Read The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6) for Free Online

net in case my hard drive dies. That happened to me once and it was hell. What you have there are my father’s memoirs, typed up from his handwritten journals.’
    ‘He was a diplomat, is that right?’
    ‘Yes, he was in the American Embassy after the war and then on the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Europe’s economies. That was where I first read about your train, where he called it the slush-fund.’
    ‘The Mayor reckons it was worth about three hundred million in today’s money,’ he said.
    She shrugged as she rested both hands on the plunger of the cafetière and began to press down. ‘At the time it was worth a lot more in relative terms, at least until the devaluations. In 1945, the official exchange rate was just over a hundred francs to the dollar. But by 1949 it was over three hundred to the dollar. The money aboard the Neuvic train was certainly a vast amount, worth about five per cent of total government spending in 1946. Put it this way, the national education budget that year was 470 million francs, and the Neuvic train held about five times that.’
    Five times the education budget? The proportion staggered him, but Jacqueline had just begun. There were at least three official inquiries into the fate of the Neuvic money, she explained, adding that they had all pretty much whitewashed the whole affair, claiming the money went to finance the Resistance and their families and some was used to bribe prison guards. That was true up to a point, she conceded, but only for a fraction of the money, maybe half or a little more. Millions had been stolen.
    ‘How much do you know about French politics after the war?’ she asked.
    ‘De Gaulle came to power after the liberation of Paris in 1944 but resigned in 1946,’ he replied. ‘I’m not sure why.’
    ‘That’s simple. De Gaulle wanted a strong presidency rather than the unstable parliaments of the pre-war days. The parties, who’d been in a coalition of Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats, naturally wanted a return to the party system and they accused De Gaulle of wanting to be a dictator. Then the other two wanted to get rid of the Communists as the Cold War got under way and the Gaullists started building their own party, the RPF. Politics are expensive, so that’s where a lot of the money went, but maybe it was more virtual than real.’
    ‘Virtual? I don’t understand.’
    She looked at him. ‘Suppose you’re an American diplomat in Paris in 1946 and 1947, and the Communists are the biggest political party. Remember the Cold War is just getting started. What would American policy be?’
    ‘Stop the Communists, I suppose. And try to strengthen the other parties, the anti-Communists.’
    ‘Right, and if you’re an American diplomat, with all the money in the world, you’d use it to help the anti-Communists, right?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘No, wrong,’ Jacqueline said firmly. ‘At least wrong if you do it in public where there’s immediately a scandal about Americans buying up the French political system. But if some loyal Frenchmen with fine Resistance records start handing out wads of money with a nod and wink and a discreet murmurabout
le train de Neuvic
, nobody asks any questions, even if the money really came from the Americans.’
    ‘But wouldn’t they have to change it from dollars?’
    ‘Yes, but remember how the Marshall Plan worked. The Americans gave dollars to the Europeans to buy food and goods and machine tools to restart their factories. They were repaid in local currency, which the Americans could do nothing with. There were no real exchange markets in those days. So the various American embassies suddenly found themselves sitting on this vast slush-fund of French francs, Italian lire, Dutch guilders and so on. The money went to stop Communism through funding election campaigns, subsidizing newspapers and student organizations, backing Socialist trade unions to undermine the Communist ones.’
    ‘Two slush-funds,