by Ian Hamilton
Ava sat quietly, trying to absorb everything he had told her. She had heard his words but had no idea what they meant for him, for her, for Theresa Ng. What have I gotten myself into? she thought.
“I knew about the bank’s closing. I just didn’t know the circumstances or have an exact timeline,” she finally said.
“Now you do.”
“Have you told this story to anyone else?” she asked.
“No, just you,” he said quickly.
“Why me?”
He shrugged. “I don’t really know. There you were at the fence and then you were in the house, and you just seemed like someone I could talk to. Besides, I knew someone would come, and that sooner or later I’d have to share this nightmare. I believed you when you said you just wanted to talk . . . I have to tell you, I feel a bit better for it.”
“Well, if I can make a suggestion, don’t talk about it with anyone else.”
“I have no plans to.”
She was still trying to process two dead bodies, their heads on a chair, two bikers in a lobby, a disappearing bank, and thirty-two million missing dollars. All she had were questions that she doubted Lam could answer. She looked at her notebook.
“You said you had a letter from Surabaya with terms and conditions laid out, and you have copies of the receipts. Can I have those?”
“Sure, although I don’t know what good they’ll do you.”
“Do you also have copies of the statements you were sent?”
“I do.”
“I’d like to have them too.”
“Why?”
“I’m an accountant, like you. I want to know just how much money is involved in case I ever catch up to it.” She saw his skepticism and ignored it. “You know, in this day and age it’s difficult to hide anything anywhere. Your friend Purslow probably thought he’d be safe in some backwater in Central America, and look what happened to him, and how fast it happened.”
Lam shivered. “Will they come after me?”
“Who?”
“The ones who killed Purslow and Lowell. Maybe even the ones who hired you.”
“The people who killed Purslow will leave you alone unless you give them a reason not to,” she said slowly. “Stay quiet and out of sight and you’ll be out of mind. As for my people, I’m it. Assuming you told me the truth — and I think you did — there will be no more visits and there will be no repercussions. Now, I may need to call you in case some detail you forgot pops up, so I’d like a phone number, but that’s it.”
“Are you really going to chase the money?”
Again she took her time. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
He started to say something and then caught himself.
“I’d like to get all the paperwork you have,” she said.
He stood, and she saw the sweat stains on his shirt. He left the room and walked to the stairs. She guessed he didn’t weigh much more than 110 pounds, and she could imagine how easy it had been for the two thugs to terrify him.
As she waited, the complexity of his story began to spin in her head. Two months at the cottage had made life seem simpler than it was. She had thought that finding Lam and getting him to come clean about the fund’s money would start to resolve things for Theresa Ng and the others. Now he seemed to be, if not irrelevant, then at least a minor player in a story that had just taken a dramatic turn.
The thugs in Toronto, the two deaths in Costa Rica, the bank’s closing, the missing money — she had no idea what any of it meant.
( 14 )
It was early evening when Ava got back to the hotel. She stripped and got back under the rain shower, fighting jet lag now, her mind a jumble. She replayed Lam’s story in her head. It was so far from what she had expected, she didn’t know if she had the ambition to deal with it. Revived at least physically, she put on a T-shirt and running shorts and checked the room-service menu. She went pan-Asian: a Vietnamese fresh spring roll and a plate of nasi goreng. She chose a Pinot Grigio that she knew and liked from the wine list.
Her notebook was on the bed. She picked it up, went to the desk and leafed through the three pages of notes from her discussion with Lam, writing comments in the margins. She started a fresh page as other things he’d said came back to her. Then she turned to the back page and taped to it the photos of Purslow’s and Lowell’s heads and Muljadi’s business card. She slid the article ripped from the Tico Times between two other pages. It was a rote process, without any clear objective. Her meeting with Lam had left her utterly confused. Maybe talking to Uncle will help, she thought.
Her meal came and she drank two glasses of wine rather quickly. They went directly to her head. She knew she needed to make her phone call right away if she was going to be mentally acute.
“Wei,” he answered on the second ring.
She could hear a television in the background, a voice reciting horses’s names and training times. He’s probably watching a Happy Valley Racecourse preview, she thought. “It’s Ava.”
“How is Ho Chi Minh City? Did you get the help you wanted?”
“I did, thanks.”
“And have you managed to corner Lam yet?”
“Yes. It wasn’t very difficult — he was waiting for someone to show up, waiting for someone to talk to.”
“Some people cannot carry guilt.”
“It was more fear than guilt he was trying to shed,” she said.
“Hard to tell the difference sometimes . . . So, what was his story?”
Ava sighed, trying to group her thoughts in her head, wishing she hadn’t drunk quite so quickly. “It’s far more complicated than we thought.”
Uncle paused. “I am going to turn down the television,” he said.
While she waited, Ava turned the pages of her notebook to the photos of the two heads.
