The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,27
heart to tell her otherwise.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“I was sitting here waiting for you and thinking about the last time we were here.”
“Seems like years ago.”
“I was so worried about you.”
She glanced up at him from her bowl. There was that sentimentality again, but his face showed none of it. “It wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle, was it. At the end of the day we prevailed,” she said.
“Somehow.”
“I’m sorry if I dawdled all summer,” she said, trying to get them closer to the present. “It took weeks before my leg began to function anything close to normal, and by then I was at the cottage and feeling lazy. I’m back at work now, so let’s put worries aside.”
He ate slowly, carefully skimming congee from the top as if it were a hundred-dollar bowl of shark’s-fin soup, then emptying his spoon with tiny slurps. He had never been a careful eater, but now he was being deliberate. She found herself resting between spoonfuls so as not to get too far ahead of him.
“I have to tell you, I’m not sure that my going to Ho Chi Minh City will result in anything positive,” she said. “This could be a short assignment.”
“Why do you say that?”
She detailed her meeting with Joey Lac, emphasizing his belief that Lam was incapable of a theft of that magnitude.
“It is always the ones we never suspect until it is too late,” Uncle said, discounting the opinion with a little wave of his hand.
“Still, Lac did know him well.”
“You will find out for yourself soon enough.”
“What arrangements have you made in Vietnam?” she asked.
“You will be met at the airport by a friend. He will be wearing civilian clothes but he is an officer in the police force, District One. He will do whatever you want him to do . . . within reason, of course.”
“I’m not anticipating that Lam will give me serious trouble. He’s an accountant, not a thug.”
“Just be cautious. Remember, his brother is a man of substance, and in Vietnam he is also going to have friends. In that country that invariably leads to the police or the army.”
“I’m not going to do anything rash,” Ava said as she took her notebook from her bag. She tore off a blank page and copied the information on Bank Linno that Lac had emailed her. “Do we have contacts in Indonesia?” she asked.
“Some. Mainly in Jakarta, of course.”
She slid the paper across the table to him. “This bank is headquartered in Surabaya. I have only one name attached to it, plus a phone number and an email address. Could you find out what you can about the bank?”
“This is connected to Lam?”
“Very much so.”
“Never heard of the bank.”
“It was big enough to have a branch in Toronto, and that is where Lam deposited the cash he was collecting. The strange thing is, it shut down its office shortly after Lam ran into trouble.”
“Do you think there is a connection?”
It wasn’t his nature to leap to conclusions, no more than it was hers. Slow and steady had always been their style: A to B to C until they got to the end, not taking shortcuts, because shortcuts more often than not led to wild goose chases and a waste of time and money. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I need to get to Lam first.”
“I will find out what I can from Indonesia,” Uncle said.
“Thank you.”
He set his spoon aside, the jook only half finished. “I have to tell you that I was surprised when you called me to talk about this job.”
His face was impassive, but Ava heard the slight tremor in his voice. “Why should you have been?” she asked.
“I thought that after Macau you might have decided the risks were not worth the rewards anymore. I mean, you have enough money never to have to do this kind of thing again, and you are so damn bright you could do anything else you wanted.”
Ava reached over and rested her fingers on the back of his hand. “This is about May Ling again, isn’t it.”
He smiled. “She is not as subtle as you, although she likes to think she is. She called me yesterday, not for the first time, and actually asked me if I had ever thought about returning home to Wuhan. And when I said I had — which was true ten or fifteen years ago — she said that Changxing and she would be honoured if I