were people who would lend the money, which
eventually came out of the colonel's pocket. Some of the businesses he
financed were on the border line of respectability. Some into which his
money was sunk were frankly infamous. But it was a popular fiction that
he knew nothing of these. Or, if he did know, that he was financing or
at the back of a scoundrel, it was insisted that that scoundrel was
engaged in (so far as the colonel knew) legitimate enterprise.

Paul Phillopolis was a small Greek merchant, who had an office in
Mincing Court--a tiny room at the top of four flights of stairs. On the
glass panel of its door was the announcement: "General Exporter."

Mr. Phillopolis spent three or four hours at his office daily and for
the rest of the time, particularly towards the evening, was to be found
in a _brasserie_ in Soho. He was a dark little man, with fierce
moustachios and a set of perfect white teeth which he displayed readily,
for he was easily amused. His most intimate acquaintances knew him to be
an exporter of Greek produce to South America, and he was, in the large
sense of the word, eminently respectable.

Occasionally he would be seen away from his customary haunt, discussing
with a compatriot some very urgent business, which few knew about. For
there were ships which cleared from the Greek ports, carrying cargoes to
the order of Mr. Phillopolis, which did not appear in any bill of
lading. Dazed-looking Armenian girls, girls from South Russia, from
Greece, from Smyrna, en route to a