by Ian Hamilton
“Who are ‘they’?”
“My investors.”
“Well, you’re right, of course. They did send me.”
“And who else?”
“We’re not playing a game of bait-and-switch, Mr. Lam. There is no one with a baseball bat lurking in the shadows. I’m all they sent. And truthfully, they don’t know exactly where you are, because I haven’t told them.”
He stood to one side. “Come in,” he said.
The house was smaller than it looked from the outside. The main floor consisted of a hallway with a kitchen and eating area to the right and a living room–den combination to the left, with IKEA-style furnishings.
“I need to wash up. Why don’t you take a seat while I do,” Lam said. “Would you like some tea?”
“I’d love some tea.”
“Jasmine?”
“Perfect.”
He headed for the kitchen and Ava went into the living room. She sat down in a deeply slanted chair. The room was sparsely furnished and had two walls of bookcases. There was no television, no home entertainment system. Another wall was filled with framed diplomas. She could read most of them from her chair, and it turned out that Dr. Lam’s wife was equally distinguished, her medical degree having come from Johns Hopkins University.
She heard a tap running and the familiar sound of water being pumped from a Thermos. Lam came into the living room with a teapot and two mugs on a tray. He put it on the coffee table and then sat in a chair directly across from her. “Are you really an accountant?” he asked.
She took a card from her notebook and put it on the table.
Lam picked it up. “Offices in Hong Kong and Toronto, but no addresses.”
“We don’t have a walk-in type of clientele.”
“What kind do you have?”
“The kind who have lost a lot of money and have exhausted the conventional ways of recovering it.”
“Ah.”
“Do you mind?” she said, reaching for the teapot. When he said nothing, she poured tea into both mugs.
“So you are here to try to get their money back?” he asked, his hand shaking as he took the mug.
“I’d like to start by finding out what happened to it, and then we’ll take it from there.”
“Well, it’s gone. All of it,” he said.
She sipped her tea, her eyes focused on his. He tried to return her stare, but whatever confidence he might have had collapsed. His head dropped to his chest, tears spilling down his cheeks.
“You can take your time,” she said. “But I really need to know what happened.”
Lam sobbed and his hand began to shake more fiercely, tea splashing out of the mug. She reached over and took it from him and put it back on the tray.
“I’ve lost my career. I’ve lost every friend I ever had,” he said.
“What happened?” she urged.
He tilted his head back and began to breathe deeply through his nose. Gradually he gathered himself, and after another minute of deep breathing he reached for his mug and took a gulp of tea. “I put the money into a fund,” he said.
“Just a moment — you were the fund?” said Ava.
“Yes, I had my fund. But I put all the money I collected into another one — a bigger one. At least I thought it was a bigger one.”
“What was its name?”
“Surabaya Fidelity Security.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Why would you?” he said, the tears returning to his eyes.
Ava thought about what Joey Lac had said, about Lam not being the kind of man to steal or lie. Less than five minutes into her conversation with him she already had the same impression. “Could you start at the beginning?” she asked.
He sipped his tea. “I have — I had a friend named Fred Purslow. We worked for the same accounting firm after school, and even after we went our separate ways we kept in touch. I started my own accounting business, dealing mainly with Vietnamese clients, and he went into banking.”
“Bank Linno?”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Yeah, that’s where he ended up.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disrupt your train of thought.”
“That’s not hard these days . . . Anyway, about three years ago one of my clients, who owns a grocery store, asked me if I could help him with a problem concerning cash. He had been accumulating it illegally and wanted to find a way he could use it without drawing the attention of Revenue Canada or the police or whatever. I couldn’t think of any way of doing that and told him so. A few weeks later I was having dinner with Fred and explained the situation to him. He didn’t say anything to me right away, but the next day he called and asked to meet me. Over lunch he told me about a fund he administered at the bank. It was private, like everything that bank did, but he thought if he talked to his bosses, they might agree to let me participate.”
“Did you run a check on the fund?”
“It was private, not registered, but backed by the bank, Fred said.”
“And he was your friend, and you believed him,” Ava said.
Lam closed his eyes. “Yes, I believed him.”
“So what was special about this fund?”
“Fred told me it would provide a guaranteed return of twelve percent annually. And he told me I could put all the cash I wanted into it, no questions asked. All I had to do was set up a company that I could use to funnel the money in and out of.”
“Emerald Lion?”
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Lam, would you mind if I took some notes?” she asked, realizing this was getting complicated.
His teeth gnawed at his lower lip as he nodded at her.
She opened her pad and uncapped her pen. “Are you telling me that Emerald Lion was not actually a fund — was never a fund — that it was in reality just an incorporated company?”
“Yeah, and it was a numbered company at that, with no name. It was Fred who put a name to it for bank account purposes, or so he said.”
“Mr. Lam, I’m getting very confused, so you’re going to have to help me here,” Ava said. The connecting arrows on her notebook page were getting jumbled. “Are you saying that this whole scheme was actually concocted by an employee of the bank?”
