Vic Socotra

The Fourth Republic
Comment le Pédé Va T’il?, Part Four

My associate has had a variety of names in his official life. Let’s pick one for him now. “Associate” seems so cold and detached, though that is part of the business personal involvement can lead to attachments, which in turn can lead to bad decision-making.

Let’s call him “Tom,” since that links nicely to Dick and Harry, which in the counterintelligence world is just who you want to be. Any Tom, Dick or Harry.

“Tom” tells the next bit of the story this way:

“The Military Airlift got us to France on an RD6- the military version of the DC-6. It was the first pressurized airliner, and could make 275 knots over the clouds, even a little faster with the tailwind going east. We landed at Orly Airport, then the biggest airport serving the capital. It is south of Prais proper, and partly in the villages of Orly and Villeneuve-le-Roi.

It had been a secondary field to Le Bourget, where Lindbergh landed on the first non-stop flight across the pond, but bigger airplanes needed more runway. The Germans had used the field during the Occupation, and then the Air Corps, which flew P-47 Jugs out of it after the Liberation.

There was still a large US Air Force air transport facility on the field in those days, since NATO was still headquartered in Paris in those days.

I climbed down the ladder and walked across the ramp to the terminal. It was good to stretch my legs. It was the 7th of December, early on a Sunday morning. I had covered a lot of ground since my shiny new passport had been issued three days before.

Inside, I was met by a slim gentleman with an angular face and dark eyebrows. He was in civilian clothes, and introduced himself as Captain Maurice DeWolf, the ALUSNA. That is the shorthand way of saying American Legation- U.S. Naval Attache to France. We got into a dark embassy sedan and drive north into the capital.

The US Embassy is located in the 8th Arrondissement, on the Avenue Gabriel near the Champs de Concorde. It is a nice location, and my eyes were wide as we passed the Louvre and the ceremonial gardens. The Captain swung the car around back where a Marine guard waved us through the gate and into the motor pool. We went through the back entrance and up to his office in the silent corridors.

I was still marveling over the ride into town. I had finally saw the Eiffel Tower, which I had been thinking about since the DNI offered me the chance to volunteer for this job, whatever it was.

The very first thing the Captain did on entering the office was to brusquely ask for my passport.

“You cannot do the job with the Surete' with that in your possession,” he said. “It would completely break your cover. You are going to be an ordinary sailor on leave.”

“Can you tell me exactly what this is all about?” I asked. “I did not get much back in Washington except that it was about funny money and the Fleet.”

The Captain smiled thinly. “I can give you the outlines of it, but it is a complex matter. Parts of it are secret, parts of it deal with our relationships from the war, and part of it is about France finding its way in the world again after being partitioned by the Nazis.”

He lit up a cigarette and exhaled the smoke thoughtfully. I waited for him to give me some kind of clue as to what I was expected to do, one guy sent from Washington to help.

“First off, Nice is a special town. It is not completely French, as they say. The city has bounced between control of the Italians since Napoleon’s time. It has been a part of Italy in living memory- Mussolini occupied it in the early part of the war, when Marshall Petain set up the government in Vichy. So there is that. Consequently, there is a lot of informal connection. The princely enclave of Monaco is just up the road, and the Mob is powerful there.”

It was common knowledge that something funny had occurred between the government and the New York crime families during the war- hell, there had been a Humphrey Bogart movie about the patriotic American mobsters who broke up Nazi spy rings called “All Through the Night.” It was a good film.

When the war was over, the biggest hood in custody was strangely paroled and deported. Lucky Luciano was living the good life down in Naples.

“It is a new kind of mob, though,” said the Captain. “The Corsicans are in charge, and they are even tougher and more dangerous than the Sicilians we know back home. They were starting to infiltrate before the war. The first heroin labs were discovered near Marseilles in 1937. The Boss responsible for that is Paul Carbone.” The Captain stubbed out his cigarette. “He is a very bad man.”

I did not know then just how bad he was. The Corsicans made a truce with Luciano’s organization, and their rugged green island formed a neat triangle anchored on the Cote D’Azure of France, with Marseilles on the western end and Nice on the other. They were targeting the US for their increasing trafficking business. It would later be known as The French Connection and was built on networks that had been formed during the war with the French and American services.

