The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

by Ian Hamilton

  “You’ve done very well.”

  Theresa lowered her head, worry lines bracketing her mouth. “We were doing a lot better.”

  Ava waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, Jennie tapped the back of Theresa’s hand. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said.

  “Yes, tell me what happened, and take all the time you want,” Ava said.

  Theresa looked up, anger showing through the onset of tears. “My family invested money in a fund run by a guy who was a friend of a friend of my oldest brother. It was supposed to be safe, with returns of around ten percent a year.”

  The word Ponzi flashed into Ava’s head.

  “For the first two years the cheques came to us like clockwork every month, so we put more and more of our money into it,” Theresa continued. “Then the trouble began, and it all happened so fast. The fund was late with a payment one month — maybe by two weeks — and people were starting to panic. But then the payment came in and we got a note saying there had been a small technical problem at the bank. But the next month it was late again. My brother went down to the company’s office to complain and found the office closed. That was it. Gone. Finished.”

  “What was the name of the company?”

  “Emerald Lion.”

  Ava searched her memory and came up blank. “I don’t remember reading or hearing anything about this.”

  “It was mentioned in Sing Tao and the other Chinese newspapers,” Jennie said.

  “And the Vietnamese ones,” Theresa added.

  “When?”

  “About six months ago now.”

  “And what did the papers have to say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How was it reported? As a scam?”

  “They sort of hinted at that, although they were being careful because none of them had talked to Lam Van Dinh.”

  “He ran the fund?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did the authorities say?”

  Theresa’s face went blank.

  Ava asked, “The fund was registered, wasn’t it? Surely the securities and exchange commission looked into it.”

  “I never heard about any commission, and I have no idea if it was registered.”

  “Theresa, the Ontario Securities Commission has an investment funds branch. In order to operate legally in the province, Emerald Lion had to be registered with them.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Well, then, there are the police. Surely you went to them?”

  “One of the other people who lost money did, but then decided not to pursue it.”

  “And why not?” Ava asked.

  Theresa’s face was pinched. She glanced at Jennie, questions in her eyes.

  “They were scared,” Jennie Lee said.

  “Of what?”

  Jennie said to Theresa, “You can trust Ava, I told you that. She’s helped people with bigger problems than yours and she knows how to keep her mouth shut. Don’t you, Ava.”

  “Mummy, I’m not sure —”

  “Theresa, tell her what happened,” Jennie insisted.

  “Cash,” said Theresa.

  Ava blinked. “Now I’m past confused.”

  “They all gave this Lam cash,” Jennie said.

  “It was my brother’s idea,” said Theresa. “He was talking to a friend who owns some Vietnamese grocery stores with dead cash registers that he was taking the cash out of. The problem was, he had too much cash to spend without raising attention. I mean, try buying a car with cash, or a house. And then he was afraid of Revenue Canada and the police. You just can’t put it in the bank anymore without them asking a hundred questions. So he hooked up with Lam.”

  “And what did Lam do with the cash?”

  “He said he had an arrangement with Bank Linno, from Indonesia, I was told. They had a branch in Toronto. He would deposit the cash into the fund account there. He told them he had hundreds of small investors in the fund and that he collected cash from them every week. So, according to him, he could deposit it regularly without any of the fuss or bother he’d get from the Canadian banks.”

  “How many investors were there?”

  Theresa shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but not hundreds, because you had to be able to put in at least one hundred thousand in cash to start.”

  “Everyone put in cash?”

  “Of course. That was the purpose.”

  “You mean money laundering was the purpose?”

  “We just wanted to be able to spend our money without having the government on our backs.”

  “So you put cash in and you got cheques back from a supposedly reputable financial fund, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And those cheques were deposited into the bank in Indonesia?”

  “Yes.”

  “So no questions from the bank, and you could withdraw the cash as you wanted, without any worries.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you report that income to Revenue Canada?”

  “No. Lam said we didn’t have to,” Theresa said, fidgeting with her napkin.

  “That’s nonsense. The fund would have had to issue T5 slips for all the payments it made.”

  “They didn’t send us anything. Just a monthly report of how much money we had in the fund.”

  “Did they tell you how it was invested?”

  “No.”

  “These people don’t have much trust in the government or the banks,” Jennie said to Ava, as if Theresa weren’t sitting next to her.

  “No, I guess not, but putting their faith in a fund that was probably unregulated and unregistered, and whose main attraction was that it was run by a fellow Vietnamese, doesn’t seem to have worked out so well,” Ava said. She saw Theresa’s face flush. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be harsh,” she added.

  “No, you are just speaking the truth.”

  “Theresa, just how long were you in the fund?”

  “More than two years.”

  “How much were you paid over that time?”

  “More than two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “My God. Just how much money did you have in it?”

  “Close to three million dollars.”

  Ava thought she hadn’t heard correctly. “Do you mean the fund had three million in it?”

  “No, it had more than thirty million, from what we can figure. My family had three million in it.”

