The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

by Ian Hamilton

  She went to the Sing Tao website and tracked several stories there. The first one was longer than the Globe’s but also surprisingly vague on specifics. It mentioned that Emerald Lion was a private investment fund that had run into problems. No numbers were mentioned, and the story consisted mainly of quotes from unnamed investors asking that the fund’s management come forward.

  The same photo of Lam accompanied every article. Long, thin face. Sad, droopy eyes. A thick head of hair combed straight back and a thick, bushy moustache — unusual for an Asian. He was certainly distinctive-looking, and if Theresa’s sister thought she had seen him, she probably had. Not that it mattered. There was no reason for Ava to take on the job other than to appease her mother. She had decided to call Uncle on Tuesday, because keeping her word was important to her, but she knew already he wouldn’t want to take on such a minor job. Theresa and her mother would be disappointed. To avoid her mother’s sharp tongue, Ava would blame Uncle.

  When the Mass finished, people began to file out of the church. Maria lagged behind as always, kneeling for a final prayer. Ava sat patiently, and when Maria was done, she reached for her hand and walked with her to the exit.

  The church was dimly lit, and the contrast between its dark interior and the outside world, where the sun shone unfiltered, was almost blinding. As Ava struggled to adjust her vision, Maria said, “There’s that woman again.”

  To their right, Theresa Ng stood with an older woman. Before Ava could react, Theresa was upon her, the other woman in tow. “This is Ava Lee,” Theresa said. “She is the woman who is going to help us.”

  Ava didn’t know what to say.

  “This is my mother,” Theresa continued. “I told her I was coming here today before work to pray, to thank God for sending you to us, and she insisted on coming with me.”

  Ava still didn’t know what to say.

  Theresa’s mother stepped forward, tears welling in her eyes, and reached for Ava’s hand. “Bless you,” she said.

  “Auntie, please —” Ava said.

  “Bless you for helping us.”

  “Auntie —”

  Theresa intervened. “I’m sorry for disturbing you on a Sunday, at church.”

  Ava was grateful that at least she had restrained the mother. “I’ll call you sometime next week, okay?” she said.

  Theresa nodded, looking a little confused.

  What did Mummy tell her after I dropped them off? Ava wondered.

  Ava felt a chill in the air, a hint of autumn, and a reminder that in about twenty hours she would be making the drive south, back to Toronto, back to a life that she had spent two months avoiding.

  ( 4 )

  Ava lived in a condo in Yorkville, in the centre of Toronto, surrounded by boutiques, art galleries, restaurants, and stores on nearby Bloor Street that showcased a wide swath of the world’s luxury clothing, jewellery, and leather brands. It was early Monday afternoon when she pulled up in front of her building, handed her Audi A6 keys to the concierge, and took the elevator with Maria to her unit.

  The drive from Orillia had been slow and uneventful. She had dropped off her mother at her house in Richmond Hill, a northern suburb, and then worked her way down the Don Valley Expressway to the city. Maria lived just off the Danforth, the eastern extension of Bloor, only a few kilometres away, but she spent the afternoon with Ava as she stocked up on instant coffee at the Starbucks almost directly across the street from her condo and bought groceries at Whole Foods on Avenue Road. They ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant and went back to Ava’s to have sex. Then Maria left to get organized for her work week.

  Ava sat at the window and looked down at Avenue Road. The traffic was moving slowly, and it would be moving even more slowly in the days to come as the city repopulated after the long weekend. What the hell am I going to do with myself? Ava thought before going to bed.

  She slept well, was up by seven thirty, made coffee, and retrieved the newspaper from the door. She carried paper, coffee, and her computer to the small table by the kitchen window. She glanced outside. The street below was teeming with traffic and pedestrians, everyone with someplace to go, something to do.

  She turned on her computer and waded into her emails. May Ling had sent her daily diary and was urging Ava to think more seriously about joining forces. Amanda Yee said her father was impressed with the business she’d constructed with May and was giving her more and more responsibility; for the first time, he was talking about retiring. She made no mention of Michael. Ava had no reason to think this was a bad sign, but she did. Mimi had emailed to say she and Derek were buying a house in Leaside, a neighbourhood filled with professional daddies and yummy mummies. Ava could already feel her slipping away. And then her father, Marcus, had written that the crisis with Michael had convinced him he needed liquidity. He was going to sell all his properties and put the money into some safe interest-bearing bonds. It would allow him to spend more time with his family, he said. Which one? Ava wondered.

  Everyone in flux, everyone in transition, she thought, her feeling of aimlessness deepening.

  She decided to go for a morning run when the traffic outside settled down, and then later in the afternoon to walk over to the house where she was tutored in and practised bak mei. She wasn’t back to full strength yet, but she was getting close, and the pain the exercise brought on was becoming more manageable.

  She opened the newspaper, scanned the news section, and then turned to the business section. The word Ponzi jumped out at her from the headline on the front page. The article wasn’t related to the Theresa Ng situation, but it brought her name back into Ava’s head and reminded her there was an obligation she needed to fulfill. She reached for the phone and called Hong Kong.

