The Two Sisters of Borneo

by Ian Hamilton

  “I have his home number.”

  “Then call him. Tell him to get over to the hospital — he needs to take control of the situation. He needs to calm Ah-Pei, he needs to find out exactly how the girls are, and he needs to stay there and keep communicating with you until there is nothing new to learn.”

  “I’ll do that right away.”

  “Good.”

  “Ava, I’ve booked a flight out of here first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll be in Kota Kinabalu by mid-afternoon.”

  “And I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  “Christ, what a mess,” May groaned.

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Michael? Jack Yee?”

  “God, I forgot about them.”

  “So they don’t know?”

  “Not unless the police or someone from the hospital called them.”

  “On second thought, I can’t imagine they would know anything. Otherwise I’m quite sure that one of them would have phoned me by now.”

  “Are you going to call them?”

  Ava paused. “Yes, I will, but not until we know what state Amanda is in. So call that lawyer and keep in touch with me. I want to know everything.”

  ( 16 )

  “What’s the matter?” Jennie Lee asked when Ava came back into the restaurant.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t tell me that. You have that look in your eyes that means you’re upset about something.”

  “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Does it have anything to do with Maria?”

  “Mummy, please. It’s a business problem.”

  “Then it must be a serious one.”

  “Let’s just eat, okay? It isn’t worth discussing and I’m not that worried,” Ava said, putting the phone next to her bowl.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Ava shrugged. “I feel like having some sticky rice. Will you share?”

  Her mother stared at her. “Just tell me it isn’t a problem with the girl.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Good. I like her.”

  “Sticky rice?”

  “I’ll have some.”

  They ate slowly, their conversation returning to stories about Marian, Jennie’s recent run of very good luck at the mah-jong tables, and her inability to transport that luck north to Casino Rama’s baccarat tables. It was past two o’clock when they finished, almost an hour since May Ling’s call, and Ava’s phone hadn’t rung again. She said goodbye to her mother outside the restaurant in a flurry of hugs and kisses and then darted towards her car.

  As soon as Ava was inside the Audi, she checked the phone to see if she had somehow missed an incoming call. She hadn’t. She calculated the time it would take for May Ling to reach the lawyer and for him to rouse himself from bed and get to the hospital. Calm down, she thought. You’ll find out soon enough.

  In the meantime, she had to get herself organized, so she called Gail. “I need to get to Kota Kinabalu as soon as possible. It’s in Borneo and I know there are direct flights from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. I don’t care which airline I fly or how you get me there. Please call me or email me when you have the flight information.”

  She put the phone in the coffee-cup holder. Ring, she thought.

  The Don Valley Parkway going south towards the city was clogged. Her estimated half-hour drive ran close to an hour. Her phone rang once. She leapt at it and then saw that the incoming number was Gail’s. She had booked Ava on the Cathay Pacific flight that evening to Hong Kong, where she would connect with an Air Asia plane flying nonstop to Kota Kinabalu. She would be in transit for less than twenty-four hours.

  It was mid-afternoon when she reached the condo, the middle of the night in Borneo. She went into the bedroom and took her Shanghai Tang Double Happiness black leather bag out of the closet. She tossed it onto the bed and began to methodically pack it with clothes that were associated with work: two pairs of black slacks, a grey pencil skirt, Cole Haan pumps, four Brooks Brothers shirts — two white button-downs and a light blue and a pink with modified Italian collar, all of them with French cuffs — and bras and underwear. She checked her jewellery case and took out her favourite set of green jade cufflinks, which she had bought in Beijing, and a set of Shanghai Tang blue enamel links. She transferred them to a smaller kid-leather pouch and then added her Cartier Tank Française watch and the ivory chignon pin, which had become fixed in her mind as a good-luck token. Her cosmetics went into a separate bag: black mascara, red lipstick, and a bottle of Annick Goutal perfume.

  Ava zipped the bag and went back to the closet for the Chanel bag she used for her running gear and her computer and notebooks. She placed her shoes in the bottom and then tossed in two pairs of shorts, a sports bra, and three black Giordano T-shirts. The laptop, still sitting on her kitchen table, would go in last.

  She carried the Chanel bag into the kitchen. She packed enough sachets of Starbucks VIA instant coffee to last for a week, then spotted the notebook she had started in Amsterdam lying next to the computer. She picked it up and put it in the bag. Was there a link between what had transpired in Borneo and what was going on in Amsterdam? The thought came to her as a question but was almost instantly transformed by her mind into a fact.

  She stood at the kitchen window and looked out on the grey, overcast day. It was beginning to snow again. She hardly noticed. Her imagination was now cementing the connections between the brothers and the Dutch companies. This attack has to be a reaction to the lawsuit, Ava thought. Tambi and Mamat had paid, directly or indirectly, to have the women beaten. There was no other explanation for what had happened. Men with bats in restaurant parking lots don’t occur at random. Men with bats are paid to wield them. The women were targeted. And who else had a motive?

