So the Oilofina boss thought to himself that with a bit of ingenuity and audacity, he could buy this defective naphtha and turn it into mediocre-quality diesel himself, which he would then on-sell to the Africans, making a pretty packet in the process. In Europe, fuel sold into the market is not allowed to exceed a certain limit of sulphur content in order to comply with environmental pollution regulations, but in Africa it’s different. People drive around in wrecks running on diesel that exceeds the regulation limit by five hundred times, and the brokers call it African-quality diesel. Millions of people die every year from respiratory diseases caused by sulphur dioxide, but the rest of the world couldn’t give a shit and brokers like de Rigny grease the governments’ palms so the regulations, or rather the lack thereof, remain as they are.

The odyssey starts.

Three characters in this story: the cousin, of course, with his genetic nose for business. An obscure Russian ship’s captain, globalisation’s dogsbody, used to receiving his orders via satellite telephone without ever meeting his employers. And of course, Africa. Africa, which rhymes with moolah, corruption, scapegoat, impunity, coup d’état . . . Complete walk in the park.

Philippe de Rigny is in the oil-broking business and not in refining, but that doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing a de Rigny doesn’t know how to do.

So he decides to desulphurise his naphtha himself, using an age-old, polluting procedure – the merox process – which consists of washing it with caustic soda. You put the naphtha and the soda into an uncovered vat and after twenty-four hours a disgusting diesel floats to the surface while the sulphur, combined with the sodium and oxygen, falls to the bottom of the vat. This residual product is ultra-toxic and corrosive. It looks like thick black syrup and gives off a gas that has the stench of death: this is the mercaptan that everybody knows about because it’s used to perfume our town gas so leaks can be detected. The cousin calculated that if he sweetened his 30,000 tonnes of low-cost naphtha on the cheap using the merox process and resold the diesel fuel he thus obtained to the Africans, he would be able to pocket 7 million dollars. And in order to make an even bigger profit margin, he decides to carry out the chemical reaction himself – where? – on the high seas, of course, right there on his tanker, in international waters, where nobody will come and give him any grief.