Moshe never said as much, but it wasn’t hard to guess how he and Ezra first met. And the Bulgarian connection might have been coincidental, but in a world as small as ours I doubted it. Seconds before he’d been shot, Lukov had told me that ‘even the fucking Lebanese’ were interested in the Arkhangel note. Maybe that was code. Maybe the gunmen wearing keffiyehs by the bakery were the Israelis. Indeed, Talia had all but confirmed it.

Whatever questions there were about what had just gone down in Paris, the results of Moshe’s Middle Eastern enterprise were certain. So successful were his 1988-series bills – his plates had printed nearly a billion dollars’ worth – that they didn’t just destabilize the Lebanese economy, they became a global pariah. Once finally detected, they were shunned worldwide by corner exchange kiosks and central banks alike. But by then, of course, it was too late for anyone who’d bought them to give them back. The following year – Moshe recounted while he ran a chemical test on the ink on our note – the Federal Reserve had entirely redesigned the hundred-dollar bill.

‘Because of me, Benjamin Franklin got a facelift. And the best of all?’ he whispered. ‘Iran got the blame.’

As far as a crook’s curriculum vitae went, it was spectacular. I reckoned it must have been, all told, one of the most successful asymmetric attacks carried out before the internet weaponized the misplaced brilliance of boys like Baaz.

Moshe had left us with his history and a fresh glass of tea ‘to check his files’. Baaz and I held on to the banknote. An hour later, Moshe reappeared. Cheeks flushed. Breath short. Brow moist. Whatever he’d discovered – or confirmed – had made him hurry to tell us. Baaz came to from his maths meditation. I sat up straight.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘It is absolutely genuine,’ Moshe declared. ‘And one hundred per cent fake news.’

‘I don’t understand.’ It was Baaz who replied, but he spoke for both of us. ‘How can it be a genuine fake? It has to be one thing or the other.’

‘Well, yes …’ Moshe ran his right hand across his forehead and drew up his own stool to the work bench where Baaz and I had sat waiting for the verdict, ‘and no. It’s both things at the same time.’

While he lit one of his own cigarettes, I finished the last mouthful of tea from my glass – long since stewed.