Ali Aziz was waiting for me by the pool. He had the studied good looks of a man who had been sanded, buffed and polished by professionals. The skin on his face was tanned to a deep honey-gold. There were no bags under his eyes or wrinkles on his forehead, no signs of the stress of ordinary life. His only resistance to vanity was that he no longer wore a toupee to cover his bald spot. He looked much better without it, actually. He was so rich now that he didn’t need to pretend about anything.

Ali’s villa was an immense place, surrounded on three sides by the azure of the Mediterranean. A long driveway wound up the hill, past a tennis court, to a kind of plateau of green lawns and flower gardens carved out of the hillside. Modern sculpture graced the grounds, and there was a faint sound of orchestral music coming from speakers hidden in the trees. The house itself was magnificent—painted a creamy white, with sumptuous furniture and huge picture windows looking out on the sea. Between the main residence and a lavish guesthouse was a large pool shaped like an elongated figure eight, with fountains and a waterfall and small islands of green. Rising from a pool chair to greet me, one hand outstretched and the other grasping a cellular phone, was my host.

“My dear Eric,” he said, ignoring the man on the other end of the cell phone who continued to babble away. “What a pleasure it is to see you. Put on some trunks and have a swim. I will be with you in an instant.” He rolled his eyes, as if to say that the telephone conversation was mere business, whereas I represented that most precious thing on earth, which was friendship.

Ali Aziz liked to think of himself as an investment banker, and in many ways he was. The chief difference was that his deals generally involved the payment of bribes to politicians, abroad and in France, but they were no less complicated for that. They required networks of offshore accounts, sophisticated legal services, careful money management. Above all, they required absolute discretion and reliability in sharing out the spoils among the parties to the transaction.