5 Smokin'

'Bollocks, is it proof! You'll be saying next that there are - .'
He took out a tobacco tin. It was old and rusted, it could once have contained anything from St Bruno to Golden Virginia. He popped the lid and proferred the two thin cylinders in old fashioned-looking brown cigarette paper. I stared at him, surely he wasn't going to smoke in a pub.
'Relax, we'll smoke 'em outside… Well most of 'em.'
'No thanks.' I said.
He lit up, using an old-fashioned match on the exposed Yorkshire stone above the pew-seat's back.  As he stood, fag glued to his lower lip, he nodded at Bruce the Landlord. Smoke rose towards the light overhead.
'Well, if you want to keep talking, you'll have to come with me.'
I followed him outside. It was raining. He didn't seem to care. He was enjoying his roll-up so much, it could have been a doobie, except for the absence of Sweet Jane's perfume. Even so, there was something about the smell, something unexpected.
'I haven't seen a brown Rizla paper since before we used to be able to smell ganja on the high street.'
His eyes were slitted, the smoke was dense, even though we were standing in the doorway, facing the empty car-park.
'They're not Rizla papers. Too light a brown for those.' He held up his cigarette in the jailhouse grip, between thumb and forefinger and the lit end cowled by his palm. 'This, my friend, is a papiros. It contains tobacco, well some. Also floor-sweepings, natural – non-synthetic – fibres, whatever. And the paper? Well, that is usually just paper, any kind of paper.' He handed me the tobacco tin. I opened it. Perhaps I had been mistaken and it had contained three cigarettes earlier, for there were two inside it now.
'Take one – and take a good look at it. You don't have to smoke it.' I took one, the colour was the yellow of very old printed matter. I could just make out the typed lines but not the typeface, nor any words.
He looked at me expectantly, still holding out the tobacco tin. The papirosi were tightly rolled, there were still two. The print on one was darker, more defined. 'Yes, take a look at that one, too.' Vint said.
I held each end of the cigarette, one word was visible. I had to rotate the cylinder to read it. 'MacTavish'. It read.
I dropped the cigarette back into the tin. There were still just two, when he replaced the lid. He pocketed the tin.
'Any paper, any kind of paper at all.'
I waited for him to finish his "papiros", expecting him to get to the point. Any point at all. But he didn't. he dropped the butt into a puddle, waited for the sizzle to fizzle and gave me the pseudo-American military salute that nobody outside of "the movies" ever gave anyone. That was the last I saw of him for a month or two.

The first 2000 or so words are here https://www.abctales.com/collection/prospero-vint