  “How did you —” Ava began.

  Jennie said, “Theresa, I’d like another tea. Do you think you could get me one? And Ava, how about you? Another water?”

  Theresa seemed only too happy to get away from the table. When she was out of earshot, Jennie said to Ava, “I know what you’re going to ask, and I don’t think you should. Does it really matter how they got that kind of cash? They all work hard and they save hard. Accept it at that. This is embarrassing enough for her.”

  “Mummy, by not declaring income they were already breaking the law. Laundering the money compounds the severity.”

  “When did you become so Canadian?” Jennie asked. “Is it only the big and the rich who are allowed to do whatever they want to avoid paying taxes?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No, the point is that Theresa and her family worked for years and put everything back into the family, and now the money is gone and they want you to help them get it back. That is what you do for a living, isn’t it?”

  “You know it is.”

  “And when you do it in Asia, are you and Uncle always so fussy about how your big-shot clients came by their money, and how they hang on to it too?”

  Ava sat back and stared at her mother. “You don’t know who most of my clients are, or the kind of due diligence we do,” she said.

  “I know about Tommy Ordonez, because you needed my help, remember? You needed to get to his sister-in-law in Vancouver. When you called me, did I ask you how Ordonez became the richest man in the Philippines? Did
I ask you about due diligence? All I remember is that my daughter needed my help.”

  Ava and Uncle had recovered more than fifty million dollars for Ordonez, money from his businesses that his brother had lost in an online gambling scam. Arguments lined up in Ava’s head about the difference between that case and Theresa Ng’s situation, and just as quickly they dissolved. She didn’t win many arguments with her mother anyway, particularly when Jennie decided she wasn’t going to back down, regardless of whatever logic Ava threw at her.

  Theresa came back with two mugs and a bottle of water on a tray. She couldn’t look Ava in the eye, and Ava felt a twinge of sympathy for her.

  “So, Theresa, as I calculate, this character Lam stopped paying you dividends and has been gone for the past six months,” she said as the woman passed out their drinks and then sat down.

  “That’s about right.”

  “And neither you nor any of the other people who lost money went to a government authority, other than that one person who approached the police and then backed off.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “So you’ve done absolutely nothing to try to get your money back?”

  “We tried to find Lam.”

  “How?”

  “We hired a private detective, a Canadian. I don’t think he took us very seriously.”

  “And what did he find?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So what makes you think I can do any better?”

  “We think we know where Lam is now.”

  “You think?” Ava said.

  “I got a phone call four days ago from my sister, who’s visiting relatives in Saigon — they call it Ho Chi Minh City now, but to us it is still Saigon — with my mother. They took our cousins to dinner at the Hyatt in the city, and when they were leaving, a big BMW pulled up at the hotel entrance. My sister swears she saw Lam get out of the car and walk into the hotel.”

  “How did she know it was him?”

  “His picture was all over the local Vietnamese newspapers when the company got into trouble, and my sister said she recognized him from there. And, of course, she yelled his name. She said he turned around right away, looked at her, and then ran into the hotel.”

  “It was him,” Jennie said, nodding at Theresa.

  Theresa nodded back and then looked at Ava. The uncertainty that had been in her eyes had vanished, replaced by anger that verged on hatred. “I was upset and happy all at the same time. I talked to the rest of my family, and we told my sister to go back to the hotel every night and see if she could talk to him. He never showed again. While this was going on, I was telling your mother everything, and she was kind enough to suggest that maybe you’d help us.”

  “I didn’t say you would,” Jennie stressed to Ava. “I told Theresa that you and the man you work with in Hong Kong are very good at recovering money. That’s true enough, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s all she said,” Theresa added.

  Ava felt the pressure all the same. “You have to understand, I don’t decide which cases we take and which ones we don’t take. I have to talk to my boss in Hong Kong. You haven’t given us very much to go on. I mean, one possible sighting at a hotel —”

  “My sister wrote down the licence number of the car, so you have that too.”

  “Well, that’s helpful, but there is also the amount of money involved. I don’t mean to be insulting, Theresa, or minimize its importance to you, but it’s less than what we’d normally consider.”

  Theresa glanced at Jennie, her eyes begging.

  “You will talk to Uncle, though, won’t you?” Jennie asked.

  Ava sighed. She knew there wasn’t any way her mother would accept no for an answer. “Okay, I’ll talk to him. No promises, though.”

  “Thank you,” Theresa said.

  “And then there is our fee. We pay all our own expenses — all of them — but we keep thirty percent of everything we collect. Are you okay with that?”

  “What if you don’t get anything back?”

  “The expenses are still our cost, not yours.”

  Theresa nodded. “Getting seventy percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing.”

  “Do you need to talk to your family?”

  “No, I can make the decision, and I think you’re being fair.”

  “Okay, then. I still need to talk to Hong Kong to get the go-ahead.”

  “Ava, can’t you just tell her now?” Jennie said.