“Yeah.”
“You deposited the cash through him?”
“Yeah, I gave it to Fred. He did the actual deposits.”
“But you have receipts and the like?”
He gave her a hard stare. “Yeah. In fact, I brought them with me. They’re upstairs.”
“So you gave the money to Fred, he put it into your bank account —”
“No,” Lam said, his voice rising. “He put it directly into the bank fund account.”
“Surabaya Fidelity Security?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, he put your cash into that fund and then, I assume monthly, the fund remitted whatever portion of the twelve percent annual return was due into the Emerald Lion account?”
“That’s how it worked.”
“And you had promised your people — your clients — a ten percent return.”
“Yeah.”
“So you pocketed the other two percent for yourself.”
“One percent. Fred and I each took one percent.”
Ava did some quick math. One percent of $30 million still gave Lam an income of $300,000. “I saw the monthly reports you sent to your clients. They were quite detailed in terms of their returns.”
“I just took the reports I got from Surabaya, took off two percent, and then apportioned the money to the clients.”
Ava took Theresa Ng’s last report from her bag and held it out to Lam. “Is this example pretty standard?”
His head turned away so quickly it was as if she had slapped him across the cheek. “I don’t want to look at that,” he said.
Ava left it on the table. “What went wrong?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
Lam shook his head and his hands
began to tremble again. “You can guess, can’t you?”
“I’d rather you told me.”
He shuddered, and when he began to speak, his voice cracked. “It all happened so fast — too fast for me to think clearly. I mean, looking back, I should have acted more quickly than I did.”
“There wasn’t a bank fund.”
He reached for Theresa Ng’s fund report, looked at it, and then scrunched it into a ball. “He told me there was a glitch in the bank’s system and that the monthly payment was going to be a bit late. I began to worry right away, but Fred was my friend and the explanation he gave seemed plausible enough. He said he’d call me as soon as things were sorted. I waited for about three days before I called him again. He told me we were less than forty-eight hours away from having the funds deposited.”
“So you waited some more?”
“Yeah, but when I didn’t hear from him, I called again, and this time I got a message on his office voicemail. It was a Thursday, I remember, and the message said he was on vacation and would be out of the office until the following Monday. What could I do? I waited . . . It was the longest weekend of my life.”
“And then on Monday?”
“No Fred.”
“Ah.”
“I was going crazy. Some of the clients were already calling, and they weren’t being polite. I repeated Fred’s line about a glitch in the bank’s system. No one cared, of course.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to the bank and asked to speak to the manager. Actually his title was ‘President, Canadian Operations.’”
“What was his name?”
“Aris Muljadi.”
“You remember. I’m impressed.”
“How could I forget? I had to beg to get in to see him, and even then they made me wait for half an hour outside his office. I must have looked at his nameplate twenty times.”
“What did Mr. Muljadi have to say?”
“He just listened at first. I told him I was getting pressured by my people and that I needed the money from the Surabaya fund deposited into my account. But I knew, before I was more than a couple of sentences into my demand, that I was wasting my time. I mean, he sat back in his chair and looked at me like I was demented. I kept talking anyway, mentioning what Fred had told me about the glitches.”
“About which he knew nothing, am I right?”
“Yeah, nothing.”
“How about the Surabaya fund?”
Ava hadn’t thought it possible for Lam to slump even further into himself, but he did. His shoulders collapsed around his chest and his head hung so low she thought it was going to hit the table. “He’d never heard of it,” he said, the tears returning.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing at first. I was in a state of shock. It was like a doctor had just told me I had cancer and two months to live. He just stared at me silently. When I did start to talk, I was completely manic, I guess. I cursed the bank and Fred. I threatened to go directly to the police. That’s when he finally did something.”
“What?”
“He asked me to go into the boardroom next to his office and wait there while he tried to sort things out. I was only in there for about fifteen minutes when he showed up with another man. His family name was Rocca — I never got his first name. Rocca had a tape recorder with him. They sat down and asked me to explain my relationship with the bank and how I had come to put money into the Surabaya fund. I have to tell you, I was really reluctant to do it, but Muljadi said they couldn’t do anything to help me unless they knew all the facts. He assured me that if the bank was in any way involved in what had transpired, they would make things right.
“Rocca stepped in then and went even further. He said that if an employee of the bank, even without the bank’s knowledge and authority, had done something improper, the bank still had a professional and moral obligation to cover any losses I had incurred.”
“That sounds responsible.”
“Unless it was bullshit, which it was, of course,” Lam said. “All they wanted from me was details about the account and how Fred and I had managed things. After I told them, they asked me to wait in the boardroom while they verified my story. It didn’t take that long, maybe half an hour, but to me it felt like an eternity. I was going back and forth between feeling that the bank was going to make things right and feeling like my life was going to end.