“This is particularly sensitive, since the French National Police had a connection with them to help prevent the French communists from bringing the port of Marseille under their control. Marseille happens to be a perfect shipping point for all types of illegal goods, with frequent arrivals of ships going to all points of the earth. That is where the Navy comes in.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. I had to lean in to hear him.

“The Fleet is bringing greenbacks ashore when our ships anchor there. Sure, the sailors should convert their currency to military scrip, but the temptation to change it on the Black Market is too great. The profit from black-marketeering allows the thugs to launder profits from all their activities, and that includes counterfeiting.”

“I am no expert on any of that,” I said. “I was a chief detective in the Occupation in Japan, and I know about what goes on around the military.”

The Captain raised his eyebrows. “You should know this, Tom. The Fourth Republic is having a crisis of national identity. They are trying to re-establish the empire that the Germans and Japanese took away from them, and not everyone is happy to see them doing it. There are problems in Algeria, which is not a colony, but a province of France proper. Indochina has a guerilla war in process. The Franc is in trouble, and that is what this is about.”

“I am not an economist,” I said. “I am a Boatswain’s Mate.” I lit up a smoke of my own with my Zippo, which had the symbol of Fleet Activities Yokosuka on one side, and a Tori gate on the other.

The Captain knitted his brown. “That is precisely why you were selected. You look like a Fleet sailor, but they tell me you think like a cop. Short and simple, France has elected a conservative government to try to fix the economy. Prime Minister Antone Pinay is a member of the petit bourgeoisie, a tanner by trade. He is the first of the old-line Vichyites who has been elected Prime Minister.”

I looked at him attentively, though the politics of France was pretty far from where I put much interest up to this very moment. Now it had my complete attention.

“Piny was locked up for a while after the liberation, but he has rehabilitated himself along with a bunch of his Vichy friends. He helped create the conservative part- the National Center of Independents and Peasants. They call it the CNIP these days, and he was elected Prime Minister last March to fix the national finances. Part of that is an austerity campaign, but the other part is to crack down on the black market. That is why you are here.”

“I was a pretty good cop in Japan,” I said. “But I don’t know the waterfront here. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

The Captain smiled grimly. “You are not going to have to. You are not here to be a cop. You are here to be a target. The Counterfeiting Section of the French National Police will take care of everything else.”

“I need to have some identification if I get stopped in uniform. If you are keeping my passport, I will need to have something that looks like leave papers.”

“Good point.” He rummaged around in his desk and found a form that he handed to me. It was a leave request chit. I sat down at the typewriter at his secretary’s desk. “What carrier is assigned to Sixth Fleet now?” I asked.

“USS Tarawa is operating near the Straits of Messina this week,” He responded, and I dutifully typed the name on the form, and gave myself thirty days leave. Under the “authorized by” block I typed in a name I made up on the spot: “W. T. Hatch, LCDR, USN,” not knowing there really was an officer by that name in the intelligence business. I asked the Captain to please scrawl some kind of signature that made the leave chit look halfway good.

At this point. Captain DeWoIfe handed me a substantial amount of U.S. currency. “You are probably going to need this,” He said. “No receipts- it will make it look like you are on official business. Call if you need more, though you are never to come to this office again. He handed me a piece of paper with some numbers on it.

“If you need anything from now on, or any assistance or more currency, call my Executive Assistant, Barbara. The numbers are her direct office line and her apartment."

He assured me that if anything went wrong on the project, the American Embassy would do everything in their power to get me out of a jam.

‘In the meantime, at high noon you will be met on the street comer just outside this building. I’ll take you down there and show you where it is. A man by the name of Christides will pick you up and take you for the first meeting with the Surete. He walked me down to the side door to the embassy and pointed to the corner on the Place de la Concorde where I was to stand.

“I wish you good luck,” he said, “The fate of the Fourth Republic could count on it. He smiled again, enigmatically, and turned on his heel. It was a gray day in Paris.

Good luck was exactly what I was going to need.

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