  “Mummy, I can’t.”

  “You’ll do your best with Uncle, though?”

  “My best, but I’m not making any promises.”

  “Ava,” Jennie persisted.

  “No promises,” Ava repeated.

  ( 3 )

  Labour Day weekend has a peculiar impact on the Canadian psyche, and Ava wasn’t immune to it. The weekend represents the end of summer, the start of a new school year for virtually every child in the country, and the turning of new pages in many lives. It marks, very specifically, the time for play to end and for work to recommence in a dedicated way. Having a plan in mind would be a good start, but Ava didn’t have one. She was all loose ends, suffering from the same kind of melancholy that January 2 often induces in people.

  She met Maria at the bus drop-off at Rama on Friday night. They lazed their way through the weekend, eating, drinking, walking, reading, and making love. Maria was one of the least demanding people Ava had ever met. She seemed content with doing little things — in fact, doing nothing at all — as long as it was in Ava’s company. It made Ava feel guilty at times, and she found herself overcompensating by planning activities she wouldn’t consider if she were on her own. So it was that on Sunday she drove them north to Midland, to the Martyrs’ Shrine.

  They were both Catholic, both wore crucifixes, and, in their own quiet ways, both often prayed. Maria, like Jennie, rarely missed Sunday Mass, but knowing Ava’s aversion to the official structure of the Church, forewent it on her weekend trips to the north. So it came as a surprise when Ava suggested they drive to Midland. Ava debated asking her mother to join them but, knowing that the three of them would be sharing a car ride back to the city on Monday, decided one trip together was all she could handle.

  They left the cottage just after eight, and the roads were so quiet they reached the shrine just before nine, in time for the ten-o’clock Mass. They wandered the spacious grounds and then stood at the back of the church reading the grisly details of the martyrs’ deaths. Most of them had been tortured at length by the Hurons. Maria was especially taken by the suffering endured by Jean de Brébeuf, and insisted on reading the details aloud to Ava.

  Maria was Colombian, a graduate in English and business from the University of Bogotá. She was an assistant trade commissioner at Colombia’s office in Toronto, on a four-year assignment with two years left to go — a fact they didn’t discuss. Ava couldn’t understand how, with all that education, Catholicism still flowed so vigorously through Maria’s veins. For her own part, Ava had never had a true passion for the religion, and the Church’s position on sexual orientation watered down any other emotional pull she might feel. Still, she found comfort from time to time in prayer, and she was completely tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs.

  The church filled quickly, mainly with summer visitors, Ava assumed. The church was built almost entirely of wood in the manner of the great longhouses the Hurons and Algonquins had once built. Even the roof was patched with enormous sheets of dried birch bark. The service began and Maria quickly fell into its rhythm, her face beaming, her voice loudly echoing the refrains, her arms held out, palms turned up. Ava’s mind began to wander five minutes in, as she replayed the options in her life.

  She thought again about May Ling and her offer. It was flattering, and the money would certainly be great. But she didn’t need the money, and she had been working basically on her own for so long she wasn’t sure how well she would adapt to a more structured occupation. It was no
t that she didn’t believe in structure, but the idea of its being imposed upon her rather than self-imposed bothered her.

  Maybe I should go into business for myself, she mused. But what would Uncle do? she thought for what seemed like the tenth time in ten days. He had never discussed retiring, and she wondered if the day would ever come when he would walk away from work. What else did he have? He had no family. He had no hobbies except betting on horse racing, and that wasn’t enough to occupy a man whose mind was still sharp and whose sense of adventure was still keen.

  Well, I could always keep doing nothing for a while, she thought. And then an odd feeling gnawed at her. Was she really built to do nothing? Her best friend, Mimi, had a good job. Maria loved her work. Even her mother qualified as being employed, if playing mah-jong for money could be considered a profession. The only person she knew who actually did nothing was Mimi’s husband and her own best male friend, Derek. Like Ava, Derek practised bak mei. That’s how they had met — as the only two bak mei students of Grandmaster Tang. Derek was the only child of a wealthy Hong Kong family, and after graduation he had chosen to stay in Toronto and live a life of complete idleness, interrupted only by odd jobs he did when Ava needed him. But even those jobs had ended now. Mimi was pregnant, and Ava couldn’t ask her husband, a father-to-be, to put himself at risk.

  Ava’s thoughts of Derek were interrupted when Maria leaned over and whispered, “That woman is staring at you.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one to the right a couple of aisles down.”

  Ava saw only the backs of heads, and then she noticed one whose hair was pulled tightly back in a ponytail secured by a red rubber band. As the homily ended, the woman turned and looked back. It was Theresa Ng. Ava acknowledged her with a smile.

  She hadn’t thought about Theresa since turning off her computer on Friday evening. After returning from their meeting, Ava had opened the computer with the intention of checking emails, but almost subconsciously she typed “Emerald Lion” into the search engine. There was a small story about the company in the Globe and Mail’s business section, but it lacked any kind of detail.