The midday Caribbean sun blazed high over Jolly Harbour, on the west coast of Antigua, where Tom Hobbs sat smoking a Marlboro on the decking of his rented villa. He was trying in vain to resist the temptation to go indoors and open a suitcase which didn’t belong to him. It was a piece of luggage which he’d been entrusted to deliver to another person; but the intended recipient now seemed missing, and he couldn’t return the item to its sender. Not now. So was it his, he wondered? Legally? Morally? Did anybody care? 

There was no rush. On the hillsides across the bay, palms swayed in the tropical breeze. Emerald and cornflower paint peeled in the heat from the clapboard villas around him; a squadron of pelicans patrolled low over the turquoise water, and in the distance a fisherman cast his net in a perfect arc from a bright yellow skiff.  

 Tom finished his cigarette and retreated into the shade of his villa. He drew the curtains against the hot sun and any prying eyes, then lifted the suitcase onto a glass coffee table. He pushed gingerly at the catches, expecting them to be locked; but they snapped open willingly, and he lifted the lid on three million Eastern Caribbean dollars. Cash. In used notes, naturally.  

Tom’s code name at Stanford International Bank was The Baggage Handler. His name was not on the payroll or any other document. He was just the man who made unofficial deliveries from suppliers to recipients, from the briber to the bribed, from the blackmailed to the blackmailer. Tom never saw the contents of the deliveries, and never asked about them. It was safer that way. He guessed, though. Banknotes, he suspected, most of the time, going by size and weight. Drugs, perhaps, sometimes. Watches or jewellery in the smaller, lighter boxes. Sometimes just an envelope.  

‘Never post anything through a letterbox,’ his handler regularly reminded him. ‘Never leave it to be picked up. Never give it to someone else to pass on. You have to put it in the hands of the addressee. If you can’t find them, you walk.’ 

Tom’s activities were grease in the engine of Stanford’s nefarious business. When a government official—a planning officer, say, or an investigator in the anti-money laundering team—needed to be persuaded to commit some administrative act of a dubious nature, Tom would turn up on their doorstep, hand over one of Stanford’s generous gifts, and walk away before the recipient could ask any questions.  

He had first met Sir Allen Stanford at a yacht party a year earlier. Tom was a lowly crew member, charged with topping up champagne flutes whenever they approached emptiness, and Stanford was the billionaire playboy guest of honour, but in a quiet moment Stanford had cadged a cigarette from Tom as he took a smoking break on the dockside. 

‘Don’t tell my wife,’ Stanford had said, grinning. He was a big man, and there was something of the matinee idol about him, but his voice had an exaggerated bass note to it and his moustache was unconvincing.  

‘I won’t,’ said Tom. ‘Here, have the packet. I’m a smuggler, I’ve got thousands of them in my cabin.’  

Stanford laughed and took the packet. ‘You sound English,’ he said, in his broad Texan drawl. ‘You like cricket?’ He exhaled a cloud of smoke towards the star-spangled sky. 

‘Love it,’ said Tom, truthfully. ‘I was brought up on it.’ 

‘What did you think of my big match? Twenty million bucks up for grabs for the winners, and England were rubbish. I didn’t understand it. Money usually brings out the best in people.’ 

‘And the worst,’ said Tom.  

Stanford chuckled again. The conversation rolled on from cricket to other mutual interests—yachts, smoking, smuggling—until it was time to rejoin the party. Stanford flicked the stub of his cigarette into the shining water and turned to Tom. ‘You work on this yacht permanently?’ 

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘It’s sailing back to the Med next week, but I want to stay in Antigua for a while. Have a look around.’  

‘Got a job?’  

‘Not yet. It’ll be difficult, I don’t have any papers.’ 

Stanford paused, smoothed his moustache with his thumb and index finger, then nodded towards the car park behind them. ‘See my man waiting in the black Mercedes over there? Go and ask him for his number, and call it if your hands are idle. The devil will find work for them to do.’ 

Before Tom could respond, Stanford turned and strode purposefully up the gangplank, back to the teak decking and the wine-fuelled gossip of the wealthy guests. 

Tom was aware that he emanated some mysterious, trustworthy demeanour. Passers-by picked him out in the street to ask for directions. Dogs and cats befriended him instantly. Strangers asked him to watch their luggage, or even their child, while they nipped to the toilet. It amused him, because he never thought of himself as honest. He had lied and cheated and added his contribution to the world’s woes, but it didn’t seem to show on his face; and so he made friends easily, and had earned the trust of Allen Stanford within the space of a single conversation that night, and now here he was, making a living in paradise. After each delivery, he would be paid in used notes, so that there was no incriminating trail back to the Bank. It was easy money, apart from the risk of being arrested. The deliveries, though lucrative, were sporadic, and he had time to sail on sparkling seas and idle away long, blue-sky afternoons on white-sand beaches; and he had become a regular at the Dogwatch, a down-to-earth bar on the harbour’s edge favoured by locals and visiting sailors who had bedecked the timber-beamed ceiling with colourful pennants from their yachts. The bar boasted beer-marinated floorboards, a pool table, a jukebox and a motley collection of mismatched tables and chairs. It opened out onto a shaded, weather-beaten veranda where Tom would often avoid the mid-day heat with a book, or the London Times, when he could get hold of a copy; and in the early evenings he would linger over a rum, watching the sun set over the marina and listening to the tree frogs building their nightly chorus. 