“The money is gone?” Uncle asked when he came back on the line.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the whereabouts of the money. All I know is that Lam doesn’t seem to have it, and the people who were the prime suspects are dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, decapitated, actually. I’m looking at pictures of their heads as we speak.”
Uncle said very slowly, “This is not what we expected.”
He’s like my echo, Ava thought. “It is a bizarre story.”
“I am listening.”
She went over the events as described by Lam. Uncle didn’t speak once, but she could feel his attention. When she was finished, the first question he asked was the most obvious. “And you believe him?”
“I think I do,” she said, and then closed her eyes and imagined Lam sitting in front of her. “In fact, I know I do. He told me the truth about as much as he knew. His friend Joey Lac in Toronto told me that Lam can’t lie. I feel the same way about him.”
“If that is the case, then the people who killed the two men in Costa Rica probably have the money.”
“Of course,” Ava said.
“And it seems to me that the money is then out of reach.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t find it,” she said defensively.
“Ava, I know if you set your mind to it, you might be able to find it. What I am saying is that it does not appear to be worth the risk. We do not know who is at the other end of the money trail. All we know is that they were prepared to kill two men for it, and were able to reach down to Costa Rica to do it.”
She was surprised, even slightly dismayed, by his reaction. They were no strangers to difficult money trails and no strangers to violence, or the potential for it. “I’m not quite ready to give it up,” she said. “We still have a link to Lam and the money, and it’s that bank. Let’s find out what we can about them.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. That depends on the information, doesn’t it. Did you make those calls to Indonesia?”
“I did.”
She waited for him to tell her what he had unearthed. When he rem
ained quiet, she said, “Uncle, you know I’m not about to do anything rash or stupid. What did your people say?”
She sensed he wanted to withhold what he had, and she was preparing to counter when he said, “Our contacts there are not as good as I was led to think. I do not have any information yet.”
“How much longer do we have to wait?”
“I do not know.”
“I’m finished here,” she said. “So I either go home or I pursue this bank lead. I mean, what other options do we have?”
“I will call Indonesia again.”
“Thank you.”
“Give me an hour.”
“I’ll wait up until then.”
As Ava ended the call she tried to remember a time when Uncle had lacked a sense of urgency, and couldn’t. She’d wait for him, she decided, but in the meantime she’d explore one other potential information source.
It was well into the morning in Toronto and Ava knew her friend Johnny Yan would be at his Toronto Commonwealth Bank desk. They had gone to school together and were part of a network of young Chinese professionals who had graduated from York University and who helped each other to advance their careers. They thought of it as guanxi, Canadian-style. She sent him an email, knowing that he was in his office, the computer would be on, and he would be monitoring his emails on an ongoing basis. I need to talk to you, she wrote.
In less than a minute he replied. Call my cellphone.
He picked up the phone halfway through the first ring. “Hey, long time, no hear. Where are you?”
“Ho Chi Minh City.”
“Thanks for that last piece of business,” he said.
Johnny’s information had helped her with the Tommy Ordonez case. In fact, without him, she wasn’t sure it would have been resolved, or at least resolved so quickly and so well. When the case had been put to bed, she asked Uncle Chang, who functioned as the effective CFO of the Ordonez empire, to divert some business to Toronto Commonwealth and to be very specific that Johnny Yan was to handle their account.
“Did it get you a promotion?”
“Not yet, but it sure as hell got me the right kind of attention in the right kind of places.”
“I have another one I’m going to throw your way in a while,” she said, thinking of May Ling Wong.
“Is that a prelude to being asked a favour?”
“Of course.”
“Then ask away.”
“Bank Linno — ever heard of them?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“It’s Indonesian, out of Surabaya. They had an office on College Street until a few months ago that they closed in a real hurry.”
“Still doesn’t ring a bell.”
“It was private, evidently.”
“A near-bank?”
“I think so. It had only the one office and it was on the eighth floor of an older building, so they weren’t pandering for business.”
“What else do you know?”
“I have two names. A guy named Aris Muljadi, who was the president or something and could be Indonesian, and a Canadian named Rocca.”
“First name for Rocca?”
“Don’t have one.”
“That’s helpful.”
“Johnny, don’t get lazy on me.”
He laughed. “When do you need the information?”
“In an hour or two?”
“Of course you do. You always do.”
“Exactly, and you always come through for me.”
“You’re lucky. I don’t have my first meeting until ten, so I have some time to work on this now. I’ll call Henry Pang — remember him?”
“Vaguely.”
“He was two years behind us. He’s at the bank now, in the international marketing division. He should know something.”
“Thank him for me.”
“No, I won’t. If he knows you’re involved, he’ll expect a favour. I’ll keep that for myself and throw him a bone of a different kind.”
“Your call. Just get me some information.”
