‘OK, 1,225.5 coins are worth 1,702,440 US dollars and 9 cents.’ I opened my mouth, goldfish-like, but Baaz ploughed on. ‘On the second of January last year I invested 10,000 dollars in Ether. One Ether was worth 8 dollars and 16 cents then.’

‘I … I don’t know where to begin. I mean, for a start, where on earth did you get 10,000 dollars from?’

‘From my auntie. “Living expenses”, huna?’

‘Wow, that’s …’ I started to laugh. ‘That’s crazy.’ Baaz started to laugh, too. ‘You’re a millionaire. And your auntie … she has no idea, does she?’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I think today would be a good day to cash in, don’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I think it would.’

The Challenger 300 banked hard to the south-east. The dark lines of the boulevards cut the city into what looked like slabs of stone, paving the Île-de-France white in the weak morning sun. The little streets I’d raced along two days before merged into a web of fine black lines between them, knitting the capital together. Of the underworld that stretched out south of the Seine, there was no sign: no ripple in the lanes and highways, no hint of what lay beneath. Not even from that unique perspective hundreds of feet above the ground, it seemed, could the whole of the city be seen. The big, bright, imperial capital was as lost to the catacombs as the dead they concealed were lost to the world above.

But as we climbed higher and the buildings shrank, the Arc de Triomphe began to look like the sepulchres in Montparnasse, the Champs-Élysées and the wheel of the avenues spinning away from it like walkways for the curious and the bereaved to meander among the graves. The picture warped and juddered in the slipstream, and for a moment it looked as if the city was consuming itself in the haze. And then a blanket of grey spread beneath the winking green eye of the starboard wingtip and Paris was buried under the clouds.

I adjusted the Grach in the waistband of my jeans and stretched out in the beige leather seat. The flight attendant who’d brought me a double Johnnie Walker Black before take-off returned with an ashtray. I unwrapped the packet of Gauloises I’d lifted from Lukov’s corpse and lit the tobacco. The smoke was cool and soothing and I dragged it down deep into my lungs, holding it there for a long moment before exhaling and blurring the cabin with a blue-grey fog. That was the great thing about private jets: no security, and no no-smoking signs.