Three days before he opened the orphaned suitcase, Tom had received a routine call from his handler. He was to pick up a consignment from the bank. He drove from Jolly Harbour through St John’s, the capital. His car of choice was a Toyota Yaris, because there were hundreds of them on the island; they were a popular hire car for tourists. It was part of his cloak of anonymity. Tarmac roads gave way to the rutted and potholed streets of the suburbs; corrugated iron houses, dusty children playing cricket on scrubland, abandoned cars on piles of bricks at the roadsides. Then on beyond the town, to the contrasting world of the airport area; a carefully tended landscape of green lawns, riotous flowerbeds and whitewashed walls. This was Stanford’s territory. The bank’s headquarters was the first building tourists saw as they emerged blinking from the Arrivals concourse; a mock-classical edifice in its own grounds, a brash statement of authority in white stucco and golden plaques. The nearby Stanford cricket ground, with its Stanford restaurant and Stanford bar, reinforced the big man’s message: welcome to Antigua. I own it. 

Tom parked at a discrete distance, out of range of the closed-circuit television cameras, and walked between tall columns into the bank’s reception area. A security guard beckoned him along a marbled hallway to the porter’s office, where he was given the Samsonite suitcase and its destination. Throughout his visit Tom did not speak, and he did not remove his Ray-Bans. 

The delivery address was a place he’d visited before, a remote home on the far side of the island, on a slope above Half Moon Bay. Tom drove east, through the inland parishes—Saint George, Saint Peter, Saint Philip—and on the far side of Freetown turned up a winding hillside track to a sleek modern villa. He had no idea who the occupant, the intended recipient of the suitcase, was; the less he knew about these people and their exchanges the better, he always reasoned, imagining himself in court pleading plausible deniability. All he knew was a codeword, and his job was to give the suitcase to the person who said the codeword. 

He parked the Yaris on the driveway. There were no other cars at the house, and no sign of activity. He knocked on the shuttered door and waited. From this elevated viewpoint he could see the long, gentle curve of the blue horizon. All was silent. A lone frigate bird swooped low over the windblown garden and arced back down towards the sea, where three white-sailed yachts were carving wakes towards the vast Atlantic. He watched them for a few minutes, then walked back to his car, checked the suitcase in the boot and drove home. 

Next day he tried again, but there was still no sign of life at the villa. He tried to call his boss, but there was no reply. He left no message. It was another of the boss’s rules; only call me with this cell phone, and leave no messages. Never text me. If anything goes wrong, throw the phone away. Chuck it in the sea. 

Tom drove to the remote villa four times, to no avail. Each night he hid the suitcase in his attic, and each day he carried on with his normal routine; breakfast, a swim on the beach, and lunch at the Dogwatch.  

Tom stacked the cash on his coffee table and swore gently to himself. The musty aroma of banknotes was so strong he wondered if his neighbours could smell it. He counted it all back into the suitcase and hid it in his attic. 

He needed a drink. He washed the waxy residue of the notes from his hands, locked his villa, checking all the windows were closed, and headed out into the stifling heat towards the Dogwatch. 

Joseph, the bar manager, greeted him with a cheery ‘Hello, English.’  

All the bar staff called Tom ‘English.’ None of them knew his real name. He liked the anonymity.  

‘Hot out there today, man. Nice cold bottle of Wadadli?’ 

‘Twist my arm.’ 

Tom took the beer to his favourite spot on the veranda. An American couple on a nearby table were poring over the local newspaper. Their son, a tanned, blonde-haired boy in a basketball vest, was blowing bubbles into a glass of coke. The woman looked from the newspaper to her partner and back again, her face puckered. Tom could just hear snatches of their low conversation:  

‘We’re screwed, aren’t we?’ 

‘What can we do?’ 

Tom went back to the bar and asked Joseph for a copy of the paper. Stanford Bank Collapses, announced the headline. Arrests made. Massive fraud alleged.  

The last few days began to make sense. Stanford was going down, and his rats were abandoning the island. The man in the villa at Half Moon Bay and Tom’s boss must have gone already. Tom realised he too would have to leave; the FBI would be sniffing everywhere. There was no way he could take the suitcase back to the bank.  

Tom took the paper back to his table and gazed out over the harbour. A wooden schooner was making ready to leave its mooring, the crew moving about the deck and the pontoon in a hasty dance of ropes and fenders.  

The American boy was drumming on the table with plastic straws. ‘I’m bored,’ he said to his parents, ‘Can we go to the beach now?’  

‘Not yet, Danny,’ said his mother. ‘We’re going to have lunch here. Do you want to play pool or something?’  

‘There’s nobody playing.’  

On a sudden impulse, Tom said, ‘I’ll play, if you like.’ 

The parents nodded their approval, and Tom led the boy into the bar. Joseph flicked on the bright, low lights above the pool table and the green baize glowed. Tom pushed coins into the slot in the side of the table.  