  Her mind was fixed on Borneo. She had told May Ling not to speculate about what had happened. Now what was she doing? Not speculating, she thought; it was all too certain. Uncle often said that if something looked like a bowl of white rice, smelled like white rice, and tasted like white rice, you could call it Emperor’s Treasure Feast all you wanted, but it wouldn’t change the fact that it was plain white rice.

  Her cellphone rang in the bedroom. Ava ran to it and saw May Ling’s number.

  “Yes, May,” Ava said.

  “I just heard from the lawyer.”

  The apprehension that had been floating around Ava like an aura now settled on her like a shroud. “Did he get to the hospital?” she asked.

  “He did.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Chi-Tze has just come out of surgery. She has four broken ribs, her right arm is broken in two places, and her right shin bone is badly damaged. The doctor said she was fortunate not to have been struck on the kneecap.”

  “And Amanda?” Ava asked.

  “They don’t know yet,” May said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s still being attended to.”

  “Why?”

  “Ava . . . they struck her on the head,” May said.

  Ava sat down on the bed, the phone almost slipping from her hand.

  “The policeman the lawyer spoke to said Chi-Tze was lucky because she held her arm in front of her face. That’s why it was broken in two places.”

  “The bastards,” Ava whispered.

  “They have no idea when we’ll know any more about Amanda.”

  Ava felt sweat gathering on her upper lip. “The lawyer is going to stay at the hospital?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And report to you if anything happens?”

  “I told him to call me every half-hour, even if it is only to tell me there’s no change.”

  “Good.”

  “When are you arriving?”r />
  “I leave Toronto tonight at around eleven. I’ll be in Borneo the day after tomorrow, around lunchtime.”

  “Thank God. I don’t think I can handle this by myself.”

  “Keep the lawyer or one of his people at the hospital until we get things sorted.”

  May Ling took a deep breath. “Ava, they’ve been asking about notifying Amanda’s family. The police are quite anxious to let them know what’s happened.”

  “I’m not going to call Michael or Jack until we know for certain how she is,” Ava said, more harshly than she meant. “If they insist on speaking to someone, give them my number.”

  “Okay. I’ll keep in touch.”

  Ava closed the phone and walked back towards the kitchen. She looked out the window and watched the wind whip the snow into swirling eddies. She went to her computer and logged on to the Pearson International website. So far it looked as if most of the flights from the airport were leaving on time. She switched over to her email account. She wrote to Uncle, copying Sonny in case Uncle wasn’t checking his mail — a not infrequent occurrence. I’m leaving Toronto tonight for Hong Kong, where I’m connecting with an Asia Air flight to Kota Kinabalu at 11 a.m. I may need your help. Let me know where you are and how I can reach you.

  She checked the time. It was the middle of the night in Shanghai. She called Uncle’s mobile and repeated the message she had emailed to him.

  Ava pushed her chair back from the table. She needed to call Maria and her mother to let them know she was travelling again. She reached for her phone, but it rang before she could pick it up. She stared at an unfamiliar country code.

  “Yes, this is Ava Lee,” she said.

  “Jacob Smits here.”

  Again, and so soon, she thought. Then she said, “Mr. Smits, we communicated just a few hours ago. Was anything unclear?”

  “No, not at all, but I’ve met with my contact. I spent the last hour going through the paperwork he gave me. I was going to email you but I thought a phone call might be better, because the situation’s a bit complicated and I thought you would have questions.”

  She heard eagerness in his voice. “You’ve found something?”

  “I have.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “I think great is the right word.”

  “Let me get my notebook,” Ava said, reaching into her Chanel bag to retrieve it. She opened it and sat at the table. “Tell me what you have.”

  “Well, earlier today I went over the documents you gave me that relate to the bankruptcy filing. As you told me, Meijer supposedly advanced money and made loans to Janssen that went sour — thus their secured creditor position. There were seventeen different transactions, adding up to the twenty million dollars or so Meijer claims they are owed. Every transaction is papered and on the surface appears completely genuine. I can’t fault Timmerman for taking them at face value.”

  “So far, Mr. Smits, you haven’t told me anything I don’t know.”

  She heard the sound of Smits taking a drink. She looked at the time: eight in the evening in Amsterdam. She wondered if he was sticking to his two-beer rule.

  “I said the transactions appear genuine. In fact, they are not.”

  “How can you be so certain?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t find the money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What Timmerman has in its bankruptcy files are various loan documents and company financial statements that support the transactions. I decided to dig a bit deeper. I wanted to know what Janssen did with all that money Meijer supposedly gave to them.”

  “And?”

  “They didn’t spend a euro of it.”

  Ava stopped writing. “How can you know that?” she asked.

