I took advantage of her death to launder some of my money through her estate, and also accepted Colette Fò’s offer to buy my apartment. Despite my act of valour, she didn’t offer me a discount, but she did say this, which floored me:

“You can leave drug in basement until you find other place.”

I stood there, speechless.

“I thought you didn’t even see me,” I stammered.

She smiled. “In the building we call you the phantom. But you less phantom now. Lot less.”

She invited me in for some tea and told me a little about her life. She was seven years younger than me and, like many of the Chinese in Belleville, came from Wenzhou province, a small port of 8 million inhabitants, 400 kilometres from Shanghai. She was definitely not a widow as I had imagined, and somewhere in China, there existed a Mr. Fò whom she never saw and who produced counterfeit spare auto parts that she flogged to mechanics, thereby explaining the red-white-and-blue plastic Tati bags weighing 2 tonnes that she too was always lugging around in the lift. Her family also owned a hair factory which made extensions that were imported to France and resold to Africans in Paris who then sold them on to their country of origin. Every cent earned in China, Africa or France was reinvested in Pari Mutuel Urbain betting licences for bars-tabacs, giant money laundering machines, and from there into real estate.

You may call us wogs, vulgar foreigners, outsiders — but tremble, good people, for we shall crush you all!

She had arrived twelve years ago, reuniting with a distant uncle who was already living in our building. She had two children: a girl born in China who was now about twenty and whom she had not seen grow up, and another born in France who was twelve and with whom she had been pregnant as an immigrant. As soon as she became a French citizen, she had brought over the whole family, one at a time, including cousins and elderly family members. She had chosen her first name because Colette was the only French woman writer she had studied in Wenzhou, when she had learned our language for a year.

She was a very pleasant woman, and I was annoyed with myself for not having tried to get to know her before moving out.