The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,51
stretched, testing her leg. There was still some pain but it was manageable, and she knew she could run at close to full speed. She turned to the right and began to motor. The downtown had an uncluttered look, with offices and shops set well back from the wide streets. The air was humid, thick with the smell of cooking oil, rotting vegetation, exhaust fumes, and garbage left at the roadside for dogs and rats to root through. She gagged a little at first when the smell became especially pungent, but gradually she became acclimatized. After two kilometres straight west, she turned back and found herself breathing normally.
Passing the hotel on the journey back, she found herself on Basuki Rahmat Street, and there, only a few hundred metres away, was Tunjungan Plaza. The complex was massive, with four separate blocks, each five storeys high. A huge SOGO sign advertised the presence of the Japanese retailer. Another promised more than five hundred stores. Ava hadn’t seen many shopping centres that large.
She headed east past the plaza, searching for Bank Linno. It was half a kilometre farther on, its name emblazoned in red neon halfway up the eight-storey structure and repeated on the ground level, above double glass doors that led into the customer branch. The building was rather unremarkable: of modest height, the windows small and dusty, the stucco exterior turning yellow in the cracks. It didn’t look as if it housed a bank with billions of dollars in capital.
Ava ran for another two kilometres before heading back. The bank didn’t look any more imposing from the opposite direction.
She started to sweat the instant she stepped into the air-conditioned hotel lobby. She always sweated when she exercised, but this was different. It was as if her body had been storing heat as she ran instead of releasing it gradually, and the cold air triggered a flood. Her white T-shirt was soaked by the time she was halfway across the lobby, her nipples visible through it in spite of the white athletic bra. The hotel was more active now, and she could feel eyes on her. She wiped her face with the hem of her shirt, briefly exposing her midsection. She should have carried a small towel with her, but after a season of running in Ontario’s cottage country — where a normal summer day would have been chilly to any Javanese — she had forgotten about the ravages of humidity.
She stripped as soon as she got to her room. There was no sense showering yet; it would only make her sweat all the more and for longer. She adjusted the air conditioning so it wasn’t quite so cold and so strong, and wrapped herself in a robe from the bathroom.
She sat down in a chair by the window and looked out onto the gardens, thinking of the bank and Andy Cameron and trying to come up with an approach that would seem plausible, trying to create a flow of conversation that would throw some light on what was a rather disjointed set of facts. It wasn’t an easy transition, moving from questions about the bank and the services it could provide for her fictional Hong Kong company to questions about a defunct Toronto branch, a bogus bank fund, and employees who preferred to be invisible. She was struggling — the connections were almost too tenuous.
When she finally stopped sweating, Ava took off the damp robe and walked into the shower, taking her workout gear with her. When she was done, she wrung out her bra, underwear, T-shirt, and shorts and hung them over the top of the shower stall.
She crawled back into bed and turned on the television. She watched the BBC World News, BBC News from Asia, the BBC world weather report, and BBC Business News. She was just getting into an interview between a presenter and the mayor of London when her cellphone rang.
“Ava Lee,” she said, not looking at the ID.
“It’s Sonny.”
She felt an immediate surge of fear and then caught herself. “Did you find out anything?”
“I had my woman follow him yesterday morning, and then again today. Both times he went to Queen Elizabeth.”
“The hospital?”
“Yeah, here in Kowloon.”
So many possibilities, she thought, and they don’t have to be dire. “Can you figure out why?”
“I’m guessing cancer,” Sonny said.
She heard the thickness in his voice and knew he was struggling. “But you aren’t positive.”