The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

( 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.

Ava sat down as well. “Anyway, again, thanks for coming.”

“I didn’t want to, but this is better than you showing up at my office. There’s been enough trouble there, and with my family, because of this. I’m lucky to still have a job.”

Questions popped into Ava’s head but she caught herself, telling herself not to rush. Lac was nervous enough already. “Let’s order some food and then we can chat,” she said. “Is there anything in particular you like or don’t like?”

“I like chicken feet.”

“Duck webs?”

“Those too.”

Ava filled out the dim sum menu and held it aloft for a server to take, mark, and carry off to the kitchen. “I added har gow, eggplants stuffed with fish paste, and deep-fried octopus.”

“Great,” he said, with no enthusiasm.

“Where did you go to school?” Ava asked.

“York.”

“So did I. What year?”

“1990.”

“Ah, I was a few years behind you.”

“No kidding,” he said, and then looked directly at her for the first time. “Tell me, just what kind of company do you work for? And what makes you think you can find Lam and, if you do, that you can get some money back?”

“My company is based in Hong Kong,” she said, pleased that he wanted to get down to business. “We’ve been doing this kind of thing for more than ten years. People who lose money and can’t get it back through traditional methods turn to us. Our client base is mainly Asian. We have a surprisingly high success rate.”

“You said on the phone you know where Lam is. Do you really?”

“Yes.”

“It won’t matter. I don’t think he has any money,” Lac said.

“Someone does. The money went somewhere.”

“And you’ll find it?”

Ava shrugged. “You got in trouble at work?”

“A client put money into the fund.”

“And with your family?”

“One of my uncles.”

“What is his name?”

“Louis Lac.”

The name sounded familiar. Ava pulled out her notebook and checked the entries from the Vietnamese restaurant. There he was, more than two million dollars out of pocket. “Your uncle is now a client of mine. He was one of those who hired us.”

The har gow arrived at the table and Joey plunged in. Ava waited until he had chewed most of his first dumpling. “How do you know Lam?”

“We were at school, at York, together. We graduated the same year and worked at the Commonwealth Bank for a few years before going in separate directions. We always kept in touch. There was a group of us, all Vietnamese, who did that. It was a good network until Lam f*cked it up.”

Ava extracted a har gow from the steamer and slathered it with chili sauce. “So you weren’t the only one who referred people to Lam’s fund.”

“No, but I’m the only one who got hit with a baseball bat.”

“That was unnecessary,” she said. “People can get overly emotional when it comes to money.”

The other dishes began to arrive. While Lac dove into the chicken feet, Ava asked, “What kind of man was Lam?”

Lac paused. “I thought — I thought he was a good man, at least a decent man. He was an accountant, like us, and he took his job seriously. Until this shit happened I would have trusted him with my own money.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I didn’t have enough to buy into the fund.”

“Lucky you,” she said, and then regretted it. Nothing he had said warranted sarcasm. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“I’ve heard worse. I used to like visiting with my uncle, but not anymore. And Bobby Ng and I were friends for years. Not anymore. Lam ruined it all.”

“And you thought he was a good guy.”

“Yeah. And deep down, I still do.”

“Why is that?”

“If you meet him, you’ll find out,” Lac said.

“What does that mean?”

“Lam is so small his father tried to get him to be a jockey. And he’s as timid as he is tiny. In school he was the guy who was always trying to please everyone else, to be everyone’s friend. I kind of felt sorry for him until I got to know him a bit better, and found out how smart he is and how genuine he is. He wouldn’t hurt a fly; really, he wouldn’t. How he got himself into this mess I have no idea, but I have to tell you, I don’t think it was planned, premeditated.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I saw him after the shit began to come down. The first time was when he was starting to have trouble making payments. He told me he’d invested all the money and that the returns were slow because the bank was screwing around with new systems. He swore to me that the money was intact, and I believed him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think he could have been lying. He was obviously troubled about it but he could still look me in the eye. That meant a lot to me.”

“You met him more than once?”

“Yeah, about a week later my uncle came to me and asked to talk to Lam about getting his money out of the fund. I met Lam downtown. He was a mess — shaking, stuttering, not thinking clearly, almost disoriented. He told me he couldn’t sleep and that he was taking pills and had started to drink. He didn’t act like a guy who had salted away millions of dollars and was about to leave with it.”

“What did he say about the money?”

“He said his contract required my uncle to give him thirty days’ notice before withdrawal.”

“Is that true?”

“I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I pressed him anyway, as a friend. He said he couldn’t help me and just got more nervous.”

“And you didn’t suspect something funny was going on?”

“He said that the way the investors had reacted to one slow payment had really upset him,” Lac said. “After what Bobby Ng did to me, I can’t blame him.”

“Like I said, that was unnecessary.”

“So, I don’t know, maybe Lam was nervous about someone like Bobby, someone who might use something more deadly than a baseball bat.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“I wasn’t exactly in full control of my own faculties. All I could think about was how my uncle was going to react.”

Ava glanced at her notebook. “He collected cash, correct?”

“That’s the Vietnamese way.”

“And put it into Bank Linno?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“What do you know about that bank?”

Lac shrugged. “They had one branch here, on College Street. It’s closed now.”

Ava gaped. “How do you know that?”

“I went there. When Lam disappeared, it was one of the few leads I had.”

“And it was closed?”

“I spoke to an accountant who had an office on the same floor and he told me they’d done a weekend flyer. The landlord wasn’t pleased.”

“Did the accountant know anyone who worked there?”

“No, and I did ask. I also followed up with the landlord to see if he would give me the name and phone number of the person who had signed the lease. He did. It was some guy from Indonesia who the landlord was trying to chase down.”

“Did you call Indonesia?”

“I did. The guy wouldn’t take or return my call.”

“Do you have his name?”

“It’s at my office.”

“Could you email it to me, with his phone number?”

“Sure.”

“And the landlord’s name and number as well, if you could.”

Lac furrowed his brow and pressed his lips together. “I’ll do it, but I think you’ll be wasting your time.”

Ava shook her head as she passed him her card. “My email address is there,” she said. “This thing about the branch closing, how odd is that? Taking all that cash from Lam and then, when he runs into financial difficulties, closing its doors . . .”

“Of course it’s weird, but it was hardly a mainstream bank. The office was on the eighth floor of a rundown building, and from what the accountant told me, there were never many customers coming and going.”

“What kind of bank is it? I looked on its website and there was hardly any information.”

“The sign on its door said PRIVATE INVESTMENT BANK, so it probably wasn’t offering any kind of regular service.”

“Did it have a charter?”

“Not that I could find, and I did look.”

“I’m sure you did,” Ava said.

“It just dead-ended.”

“When was the last time you saw or heard from Lam?”

“When I met with him to ask for my uncle’s money back.”

“Did he ever say anything about the bank?”

“Not a word.”

“And you really don’t think Lam took off with the money?”

Lac tossed back his head, his eyes pressed shut. “No, and I wish I did. It would be easier that way, because there would at least be some hope of recovering it. But it isn’t like Lam to steal. He just isn’t that kind of person.”

“So you insist,” Ava said. “But if he didn’t steal it, where did it go?”