FRANCE: Loulou

“Look out for Loulou,” was a warning often whispered in the Paris underworld when chunky Louis Métra was chief of the Vice and Narcotic Brigade. A Parisian cop since 1925, “Loulou” Métra, a mild, tactful and polite fellow, had an insidious talent for winning the confidence of shady characters. The labyrinths of Parisian vice being what they are, Loulou was also skill ful at extricating prominent citizens from embarrassing situations. Once he got the delicate task of recovering a royal jewel impulsively presented by a visiting for eign prince to a professional homosexual.

Loulou had the bauble back safe in its rightful owner’s hands within two hours, with no one the wiser. On one of his visits to Montmartre, he rounded up the notorious Mancuso brothers, international dope peddlers who presumably held the Paris concession from that great cartelist of dope, Lucky Luciano.

While relentlessly pursuing international drug traffickers, however, Louis Métra confessed a romantic sympathy for the addicts — especially artists, writers and wealthy thrill-seekers — who bought their goods. “My curiosity is renewed each time I watch an opium smoker going through the rite,” he once said. “It is like a priest venerating a divinity. The bluish smoke goes up like incense dedicated to some ethereal goddess. Opium smokers are delicate, delicious people.”

In 1948 Chief Inspector Louis Métra retired from the force and set up practice as a private detective, and most of the Paris underworld breathed easier. Many of Louis’ old friends among the drug addicts continued to visit him at his new office below Montmartre. They visited him so regularly, in fact, that Louis’ former colleagues became suspicious. One day last fall, armed with a telescope, police in an apartment across the street watched two known female addicts drop in on Louis and pick up a large package. They followed the women back to their apartment and caught them busily boiling down a batch of opium. There was still no direct proof that Métra had provided the opium, but the police kept watching and waiting. The watching was doubly difficult since Métra knew all the cop tricks, and it would not do to trail him in the familiar black Citroen.

Last week the cops got all the evidence they needed. Louis Métra parked his car on the fashionable Boulevard Suchet. got out and walked a few feet, then satisfied that he was not being followed, returned to his car for a small package of opium for a nobleman in a nearby apartment. At this point, the cops jumped out of their Buick convertible, caught him with the goods and arrested the onetime foe of Parisian vice for dope peddling.