The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

by Ian Hamilton

  Passing the hotel on the journey back, she found herself on Basuki Rahmat Street, and there, only a few hundred metres away, was Tunjungan Plaza. The complex was massive, with four separate blocks, each five storeys high. A huge SOGO sign advertised the presence of the Japanese retailer. Another promised more than five hundred stores. Ava hadn’t seen many shopping centres that large.

  She headed east past the plaza, searching for Bank Linno. It was half a kilometre farther on, its name emblazoned in red neon halfway up the eight-storey structure and repeated on the ground level, above double glass doors that led into the customer branch. The building was rather unremarkable: of modest height, the windows small and dusty, the stucco exterior turning yellow in the cracks. It didn’t look as if it housed a bank with billions of dollars in capital.

  Ava ran for another two kilometres before heading back. The bank didn’t look any more imposing from the opposite direction.

  She started to sweat the instant she stepped into the air-conditioned hotel lobby. She always sweated when she exercised, but this was different. It was as if her body had been storing heat as she ran instead of releasing it gradually, and the cold air triggered a flood. Her white T-shirt was soaked by the time she was halfway across the lobby, her nipples visible through it in spite of the white athletic bra. The hotel was more active now, and she could feel eyes on her. She wiped her face with the hem of her shirt, briefly exposing her midsection. She should have carried a small towel with her, but after a season of running in Ontario’s cottage country — where a normal summer day would have been chilly to any Javanese — she had forgotten about the ravages of humidity.

  She stripped as soon as she got to her room. There was no sense showering yet; it would only make her sweat all the more and for longer. She adjusted the air conditioning so it wasn’t quite so cold and so strong, and wrapped herself in a robe from the bathroom.

  She sat down in a chair by the window and looked out onto the gardens, thinking of the bank and Andy Cameron and trying to come up with an approach that would seem plausible, trying to create a flow of conversation that would throw some light on what was a rather disjointed set of facts. It wasn’t an easy transition, moving from questions about the bank and the services it could provide for her fictional Hong Kong company to questions about a defunct Toronto branch, a bogus bank fund, and employees who preferred to be invisible. She was struggling — the connections were almost too tenuous.

  When she finally stopped sweating, Ava took off the damp robe and walked into the shower, taking her workout gear with her. When she was done, she wrung out her bra, underwear, T-shirt, and shorts and hung them over the top of the shower stall.

  She crawled back into bed and turned on the television. She watched the BBC World News, BBC News from Asia, the BBC world weather report, and BBC Business News. She was just getting into an interview between a presenter and the mayor of London when her cellphone rang.

  “Ava Lee,” she said, not looking at the ID.

  “It’s Sonny.”

  She felt an immediate surge of fear and then caught herself. “Did you find out anything?”

  “I had my woman follow him yesterday morning, and then again today. Both times he went to Queen Elizabeth.”

  “The hospital?”

  “Yeah, here in Kowloon.”

  So many possibilities, she thought, and they don’t have to be dire. “Can you figure out why?”

  “I’m guessing cancer,” Sonny said.

  She heard the thickness in his voice and knew he was struggling. “But you aren’t positive.”

  “Ava, it’s known as the cancer hospital.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Yesterday my woman just followed him to the hospital. Today she trailed him right inside. He went to the floor where they give radiation treatments.”

  “I see.”

  “Ava, what are we going to do?”

  “Well, let’s start by not jumping to conclusions,” she said with as much force as she could. She moved to the side of the bed, sitting up so she could look out the window at the tops of trees in the garden. Somehow they didn’t seem real. “Can you have your woman follow him again?”

  “I don’t want to push our luck. He’s still who he is, and she shared an elevator with him this morning. I’m sure he’d recognize her if we tried it again.”

  “Can we find out who his doctor is?”

  “Which one?”

  “What does it matter?” she snapped, impatient more with the situation than with Sonny.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She drew a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. Berating Sonny wasn’t going to help. “Talk to Lourdes and see if she knows who his family doctor is. If she doesn’t, ask around, talk to some of the other uncles . . . No, no, forget that last bit. For sure they’ll tell him. Just talk to Lourdes; she should know. Whatever is going on, his family doctor will have been his first point of contact.”

  “What if we can’t get a name?”

  “Then we’ll get a list of all the doctors at Queen Elizabeth who do radiation treatment and I’ll contact them one by one until I find the one he’s seeing.”

  “He’s still at the hospital. I’m going to see Lourdes right away.”

  “Sonny, don’t alarm her.”

  “She’s scared already.”

  “Don’t make it worse. Just tell her you’re feeling a bit under the weather and want to see a doctor, and then ask her if Uncle’s is nearby.”

  “She won’t believe that.”

  “Tell her anyway. It’s amazing what people are prepared to believe to avoid coping with an uglier reality.”

  “Okay,” he said, without any conviction.

  Ava weighed her options. “Sonny, do you want me to come back to Hong Kong today?”

  “No, there’s no point to that, is there. I mean, we don’t know anything for sure, and besides, he’s so damn happy that you’re back here and you’re working a job together. We don’t want to ruin that. It’s the first time in weeks that I’ve seen him cheery.”