“The two of them came back together but it was Rocca who did the talking. He was wearing a black suit with a white shirt and black tie, and I remember thinking that he looked like a funeral director. Anyway, he explained that it appeared that Fred Purslow had put together a rather simple but effective fraudulent scheme. Fred’s job at the bank was account manager — he had the authority to open and close accounts. What he had done was open an account for Emerald Lion and at the same time he opened an account for a numbered company, which listed a guy named Barry Lowell as director and sole signing authority. When he said that name, I almost fell over, because Barry had been a classmate of ours as well. He was friends with Fred but not with me.”
“So the money you gave to Purslow — he put it into the numbered company’s account that he and Lowell controlled?”
“Yeah.”
“And then transferred dribs and drabs into your account at month’s end?”
“Yeah, and gave me dummy reports on dummy letterhead.”
“So Rocca and Muljadi knew it had been a scam.”
“They knew.”
Ava looked down at the notes she’d been taking and knew there was something wrong with Lam’s explanation. “One thing doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Why would Purslow stop making payments? There had to be tons of cash still available to him, unless of course he was blowing his brains out in Vegas or something. Usually this kind of scheme doesn’t unravel for years, unless the fund promises a rate of return that is completely unrealistic. All he was delivering was eleven percent. At that rate he could have kept doing it for years and years, especially since you were putting more and more money into it.”
“I’m not a complete idiot,” Lam said. “I asked them the same question.”
“Did they have an answer?”
“Oh, yeah. The bank had decided six months before to close down their Canadian operation at the end of the calendar year. Everyone was going to lose their job, but to keep things running until then they offered a bonus to any employee who would stay till the end. Purslow signed on to stay. They were into the second-last month when he bolted. I guess he figured there was no way to duplicate this scheme using any other bank, so he took off while he could.”
“The numbered company’s account was emptied?”
“According to Rocca the money had been transferred offshore. I asked him where and he wouldn’t tell me. He said the bank was going to take matters into its own hands and that I wasn’t to worry myself.”
“Easy to say.”
“He said they’d find Purslow, find the money, and return it to me. In the meantime they wanted me to stay quiet. I said that was kind of hard to do when my clients were getting more and more demanding. At that point Muljadi stepped in and said the bank was prepared to advance me the month’s payments that were due. That would buy us all enough time to get things sorted out, he said.”
“How much was that?”
“Just over three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Of course. So you took the money and kept your mouth shut.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said, and then regretted it as his face fell.
“What else could I have done?” he said, talking to himself as much as to her.
“Not much, I suppose,” she said. “Now, when was the next time you heard from the bank?”
“Never.”
He said it so simply that she thought she had misheard. “What?”
“Never. I never heard from Rocca, Muljadi, or the bank, at least not directly.
”
“I don’t understand.”
“I saw them on a Monday afternoon, the day Purslow was supposed to be back from his holiday. They put the money they had promised into my account the same day and I paid it out to my clients. Then I sat and waited for them to contact me. A week went by without any word. Halfway into the next week, I was starting to get really, really paranoid again when a brown envelope was slid under my apartment door. I opened it, and whatever bad feelings I had about the way things were going were multiplied by ten — no, make that a hundred. It was a newspaper clipping from a Costa Rican newspaper called the Tico Times. The bodies of two headless men had been washed up on shore near a resort, and police were working to identify them. Attached to the clipping were two photos. They were of the heads of Purslow and Lowell, each set up on a wooden chair, with a note that read, This is what happens to faggots who steal,” he said, fighting for breath.
Ava had stopped writing when Lam mentioned the envelope. He had been looking sideways at one of the bookcases while he talked, so she found it difficult to read his face. “Mr. Lam, look at me, please,” she said.
He turned towards her, and she knew immediately he was telling her the truth. “I was terrified,” he sobbed.
And you still are, Ava thought. Suddenly nervous, she swivelled her head towards the door to see if someone was there. “You should have been,” she said, feeling a deep disquiet.
He began speaking quickly, as if in a rush to get it all out of his system. “I had no idea what to do. I paced for hours. Then I drank some whisky and finally worked up enough nerve to leave my apartment and go to the bank. Of course, when I got there, it was closed — completely shuttered, everyone gone.
“I ran down the stairs to the lobby. I wasn’t thinking that clearly, but I thought that if I went to see my lawyer he could at least tell me which police force or government officials or whoever I should go to . . . I didn’t get out of the building. They were waiting for me in the lobby — two of them — they looked like bikers. They were huge. Each of them took me by an arm and almost carried me out the door. They told me to keep quiet if I didn’t want to get hurt. Then they bundled me into the back of a big SUV with tinted windows. They sat on either side of me and asked if I’d had a chance to look at the envelope. I couldn’t talk, so I just nodded. They said it was time for me to forget that I had seen the photos, and time to forget about the bank and my money. If I opened my mouth to anyone or showed the photos to anyone, they’d come after me and do the exact same thing they’d done to Purslow. The next day I was on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City.”