‘Just “Max” is fine. And on the contrary,’ I said, ‘there’s a picture I’d like you to, uh, interpret for me.’ Baaz cleared his throat. ‘For us,’ I corrected myself.

‘I see. That’s most …’ he paused. ‘Tell me, who is the painting of?’ I dragged on the Marlboro and looked over at Baaz. Baaz stared at us, drumming the air with his fingers. ‘One of Ezra’s friends, perhaps?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You could say that. It’s a portrait,’ I gripped the cigarette between my teeth, took out the hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Moshe, ‘of Benjamin Franklin.’

He took the bill and looked at it, his eyes darting between me and the money.

‘A good man,’ he said, ‘by all accounts.’ And then, turning the note over, ‘But not, I think, an angel.’

I rubbed my face with my hands. It was past midday and I hadn’t eaten. We’d been perched on two wooden stools in a small, stuffy space above the storeroom-cum-gallery with growing leg cramp and decreasing expectations. I probed the wounds in my shoulder and thigh with my forefinger to distract myself. They hurt – and the dressing on my collarbone was leaking. At least the scratches I’d picked up on the beach in Kent had scabbed over, though the wire cut on my hands from the night run across the Mayo countryside to Doc’s bled when I picked at it.

As soon as Moshe had gone to work, Baaz had slipped into trance-like reflection. When I’d asked him what he was thinking about, he’d replied, ‘Factoring primes.’

I’d let him get on with it.

All the while that Moshe examined the banknote, he fed me with escapades from his past. Perhaps Ezra had contacted him. Maybe he’d called Ezra. Either way, he had decided to trust me, and to talk. Maybe he didn’t get to speak English very often in Mea She’arim. Maybe Ezra had given him a green light to gab. Whatever the case, once he started talking, he couldn’t stop: what started as a trickle ended up as a flood.

Painting, it turned out, was merely a profitable sideline for the Traitor. Moshe Mendel Katz’s real vocation was money – specifically, the mass production of fake paper notes. In 1995, between the First and Second Intifadas, he told us, he’d been arrested, and then co-opted, by the secret services to help them pump an ocean of forged cash into the pockets and vaults of Israel’s Arab neighbours. If he cut the plates, the Israeli government would cut him a deal. So, he did – and Special Forces smuggled them across the border, where they were installed in printing presses hidden in a network of caves north of Beirut. The operation was fronted by the Bulgarian mafia and run out of Tel Aviv.