‘Nobody ever goes looking for men on the islands because it costs too much.’

‘But is there anybody there?’

‘Three thousand souls. You have to make the journey by sailing boat, and it’s dangerous.’

‘Well, find me a boat.’

Chapter 5

5

ONE DAY, WHILE I WAS dealing with the file of a lawyer who had been worked over by his clients, I came up with the idea for my little business.

I had never come across a case like that before, and as I know quite a few people, at least by name, I was curious to know who had been beaten up. I was on my break, so I took the chance to flick through the file as I sat there on my stool.

The victim had told the cops how the dealers had come to his office to extract one of their mates’ files from him. He had of course refused, concerned about possible reprisals on snitches, whose details generally appear at the top of statements: your name is such-and-such, you live at ... So, the dudes beat him up and turned his entire office upside down trying to find the CD-ROM in question. Since that sort of digitised document is incomprehensible if you’re not familiar with legal jargon, once they found it they asked the lawyer to print them out the pages with the lists of users that the police had pulled from the guy’s mobile. The truth was they hadn’t come to avenge their mate but simply to pick up his deals where the latter had left off after his arrest.

Working in reprographics, I used to photocopy dozens of lists every week in the drug squad files, but I had never put a commercial value on them. Suddenly it seemed so blindingly obvious that I wondered why nobody had ever thought to make money from this manna from heaven.

So it was following this discovery, when I was back in my little room under the eaves after putting Juliette to bed, that I started systematically sifting through all that sludge in order to extract my first batch of material.