Free Tigerman by Nick Harkaway Page A

a single measure in a little red glass.
    The rum was brown and thick, and there were veins like treacle in it. Every September, Shola harvested his small marijuana crop – the plant grew well on the island, at least on the sheltered side – and selected some of the best leaves. He dipped them briefly in boiling water to kill anything living, and pushed a handful into each of twelve bottles of sweet white alcohol. Then he buried the bottles in the mud at the back of his house, and the sun baked the mud and the mud coddled the rum, so that when he dug it up again in July the leaves were beaded with resiny sap. He shook the bottles one by one until the rum was the colour of crude oil, then poured it through a fresh linen cloth, and finally stoppered the finished product again and laid the bottles by for special occasions and dire emergencies. It was quite respectable. Mancreu men had brewed fortified rums for as long as anyone could remember. There were pictures of missionaries drinking them and losing their inhibitions, and stories of Knights Templar finding out about them and mistaking them for Christ’s Blood. The original indigenes had made theirs with a local hallucinogenic root, but no one used that any more because it was addictive and had the unfortunate property of sending you blind and mad. Marijuana was better, and you could sell it to the Black Fleet for Swiss francs. Shola no longer trusted dollars. The Chinese owned the dollar, Shola said. It was only a matter of time.
    The Sergeant declined the drink with thanks, though part of him very much wanted to accept. A strange, Victorian spectre dangled over him: the image of a fat, hirsute colonial administrator taking to the local drugs and losing his mind, running naked through the streets. Children laughed and pointed, women smirked. Men sucked air through their teeth as something terrible and a little bit funny happened to his exposed member. People – undefinable people, but including Kershaw, Beneseffe, the Witch, Pechorin, and of course, Kaiko Inoue and even the boy – would think less of him.
    Shola shrugged and poured half the glass carefully back into the bottle, then drank the rest. The Sergeant, feeling embarrassed at this evidence of his own prudishness, accepted a bowl of soup instead, and returned his attention to Eddie Coyle.
    The men came in as Shola was shifting the café from one mood to another. He had turned on the neon lights and taken the tea kettle off the hob, but he had not closed the shutters. He had gone up to the private rooms to change his workmanish daytime shirt for the extraordinarily ugly red silk one he wore at night. Every day he looked exactly the same. Perhaps he had several sets of each uniform. The Sergeant imagined a daytime closet upstairs filled with vests and aprons and grubby trousers, and opposite it an old wardrobe filled with a row of Casanova blouses, vintage 1974 from Yeah, Baby! of Brick Lane, bought from eBay and shipped by sea to Qatar and then on to Mancreu, vacuum-sealed by Shola’s explicit instruction, lest the damp creep in and they arrive covered in mould.
    There were five men, and they arrived as the Sergeant finished his soup. They were local but not familiar, and from his vantage the Sergeant had time to be uncomfortable with their intent faces and their focus. He shifted his weight from the bones of his arse to his feet, and felt the muscles in his stomach tighten as he leaned forward over his empty bowl.
    The shooting started.
    They weren’t systematic but they made up for it with sheer aggression. They had a shotgun and four Chinese AKs. Two fishermen having dinner before going out for the evening went down first, then the dogmeat seller who always smelled of chum. Two good-time girls at the bar – Isobel and Fleur, or so they had claimed – tried to dive behind it and were hit on the way over. Then Shola.
    The Sergeant saw Shola very clearly, because they were on opposing trajectories. The Sergeant