  “All right, but if you need me, all you have to do is call. Uncle is more important than any job.”

  “He’s more important than anything,” said Sonny.

  “I know.”

  “Than anything,” Sonny repeated.

  “Yes, Sonny, than anything. Now get over to the apartment and talk to Lourdes before he gets back.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  I wish he hadn’t called me that, she thought as she ended the call.

  She sat on the edge of the bed for another five minutes, her mind spinning. She had known something was wrong, and maybe she had even suspected it was something like cancer. Still, to have it confirmed was different. Except it isn’t confirmed, she told herself. And then there was the matter of flying back to Hong Kong. It was an emotional reaction, she knew. Get on a plane, go see Uncle, find out what’s going on. And then what? What if it wasn’t a crisis? How silly would she look then? And she couldn’t discount Sonny’s logic either. Uncle was happy right now, so why alarm him? Tears welled in her eyes. She wiped them away, but it wasn’t so easy to get rid of the knots in her stomach.

  Ava slid off the bed and was walking over to her computer to search for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital when the room phone rang.

  “Ava Lee,” she said dully.

  “Good morning, Ava, it’s John Masterson.”

  “Hi, John.”

  “I just spoke with Andy Cameron and he said he would be happy to meet with you.”

  “That’s good.”

  “The thing is, though, today his schedule is crammed, and then Saturday and Sunday he has his golf club’s annual two-day member/guest tournament. How would dinner tonight work?”

  Ava hesitated.

  “Actually, Ava, that was my idea. Fay, my wife, and I were going to invite you to join us tonight anyway, and I thought why not throw Andy into the mix. We’ll be a foursome, but you can at least have
a chance to get acquainted with him, talk a little shop.”

  That might actually make things easier, Ava thought. He might be a little more free-wheeling, and with a couple of drinks in him, maybe I can manoeuvre some questions by him. “Yes, why not,” she said.

  “Great, I’ll let Andy know. We were thinking about Chinese, if that’s okay with you. There’s a restaurant called X.O Suki not far from the hotel that we like.”

  “Sounds fine.”

  “How does that leave your day?” he asked.

  Now where is this going? Ava thought. “Reasonably free.”

  “Because Fay doesn’t have to work and she’s offered to take you sightseeing if you’re up to it.”

  “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “It isn’t like that at all. She’d love to do it.”

  What else was there for her to do? Hang around the room and mope? “Then in that case I’m happy to accept her offer.”

  “Wait a second,” Masterson said, his voice becoming muffled. “I just spoke with Fay. She’ll meet you in the hotel lobby at around ten.”

  Ava checked her watch. It was just nine thirty. The Mastersons weren’t people for wasting time.

  ( 18 )

  Ava hadn’t known what to expect in Fay Masterson, certainly not a near double to Amanda Yee. She was young, maybe in her mid-twenties, not quite five feet tall in her Puma runners, and rail-thin in a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt with DIOR stitched in beadwork across the front. Her hair was cut into a bob, making her fine-featured face look slightly gaunt. Her dark brown eyes had thick lashes heavy with mascara, and her lips were generously glossed in bright red. She looked, Ava thought, at least partially Chinese.

  Fay saw Ava first and waved to her as she came down the stairs. Masterson had obviously given his wife a description. The two women shook hands, gauging each other. Ava was in her training pants and a black T-shirt and wore no makeup. She must have passed initial inspection, because Fay gave her a quick, bright smile and said, “My car is outside.” Then she began to chat as if they were lifelong friends — another Amanda trait.

  “Have you been to Surabaya before?” she asked as they walked out of the hotel.

  “No.”

  “Then forgive me for doing my tour-guide thing,” Fay said. “I took history in college and I’m proud of our city. It’s the second-largest city in Indonesia, with a metropolitan population that has to be six or seven million now, but it’s manageable, don’t you think? Not like Jakarta, with its horrible traffic and pollution. The name is more interesting too. Suro means ‘shark’ and baya means ‘crocodile.’ According to legend, the two animals battled here to see who would have dominance.”

  “And who won?” Ava asked as they reached the car, an Audi TT.

  “I have no idea,” Fay laughed.

  “I have an Audi at home,” Ava said, lowering her head to climb into the sports car.

  “What model?”

  “An A6.”

  “Ah,” Fay said, acknowledging a peer. “So today I thought we’d visit some museums, maybe lunch near Kalimas Harbour, and then go to the Arab quarter and see some of our beautiful mosques.”

  “I’m completely in your hands.”

  “About a month ago John had some visitors here from Boston and I took them on a tour. One of the sites was the Majapahit Hotel, but you don’t need to see that, do you.”

  “It’s a great hotel.”

  “Better than Raffles.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me.”

  Fay pulled away from the hotel and into light traffic. “The city was founded in the thirteenth century,” she said. “It was a sultanate originally, but then the Dutch came in the mid-1770s and stayed until the Japanese occupied it in 1942. Do you know much about colonial Asia?”

  “My family is from Hong Kong.”

