Colette Fò, my neighbour from across the landing, must have been thinking more or less the same thing herself, because she looked as preoccupied as I did whenever we crossed paths in the lift, each with our big bags. I decided to break the ice and dive straight in, getting right to the point:

“Tell me, Madame Fò, would it bother you if I were to pay my building and administration fees in cash this quarter?”

The first decision the Fòs had made once they had majority ownership in the building was to sack the property manager and take over management of the whole building themselves.

I had never noticed to what extent this morose creature was a Chinese version of myself. Similarly dressed in grey or black off-the-rack outfits, always carrying a plastic bag, up at 6 a.m. and never in bed before midnight, and with the whole family apparently relying on her with no support from any Monsieur Fò, whom I imagined to be dead or somewhere in prison. You only had to look at her to see that she too was getting no pleasure from the capital she was accumulating; and it was substantial capital, seeing as she owned at least four bars-tabacs in the neighbourhood and I don’t know how many apartments.

Her gaze settled on me, and I could feel her weighing me up as if to assess my future usefulness in the shorter or longer term.

“You have too much cash?”

“You could say that.”

“Me, buy your apartment for market value plus cash less 30 percent commission.”

“The apartment’s worth 540. So if I give you 300 in cash, you buy it from me for 750 and you keep 90, right? Ninety’s a lot, isn’t it? Laundering is usually 20 percent.”

We also had that in common: I was quick with numbers.

“Lots of work to make money disappear.”

“I’ll think about it. 90,000 euros commission is quite a bit.”

And we each went home. With my Hermès bag and my pink diamonds, I had potentially laundered 500,000 euros. The sale of my apartment would add another 200,000 to that; then there was my life annuity which was a work in progress. It was all beginning to take shape.

Towards the end of November, I was given a new series of translations in a case involving far greater quantities of drugs than the amounts I was dealing with my bunch of losers. It involved Tunisians, some of whom were based in the West Indies and who were importing cocaine from Colombia — which they were paying for in hash. In tonnes of hash. But I didn’t dare make contact with them as I had with Scotch because the file originated with the Central Bureau for Drug Control and I was suspicious that the guys I was listening to had been recruited by the police to set up “fake genuine” deliveries.