The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

by Ian Hamilton

  “Is he known to them otherwise?”

  “Not to any great extent. He left Vietnam twenty years ago to attend university in Canada. Until now he has been back infrequently, and then for only a week at a time, presumably to visit his family.”

  “So, no criminal activity?”

  “Nothing on record.”

  “I guess I’m going to be visiting Ho Chi Minh.”

  “If you do, you will come through Hong Kong?”

  “Of course.”

  “It will be good to see you,” Uncle said.

  He sounds sentimental, she thought, and that’s not like him. “You too,” she replied, wondering what exactly was going on in his head. “But before I book anything, could you get confirmation for me that Lam is still there? You mentioned his brother’s house . . .”

  “He is there, in the house. Our people saw him puttering around the garden.”

  “How did they know it was him?

  “Ava, they have his passport photo.”

  “Of course,” she said, feeling silly. “They didn’t talk to him, did they?”

  “Do not worry. They did not approach him.”

  “So that settles it. I’ll try to leave tonight. I’ll catch the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong and connect from there.”

  “Don’t book anything to Ho Chi Minh until late morning or early afternoon. That way we can have breakfast before you leave.”

  “I’ll do that, and I’ll email you my flight information once I have it.”

  “It is good to have you back,” he said.

  “I’ll see you in Hong Kong,” she said, ending the call.

  I’m going back to work, she thought.

  ( 8 )

  Ava slept fitfully, her father back in her dreams and her half-brother Michael lingering at the edges. They were in some big city in the United States, staying in a complex of offices and factories and floors of hotel rooms all intermingled, and they had to get to the airport. Her father sent her to get their bags while he checked out. She got lost in a warren of corridors, madly taking elevator after elevator as time ticked away. Doors opened onto rooms filled with conveyor belts, other rooms crammed with desks and office workers who thought she was crazy when she demanded to know where the entrance to the hotel was. As their departure time drew closer, her panic increased. That was when Michael appeared, in an atrium two floors above her, yelling at her to join him. Afraid to try the elevators, she took the stairs. But when she had climbed the two flights, there was no exit door. In fact there was no door at all.

  She woke with a start and glanced quickly at her bedside clock. It was just past seven, and she was glad to get out of bed, thinking it odd that the dream, with its recurring theme of a lost father and a distant brother, should come back to her on the second night she was in the city. Up north she had slept like a stone.

  Ava went to the door to retrieve her newspaper and then made herself an instant coffee. She sat at the table by the window and read with a bit more urgency than she had the day before. She had other things to do now.

  After showering, dressing, and drinking two more cups of coffee, she went through her clothes three times before finally choosing two pairs of slacks, a short skirt, four dress shirts, and two pairs of shoes. She placed them on her bed and then added her travel toilet kit, bras, panties, three T-shirts, running shoes, shorts, and her Adidas nylon jacket and training pants. I’m going to need a real suitcase if I take all this stuff, she thought as she looked down at the piles. Two shirts, the skirt, and a pair of shoes went back into the closet. If she wore the runners and the Adidas outfit, she’d get everything else into her Shanghai Tang leather carry-on.

  When she’d finished packing, she sat down in the kitchen and picked up the phone. In rapid succession she called Maria, Mimi, and her sister, Marian, and told them she’d taken a job and was leaving the country for at least a few days. None of them seemed surprised. Marian said, “I was wondering how long it would take for you to get back at it.” Mimi told her to stay in touch. And Maria, who Ava had anticipated would feel bereft, just said, “That woman at the church?” Ava felt slightly put out by their lack of concern, until she realized that none of them knew the soul-searching she’d been doing the past few months. They thought that it was business as usual, and that meant Ava getting on a plane to somewhere.

  She called her mother last. It was still a bit early for Jennie and her voice was heavy with sleep. “You’re leaving today?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Theresa called me late last night. She’s very grateful. I’m very grateful.”