  “Fortunately I know the accountant for Meijer. I know him from my days on the police force, when he was a naughty boy and it was my decision whether or not to prosecute him. It seems I made the right decision, because he’s still quite grateful and very willing to help. He didn’t come right out and tell me what they did, but he said it might be instructive to look at the actual banking records for both companies, which happened — good for us — to use the same bank. You can invent company accounts but a bank can’t handle imaginary cash. The bank’s records show that none of the money related to those seventeen transactions found its way into the Janssen account.”

  “Couldn’t the money have gone offshore?” Ava asked.

  “There was no money,” he said, his voice triumphant. “Meijer’s bank records show that not a single euro was ever taken from their account and transferred to Janssen, here in the Netherlands or anywhere else. All the transaction records the trustee has are bogus. The companies’ financial statements were produced after the fact.”

  “And you have the actual bank records?”

  “That’s what cost me fifteen thousand euros, and even then I had to be very persuasive. Our Dutch bankers consider themselves to be morally superior to even our Protestant churchmen. Ms. Lee, I know I told you it would be ten thousand, but my contact needed a lot more coaxing.”

  “Your snitch is a banker?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you have the bank records?” she pressed.

  “I have them in front of me, in a nice neat pile.”

  “Mr. Smits —”

  “Please, call me Jacob,” he said.

  “This is very good work, Jacob.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What I don’t understand is why the trustee couldn’t figure this out.”

  “Ms. Lee —”

  “Call me Ava.”

  “Ava, they process the paperwork they’re given. This was a clean, well-documented bankruptcy. They had no reason to start digging into bank records — assuming they’d ever gotten to see them in the first place.”

  “You haven’t told me why Meijer and Janssen would do this. Trying to pull off a scam like this presumes some strong connections between the companies, and obviously some strong motivation.”

  “My contact at Meijer told me that Johann Meijer and Jan de Groot are old university roommates. They’re also brothers-in-law.”

  “Ah.”

  “Janssen did have financial problems. Nowhere close to as large as the money involved in your situation — they were about two million dollars in the hole — but they were being squeezed. And from what I saw in Meijer’s records, while they weren’t in any financial difficulty, they had hardly made a dollar over the past three years. My opinion is that these two old friends and relations saw the chance to scoop you and grabbed it. And if you don’t mind me saying, they obviously weren’t afraid of any consequences from your side.”

  “No, they weren’t. We — that is to say, the previous management of our company — gave them a sweetheart deal with some ridiculously advantageous payment terms. It’s as if they were setting the table for us to be taken. But that’s another issue,” she said. “So now what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do we do?”

  “Ava, you hired me to find out if there was any fire behind the smoke you sensed. I’ve found one that’s blazing.”

  “Well, now I’m asking you for advice. Can we take this information to the trustee and get him to put the brakes on the bankruptcy process and seize whatever inventory is left, as well as the cash that sales have generated thus far? Or do we have to go see Meijer and threaten them with God knows what we can threaten them with under Dutch law?”

  She heard him slurp.

  “I hope that’s only your second beer,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Then your advice should be coming from a clear head.”

  “Suing Meijer and Janssen would take forever, and by then, who knows how much money would be left and where it would be?”

  “That isn�
�t my first preference anyway. How about going to the trustee and getting him to intervene in the current process?”

  “There are some problems here — I mean, with the questions you’re asking. They aren’t so simple to answer.”

  “Why not?”

  “The bank records, for a start. They’re a problem.”

  “How?”

  “I told the guy I bought them from that I’d keep them confidential, that I’d protect his identity, and I want to keep my word.”

  “I see.”

  “And on top of that, I have doubts that the trustee would take too kindly to me showing up at his office with stolen records. And in this country, Ava, these documents would be considered stolen. Knowing Timmerman, they’d be as likely to turn me in as go after Meijer and Janssen.”

  “There has to be a way —”

  “Lastly, there is something really curious about the bank information that I think we need to clarify before you start making decisions about what to do,” he interrupted, and then paused.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well, the records are completely up to date. For Janssen that doesn’t matter, because the bank account was shuttered more than a month ago. But Meijer’s account is still fully active, as it should be. The thing is, I don’t see any recent deposits from or through Janssen, or any other deposits that look to be outside their normal business pattern. In other words, if furniture has been sold — and you were told it has been — then where the hell is that money? These kinds of distress sales don’t lend themselves to terms. Normally immediate payment is made via certified cheque or a wire transfer, but nothing has shown up in the Meijer account.”

  “The money has gone offshore?”

  “That’s my guess, and I think it would be wise for us to find out where it actually is before we approach Timmerman or Meijer.”

  “Do you think you can do that?”

  “Why not? There can’t be that many furniture dealers in the Netherlands. I’m sure I can find one who did a deal with Janssen, and with the right enticement I’m sure I can convince them to show me his invoices and how they paid for the goods. Once we have a copy of the cheque or wire transfer, we’ll know where the money is.”