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leather apron. He held a pair of garden shears in one hand, while the other parted the lush, ridged fronds.
    ‘Ah, Mr Brodzinski!’ he cried, ‘Glad you’re here. Let me put my gardening things away and we’ll go upstairs to, ah, talk.’
    Tom thought he might come to loathe Adams’s ‘ah’, a tic that suggested everything the Consul said was judicious, considered and yet never the less utterly provisional. Adams’s arrival didn’t stop the women’s chattering, and he’d had to raise his voice to be heard above it.
    Tom thought it odd that the Consul’s tone was so lighthearted – joyful, even. Taking him in more fully, he noted further transformations: Adams’s eyes were bright, and there was a happy slackness to his stride.
    Tom waited while the older man took off his apron and placed it, together with the shears, in a battered cupboard behind the town car. He then followed Adams’s narrow rump up an open flight of stairs, which emerged into the room he’d already seen from the front door.
    ‘Drink?’ Adams asked, with what Tom felt was unseemly levity, given the urgency with which the Consul had impelled him to come.
    ‘Round this time I normally have a long cool one, a Daquiri mixed with the local palm spirit. Some Anglos say this climate doesn’t, ah, allow for early drinking, but I say, they can’t handle it.’
    ‘Um . . . I dunno, yeah, OK, then,’ Tom mumbled; and then, finding his tongue, continued: ‘Those women downstairs in the town car – are they, kind of, clients of yours, or what?’
    Adams, who had opened the front of a drinks cabinet, and was mixing the cocktails with near-professional bravura, snorted at this. He paused and looked over at Tom. For a moment, it seemed as if he was going to launch into an explanation of their presence, but he only snapped: ‘No, friends.’
    Tom, although understanding full well that Adams wished to avoid discussing his private life, couldn’t forbear: ‘What about the town car?’ he pressed. ‘Strange place to see one.’
    The Consul took a long slug on his Daquiri before answering, and Tom, who had grasped the chilly pole of the highball glass, followed suit, unthinkingly. The drink was a physical wrench, jerking him right into the present, slamming his face against hard reality.
    Was the palm spirit like mescal, or something? Tom wondered, because at once the pulsing of the cicadas was that much louder, the heat more insistent; the swirls of Adam’s native daubs threatened to rotate like pinwheels.
    Adams tugged at his long U of a chin, in lieu of a goatee. ‘I was working in the south, at our embassy in the capital. When I had to take early retirement . . .’ Adams paused and, deliberately and unselfconsciously, lifted one hand high above his head, then brought it down to gently pat the back of his head. He resumed: ‘The town car was offered to me as part of my, ah, termination package. Only just made it here. Not the best set of wheels for, ah, off-roading.’
    He took another pull on his drink and sat down in the rattan easy-chair opposite the one Tom had collapsed into. He set his glass down on a matching side table and leaned forward, caging the fluttery moment with his wiry hands. ‘Two points, Mr Brodzinski.’ Adams drew one long finger far back with another. It looked painful. ‘One: Mr Lincoln has, very unfortunately, developed an infection.’
    ‘Infection?’
    ‘Two: the Assistant DA has already visited the Mimosa, together with police ballistics experts–’
    ‘Ballistics?’
    ‘Mr Brodzinski, I’d be grateful if you didn’t interrupt. The ballistics people have established – to the satisfaction of the Public Prosecutor at least – that the trajectory of your, ah, cigarette end would’ve taken it inside the exclusion zone that forbids smoking within sixteen metres of all public buildings.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’ Tom was more than incredulous: he was oscillating in and out of hysteria. ‘Smoking is