In four years, I had drawn up an Excel spreadsheet with about fifteen thousand mobile phone numbers, organised according to different criteria: details of the drugs used, the suppliers, the quantities consumed and, most importantly, when the purchasers were brought into the station to snitch on their dealer I would make a note of their real name (and not just Fred 32, the blonde chick or the black guy, as they appeared in the list of contacts). There was no doubling up and I had quite a few addresses of well-known figures who were systematically brought in; the cops love nothing more than to feast their eyes on the celebrity set pissing their pants. It was all saved to the cloud. Now, with a bit of hindsight, I’m wondering why I wasted so much time drawing that thing up. I think you’d probably have to ask those weirdos in the United Sates who stockpile firearms. (I’m very hard on myself.) Whenever they’re asked what they’re going to use the arsenal for, they always give the same answer: they want to be ready. For what? Not even they know. If you want my opinion, it allows them to tell themselves that if they wanted to they could show people what’s what, with their gun-racks filled to the brim. A sort of narcissistic reassurance in a world where they feel disempowered about the fact they’ve got no control over anything. Similarly, this cloud of mass destruction was there to reassure this tortoise on her back, so she could tell herself that she could create one hell of a shitshow if she ever felt the need.

Shady activities require the services of loyal men and women, united by similar backgrounds, so we kept the work in-house, as it were.

My business partners, Ahmed and Mohamed, came from across the landing. The two of them, Dupont and Dupond as I affectionately called them, were the sort of Arabs you invite to improve diversity at parties in Paris because they’re gay, elegant and cool. When I put my cunning idea to them, they looked at me in genuine wonder. One of them said to me: ‘Too good!’ The other: ‘Too cool!’ They knew a lot of people and so didn’t have any problem flogging my lists to dealers with a margin which I suspected was totally over-the-top, but I didn’t give a damn because what mattered to me was being able to work with people I trusted who were in it for the long haul, which has always been the case. I also knew they would do everything to ensure nothing could ever be traced back to them; as for tracing it back to me, that was unthinkable.

In order to launder my money, I first started doing business with Dioulou, the Malian father of a family on my floor (second door to the left of the toilets), whom I paid cash.