‘I’m Danny,’ said the boy. ‘What’s your name?’  

‘Tom. Have you played pool much?’ The coloured balls clattered into action.  

‘A little,’ said the boy, shrugging. ‘Can we play for money?’  

‘Sure, but don’t tell your dad. One dollar to the winner?’  

‘Deal. Then we raise the stakes.’  

Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘How old are you?’  

‘Ten. How old are you?’  

‘Forty-eight. Which part of the States are you from?’  

‘New York. Which part of England are you from?’ 

‘How do you know I’m English?’  

‘I heard the barman talking to you.’  

‘You don’t miss much, do you?’  

‘Nope. My Uncle Jim says I’m precocious.’  

‘Do you know what ‘precocious’ means?’  

‘Yes.’  

‘Then Uncle Jim is probably right.’  

‘I’m home-schooled. My Mom was a teacher, so that helps.’ 

‘Why did she stop teaching?’ 

‘My Dad got hurt, when he was a firefighter. He went into the Twin Towers and breathed some smoke. So they both quit their jobs and now we live on our catamaran.’ 

The boy took the first shot. He scattered the rack, pocketed two spot balls and then missed his third, an easy pot into the centre pocket.  

‘Bad luck,’ said Tom. He potted a stripe and then deliberately missed his next, to give the boy a chance. 

The boy looked at him. ‘Are you hustling me?’  

‘What do you mean?’ 

‘You fluffed your shot. On purpose. Then the next game, when we’ve bet more money, you’ll win.’  

‘Not true,’ protested Tom, weakly. ‘I’m just not very good.’  

They continued the game warily, each doubting the other’s honesty. They potted and missed, potted and missed again. The boy played the way he’d seen men play; stepping back from the table to line up his shot, tilting his head from side to side, occasionally spinning the cue like a windmill. Tom used to perform the same rituals when he was a boy, forty years ago in the back rooms of his English hometown pubs where his father sat in a corner watching, quietly, proudly, over the brim of his pint of Bass bitter. Tom’s father would give him five pounds to bet against the men, and say, ‘bring me the fiver back and anything else you win, you can keep,’ and Tom would usually win, especially when the men were drinking heavily; sometimes twenty pounds, sometimes a hundred. On the good nights he would share the winnings with his father.  

‘I have an idea, Danny,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s skip the game where we’re hustling each other, and instead we’ll play the game we both want to actually win.’ 

‘Cool.’ 

‘How much should we play for?’ 

‘Six hundred and fifty-six thousand Eastern Caribbean dollars.’ 

Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s a lot of pocket money.’ 

‘I know. It’s about a quarter of a million US. It’s what my Mom and Dad lost. That’s why my mom is crying. She says we’ll have to sell our boat.’ 

‘How did they lose it?’ 

‘Something to do with the bank. It’s in the paper. A man called Stanford did bad things and the FBI arrested him, but all the money’s disappeared.’ 

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Tom, and realised with a jolt that he meant it. ‘Maybe you can win it back playing pool.’ 

‘I wish.’ 

‘You’re young, you can do anything. You watch. I’ll play you for ten dollars, for starters.’ 

The boy twisted the chalk block on the tip of his cue. ‘Deal.’ 

After two games, the boy’s lunch arrived, and his parents called him back to the table. Tom gave the boy his winnings: twenty dollars.  

‘Well played,’ said Tom. ‘You’re pretty good.’ 

‘Thanks,’ said the boy. ‘You’re out of practice.’  

They smiled and shook hands with exaggerated courtesy. Tom finished his beer, walked back along the dockside to his villa and climbed the wooden ladder to his attic. He opened the ownerless suitcase, counted six hundred and fifty-six thousand Eastern Caribbean dollars into an old black rucksack, and carried it back to the Dogwatch.  

He entered through the back door. The Americans were still at their table out on the front veranda. Danny’s mother had moved around to his father’s side and was slumped next to him, her head on his shoulder. Danny was finishing a burger. None of them noticed Tom walk up to the bar.  

‘Listen, Joseph,’ he whispered, ‘could you do me a favour?’  

‘Sure.’  

‘The Americans outside. The boy I played pool with. Would you give them this?’ Tom handed the heavy rucksack over the bar and Joseph, aware from the tone of Tom’s voice of the need for discretion, stored it under the counter, out of view.  

‘No problem,’ said Joseph, tilting his head backwards slightly, ‘but why don’t you do it yourself?’ 

‘It’s complicated. Trust me, you’ll be doing a good thing.’ 

‘No sweat.’ 

‘Wait until I’m gone. Then tell them it belongs to them. Say it’s from a friend.’ 

‘Sure. You okay?’ 

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Tom. ‘Just got a few things to sort out. You take care now.’ 

‘Always do, man. You too.’ 

The two men held each others’ gaze for a second. Then Tom smiled, left by the back door, and never set foot in the Dogwatch again. 

He could live on the remainder of the cash for a few years, if he stayed in the Eastern Caribbean dollar countries; Saint Lucia, Grenada, Dominica and the rest. Then something would turn up, he was sure. If his hands were idle, the devil would find work for them to do.  

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[2,963 words] 

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