  “I made no promises, and don’t you make any either. I’ll do the best I can.”

  “I’m just happy that you’re trying.”

  “Trying is the correct word.”

  “Are you going through Hong Kong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you spending any time there?”

  Ava hesitated. She knew where this would go. “Just a few hours. I only have enough time to meet with Uncle.”

  “Call your father anyway when you’re there. If someone sees you and tells him you were in Hong Kong and you didn’t at least call, he’ll be hurt.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “Good. When he calls me tonight, I’ll tell him to expect it.”

  Ava started to protest and then caught herself. Marcus and Jennie talked every day, and she was sure there wasn’t a day when she and Marian weren’t part of the conversation. And if Jennie talked to Marcus, Marcus would mention it to Michael, and Michael to Amanda, and Amanda to May Ling. Ava’s life had been much simpler six months before.

  Her cellphone rang. “Mummy, my other phone — I need to answer it.”

  “Keep in touch.”

  “Only if you promise not to ask me how I’m doing with Theresa’s case.”

  “Ava, don’t be so mean.”

  “Love you,” Ava said, hanging up and reaching for her cell.

  It was Theresa Ng, sounding depressed. “I just talked to Joey Lac, and he’s not sure he wants to meet with anyone.”

  “Not sure or won’t?”

  “You’ll have to phone him and find out.”

  “Theresa, when you said your brother hit him, what exactly happened?”

  “They argued and my brother lost his temper.”

  “Did he hurt Lac?”

  “A bit.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He hit him in the leg with a baseball bat.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry, Ava. But he didn’t break his leg or anything. He just bruised it, I think.”

  No wonder Joey Lac isn’t keen on meeting, Ava thought. “Give me his phone number,” she said, exasperated.

  Ava dialled the number, for a Richmond Hill accounting firm, and was put on hold for a couple of minutes. She was beginning to think Lac was going to duck her call when he came on the line with a timid “Hello.”

  “Mr. Lac, my name is Ava Lee and I’m an accountant. I was given your number by Theresa Ng. She told me that you had an unpleasant conversation with her brother some time ago. I just want you to understand up front that I’m calling you in a professional accounting capacity. I’d like an opportunity to meet with you — just the two of us — for a far more civilized and polite discussion about Lam Van Dinh and his fund. Do you think that could be possible?”

  “I don’t know anything,” he said.

  “You don’t know anything about what?”

  “The Emerald Lion Fund. I told Bobby that.”

  “Bobby is Theresa’s brother?”

  “Yes, and I told him I knew nothing about the actual fund.”

  “But you do know Lam Van Dinh?”

  “Of course. We were schoolmates and we were friends.”

  “Then I really need to sit and chat with you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ava wondered how much to tell him. “Have you been in touch with him
since he left Canada?”

  “No. I don’t actually know for sure he’s gone, although I haven’t heard from him, and I know everyone is saying he ran away.”

  “Well, he almost certainly did leave, and we think we know where he is. My plan is to go to see him to find out what happened to the money.”

  “Good luck,” Lac said sharply.

  “Why do you say it that way?”

  “I don’t think you’ll find any money.”

  “And why not?”

  He paused, and Ava knew she had to meet with him. “Look, rather than having this awkward kind of talk, why don’t I buy you lunch today? I have to go to Richmond Hill anyway. Do you know where the Lucky Season restaurant is?”

  “Times Square?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Ava said. “I’ll meet you there at one o’clock. I’ll be wearing a blue nylon Adidas jacket.”

  When he didn’t answer, Ava said, “If you prefer, I can come to your office . . . Mr. Lac, I’ll be there alone. There is absolutely no reason for you not to talk to me. All I want is to understand the kind of person Lam is — or was — and I think you can help me do that. I have no other motive.”

  “I can’t get away until one thirty,” he said slowly.

  “Then I’ll see you at one thirty. And Mr. Lac, thank you, I really appreciate this.”

