Al Capone's Chair

He was sitting in Al Capone's chair in his room at the small hotel he lodged in when travelling through that town. It was part of the legend the owner, an agedly small, fussing American lady called Dorcas, told of her past.

She had been, she said, the docent of a hotel in Cicero, and the chair, hailing from there too, was part of a second hand furniture business which formed Capone's legal façade. The hotel, no doubt, if it existed, had been a speakeasy, its bar pouring bootleg cocktails and Dorcas welcoming people in.

The chair, deep and wide with rolled arms and a carved wooden frontage, in a faded red plush, was far away now from the windy city of Chicago, at the seaside in England.

When he came to stay here, he was chaperoning others and Dorcas was the perfect host, having lost none of her old skills, her garrulity really saying nothing, flourishing embellished tales of a long past time elsewhere, while asking no questions of her guests. She had come here in the early sixties, perhaps to help her son (now elderly too and partner manager) to escape the draft.

He checked his watch. It was almost time to go and collect this year's charges. He didn't smoke, but it seemed to him, and not for the first time when he had stayed here, that as he rose a waft of fresh cigar fragrance came to him, as of a fellow conspirator companionably waiting alongside. In a second it had gone and he thought it must be some kind of autosuggestion he had fancied up, a created part of this annual routine.

He went out into a coldish summer evening, where once past the shelter of the seafront streets and on the promenade walk, a blustering wind swept in across the bleak looking mudflats of the estuary, stretching for miles out beyond the pier that the sea never reached, blank of life and not even picked over by birds, just ridges of mud with a dull pewter gleam where the sun caught on moisture. And yet, out there, was where the booty lay.

He stood watching for about twenty minutes, checking his watch again when the coastguard jeep made its regular evening patrol along the nearside of the estuary. He had all their timings marked out and, as much as you could ever be sure of them, the tidal changes which made lethal quick sands in different places.

He was known as a safe pair of hands and if there were occasional drownings of cockle pickers, the illegals were untraceable and liability could never be brought to the door of those who paid him to collect their lucrative treasure.

He scanned the seafront. The fun fair was far to the right and even should evening strollers brave the chill for a bit of a view of the Queen's Gardens along the prom, they would be some miles out at their work, invisible against the dun backdrop reaching out behind.

A punctilious man, he checked his watch again and walked to the meeting and drop off point, where the lorry would be waiting for him to collect the pickers. It was there, as arranged, for organisation was everything in such a business.

They filed out silently, as instructed, some twenty or so men, with their small belongings and followed him through the backstreets to the hotel, which in anticipation of their arrival, already blinked, no vacancies, in its front window.