The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,36

and it was a numbered company at that, with no name. It was Fred who put a name to it for bank account purposes, or so he said.”

“Mr. Lam, I’m getting very confused, so you’re going to have to help me here,” Ava said. The connecting arrows on her notebook page were getting jumbled. “Are you saying that this whole scheme was actually concocted by an employee of the bank?”

“Yeah.”

“You deposited the cash through him?”

“Yeah, I gave it to Fred. He did the actual deposits.”

“But you have receipts and the like?”

He gave her a hard stare. “Yeah. In fact, I brought them with me. They’re upstairs.”

“So you gave the money to Fred, he put it into your bank account —”

“No,” Lam said, his voice rising. “He put it directly into the bank fund account.”

“Surabaya Fidelity Security?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, he put your cash into that fund and then, I assume monthly, the fund remitted whatever portion of the twelve percent annual return was due into the Emerald Lion account?”

“That’s how it worked.”

“And you had promised your people — your clients — a ten percent return.”

“Yeah.”

“So you pocketed the other two percent for yourself.”

“One percent. Fred and I each took one percent.”

Ava did some quick math. One percent of $30 million still gave Lam an income of $300,000. “I saw the monthly reports you sent to your clients. They were quite detailed in terms of their returns.”

“I just took the reports I got from Surabaya, took off two percent, and then apportioned the money to the clients.”

Ava took Theresa Ng’s last report from her bag and held it out to Lam. “Is this example pretty standard?”

His head turned away so quickly it was as if she had slapped him across the cheek. “I don’t want to look at that,” he said.

Ava left it on the table. “What went wrong?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

Lam shook his head and his hands began to tremble again. “You can guess, can’t you?”

“I’d rather you told me.”

He shuddered, and when he began to speak, his voice cracked. “It all happened so fast — too fast for me to think clearly. I mean, looking back, I should have acted more quickly than I did.”

“There wasn’t a bank fund.”

He reached for Theresa Ng’s fund report, looked at it, and then scrunched it into a ball. “He told me there was a glitch in the bank’s system and that the monthly payment was going to be a bit late. I began to worry right away, but Fred was my friend and the explanation he gave seemed plausible enough. He said he’d call me as soon as things were sorted. I waited for about three days before I called him again. He told me we were less than forty-eight hours away from having the funds deposited.”

“So you waited some more?”

“Yeah, but when I didn’t hear from him, I called again, and this time I got a message on his office voicemail. It was a Thursday, I remember, and the message said he was on vacation and would be out of the office until the following Monday. What could I do? I waited . . . It was the longest weekend of my life.”

“And then on Monday?”

“No Fred.”

“Ah.”

“I was going crazy. Some of the clients were already calling, and they weren’t being polite. I repeated Fred’s line about a glitch in the bank’s system. No one cared, of course.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to the bank and asked to speak to the manager. Actually his title was ‘President, Canadian Operations.’”

“What was his name?”

“Aris Muljadi.”

“You remember. I’m impressed.”

“How could I forget? I had to beg to get in to see him, and even then they made me wait for half an hour outside his office. I must have looked at his nameplate twenty times.”

“What did Mr. Muljadi have to say?”

“He just listened at first. I told him I was getting pressured by my people and that I needed the money from the Surabaya fund deposited into my account. But I knew, before I was more than a couple of sentences into my demand, that I was wasting my time. I mean, he sat back in his chair and looked at me like I was demented. I kept talking anyway, mentioning what Fred had told me about the glitches.”

“About which he knew nothing, am I right?”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“How about the Surabaya fund?”

Ava hadn’t thought it possible for Lam to slump even further into himself, but he did. His shoulders collapsed around his chest and his