  “There are big differences between the British and the Dutch. The British actually built institutions and infrastructure that were meant to last long after they were gone. The Dutch didn’t care about anything other than money. Everything they built in our country was designed for a single purpose: to maximize the outflow of goods and profits to Holland. I mean, when the British left India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, they also left behind legal, bureaucratic, and educational systems and some concept of parliamentary tradition. The Dutch were here for more than two hundred years and didn’t leave anything other than bad memories.”

  Ava’s family had its own views on the British regime in Hong Kong, and they weren’t quite so rosy. She didn’t know enough about it, though, to start a debate. Instead she was struck by how much Fay reminded her of Amanda. “I’m sorry, I don’t meant to be rude, but I can’t help thinking that you have some Chinese blood in you,” she said.

  “I do. My family has been in Java for more than three hundred years — the family name was Ho. There’s been a lot of intermarriage, but even until about fifty years ago Ho was a family name.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Suharto passed a law that forced all the Indo-Chinese to change their names to Indonesian ones. My family’s name became Supomo. When Sukarno replaced Suharto, the law was revoked but the name stuck, except for my older sister, who reclaimed our original family name. She’s a doctor here, Vivian Ho. She tried to talk me into changing mine back as well, except I had met John, and I liked the idea of being Fay Masterson,” she said. “Ava, are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re such a pretty woman.”

  “I’m fussy.”

  Fay nodded. “Me too. I waited for John, and then I made John wait as well. He’d been spoiled by too many women too willing to sleep with him. I made him chase me.”

  She stopped the car in front of what looked like a colonial mansion. “This is the House of Sampoerna. The building was originally an orphanage, built in the 1800s. It was bought in the 1930s by Liem Seeng Tee and he turned it into a cigarette factory.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Yes, that’s why I brought you here. Sampoerna is now the name the family uses, but I prefer to think of it as ‘the House of Tee.’ It’s a great story.”

  The house was part museum, part art gallery, and still functioning as a cigarette factory. Ava’s initial interest was the amazing story of Liem Seeng Tee. After his mother died in China, his father took their three young children to Indonesia, only to die soon after their arrival. Tee was adopted, given a rudimentary education, and then sent out to work. With a bicycle as his only asset, he proceeded to parlay that into a cigarette empire that was now, having passed from the family’s hands to Philip Morris, the fifth largest in the world. Smarts, sacrifice, hard work, long-term vision, total commitment, maybe a bit of luck. Those were the reasons for his success, and the reasons why nearly every economy in Southeast Asia — Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand included — was controlled by the Chinese. The house was portrayed as a living, working monument to the company he had built, but to Ava’s mind it was all about Tee.

  “Have you ever smoked?” Fay asked when they got to the factory and looked out on several hundred people, mainly women, hand-rolling cigarettes.

  “No.”

  “Me neither, but I find this interesting all the same. They make Dji Sam Soe cigarettes here. They’re the most expensive and prestigious of all the kretek cigarettes. As you can see, they’re handmade. We can actually make one here. Want to give it a go?”

  “Sure, why not,” she said.

  The woman who instructed them was more than just hands-on. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of the blends that Tee had developed decades ago and still existed. Ava found the information she imparted on cloves particularly interesting. Who would have known that Zanzibar had the world’s best?

  Ava dropped her crudely rolled attempt into a garbage can as they left the building. “That was fun. I just can’t help feeling a bit sorry that he felt he had to change his family name.
”

  “Well, at least he chose a good one. Sampoerna is the Indonesian word for ‘perfect.’”

  “The House of Perfect . . . the Perfect House. How clever.”

  They walked to the car. It was just past noon and the sun bore down on them. It had to be close to thirty degrees. Fay rolled down the windows while they waited for the air conditioning to kick in. “Is it always this hot?” Ava asked.

  “Every day. I don’t think the temperature varies more than three or four degrees all year round. And we’re on the coast — it’s even warmer inland. The only variety we get in weather is rain. We’re still in the dry season, at the tail end of it actually. In the next few weeks the rains will kick in and then we’ll have the monsoons to contend with. I have to tell you, when John and I got married in Toronto, it was also September, and evidently fine weather for that time of year, but I almost froze to death. I can’t imagine how thin my blood is.”

  Fay pulled out of the parking lot. “We’ll go down to the harbour. There’s a seafood restaurant there I really like.” She turned onto a road that was flanked on the right by a river. “The Kalimas — it runs down to the harbour and feeds into the Madura Strait. We’re still a major seaport, as you’ll see.”

  Ava was quite taken with ports and thought she had seen just about every type, but Kalimas Harbour was spectacularly original. It was filled with pinisis — two-masted wooden sailing ships — and praus — double-hulled ships — their big, colourful sails rippling in the light breeze. These weren’t museum pieces; they were real, working ships that filled every berth and lined up three-deep waiting to load or unload an eclectic array of goods.

  “This is wonderful,” Ava said as they drove past one with Kia sedans on its deck, another with boxes marked HEWLETT PACKARD, and yet more, holding cages stuffed with chickens, live cows, bags of cement, bags of rice.