The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,33
have sounded louder, because cars and even motorbikes began to peel to one side, creating enough of a lane for Tran to scrape through. When they finally reached a boulevard where traffic was moving at a normal pace — which still meant slowly — he turned off the siren.
“Tell me about Lam the surgeon first,” she said.
Tran pulled a toothpick from his chest pocket and began to dig at his teeth. Ava wondered if that was a ploy to buy time while he figured out what he should and shouldn’t say.
He began to speak in a monotonous, rehearsed voice. “The family is from a village in the south. The father was a farmer and non-political. All he wanted to do was farm and raise his three sons. Sometime in 1973 he decided that Nguyen and his cronies, the Americans, weren’t going to win the war, so he began to quietly help his brothers from the north. It was a practical matter, I think, not ideological. But in any event, by the time the famous tank from the north crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace on April 30 to end the war, Lam had friends on the winning side. And he wasn’t a man who was shy about asking his friends for favours.”
“Guanxi.”
“Of course. The family, like many, is Vietnamese Chinese. They know the importance of guanxi, and Lam used his. He didn’t ask for a lot. His sons were very bright and all he wanted was for them to have as much education as they could manage. The oldest brother is the neurosurgeon. He is a very capable man, and also a great nationalist. He has been offered positions overseas that would pay him ten or maybe a hundred times more money than he makes here, but he has chosen to remain . . . something that has not gone unnoticed.”
“You said three sons?”
“Yes, the middle son died about ten years ago in a car accident.”
“I see.”
“The father and the mother are dead now as well, so that leaves the surgeon and his younger brother. The surgeon has a wife but no children, so the brother is very important to him.”
“I understand,” Ava said.
“The brother left Vietnam twenty years ago to attend school in Canada, and he never came back here to live. He visited from time to time — I have the records with me if you want to see them. He usually stayed for about a week, and it seems all he did was spend time with the family. He has no criminal record: a file that is completely blank,” he said, and then glanced at Ava. “I have to tell you, I was a little surprised when my boss asked me to look into him, especially when the request originated with your boss in Hong Kong. The things we normally do for Hong Kong — and for other friends in China — usually involve people who the police know intimately, and for the wrong reasons.”
She was slightly taken aback by his mention of “your boss in Hong Kong” again. Is he fishing for something? she wondered. “I find you extremely well spoken,” she said. “You had a good education, didn’t you.”
“Australia. I told you.”
“BA?”
“Master’s.”
“So you should be able to understand that I never talk about my boss, or my boss’s business, or my boss’s friends.”
“I wasn’t —” he began.
“No need to explain. Let’s just drop it,” she said. “And as for the Lam brothers, I have no need to speak to the surgeon, but if I do, I’ll be respectful. The younger Lam is a bit more of a challenge, since we think he stole or lost more than thirty million Canadian dollars. How many dong is that?”
He looked at her with a touch of anger in his eyes, and she knew she shouldn’t have taunted him about the dong, one of the world’s weakest currencies. “About fifty-four billion,” he said sharply.
“Well, in any currency, it’s a lot of money,” she said. “He stole it or he lost it — I’m not sure which. I just need to find out.”
“He doesn’t live or act like a man with a lot of money. We’ve been watching him for the past few days. He hasn’t left his brother’s house. He gardens, he goes for walks . . . One of my men thought he saw him crying.”
“I’ll try not to bring him to tears,” she said.
The house was on a side street in a commercial area just