  Ava turned on her computer. There was a long email from May Ling; Ava debated telling her she was headed for Asia and decided against it. May could be emotionally taxing, and now that she was back on the job, Ava knew she needed to focus. The same held true for telling Amanda, with one additional reason: Ava knew Amanda would want to talk about Michael, and Ava wasn’t quite ready to get caught up in the complexities of her father’s first family.

  She closed her laptop and checked her notes from the night before. Bank Linno was at the top of the list, right after Joey Lac. Ava knew of several Indonesian banks, but Linno wasn’t one of them. That wasn’t unusual, since there were more than a hundred commercial banks in the country. She logged on to their website and was immediately struck by how sparse it was. As she dug into the information she could access, things became even odder. The bank was headquartered in Surabaya, in East Java. Surabaya had a population of more than three million and was a major city, but it wasn’t Jakarta. In fact, the bank had no presence at all in Jakarta, the capital, not even a branch. Its activity in Indonesia was restricted to East Java; from the list of branches the website provided, it seemed to be operating only in Surabaya, Batu, Malang, and Madiun.

  What is a small regional Indonesian bank doing with an office in Toronto? she wondered as she clicked the INTERNATIONAL tab on the website. And what is the same bank doing with offices in New York, Rome, Caracas, and Porlamar?

  She opened the Toronto branch’s page and got nothing but an 800 phone number — no address, no contact names, no services. Without thinking, she reached for her cell and dialled the number. It rang twice and then went to voicemail. Ava hung up. How strange is that? she thought.

  Canada had five major chartered banks and a much longer list of smaller banks and credit unions. The entire system was heavily regulated and perhaps the safest in the world. Linno could be operating without a charter; it could be a “near-bank.” Ava knew of several banks that didn’t deal directly with the public, that worked through financial advisors, but even they at least posted their services.

  She opened the pages for the other international branches and found the same dearth of information. Then she switched back to the Surabaya headquarters. The information on the bank’s Indonesian operations was much more detailed; it appeared to provide a full range of consumer and commercial services. Ava copied the branch names, addresses, phone numbers, and email contacts into her notebook. It was noon in Toronto, midnight in Surabaya. Since there was no point in calling, Ava fired off an email requesting a contact name and address for the Toronto office.

  When that was done, she packed the laptop and her notebook into the large Chanel bag she used as a briefcase and called downstairs for her car to be brought up from the garage. She looked around the apartment. She had been back for only two days, but it felt like a lot longer.

  ( 9 )

  The drive up the Don Valley Parkway was laborious, as usual, and the traffic didn’t lessen when she exited at Highway 7 and entered Chinatown North. About 500,000 people of Chinese descent now lived in the city and the Greater Toronto Area. The first big wave had come from Hong Kong, just prior to repatriation, and was quickly followed by an influx from the mainland. The city had Chinese daily newspapers, Chinese radio and television stations, huge shopping centres built Hong Kong style, and restaurants — hundreds of restaurants — offering every known East Asian cuisine, served up by chefs recruited from the best restaurants in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing and paid huge salaries to relocate in Canada. Jennie Lee maintained that the Chinese restaurants in Toronto were now the best in the world, and Ava couldn’t argue with her.

  When they had first moved to Toronto, the only Chinatown was located downtown. Every Saturday morning Jennie had bundled Ava and Marian into the car and driven them there for abacus and Mandarin lessons while she shopped for Chinese vegetables and the ten-kilo bags of fragrant Thai rice that she loved. The downtown Chinatown was densely populated, so Jennie had settled herself and the kids in the northern suburb of Richmond Hill, where a wealthy, sophisticated Chinese population was beginning to expand.

