The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,1
honey,” Maria said.
“I’ll pick you up in front of the casino hotel,” Ava said.
“Your mother is staying at the hotel again?”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t like me.”
“That’s not true.”
“She never wants to be in my company, and when she is, the only two things she ever says to me are that I have nice manners and that I look good in bright colours.”
“Those are compliments.”
“I make her uncomfortable.”
“No, we make her uncomfortable. Although we’ve never discussed it, I know she can’t stay in the cottage when you’re here because she wouldn’t be able to stop herself thinking about what’s going on in our bedroom. She’s very Chinese and very Catholic, and as understanding as she tries to be, there are limits to what she can handle. Is your very Colombian, very Catholic mother any different?”
“No,” Maria said softly.
“So I’ll see you tonight. The weather forecast for the weekend is fantastic.”
Ava returned to the computer. Her sister, Marian, had sent one of her typical newsy emails. The girls go back to school on Tuesday. New uniforms for them this year. I bought them over a month ago, and when I did I couldn’t help but remember how Mummy always left doing that until the very last minute, and how we ended up in long lines that took hours to process and were lucky at the end to find uniforms in the right size.
Ava sighed. Her mother and her sister had personalities that didn’t mesh well, a fact made even more contentious when Marian married an uptight gweilo civil servant who was incapable of understanding a woman like Jennie Lee.
And I can’t believe that she actually stayed at the cottage with you for two months, Marian wrote. She came to our cottage in the Gatineaus once and barely lasted the week. She said she didn’t like blackflies, squirrels, raccoons, horseflies, mosquitoes, dirt roads, and cold lakes.
Give the girls a hug for me, Ava replied. I’m sure they’ll have another great year at school. As for Mummy, well, she initially came to the cottage because she knew I needed her help, and she stayed because I stocked the fridge with Chinese food, brought in Chinese cable TV, told her to invite her friends from Richmond Hill to play mah-jong, and most evenings I drive her over to Casino Rama to play baccarat.
The cottage was on Lake Couchiching, near the town of Orillia, about an hour’s drive from Toronto’s northern suburbs and only fifteen minutes from the casino. She had found it online, surprised to find something that could give her the privacy she wanted and still be close to good restaurants and the services she was used to.
She worked down her email list, deleting most messages until she got to the part of her world that was ending its day. There were emails from Amanda Yee, her half-brother’s fiancée, in Hong Kong, and from May Ling Wong in Wuhan. Ava had met Amanda during the Macau affair and they had become friends. She was Jack Yee’s only child. Jack owned a Hong Kong trading operation that occasionally — something common enough for traders — ran into problems with suppliers or customers. Twice he had hired Uncle and Ava to get his money back. Twice they had succeeded, once saving his life in the process.
Ava hadn’t known that Amanda and Jack were related until after she had met Amanda as her half-brother’s fiancée. It had been a difficult introduction, made in the middle of a kidnapping and the financial fiasco that threatened her half-brother Michael’s business and the entire family’s well-being. But Amanda had been a rock throughout it all, earning Ava’s respect. In her email, Amanda was fretting about wedding dates and venues; friends or not, and respect or not, those were two subjects Ava had no interest in.
May Ling’s message was long and colourful. Ava had met May Ling as a client. She and her husband, Changxing, were the wealthiest couple in Hubei province, and among the wealthiest in China. They had hired Ava and Uncle to find the people who had sold them some fake Fauvist paintings and to retrieve their money. It wasn’t a simple job and had been made even more complicated when the Wongs decided they also wanted revenge. Lies were told, some vicious acts ensued, and the early relationship between Ava and May Ling devolved into mistrust and anger. But fences had been mended and May had been supportive and, indeed, integral to Ava’s success in Macau. The two women