She washed the walls of the room where he had slept with a mix of St. Marc’s household cleaning powder and bleach, and burnt all his furniture and the few meagre items he had left behind. All I had left of him was a pebble. An ordinary black pebble with a curious pattern that he had found when he was out walking. Even that she managed to steal from me and put in the bin.

Then, as if he had never spent any time with us, she simply resumed her collecting of problematic housekeepers.

That evening, a little drunk, I told Philippe a light version of this story and that made me happy.

5

You’ll be hungry again in an hour

While stacking my wads of cash in piles, I came across a 200-euro note with writing on it, slipped in with those Scotch had given me. Normally, notes like these were in small denominations of five, and on them would be handwritten messages in all sorts of languages — things like Money is king, sovereign debt, the fallen people, or Politicos y banqueros, una disgracia para la nación, or In the name of the law, you are hereby indebted to me . . . Marks left by utopians who dreamed of breaking the machine, before releasing them back into the European currency market like so many grains of sand. There was no shortage of irony in the fact that these notes would end up in the hands of drug traffickers, those paragons of capitalism.

I had never seen one worth so much. What was going on inside the head of the person who had written you’ll be hungry again in an hour on such a big denomination, thereby risking it being declined?

Proudly I placed this very special 200-euro note in the corner of The Little Fireworks Collector’s frame like a New York hot dog vendor who frames his first dollar. It was official: the Godmother was open for business . . .

People were hard at work in Scotch’s universe, gathering my money.

Intercept No. 8635 dated Sunday, 8 August. Intercept taken from the telephone device of the person under surveillance originating from line no. 2126456584539, the registered owner of which is not known to the Moroccan authorities. The person using the line is Karim Moufti alias Scotch. His interlocutor is Mounir Charkani alias Lizard.

Words in Arabic have been translated by Madame Patience Portefeux, who has been engaged for this purpose and who hereby jointly certifies this transcript.

Lizard: Yo’ salam aleikoum, you good or what?