  Mimi had asked Ava once why so many Chinese people chose to live in Richmond Hill. The answer was simple. For years Vancouver had been the most desired landing spot for Chinese immigrants, and the town of Richmond was where they settled. When Toronto began to supplant Vancouver as the economic hub of Chinese activity in Canada, there was a migration of western Chinese Canadians. And because they — and just about everyone in Hong Kong — knew the name Richmond, Richmond Hill was where they ended up. There hadn’t been many Chinese people there when Jennie brought her two daughters east, to get away from what was for her the dreary, rainy climate of Vancouver, which reminded her too much of Hong Kong. But within a few years Richmond Hill, Ontario, was as Chinese as Richmond, British Columbia.

  The Lucky Season was in a strip mall named Times Square, which was modelled after a Hong Kong mall of the same name. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant, but it served great and cheap dim sum. Jennie had found it years ago and had been going several times a week ever since. Each dim sum serving cost $2.20, about half of what you’d pay at most other places on Highway 7, and maybe a quarter of the tab at trendy downtown restaurants such as Lai Wah Heen. The place sat about four hundred people and was always jammed.

  Ava knew the hostess — another of Jennie Lee’s innumerable friends — and was immediately led past a knot of waiting customers to a table. No one complained about the preferential treatment; having connections was an accepted part of daily life in Richmond Hill, something to be admired, not envied.

  The hostess asked after Jennie. Ava explained that her mother had spent the summer at a cottage. The woman — who was at least six foot two in flat shoes and had been a member of the Chinese women’s basketball team — looked down at Ava in disbelief. “I thought she must have gone to Hong Kong or something. I can’t see her at a cottage.”

  Ava shrugged. “She survived.”

  “Do you want hot and sour soup?” the hostess asked.

  “You know I do. I’ll order it now and everything else when my guest gets here.”

  When it came to food, Ava was absolutely biased. She believed that Chinese cuisine, in all its incredible variety and devotion to freshness, couldn’t be beat. And if she had to choose just one dish, it would be hot and sour soup. She had eaten it, she imagined, literally thousands of times, in hundreds of restaurants. And every time she ate it, it was different — not just from restaurant to restaurant but even in the same restaurant on different days. Its constant surprise delighted her. The variety of potential ingredients, both necessary and optional, was so
vast that minor adjustments here and there could change the entire flavour profile. As the name suggested, the soup was meant to be spicy, so pepper and chilis were a constant. It was also meant to have a slightly sour tang, so vinegar was always added to the chicken-broth base, along with — and this was where chefs got really creative — any combination and amounts of tofu, pork strips, bamboo shoots, wood ear mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, green onions, shrimp, scallops, and duck meat.

  Any restaurant that could make a good hot and sour soup could count on her business. Lucky Season made a great one, certainly in her top three. Ava liked hers especially spicy, and the chef at the Lucky Season went heavy on ground black pepper and chilis, lighter with the vinegar, and added sliced red and green peppers. His soup was a light brown colour, but Ava had also seen red, pink, and dark brown versions. She dipped in her spoon and pulled out a bright pink shrimp with a strip of wood ear mushroom wrapped around it. She ate it and smiled.

  Joey Lac was on time. Ava had finished her soup and was chatting with the hostess when she saw a man hovering near the doorway, eyeing the room. He was larger than she had expected, close to six feet and carrying a lot of weight. Ava stood and waved in his direction. He looked at her and then glanced around, as if trying to make sure she really was alone. Theresa’s brother has made him paranoid, Ava thought.

  He lumbered towards her, beads of sweat visible on his upper lip and forehead. Ava held out her hand. “Thanks for coming.”

  “You aren’t what I expected,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I expected someone older, someone Vietnamese. You aren’t Vietnamese, are you.”

  “Well, I’m older than I look, and no, I’m not Vietnamese. I’m Chinese. Why should that surprise you?”

  “They don’t trust many people who aren’t Vietnamese.”

  “Maybe I’m their only hope to get their money back, or maybe after what Lam did to them they’ve had to reassess who they should be trusting.”

  “I would think it’s most likely that you’re their only hope,” Lac said, lowering himself slowly onto a chair.