Port of Algiers Algiers, Algeria 2135 30 March 1943
Dick Canidy leaned against the side of the warehouse as he watched the unloading of a pair of forty-foot-long wooden-hulled fishing boats. The vessels were moored on either side of a T-shaped dock that was at the far eastern end of the port, a ramshackle area separate from the main military dockage. The longshoremen had been steadily off-loading wooden boxes filled with iced-down fish for longer than the ninety minutes that Canidy had stood there in the dark shadows.
After Canidy had left Hank Darmstadter with the C-47 Gooney Bird at the airfield, he had stopped in at the OSS villa to drop off his duffel, which held his change of clothing and the Johnson light machine gun and ammo, and to get exact directions to Francisco Nola’s dock from Stan Fine.
Fine had warned Canidy not to expect anything like a warm reception when he arrived and he’d been right. Almost to a man, the rough-looking longshoremen had given Canidy glares that clearly related that they did not like being watched by a stranger, even one supposedly known to Francisco Nola.
Canidy caught himself yawning long and hard.
Damn, it’s been a long day! he thought, when he’d finally finished. And it’s nowhere near being over.
He once more checked the chronograph on his left wrist.
Four hours! Where in hell is that boat?
On the flight back to the airfield at Algiers, Canidy had calculated time and distance and come up with an ETA of the Stefania making it to the dock. According to his figuring, the boat was now was an hour and two minutes overdue.
It was a rough figure but not that rough.
Either my math’s faulty or something’s gone wrong.
I’m guessing the latter….
Beside each fishing boat, a boom mounted on the pier was being used to lift the boxes of iced fish from the holds. It was labor-intensive, as the block and tackle and the pivoting boom were manually operated.
With two men pulling on the rope of the block and tackle, the boxes of fish were lifted out one by on
e. Then another man pushed on the boom to swing each box from above the boat to above the pier. Then the two men at the rope lowered the box to a wooden pallet waiting on the pier.
This was repeated until the pallet had a load of four boxes. Then two other men used a manual lift with steel wheels that fingered into the openings of the pallet, then raised the pallet and its load. With one man pulling on the lift handle and one pushing on the boxes, they maneuvered the fish along the pier and up into the warehouse.
As a load was wheeled past Canidy, he looked at the fish—Fair-sized blackfin tuna, he thought, maybe sixty-pounders—and studied the men, who he saw tried not to make eye contact. The one pulling on the handle stopped to open the wooden sliding door. Canidy noticed that he and the others looked less like they were Algerians and more like the Sicilians he’d seen in Palermo.
Sicilian Mafia, like those on Nola’s boat.
I really don’t like these guys, but I have come to understand them better.
Ironically, the fact that they’re known as such miserable shits plays in my favor. No one would believe I’m connected—especially to the capo di tutti capi….
The “boss of all bosses,” Charles “Lucky” Luciano, was in the big house, New York’s Great Meadow Prison in Comstock. The Guinea thug could have been serving time for any crime on his lengthy rap sheet—running booze, heroin, numbers, not to mention murder.
But, of course, it had been a woman—women—who’d done him in.
Luciano was doing time on a record sentence of thirty to fifty years for prostitution racketeering. His hookers had testified against him on charges that finally had stuck—ensuring that the son of a bitch was the one who ultimately got screwed.
Major Richard M. Canidy, U.S. Army Air Forces, had a connection with the ruthless Charlie Lucky because Luciano—ever the savvy operator—still was running his very big, very effective, and very illicit syndicate from his cell.
When OSS Director Wild Bill Donovan had decided to send Canidy into Sicily—first to find, and then to extricate, Professor Arturo Rossi before some German SS officer put two and two together and came up with Rossi’s connection to Professor Frederick Dyer, whom Canidy had just smuggled out through Hungary—it had been suggested that Canidy would need help from some type of underground resistance group there.
And without question the underworld of the Mafia was the best connected, both in Sicily and in New York City.
As it happened, there in fact had been a recently established relationship—one kept very quiet—between Charlie Lucky and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
The Battle of the Atlantic was raging, and German U-boat wolf packs were being damn deadly in their attempt to strangle England by shutting down the supply lines sailing from America. Convoys of 441-foot-long Liberty ships ferried food, fuel, munitions, men, and more to war. Each convoy contained scores of ships, each ship the equivalent load of some three hundred railroad cars. And Nazi torpedoes were blasting more and more of them to the Atlantic Ocean bottom.
It was thought that there existed the very strong possibility that the so-called fifth column of German sympathizers in New York City was giving aid and comfort to the wolf packs—anything from sending the U-boats signals that contained intelligence on the convoys to providing boats with food and bladders of fuel for replenishing U-boats in the night.
ONI’s Third Naval District was responsible for securing the waterfront in New York, Connecticut, and part of New Jersey. But it was no secret that the Mafia really ran the docks, just as it had its presence in the bars, the restaurants, the hotels—in damn near every business.