  When Uncle didn’t answer his cellphone, she called his apartment. Lourdes, his Filipina housekeeper for more than thirty years, picked up. “Ava, he is lying down,” she said. Ava detected a touch of worry in her voice.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Food poisoning, he says.”

  “Again? Didn’t he have that just a few months ago?”

  “And several times since then.”

  “Has he seen a doctor?”

  “He won’t go.”

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “He gets feverish and then the chills, throws up, has the runs. I’ve been making him sip warm water to stop from getting dehydrated.”

  Ava hadn’t detected anything different about him, but then she hadn’t seen him since Macau. He initiated all the telephone contact, and he seemed the same man to her. “Have you talked to Sonny?”

  “No, not yet, but I’m going to.”

  “Well, tell Uncle I called, and if he’s up to it, to call me back.”

  Ava walked to the bathroom to get ready to go out. As she brushed her teeth and then her hair, she thought about Uncle. He had been in his late sixties or early seventies when they met, and even adding on the years they had spent together, she thought of him as ageless. It depressed her to think he might not be.

  Her run took close to an hour. She went north on Avenue Road, around Upper Canada College, where the children of Canada’s elite were now back in school. The kids were still arriving when she ran past, through part of the affluent neighbourhood of Forest Hill, and then turned east. She trekked over to Mount Pleasant, the western edge of Leaside — Mimi and Derek’s new home — and then ran south, dodging around prams and Filipina yayas. When she got to Bloor Street, she turned right and headed back to Yorkville.

  It was nearly ten o’clock when she walked into her condo. The message light on her phone was blinking. She checked the last number and saw that it was Uncle. Ava debated for a second about showering first, then picked up the phone and called his Hong Kong apartment.

  “Wei,” Uncle said.

  “It’s Ava.”

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “I’m fine. It
is just that you usually do not call unless there is something pressing.”

  “Sorry if I alarmed you,” she said, pleased to hear his voice sounding robust. “It’s just that we have been offered a sort of a job, and I wanted to discuss it with you and get your opinion.”

  “Sort of a job?”

  “A small one, for a Vietnamese woman who knows my mother. She and her family are out of pocket for about three million Canadian dollars.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  His request surprised her. She had expected him to reject it out of hand because the amount was so much smaller than the jobs they normally took on. Ava began to explain Theresa Ng’s dilemma and Uncle listened without interruption. When she was finished, she said, “I feel obliged to give her an answer today or tomorrow. I don’t want her hanging on to false expectations.”

  Uncle was so quiet Ava wondered if he was still there. Then he said, “The total scam is for about thirty million, you think.”

  “Yes, that’s the number she used.”

  “Recovering thirty million interests me.”

  Ava wondered if he had heard her properly. “Uncle, Theresa has lost three million, not thirty.”

  “I know, but all those other people who lost money, you do not think they want it back?”

  “I’m sure they do, but they haven’t approached us, have they.”

  “Maybe because they do not know who we are.”

  Where is he going with this? she thought. It wasn’t like him to complicate matters. “Uncle, I’m not about to start chasing down these people one by one to ask them to hire us.”

  “But there is nothing to stop Theresa Ng from contacting them, is there? Let her do the work. Tell her to get hold of them and persuade them to sign on with us, organize a meeting if she has to. Three million is of no interest, of course, but if she can deliver commitments for anything over twenty million, then let us take the job.”

  This was not what she had expected, and it took her a minute to process Uncle’s suggestion. On the surface it made sense, at least if her intent was to stay with Uncle. How could she tell him that wasn’t entirely where her head was? How could she tell him she was seriously weighing other options? Sure as hell not in this phone conversation, she thought. In fact, in any phone conversation. When and if the day came for her to part ways with Uncle, she’d tell him face to face. “Okay,” she relented. “I’ll call Theresa and see if she is willing to do this. If she is, I’ll give her a week to pull it together. How does that sound?”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  Ava paused. “Lourdes told me about the food poisoning,” she said as casually as she could.

  “It was nothing.”

  “I find it unusual that you get it so frequently.”

  “I have to stop eating bargain sashimi.”

  “Was that it?”

  “Every time.”

  “You have enough money to eat the most expensive sashimi in Tokyo a thousand times a day.”

  “Old habits die hard.”

  She knew he meant his careful spending of the Hong Kong dollar. “My mother says, ‘Penny wise, pound foolish.’”

  “Your mother knows a lot of clichés.”

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  He laughed. “I will be more careful.”

  Ava hung up the phone, feeling better about his bout of illness but frustrated that he hadn’t told her to let go of the Theresa Ng case. He was supposed to be her excuse for saying no. Now she would have to depend on Theresa’s inability to deliver more clients.

  ( 5 )

  Her mother was barely awake when Ava called. Her voice was throaty, smoky. “I played mah-jong until six this morning,” Jennie said.

  “How many hours straight was that?” Ava asked.

  “Not so many. We took a break at two and went for fried noodles at Big Mouth Kee.”

