‘Keep me out of it if you do,’ he said. Then he laughed.

‘You know, the game has changed to such a degree I doubt anything would happen? It hasn’t asked for her since before you were last here. It’s interested in something else now.’

After they had come to an agreement, the assistant left Epstein to it and drove around the city all day in her Cadillac car. Strange forces were at work. She remembered everyone she killed, but she didn’t remember killing Toni Reno. Eventually, midnight or gone, she turned up at the Tango du Chat with George the tailor on her arm. George looked under the weather, but he allowed her to buy him several drinks and paid real attention to everything she said. It was quiet at the Tango du Chat. The music was over for the night. Edith Bonaventure, who owned the place, sat behind the bar reading one of her father’s diaries. People came in for a late drink, then when they saw the assistant – who was mixing Black Heart rum and bishopsweed, giving everyone those louche amused stares of hers – went out again without having one.

At around two thirty am she asked George:

‘Do you think a person like me can forget killing someone?’

She began to tell him all the other things she couldn’t remember about herself. For her, she said, talking to George was like talking to a doctor. It was a release. ‘Someone like you knows everything about someone like me.’

George knew nothing, except that in her present form she had come out of a chopshop tank in Preter Coeur. What he didn’t get was who else had been involved. SportCrime? EMC? Whatever she had been originally, he thought, the dice were loaded against her from that point in the story. Some bunch of charlatans had reinscribed her as a cruel joke. Fourteen-year-old coders and cut-boys, ripped on growth hormone from a native lemur species. He could imagine the smell of their fried food and café électrique. Radio Retro, your Station to the Stars, blaring reconstructed Oort Country tunes across the workshop while they tuned her, laying in a second nervous system on self-organising nanofibres, throttling up her reflexes, deciding whether to put in radar, already placing bets on her in fights she was too illegal to be entered for. She would never remember who she had been.

‘At birth,’ he told her, ‘this is my guess, you were already thirty, thirty-two years old?’

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘This is why I like you, George.’