The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,37

head hung so low she thought it was going to hit the table. “He’d never heard of it,” he said, the tears returning.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing at first. I was in a state of shock. It was like a doctor had just told me I had cancer and two months to live. He just stared at me silently. When I did start to talk, I was completely manic, I guess. I cursed the bank and Fred. I threatened to go directly to the police. That’s when he finally did something.”

“What?”

“He asked me to go into the boardroom next to his office and wait there while he tried to sort things out. I was only in there for about fifteen minutes when he showed up with another man. His family name was Rocca — I never got his first name. Rocca had a tape recorder with him. They sat down and asked me to explain my relationship with the bank and how I had come to put money into the Surabaya fund. I have to tell you, I was really reluctant to do it, but Muljadi said they couldn’t do anything to help me unless they knew all the facts. He assured me that if the bank was in any way involved in what had transpired, they would make things right.

“Rocca stepped in then and went even further. He said that if an employee of the bank, even without the bank’s knowledge and authority, had done something improper, the bank still had a professional and moral obligation to cover any losses I had incurred.”

“That sounds responsible.”

“Unless it was bullshit, which it was, of course,” Lam said. “All they wanted from me was details about the account and how Fred and I had managed things. After I told them, they asked me to wait in the boardroom while they verified my story. It didn’t take that long, maybe half an hour, but to me it felt like an eternity. I was going back and forth between feeling that the bank was going to make things right and feeling like my life was going to end.

“The two of them came back together but it was Rocca who did the talking. He was wearing a black suit with a white shirt and black tie, and I remember thinking that he looked like a funeral director. Anyway, he explained that it appeared that Fred Purslow had put together a rather simple but effective fraudulent scheme. Fred’s job at the bank was account manager — he had the authority to open and close accounts. What he had done was open an account for Emerald Lion and at the same time he opened an account for a numbered company, which listed a guy named Barry Lowell as director and sole signing authority. When he said that name, I almost fell over, because Barry had been a classmate of ours as well. He was friends with Fred but not with me.”

“So the money you gave to Purslow — he put it into the numbered company’s account that he and Lowell controlled?”

“Yeah.”

“And then transferred dribs and drabs into your account at month’s end?”

“Yeah, and gave me dummy reports on dummy letterhead.”

“So Rocca and Muljadi knew it had been a scam.”

“They knew.”

Ava looked down at the notes she’d been taking and knew there was something wrong with Lam’s explanation. “One thing doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Why would Purslow stop making payments? There had to be tons of cash still available to him, unless of course he was blowing his brains out in Vegas or something. Usually this kind of scheme doesn’t unravel for years, unless the fund promises a rate of return that is completely unrealistic. All he was delivering was eleven percent. At that rate he could have kept doing it for years and years, especially since you were putting more and more money into it.”

“I’m not a complete idiot,” Lam said. “I asked them the same question.”

“Did they have an answer?”

“Oh, yeah. The bank had decided six months before to close down their Canadian operation at the end of the calendar year. Everyone was going to lose their job, but to keep things running until then they offered a bonus to any employee who would stay till the end. Purslow signed on to stay. They were into the second-last month when he bolted. I guess he figured there was no way to duplicate this scheme using any other bank, so he took off while