American Express

American Express is depicted through its travellers’ cheques and the private investigation that followed their forgery. The company’s financial instruments draw an international criminal network into view; its pressure on French authorities also creates a danger that the narrator later turns to his advantage when protecting Grenade.

The Forged Cheques

In June 1947, Grenade became involved with the Perrier gang, operating from the Acceuil Café on the Left Bank, and helped produce forged American Express travellers’ cheques in hundred-dollar denominations. The counterfeits were imperfect in specific ways: their red serial numbers were too dark, and their watermarks had been printed rather than impressed. Even so, they sold readily on the black market for about a third of their face value.

Some of the cheques were detected while being carried across a border in diplomatic bags. Grenade’s part in the scheme included finding a way to microfilm diplomatic mail. When American Express applied pressure, French police watched the courier routes and found Grenade with $50,000 in forged, signed cheques. The episode places the company at the point where a financial fraud becomes an international policing matter.

Investigation and Its Consequences

French Intelligence, which had worked with Grenade intermittently since his first radio contacts in September 1940, could not extricate him once political complications became involved. The evidence does not describe a direct intervention by American Express in his arrest or the later disposition of the charges; it does establish that the company’s pressure helped prompt the police surveillance that led to his discovery.

The narrator responded by using American Express’s own investigation as one channel for a protective deception. He arranged for a document to be placed in official files presenting Grenade as a U.S. Army agent investigating the forgery of U.S. military scrip. He then leaked that account to an American Express detective and to the second secretary of a senator. After the charges against Grenade were dropped, the fabricated papers were destroyed. The narrator presents this earlier rescue as a favour returned when Grenade later sent him a warning and financial assistance.

Narrative Role

American Express is not developed as an institution with an internal structure or stated policy. Its role is specific and consequential: forged cheques give the company a reason to press for action, and its detective provides a plausible recipient for information that the narrator wants circulated. The same company therefore marks both the escalation of Grenade’s danger and the narrator’s calculated use of private investigative channels to help him.