In any case, the driver saw nothing unusual about a young Moroccan guy helping his mother with her laundry bags in a place where everybody is carrying large checked plastic bags filled with washing. Once he was back in his seat after removing one of the two bags from the trunk, I opened it up as if I was just checking to see what was in it, and showed Scotch’s brother the twenty-five neatly stacked 1-kilo packets. The transaction was swiftly completed and everybody went their own way.

“What if I find the notes for another metre before the 15th?” Scotch asked me over the phone once I was back in the taxi.

“I’ll do it for 4 for a metre and a half, 100s and 200s only though, otherwise you get nothing,” I said, not beating around the bush, and thinking how I’d be translating the exchange the next day.

Needless to say, the party Philippe had organized that very evening to celebrate his new position could not have come at a worse time. After my own private celebration for having made it home alive to walk the dog and finger my 112,000 euros, I then had to put on my game face and get myself to a café in the 20th arrondissement packed to the rafters with cops. I was not in the best of moods.

When I arrived, he was surrounded by male and female colleagues, all chatting away while inelegantly quaffing their beer straight from the bottle. I helped myself to a — I’m not sure what it was, something white, warm, alcoholic and bubbly — then planted myself in a corner waiting for it to end.

It’s not that I’m particularly snobby, they just don’t make me laugh anymore, all those cops, with their dodgy jokes that I know off by heart. Also, I don’t like drinking cheap wine. Before things got a bit tight, as they say, if anybody had asked me whether I liked champagne, I wouldn’t have known what to say. It was part of my natural habitat, what had always been poured into my nonchalantly held-out glass. But after twenty-five years of unlikely drinks parties with all kinds of concoctions on offer — all of them white, bubbly and utterly revolting — one thing I have worked out is that champagne has nothing to do with all that shit. So there you go.

I could feel Philippe’s eyes riveted on me and it was making me uncomfortable.

“What?” I said, almost aggressively.