Every paradise has a bad apple or two, and Bequia is no exception! During my early days on the island there were a few people who were rather relentless in their “Tiefing habits”, and it didn’t take long to find out who they were. With few telephones news of a crime was spread by word of mouth, often becoming quite garbled as it made its rounds. If the crime didn’t seem to fit the profile of the local “tiefs” a mainlander was automatically blamed. If it was deemed that a certain Bequian had been the culprit people would nod their heads sagely and say, “yes, it so-and-so, it have his stamp pon it”.
The first time I fell victim to a robbery I was still teaching at the High School and lived at Friendship Gap. One Sunday a group of young children appeared on my porch and politely asked for a drink of water. I went to the kitchen to pour a glass, which the children drank thankfully. Shortly after they left I noticed that the house key, usually hanging on a hook in the living room, had disappeared.
I went to my landlord’s house next door to tell him that the key had been stolen. Guildford Stowe was a large, gruff man and I was pretty intimidated by him! After letting me know that I had been “stupidy” to let the thirsty children into the house, he went to the Police Station to report the theft of the key. He had already figured out who the culprits belonged to, and had forced their grandfather to accompany him to the harbor. The police ordered the man who ran Veira’s store to open up so that the grandfather could purchase a new lock for my door. His grandchildren had thrown the stolen key away when they saw Mr. Stowe coming down the road, and were hotly proclaiming their innocence. Those children got serious “licks” from their grand-father, it seemed they were being punished not for stealing the key but for throwing it away. The old man had to pay for a new lock and key as well as a handyman to install it and he wasn’t too happy about it!
I was also robbed by a Frenchman when the Pizzeria was just a bakeshop. The bread I made each morning was hard work, I had to knead huge mounds of dough by hand before the sun was up. I needed the income from the baked goods to buy equipment for the restaurant, and each loaf of bread I sold was a step in the right direction. One morning I saw a hand reach up and take one of the fresh loaves cooling on the shelf, and was getting a paper bag ready when I realized that the owner of the hand was running down the steps! Without hesitation my dog Sheba and I ran after the man, shouting “Thief! Thief!” The man got to the Frangi wharf, jumped into his dinghy and rowed frantically to a small yacht with a French flag. Johnny Ollivierre and Kent Hazell, upon hearing what had happened, got into another dinghy and rowed out to the boat, which by then the man had securely battened down. My two friends shouted and cursed as they rowed in circles around the yacht, and I had visions of the Frenchman wolfing down a whole loaf of bread in an effort to hide the evidence!
One night a customer was robbed at the Pizzeria. A house key and a loaf of bread were pretty minor compared to the bag that was snatched from the back of a chair on the restaurant’s extension! The owner of the bag was the captain of a German yacht, and it held the ship’s papers, passports and money. The thief had scrambled up the side of the extension wall and grabbed the bag, making his get-away through the back yard of the Fig Tree next door. All hell broke loose at the table; the tourists had seen it happen, but the thief was incredibly fast and had disappeared with the skipper’s bag.
My pizza-maker saw the incident happen from the kitchen window and had glimpsed the culprit’s face. For the sake of this story I’ll call the fellow “Tiefman”. Tiefman” was a well-known bad-boy on the Island who seemed to prefer jail; as soon as he was released from prison on the mainland he would start stealing until he was caught again. An extremely outraged Mac set off on foot to try and catch up with “Tiefman”. Meanwhile, I got on the VHF radio and alerted the Bequia taxi drivers, and they jumped into action! Everyone assumed that “Tiefman” would head South and they were correct. Those taxi drivers pursued the fellow all the way to the Paget Farm Police Station, where he turned himself in to the officer on duty. I guess “Tiefman” figured jail was safer than the string of taxi drivers and a seriously pissed off Mac!
Paradise does exist, just watch out for the bad apples …………