  “Do you want me to call back?”

  “What is this about?”

  “Theresa.”

  “No, no, don’t call back. Tell me now what you’ve decided.”

  Ava couldn’t remember the last time her mother had been so eager to talk about anything that early in the morning. “I haven’t decided anything. I spoke to Uncle, and he says he has no interest in chasing after three million dollars.”

  “Ava!”

  “Wait, Mummy, don’t start having a fit. It isn’t what it seems.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You have to understand that for us to go after three million costs us the same amount in money and time as going after twenty or thirty million. Uncle is suggesting that Theresa contact some of the other people who got ripped off and get them to sign on with us. If we can get enough people, and enough money as a target, then he says he’ll agree to take on the job.”

  Her mother went quiet and Ava knew she was steaming. Ava was now certain that she had told Theresa it was a done deal, and the last thing she wanted to do was eat her words. “Theresa thinks you have taken the case,” Jennie confirmed.

  “I don’t know how that can be, since I never made a commitment. And even if I did, I report to Uncle, and the final decision is his,” Ava said, giving her mother the excuse she could use.

  “It won’t be easy for her to do this, you know,” Jennie said. “Outside of their immediate families the Vietnamese are close-mouthed. Even if they want to hire you, they won’t want everyone else to know how much money they had, how much they lost.”

  “I’ll keep their secrets. If she can get them to agree to hire us, we’ll give them individual contracts. They won’t have to disclose anything to anyone.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “You didn’t have to say that,” Jennie snapped.

  “Sorry.”

  Jennie sighed. “Me too . . . It’s just that she’s such a nice woman and I really want you to be able to help her.”

  Ava felt the first traces of guilt creep in. “I want to help her too. So talk to Theresa and tell her to get some more people onside. When she talked to me before, she said she was getting a monthly statement of affairs from that company. All the other people have to do is bring their last statement so I can confirm what they are owed. I’ll also need some basic bank information from each of them — bank name, branch address, and account number. We’ll take it from there.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to drag other people into this.”

  “That’s the way Uncle wants it.”

  “And do you always do what he wants?”

  “Yes,” Ava lied.

  It would take at least a few days for Theresa to locate and talk to the others, Ava knew, and it was by no means certain that they would want to hire her and Uncle. Agreeing to give up thirty percent would be hard for some of them, even though, as Theresa had said, seventy percent of something was better than a hundred percent of nothing.

  Uncle had taught her the most basic truth about clients on the day he hired her. “They are always initially overjoyed that we will help them, prepared to pay just about anything we ask. But the moment we actually have the money, they remember that it was all theirs and they begrudge paying us even five percent, let alone thirty.” It was why Uncle nearly always moved the recovered funds through their own bank account, so he could subtract the fee before passing on the balance to the client.

  Ava showered and dressed. It was getting close to lunch time, and now that she was back in the city, dim sum was on her mind. She phoned Mimi, who worked within walking distance of Ava’s condo, to ask if she could join her. Mimi said she had a lunch meeting at her office, so Ava called Maria’s office and was told she was at a meeting in Oakville, a suburb just west of Toronto. She didn’t feel like any other company, so it was dim sum alone or no dim sum.

  The Dynasty restaurant was east on Yorkville Avenue, no more than a five-minute walk for Ava. She ordered hot and sour soup, har gow, chicken feet, and steamed pork wrapped in bea
n curd. As she started in on the soup her cellphone rang. It was a 905 area code, the outskirts of Toronto, and an unfamiliar number.

  “Ava Lee,” she said.

  “This is Theresa. Your mother called and told me what your boss had to say.”

  “Yes?”

  “It is done.”

  “Done?”

  “Me and my brother contacted some of the people we know, and they did the same. I think we have about twelve people who are willing to hire you now.”

  “How much money does that represent?”

  Theresa hesitated. “I don’t really know. We didn’t want to start asking people how much they’d lost. Your mother told me what you want to know and we passed that information along. Everyone who is coming to the meeting will bring their own paperwork. You have to keep it secret, though. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I also told Mummy it had to be more than twenty million, not more than twenty people.”

  “Ava, I think it is more than twenty million, but the only way to be sure is for you to look at the paperwork. That’s why we organized the meeting.”

  “The meeting?”

  “We told everyone to be at the Pho Saigon Ho restaurant on Highway Ten — Hurontario Street — in Mississauga at seven o’clock and to bring their documents.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “That’s short notice.”

  “Our people can all make it. It’s too important for them not to. And your mother said you are between jobs right now.”

  Between jobs, Ava thought. More like between two women. Why hadn’t she said no when they were in Orillia? Why hadn’t Uncle said no? “Pho Saigon Ho?” she said, feeling trapped.

  “Yes, it has a private dining room in the back we can use. The owner is one of the people who lost money.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there.”

  “That’s wonderful. Thank you so much.”

  “And Theresa, just in case, bring me the licence plate number of the car your sister saw Lam get out of in Ho Chi Minh.”

  “I have it with me. Do you want it now?”

  “Why not,” Ava said.