The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,20
she was headed for Asia and decided against it. May could be emotionally taxing, and now that she was back on the job, Ava knew she needed to focus. The same held true for telling Amanda, with one additional reason: Ava knew Amanda would want to talk about Michael, and Ava wasn’t quite ready to get caught up in the complexities of her father’s first family.
She closed her laptop and checked her notes from the night before. Bank Linno was at the top of the list, right after Joey Lac. Ava knew of several Indonesian banks, but Linno wasn’t one of them. That wasn’t unusual, since there were more than a hundred commercial banks in the country. She logged on to their website and was immediately struck by how sparse it was. As she dug into the information she could access, things became even odder. The bank was headquartered in Surabaya, in East Java. Surabaya had a population of more than three million and was a major city, but it wasn’t Jakarta. In fact, the bank had no presence at all in Jakarta, the capital, not even a branch. Its activity in Indonesia was restricted to East Java; from the list of branches the website provided, it seemed to be operating only in Surabaya, Batu, Malang, and Madiun.
What is a small regional Indonesian bank doing with an office in Toronto? she wondered as she clicked the INTERNATIONAL tab on the website. And what is the same bank doing with offices in New York, Rome, Caracas, and Porlamar?
She opened the Toronto branch’s page and got nothing but an 800 phone number — no address, no contact names, no services. Without thinking, she reached for her cell and dialled the number. It rang twice and then went to voicemail. Ava hung up. How strange is that? she thought.
Canada had five major chartered banks and a much longer list of smaller banks and credit unions. The entire system was heavily regulated and perhaps the safest in the world. Linno could be operating without a charter; it could be a “near-bank.” Ava knew of several banks that didn’t deal directly with the public, that worked through financial advisors, but even they at least posted their services.
She opened the pages for the other international branches and found the same dearth of information. Then she switched back to the Surabaya headquarters. The information on the bank’s Indonesian operations was much more detailed; it appeared to provide a full range of consumer and commercial services. Ava copied the branch names, addresses, phone numbers, and email contacts into her notebook. It was noon in Toronto, midnight in Surabaya. Since there was no point in calling, Ava fired off an email requesting a contact name and address for the Toronto office.
When that was done, she packed the laptop and her notebook into the large Chanel bag she used as a briefcase and called downstairs for her car to be brought up from the garage. She looked around the apartment. She had been back for only two days, but it felt like a lot longer.
( 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