Niko has bent down behind the bar and come up with a tray full of crude water pipes, each with a wooden stem and a red clay bowl. He finds a pair of tongs and lights a piece of charcoal over the gas ring. When it is glowing he adds it to more charcoal in a clay bowl and blows on the pile until Tom can feel the heat of it from where he is sitting. Meanwhile, the band is playing a slow, lurching song with a high, lilting chorus. Batis’s cracked voice takes the lead. Another smell joins the fug of tobacco and in the air. Niko claps his hands and Pavlo stops playing, digs in his pocket and throws something across the heads of the audience. Niko catches it deftly and holds it out to Tom. It looks disappointingly like a large, very dark Oxo cube. ‘Brusiko mavraki,’ he says. ‘Brusa black.’ Niko adds the charcoal and the tongs to the tray, tucks the hashish into the pocket of his waistcoat and takes the tray out into the room. As he walks past a table, someone will nod or lift their chin, and Niko will give them one of the pipes. With the tongs he drops a piece of glowing charcoal into the clay bowl of the pipe, takes out the hashish, and, while the customers watch with eyes like razor blades, breaks off a piece and drops it expertly onto the ember. And on to the next table, as each customer sucks on the mouthpiece, inhales deeply, waits and lets out a plume of smoke. There is coughing and some restrained banter. A pipe reaches the band and is passed from hand to hand, each musician taking a couple of deep drags. Zoë only takes one, Tom can’t help noticing, and barely inhales the smoke, which by this time is hanging thickly in the air and filling the room with herbal, animalic fumes which rather set his teeth on edge. Then suddenly there is a pipe on his table.

‘You want?’ asks Niko. Tom doesn’t know what to do. He glances at the gendarme, who is staring neutrally at the far wall, and turns the mouthpiece towards him.

‘Would you … ?’ he begins. The gendarme smiles politely.

‘Please,’ he says, pushing it back towards Tom.