“I can reach you on your cell?”
“Yes, but if you have problems I’m staying at the Park Hyatt in Ho Chi Minh.”
She returned to her computer and emailed her travel agent, Gail, asking her to look into flights to Surabaya and a hotel. She also asked her to hold a seat for her on the next day’s Cathay Pacific flight to Toronto. It would be one destination or the other, Ava knew, because there was no way she was going to Costa Rica.
Ava poured herself another glass of wine and eased onto the bed. She scanned the channels, looking for something to kill time. One of the Chinese-language stations was airing Election. The movie detailed an election for overall chairmanship of the various Triad societies, and the violent and treacherous tactics used by the candidates. The film was fictional, but that didn’t dampen the horror of watching the winner — who until that point had been reasonable and conciliatory — cave in the skull of his opponent with a rock. The act took place on the bank of a river while they were fishing, being watched by the opponent’s wife and the winner’s young son. It was all the more repellent because of that, and because it was so sudden and so unexpected. Ava shuddered as the scene played out, and she thought of Uncle, who had been society chairman for four consecutive terms. It was a fact that was difficult to equate with the man she knew.
She changed channels before the violence escalated even further, and was just getting into a Hong Kong comedy show when her cellphone rang.
“I made a mistake,” Uncle said quickly. “The Indonesians were waiting for me to call them rather than them calling me. They are not quite as useless as I thought.”
“Momentai, Uncle.”
“And they found out some interesting things.”
Ava climbed down from the bed and sat at the desk. She opened her notebook and turned to a fresh page. “Go ahead.”
“Bank Linno is about forty years old. It was founded in East Java by a family that had a fleet of trawlers, with the idea of supporting the local fishing industry. They started in Surabaya and then slowly began to expand into places like Batu, Madiun, and Malang, all in East Java. In terms of branches and employees it barely breaks into the top hundred in Indonesia.”
“So what are they doing in Toronto and New York?” she interrupted.
“Be patient,” he said. “Taking three months off has made you edgy.”
“Sorry,” she said, drawing a deep breath.
“Despite being hardly a blip on the banking scene, Linno is among the top ten Indonesian banks when it comes to capitalization.”
“How much are we talking about?”
“Billions.”
“Uncle, how is that possible?”
“No one knows. Our contacts were as surprised as you. What they did find out was that about six years ago the bank’s ownership and management changed.”
“It isn’t Indonesian-owned?”
“On the surface it is. The founding family sold their shares to another Indonesian company in Surabaya, but when our people ran that down, they ended up with a law firm that is holding and voting the shares in trust. All legal, I am told.”
“And the management?”
“Stranger still. The CEO is a British man by the name of Andy Cameron. He joined the company at the same time the ownership was transferred.”
“Where was he before?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is all very strange,” Ava said, writing down Cameron’s name and then unconsciously underlining billions in her notebook. Whatever doubts she had about going to Indonesia were vanishing. If nothing else, her curiosity was in overdrive. “Uncle, if I go to Surabaya, what kind of help can I get from our people?”
He hesitated, and she wondered if he was preparing to tell her to forget it. Instead he said, “The people I know are in Jakarta. They have associates in Surabaya but they are not well organized — freelancers mainly. They would have to send someone from Jakarta to run things
for you, and then of course there is the language gap, so you would need someone to translate anyway.”
“These people, are they official?” she asked, meaning police or army.
“No, they are mainly into rent collection, protection money. They kick back a portion to the police and so have some kind of affiliation, but I do not know how much you can count on that.”
“They don’t sound too promising.”
“The man from Jakarta is a different animal. He is a jago, a gang boss, and he is tough and smart. He can be there in a few hours if you want him.”
“What is his name?”
“Perkasa.”
“Can he speak English?”
“Yes, most educated Indonesians can.”
“He’s not Chinese?” she asked, surprised.
“He is, actually. His Chinese name is Chung.”
Ava knew it was common for Chinese people doing business in other parts of Asia, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, to adopt local names. They were often some of the wealthiest people in those countries, and targets for kidnapping and worse. Ava thought it was naive of them to think a name change would offer any kind of protection, but then she wasn’t living there. “I think you should ask him to be on standby, to be ready to travel to Surabaya,” she said.
“Do you know the place?”
“No, and I hardly know Indonesia,” she said. She’d been there twice, both times to Jakarta and both times for only a few days. She had memories of traffic that rivalled the worst of Bangkok and Manila, and the sound of the early morning call to prayer from a mosque near her hotel that had her out of bed with the rising sun.
“It sounds as if you have made up your mind to go.”
“Yes, I think I have. That is, if you agree.”
He paused, and she wondered if he was thinking about saying no. “Ava, you just need to be careful. I agree this bank is worth looking into, but I do not want you to take any chances.”