Scotch: You know what fuckin’ Brandon said, about the 12 I showed him in the photo . . . He didn’t fuck around. Your juice, it’s hot shit, I’m gonna put in an order straight up, 100 percent, that’s what he said . . .

Lizard: Dude . . .

Scotch: Kill two stones with one bird, with your cousin, bro’. The Tunisian. Things are movin’ in the city. We’ll have a hookah at the Prince and have a meeting, ’cos dude, I’m feelin’ it, one hundred percent. You can start sayin’ to them already to get their notes together for a metre, I’m tellin’ you.

I was forced to leave the word godmother in the transcript, because it appeared in French in the text that had been submitted to me. It bothered me at the time, but then I told myself that I’d just found my criminal alias. So, I’d be the Godmother. I imagined the crime squad detectives already had me down by that name in the numerous exchanges in French that didn’t pass through my filter. There was a lot of chatter going around about my hash; it wasn’t every day that such good quality product fell into the lap of dealers quite so eager to get their hands on it.

I thought about where the transactions could take place. It had to be somewhere both discreet and safe, but also where there would be enough people around for me to feel secure. After all, I didn’t want my customers to hold me up at gun point and take back the money they’d just handed over to me — best-case scenario — or, even worse, to torture a confession out of me as to where I’d stashed the rest of the drugs. A place where you could give big bags to Arabs without attracting the attention of one of the thousands of patrol cars criss-crossing greater Paris thanks to the state of emergency . . . The Quick fast food joint parking lot was small, and thus too exposed, so I opted for the Fleury prison parking lot, where the families of the inmates are always coming and going, laden with bags. It might seem an odd place to deal drugs, but there’s no better place to get swallowed up in a crowd.

I put my two plastic checked bags from the Tati store, weighing 25 kilograms each, on trolleys to avoid doing my back in, then loaded them into my car in the parking space under my apartment building. I drove to another arrondissement, parked, and got a taxi to take me and the bags to Fleury. There, I asked the driver to wait for me on the edge of the great expanse of carpark, with the two bags in his trunk, while I looked for my so-called nephews who weren’t answering their phones.